𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙄𝙄𝙄.
THIS IS ME TRYING / 𝘗𝘈𝘙𝘛 𝘛𝘞𝘖 

──────

Margarita Karapanou

TW - overdose

THE DINNER - CONT.

FULL DISCLOSURE: MARK had not intended on staying.

There was an interval between date and therapy session, he'd been able to feel it. 

Suddenly, there was as if a switch had turned in Bethenny Ballard's brain. Her posture straightened, her face seemed to tense and she was ordering water to sober up a little. He watched her every movement, watching how she seemed to change from party to business within a matter of moments-- since when had he ever chosen business over party?

In reality, the subtle changes in her behaviour made him, in response, want to shut down. 

With every moment that she sobered up, he got drunker. 

It was like a very poor chemical reaction. The prospect of telling someone his inner thoughts was something that made him, quite chaotically, have his own personal civil war. Half of his being thought that it was completely pointless: hadn't he already shown himself that speaking his mind only brought trouble? 

He wasn't exactly the vulnerable type. Talking about feelings meant being honest about shit that he usually avoided even thinking about. He dreaded to even think about the sort of questions she'd ask.

But, at the same time, the other half of Mark Sloan wanted to talk so desperately. 

He'd forgotten what it was like to be heard. It was the same voice, at the back of his head, that reminded him how well Beth was doing. 

She'd championed therapy and look where she is... doing far better than he could have ever hoped for himself.

His ex-girlfriend was getting married and here he was, working out some unspoken 'Beth problem' over dinner.

Mark sighed into his glass.

Yeah, if he was going to do this, he was going to need a little bit more help on the alcohol front.

His pager was still sitting on the table between him, dubiously dormant and untouched. 

They'd been in the restaurant for nearly two hours and, when people asked him the day after why it had taken him so long, he would've pegged it as the two of them simply enjoying each other's company. 

("She's a nice girl. A little intense but... but when you work through that she's really nice.") 

Sure, that wasn't exactly a very honest answer, but it was far more believable than the truth.

The truth, of course, being that Mark felt as though he was stuck to his chair.

He'd been talking and talking and talking, and, despite the fact he was famous for loving the sound of his own voice (which, for the record, he definitely did), he was beginning to get tired. He wished Ballard would speak. 

He wished that she'd tell him more crappy anecdotes about Rhode Island or tell him something that was as deeply invasive and personal as what she'd been telling him. 

But she didn't. She watched him, even when she left the table to go to the ladies room, he could feel her eyes on him as she disappeared and reappeared far too quickly for his taste.

Admittedly, Mark couldn't tell whether it was Ballard that was making him uncomfortable or whether it was just the fact that he was still here. He felt like he couldn't leave. Something was holding him very tightly in his seat, something that made it very hard to do anything but stare back at the doctor on the other side of the table. 

His limbs felt like lead. Very heavy. He felt as though the whole world had decided to sit in his lap. Usually, he would've been into something like that (he was never one to turn down a lap dance) but tonight it seemed to just make him feel...

"Okay," Ballard cleared her throat and the suddenness of it made Mark almost jolt in his chair. (God, he was so on edge.) "Is there anywhere that you'd particularly like to start?"

Start? Oh lord. 

Starting meant beginning and beginning meant going somewhere that Mark really didn't want to go. The sudden impulse to back out of this verbal agreement burnt through him, but he bit down on the tip of his tongue. 

His hold on the glass of scotch tightened.

Beth had benefited from having someone listen, he reminded himself and that's what he told himself over and over as he began his makeshift therapy session.

Ballard had found a notepad at the bottom of her bag and looked at her with those round, familiar eyes that made his skin bristle. 

Absently, Mark wondered how many times she'd done this-- were those words preprogrammed into her like he was so accustomed to scrubbing in and out? 

Did she get cramps in her fingers from holding a pen just like his fingers ached from gripping a scalpel? 

It disorientated him, sometimes, how there were so many times of doctors, so many branches of medicine-- he found himself staring at it for a few moments before he realised that his brain was trying to sway his attention.

"I don't know," He answered eventually.

Why did he get the feeling that he was going to be crap at therapy?

He'd been meaning to find a new shrink, the sort of therapist that he could really talk to, but he hadn't had time. It seemed, ironically, that Bethenny Ballard had fallen into his bed at the perfect time. 

He wanted to chuckle at that thought, but couldn't find the energy-- trust him to see his therapist naked first.

Sloan, you asshat.

"Okay," Ballard nodded, taking his indecision and apprehension with ease. 

(It was something that caught Mark off-guard, how well she was able to navigate her drunkenness with clarity. She was not sober by any means, but it was as if he could see the alcohol slowly make its way out of her system. He was so used to alcohol-induced messes that his brain couldn't quite compute someone who was so composed.) 

"Let's revisit my last question," She said, "What would you have done differently?"

Mark's brow furrowed slightly, "Excuse me?"

"Earlier, you mentioned that you would have done things differently," She elaborated, leaning back in her chair slightly as Mark's eyebrows sunk lower and lower in thought. "Do you want to expand upon that? Is there anything specific that you would change if you had the chance?"

"What?" The realisation of what she meant almost made him scoff, "Other than leave Beth for her sister?"

"Sure," Ballard responded with a gentle bop of her head, "If that's something you regret?"

Regret. Wasn't that a bitch of a word? 

He could feel on his skin and it made his eyes wander-- 

Suddenly, He was completely distracted by the next table: a brunette woman and a brunette man, clinking champagne glasses over the floral arrangement in the centre of the table. 

Their small talk and laughter had been a discography to this conversation, just like classical music on a late-night-drive-home. 

He watched how they looked at each other, how the woman smiled so lightly and her eyes sparkled. Despite the distance between them, they were always touching, their hands never leaving each other's as they waited for their meal--

Regret. Did he regret it?

"Sure," He did. He did regret it. "Addison wasn't Beth."

Not by a mile. 

"In what way?"

A dent appeared between his eyebrows.

"Addison's Addison," He said, for a moment forgetting that Ballard didn't understand the gravity behind that assertion.

 It hit Mark, quite literally, that someone in the world didn't know the inherent charm of Addison Montgomery Forbes and how that relationship had translated onto her sister. 

"They're polar opposites. She always made Beth feel so crap about herself." A pause. "In retrospect, sleeping with Addison was the worst thing I could have ever done to Beth."

"How?"

It was Addison. It didn't need any other explanation. It was fucking Addison, quite literally.

"I think I subconsciously went for something that would hurt her the most," His brow furrowed as he struggled for a comparison. "She was always so insecure around Addison. She always idolised her and I think Addison was the one person that Beth always felt sure about-- It's like... like if Lex Luthor just fucked a load of Kryptonite... or... the Joker I don't know... fucked an owl to fuck over Batman--"

"Did you initiate the affair?"

He was almost thankful that she'd cut him short. He was pretty sure that it was some unspoken rule that psychiatrists were supposed to sit there and watch you talk yourself dry, but somehow, he appreciated the interjection. 

The question, however, was an entirely different thing in itself-- it hit him, in that moment, that no one had ever asked him that before.

He supposed that everyone had unanimously decided that he'd been the one who had started it all. 

It made sense, really. He was the one with the reputation, right? 

He was the one who could never keep his dick in his pants and had already been sleeping around. He hadn't just slept with Addison during his relationship with Beth. He didn't blame people for coming to that conclusion. But even so~

Mark hesitated before answering, "No, Addison did."

That was the wild card answer that people never expected. 

Addison had always been so clean cut and prissy until she hadn't been. He knew that if Derek or Beth had been sat across from him (hell, maybe even Amy), there would have been audible doubt clouding this section of the conversation. 

Maybe it would have even been challenged? Maybe he would have been called a liar?

Sometimes, Mark even doubted it himself-- had there been something he'd said? Had he been the first person to cross that line? 

He felt like there must have been something that he'd done to lead her on somewhere; but the cold truth was that he hadn't even realised what was happening until Addison had pushed him into a wall and kissed him so fiercely that his whole body had turned to dust. He was fairly sure that he hadn't initiated anything. 

He was fairly sure that having an affair with Addison had been the last thing on his mind-- until that had been exactly what he'd fallen into.

"I think Addison ended up being a distraction," Mark mused with a heavy feeling in his chest, "She was going through problems in her own relationship and she understood what was happening with Beth..."

 Mark shifted slightly in his chair and swallowed scotch like a man stumbling into mirage in the middle of a desert.

"So she was there?" Ballard suggested. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught how her head tilted to the side apprehensively. He didn't like the gesture, it implied as if she understood exactly what he was talking about. How could she? He'd barely told her anything. 

"Do you think that's why you had the affair?" She asked, "Because she was available?"

The couple on the next table seemed to be perfectly at ease. 

Mark watched as they exchanged a joke and the woman received an order of red wine to the table. His eyes glazed over as he glanced between the two of them; suddenly, his throat was very dry and he felt the impulse to drink scotch until his mouth was on fire.

"I think..." He kissed his teeth and inwardly cringed at the thought of emoting. "I think I wanted Beth to hurt."

A flicker of a memory crossed his mind. It was the sort of New York memory that he'd tried so hard to forget. 

It was the sort of memory that had raised while he'd been in that boardroom, blood pounding in his ears and staining his surgical gloves. It was just a glimpse, just a snapshot of a brunette sprawled across a bathroom floor. It always felt so eerily close to the sight of her against the hospital floor. His chest tightened and he bit down on his tongue again.

"Why?" Ballard asked softly, as if she could sense the sudden dip in his mood, "Why did you want to hurt her?"

Fuck.

They were straying into very personal territory, the exact personal territory that he'd spent ten minutes dissuading her from. I

t wasn't his business. It wasn't his story to tell-- but he knew that in a way, it was as much his as it was Beth's.

They'd been an us once. Hadn't they? 

(Sometimes, Mark needed someone to reassure him of that fact.) 

He'd struggled to share things between them but they had eventually. Her problems had been his. His problems had been hers. Along the way, they'd all kind of blurred together and lost their sense. 

He'd been left in New York feeling as though he needed a detox too, as if he needed to be wandering around a rehabilitation centre in Canada, his body filtering out the remnants of a relationship that made him inhale sharply whenever he was given a patient that was flagged for drug-seeking behaviour.

(He could remember his first Post-Beth patient that was a documented addict.)

(To deem it Post-Beth, somehow, felt correct. Everything in New York was sorted into Before Beth and then After. It was the only way he was able to make sense of things.) 

(Addison had found him stood in a stairwell at the back of the hospital, staring at a blank wall ahead of him. She'd asked him why he hadn't returned her calls. He'd just showed her his patient chart and then, had refused to voice the thoughts that had flooded his stream of consciousness--)

(Mark had wanted to know if Beth was okay but hadn't been able to find the words to voice that concern.)

"Drug abuse."

He said it out of nowhere. 

It wasn't something that he'd consciously decided to say, it seemed to slip through the cracks and tumble onto the dinner table in front of them, bare and exposed for all the world to see-- he watched Ballard's head lift and felt the weight of her eyes as they descended on his cracked chest. 

The realisation of what he'd just said made his ears turn pink and he desperately reached out for a drink, quenching the bile that stirred at the back of his throat.

Oh fuck.

He had another serious flash of deja vu. 

He saw Lexie's face, pale and gaunt from the strain of an argument. He saw the way she'd paused at the confession, her breath catching as he said it out loud for the first time. 

He'd said it then too. He'd said it and he'd said all of the other things he'd never found the right words for. She'd listened, but he was sure that she hadn't really heard him-- she'd gotten stuck on Mark as the victim and had not heard the frustration and self criticism that had been straining at his every muscle.

Ballard, on the other hand, didn't react at all. 

She just looked at him, a slight shadow of confusion appearing across her eyes at the suddenness of the interjection. She didn't understand how much rode on those two single words. She didn't understand. 

Lexie hadn't understood but then she had and that's where everything had gone wrong.

He'd drunk too much, that's what his mind told him. 

He felt it hit him in those two words that felt a lot bigger than they appeared. He'd swore not to say it. He'd wanted to handle this better than he'd handled telling this all to Lexie-- Mark sighed to himself and watched as Ballard processed what he'd just said.

"Earlier, you asked about Beth's problem," He said, his chest heaving very slightly as he realised that he'd fucked up again. (

Of course, he fucked up, he always fucked up when it came to Beth Montgomery. It was his flaw, so intrinsically linked with the brunette hurricane who seemed to constantly be swirling around the dustbowl in the back of his head.) 

"Her problem was addiction," Mark said.

Beth's problem. 

That felt like a very shitty way of putting it, but it was all he could manage as Ballard stared over at him. 

Even the psychiatrist, juggling the wine with her professionalism, couldn't find a response to that. 

It was important to put as much emphasis on 'was' as he could. 

He'd stressed the word so heavily that Ballard seemed to catch it more than any other word in the sentence. It was more than important; he needed to make it clear that, even if they were having a confidential conversation in a therapy (sort of?) situation, Beth's worst times were far behind her. 

He was so painfully conscious of the fact that this was Beth's new boss sitting across from him, just like he'd been so painfully aware that Andrew had been her fiancé's brother. He didn't need a repeat of the Lexie situation.

He didn't want to cause Beth anymore pain.

He knew what people thought when they heard the word addict. He knew that their heads flew to the extreme, to the deeply selfish and the judgemental and the dark. His thoughts had too; for six years, he'd painted Beth in his head to be someone who was so selfish. 

He'd seen her as the person who had pushed everything aside so she could just get her fix. But now... now Mark was grasped by the desperation to make Ballard think differently.

"She's okay now," Mark felt the impulse to clarify, if it wasn't clear enough. "She's clean. She's successful and she's better than okay. I think she's the best she's ever been and she's worked so hard to get here--"

He paused.

He was doing exactly what Ballard had said he was doing. He was protecting her.

Again, the image of her cold and unresponsive flickered across his vision. Twice.

Mark felt his body shift as he spoke:

"I'm proud of her."

Fuck, he was so proud of her. 

The realisation of it, as he sat there at the dining table, was like a bolt of lightning striking him dead in the centre of his chest and, if he'd been a couple of scotches deeper, he supposed his would've watered-- what a thought it was to have: he'd seen that woman at her worst and, as Archer had told him while they'd scrubbed out of surgery, she was at her best.

He was proud of her.

"I should have said that to Lexie," Mark said, his mind long buried in the exchange he'd had with his ex-girlfriend. "Uh, when I told her about Beth's addiction, I didn't make it clear enough that... I respect Beth now. That I don't blame her anymore for being like she was... She's not the same." 

He paused and then added:

"We weren't good to each other at the end."

"Okay," Ballard said quietly, speaking for the first time in what felt like a very long time. He was almost relieved to hear someone's voice that wasn't his own. "Why did you talk to Lexie about Beth's sobriety?"

His attention wandered back to the table beside them. 

They looked so blissfully unaware of the bad things in the universe, caught in a little bubble that made his chest tighten. 

He felt like walking over to their table and telling them about all of the terrible things that were possible in the world. 

He felt like shaking the poor bastard that was so deeply in love and wake him up the reality of how things might end.

She's going to have a hard time and she's going to get hooked on pills. 

Then you're not going to know how to handle that and try to act out over it because you're an egocentric son of a bitch that can't love without selling his soul--

"I wasn't honest with her," Mark responded, his voice sharp as he wrestled with the two women that dominated his train of thought. "I tried to be honest," A miffed laugh, "A compulsive liar tried to come clean... I'd been covering up my relationship because I didn't want to come off as the sort of asshole who just fucks over someone they claimed to care about. I thought being honest about my terrible dating history would stop her from walking out of the door."

Lexie had felt too good to be true, in a lot of ways. 

He allowed himself to think about her. It was a fresher wound and something that still felt very unfinished (Oh, because Beth was?). He didn't like how she kept looking at him with those little doe eyes that seemed to swirl with the unsaid (while Beth just didn't look at him at all) and how she seemed to always know exactly what he was going to say before he said it. 

Lexie always seemed to be there, a wavering presence in the corner of the room or the back of his head. She was always there, always on his service, always on call.

Beth had been that way once too. They were both so eager, so ready to throw themselves into work. They were both such harder workers and fiercely loyal. 

Lexie had understood things better than he had, despite her age she'd been so mature and had approached things so logically. She'd known what she'd wanted. She'd known where she was going. 

Lexie had turned to him in his hotel room and told him to teach her sex, to touch her and make her feel good (and for the record, that's exactly what Mark had done (successfully, might he add). She'd turned to him with a fire in her eyes, an assertiveness that reminded him so much of--

Oh.

If he thought about it too long, Lexie began to feel a lot like a time capsule. 

He'd felt the same things that he'd felt with Beth. He'd loved the same way and been so terrified at the end in the same way too. He'd tried to grasp something with apprehensive, inexperienced fingers and watched it slip past his grasp. 

She'd felt too much like Beth to him, as if she'd appeared in the middle of New York before the pills and the drink and the long nights in nicotine drenched nightclubs.

"I miss her."

Ballard raised her chin, eyebrows raising very slightly.

"Beth?"

He shook his head a little too quickly.

"No," His voice caught at the back of his throat and appeared a little too hoarse. "Lexie."

"How did things end between the two of you?"

In reality, Mark just didn't want to think about Beth anymore. 

There truly weren't words in the world that could explain exactly how exhausted he was with her dominating his stream of consciousness-- how exactly could he explain to Bethenny Ballard that, when he thought of a senseless face or an untethered voice, somehow, every time, they found their way back to Beth.

Lexie, meanwhile, he was all too happy to revisit. 

"It doesn't matter," Mark shrugged, his brow furrowed like a storm cloud drifting low on his brow. "I told Lexie that I missed her and she told me that she didn't care. She doesn't want anything to do with me and I... I miss her."

Ballard didn't speak.

(In fact, the psychiatrist was completely convinced that it was a diversion, a mislead that made her eyebrow twitch.)

"And then... and then today Beth tells me to let her go," Mark grimaced to himself, rubbing at his jaw as if there was an itch under his skin that he just couldn't get to. "She said that she doesn't want anything to do with me anymore..."

Mark's brow folded so tightly, in such jagged lines that he could see the hesitation in the way Ballard held herself. 

She rose forwards in her chair, noticing how Mark seemed to strangle with the idea of these two women. It was a long battle, it was exhausting-- how exactly could Mark tell this woman, this newcomer, that mentally he was still stuck in that boardroom between the two bookmarked pages of his dating history? 

It felt like a very hefty task to even consider.

"When you said drug abuse," Ballard gently prodded the elephant that Mark had thrown the doors open for and his eye twitched at its reintroduction into the conversation. "Do you want to elaborate on that?"

He did but he also didn't.

Talking about this made him feel dirty as if he was betraying the present Beth by drawing on the past. She'd made it so clear that she wanted to leave it behind and yet here he was-- Mark's face twisted.

"Just drugs," Mark said dismissively, not wanting to really spend much time thinking about it.  "But not the type you'd think."

"Tell me about it."

The invitation was dangerous and it made him pause.

 He could see it in Ballard's eyes, a deep rooted curiosity as if she knew that digging through Beth's addiction would unlock parts of Mark's psyche that he'd tried so desperately to repress. 

Was she right? Mark figured she must've been to some degree: wasn't that what this whole conversation was? Mark standing at the foot of his own graving, digging up his repressed emotions and thoughts with a shovel drenched in liquor?

His hesitation made Ballard open her mouth. 

He could hear the words as they prepared themselves at the base of her throat: regurgitated comfort that he didn't have to share anything he wasn't too comfortable with. 

But, they were way past that now. He'd just ordered another scotch and was debating, silently, whether to switch to whisky--

He needed to talk about it. Holy shit. 

He needed to talk about it so deeply that he could feel tiny fissures break through his skin at the pressure of holding it in.

"There was an outbreak of amphetamine addictions in the late nineties among surgical interns in Manhattan," Mark answered, his response far more concise and clear than he'd expected. "The game got harder and the stakes raised... and they all looked for things to help them keep up with the demand. I think the desperation to succeed killed some brain cells because holy crap..." He shook his head and chuckled faintly to himself, it was a sad chuckle that felt distant, "It was dumb."

It had been dumb. It had been so fucking dumb that he'd hated her for it.

He bit down on the tip of his tongue, briefly swept away by the memory of it; hastily hidden pill bottles, a bottle of wine washing down more amphetamines than he'd ever taken in his life, all in one go. 

She'd spun so wildly out of control and he'd run instead of trying to catch her.

God, he was going to regret saying this in the morning.

He avoided Ballard's eye, as if to not get swayed from speaking, and found himself staring back over at the couple on the next table. They looked like good people too. 

"Beth was a good surgeon," He continued, nodding lightly along with his words. "She was ambitious. She had a lot of plans and she wanted to be the best. Fuck, I mean she was the best. I think she's the best damn surgical intern I've ever worked with--" A pause and he couldn't contain the second chuckle, "And that's not just because she was fucking me."

Ballard smiled slightly. 

It was a disattached smile, the sort that made Mark feel as though he was at a funeral. 

That's what that smile was. It was almost as if she felt sorry for the way he'd laughed, like an echo of something there was once was. 

In a way, it kind of made sense. It felt like a funeral. This specifically, felt like the sort of thing you'd say as a eulogy. 

He was speaking about Beth in past tense, as if the woman she'd been before the pills and the alcohol had died long ago-- as if the woman he'd felt for had died.

That thought made his breathing hitch slightly.

"But, she couldn't keep up," Mark felt his voice waver slightly and he shifted in his chair. "No one could.... And she's always had to be an overachiever. She's always had to outdo everyone-- She got an prescription for Adderall from god knows where...  Took every upper in New York City and just..."

Was it bad that he could remember it like it was yesterday? 

Was it bad that he could remember the worst parts better than the best? 

It's all he'd been able to think about over the past few years; the Beth that was full of contempt and anguish, the Beth that popped a handful of pills and was so quick to anger and despair.

Lately, however, he'd found himself reaching out to the good. 

He could recount everything in such vivid detail, from the way that Beth used to always leave half the bed to him, no matter how drunk or inconsiderate she acted, or how she'd always a note, not matter what, to tell him where she was. 

He'd been revisited by moments that felt tender and distantly unfamiliar to him; a smile through an on-call room filled with Christmas lights, a hand snaking up his shirt in the back of a taxi cab, a dance to a song spilling out of a stereo-- 

He'd found himself thinking about them more and more.

He didn't need to fantasise. He simply remembered.

"And how did that make you feel?"

Ballard's question caught him off-guard.

"Hm?" He couldn't quite formulate a verbal response.

"You carry that burden too," Ballard responded. "Watching someone go through that... someone you cared about and loved... it must not have been easy."

It was a such a wildly different response to what Lexie had had that it, for a moment, made Mark feel as though he'd made the right call. He just stared at her. 

Mark swallowed a lump at the back of his throat.

He couldn't imagine how Beth had felt. Or maybe he could-- he found himself thinking about everything from her perspective too. It felt like a lot. Had it been a lot? He remembered the anger that had gripped him, the frustration of watching someone put themselves in that position. 

He hadn't understood. But what about Beth? How had she felt? He guessed, from the state of her in the end, pretty shit too. It felt wrong to talk about how he'd felt when Beth had gone through so much with so little support.

"I didn't help," Mark all but murmured, shaking his head. "If anything I just made things worse."

This wasn't about him. Everyone had made it very clear. 

He'd lost his right to feel anything about New York. He'd lost his right to regret or mourn the moment he'd fallen into Addison and Derek's bed.

"How so?"

"Fucking Addison did not help," Mark's response was in a scoff, one that he felt ricohet through the length of his body until his toes were trembling with it. "I didn't understand why she could put herself through all of that-- I was so angry with her for just killing herself slowly and almost dying over it. I--"

He bit his tongue, this time, by accident. 

A sharp shooting pain ran through his mouth, and for a moment, it was numb. He cut himself short, once again feeling the ghost of that boardroom and that bathroom enter at the back of his mind.

 To complete his sentence, he just silently shook his head. 

"It's hard to understand," Ballard said quietly, "It's a very hard situation. I've had patients from both sides of a relationship where drugs became almost like the other woman. I don't think you can understand while you're going through it."

He didn't respond to that thought, just dragged it in until it was replaying over and over in his mind. It became a noise almost static, wedged in between the constant loop of deeply ingrained medical training and memories that liked to swap themselves out daily. 

Ballard found a nice little crevice in his consciousness, right next to some jingle from a toothpaste commercial he'd had stuck in his head for the last week and between the expression Beth had had on her face when she'd asked him to let her go. 

Yeah, he'd internalise that for later.

"I want you to think about how you feel during that relationship..." 

Ballard continued, her voice fading into background music as Mark revisited his little friends on the next table. They were drinking and laughing. (Were they celebrating an anniversary? Mark hadn't celebrated many anniversaries in his life.) 

"Do you remember how you felt at the beginning?"

"Scared," Mark answered, although, it was mostly the scotch that did the talking on that one. The words came with the burn of alcohol at the back of his throat as he finished his glass. He grimaced and held out a hand to flag down a waiter. "I was fucking terrified during every second of that relationship-- Waiter."

"What do you mean?" Ballard asked, only pausing to let Mark exchange his order with the server.

 Once the whisky had been set on their tab, the Plastic Surgeon turned back to face her, the alcohol hitting in deeply and loosening his shoulders. 

"How so?"

"I don't date," He said it flippantly, just as he'd said it a thousand other times in his life, "I didn't know what the fuck I was doing-- and adding drugs in the mix just made it into a hot fucking mess."

God, they'd been so young; he'd been younger but Beth had been scarily young. 

She'd been making important decisions about the direction of her life while he'd been just on the verge of reaping the benefits of all of his hard work. 

She'd been so ambitious, she'd been so hungry for success, so willing to sacrifice everything for everything her siblings had and more--

He was drunk. How fun? Ballard hesitantly noticed this and, when his whisky arrived at the table, questioned whether drinking any more was a good idea. 

With water and her nearly sober sense of logic, she pointed out that being drunk during therapy wasn't exactly helpful to the psychoanalysis nor was it ethical. 

Mark just sighed and retaliated with the sad truth: the only way he was going to be candid about his feelings was if his inhibitions were completely disabled. 

Ballard, somehow, had been unable to argue with that.

It was evident in the way his mood changed. Just in the way that she became more professional, he loosened. It was as if he'd been sutured tightly together, with his prize loops that had gained so much critical acclaim. 

All it had taken was two scotch and a whiff of whisky for them to gently pry out of his skin. 

She watched him closely as he leant back in his chair.

"I'm not a big drinker," He said, raising her eyebrows. He chuckled, rolling his eyes. "I know it's hard to believe seeing as what? I've been drunk twice with you now?" 

She just smiled slightly, probably thinking about their last exchange. 

"I've never been the type of person to get drunk..." And then he paused, "Actually, after watching Beth go through all of that shit I didn't drink for two years."

He could remember it, going to Addison's social events with her, feeling like a shiny social pariah on the skirts of the Manhattan elite. They'd spent eight months charading as some sort of couple. Derek's shoes had been almighty to fill (even though Mark was pretty sure his feet were actually bigger, because... y'know). 

He'd gone through every whisper and stare stone cold sober. Every champagne flute and wine glass had made him think of her. In retrospect, he wondered whether he'd made himself do that in some sort of solidarity with the recovering alcoholic somewhere out there in the world. 

Either that, or he'd just been so traumatised by intoxication that he couldn't imagine anything worse.

"Have things changed lately?" Ballard asked.

Mark grimaced. "Yeah, that's a second date sort of question."

Her lip twitched.

"You said, a couple of moments ago, that you told Beth that you loved her," Ballard asked instead, as if that were an easier question. The appearance of the 'L-Word' almost tempted Mark to backtrack and ask her to mention the present again. "Did you? Did you love her?"

What a question. It left him thoughtful. 

If it had been five minutes ago, Mark probably would have dismissed it completely. 

It was such a sudden turn from light playful banter that he felt as though he might have been eligible for a whiplash diagnosis.

 After this dinner, he was going to need to go into the ER at work and get strapped to a board. They'd hook him up to a banana bag and give him a spinal CT-- would evidence of these conversation topics show on his scan?

 Would Lexie and Beth pop out of one of his vertebrae and he'd be exposed for saying things he was so hesitant to say?

"Of course," His throat felt scratchy, "I must have."

"Tell me about the good," Ballard said lightly and Mark looked at her weirdly. She chuckled under her breath. "Therapy isn't always about the bad things, it's good to talk about the happy crap too, okay? Tell me what went right."

Oh crap.

"I..." His brow furrowed, "I don't know."

Ballard tilted her head to the side, "You don't know?"

It's what he'd said before. He'd spent so much time focusing on the bad that redirecting the good into his full attention felt-- talking about the good, while Beth was out there with her new life felt so... It felt invasive. 

It made him feel the same way he'd felt whenever he'd contemplated visiting her at Seattle Pres while she was recovering. There was an element of disgust surrounding it, as if Mark couldn't quite He shrugged.

"I just loved her," Again, it was said so flippantly, as if Mark didn't have a rhyme or reason. "I don't know what--"

"What did you love about her?"

Oh crap (x2).

He stared over at the psychiatrist, meeting those eyes that he'd mistaken for Beth's in the gloom of Joe's bar. 

He could see Beth, even now, in the way that Ballard was sitting across from him. He wasn't stupid. He knew exactly why he'd gravitated to her, half drunk and still charred from Beth's dinner party. 

He'd watched Ballard in that little red dress, and had anticipated those familiar moles under her left shoulder blade, the sort he'd skimmed his fingers over countless times. He'd expected to find a sweet, sensitive spot just in between her hairline and her ear-- 

She had the same dark hair, same eyes that held the same stare, the sort that left physical imprints on your skin. She even held herself so similar, her shoulders lifted and torso twisted very slightly to the side.

They were the sort of small details that Mark had held onto over that five year period, collating them into a mental scrapbook to piece the Beth of his memory together.

The realisation wasn't sudden. He'd known it for a long time. 

He'd realised it the moment he'd watched Ballard slip out of his bed. He'd realised it the moment he'd seen Lexie smile in a very certain way. He'd realised it the moment he'd searched for something that wasn't quite there in Addison's eyes.

What had he loved about Beth?

Mark shook his head but his lip twitched.

"I guess, everything."

***

THE HOSPITAL

So much for an interesting case.

Archer found himself sitting in the radiology department for far longer than he would've liked.

 He supposed it was the curse of taking on a case that really should have been handled by a diagnostics team. The neurosurgeon had committed to something that, admittedly, was a big and pretty stupid task to take on. 

Surgery wasn't guaranteed and his choice of staff to assist felt more like a school science project that was bound to explode at any moment. He sat in a room filled with screens, staring at the scans as flickered across the screens on the other side of the wall.

His stare was long and monotonous, his gaze occasionally shifting lazily like the flicker of a cat's tail. 

It was his lunch break and yet, with a black coffee in his hand, he found himself immersed in the pictures of his patient's brain. He leant back in his chair, sighing to himself as, with a heavy heart, he realised that this was a lot deeper than just neurological--

"Doctor Montgomery?"

Another sigh as his surgical intern appeared, bringing with her a bundle of files that told him exactly what he didn't want to hear. 

Lexie's face proclaimed exactly what he'd feared: in the last team minutes, a new symptom had popped up, leading them to believe that his kidneys were beginning to shut down. 

It left a grimace permanently inscribed across his features; he shifted through the new entries in Nick's chart and found himself shaking his head very slightly.

Beth had been wrong,

"Are we even sure it's surgical?" Lexie asked slowly, her brow furrowed as she lingered over his shoulder. She'd spent the last ten minutes organising a general surgeon to put Nick on dialysis. "Should I organise a neurologist to have a look on--"

"I spent ten years as a neurologist in a private clinic in Connecticut," Archer chipped back, raising a newer scan against the glow of a distant lightbox. He squinted at it, seeing nothing of particular interest. "And, not to brag or anything, but I don't think the Chief is going to fire me if he finds out that I'm going to switch my speciality for a few cases."

Lexie didn't respond. 

"We know it's not systemic sclerosis," Archer didn't indicate that he'd heard her, just continued to stare blankly at the picture of Nick's hippocampus. "Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia could explain brain and kidney problems..."

"But the CBC showed normal white blood cells," She tried again, remembering an indicator on the lab report that dismissed her initial suggestion. (Mentally, Lexie ran through everything she could remember which, with an eidetic memory, happened to be a very long and intricate list. She bunched her muscles, straining to remember something that would fit.) "Maybe it could be diabetes or a congenital metabolic disorder--"

Still nothing.

Lexie, admittedly, had never been good with silence. 

She'd struggled to keep up with every passing moment that didn't have something to offer her. It wasn't that they were a waste of time by any means, but it always made her frustrated that she wasn't doing something, learning something, doing more. That's the feeling that filled her when she stared at the back of Archer Montgomery's head. 

She wanted her teacher to actually teach her something-- 

God forbid he actually do his damn job.

She tried again.

"Diabetes makes more sense I guess--"

Archer cleared his throat for the first time in one and a half minutes.

(She'd subconsciously counted every second and the sudden sound almost made her jump.)

"Do you think my nose is too big?"

That question was unexpected.

(It made her eyebrows raise and the words catch at the back of her throat, falling out in a choppy stutter that made her cheeks flush. He'd said it so casually as if he was making an observation on the information she'd just throw in his direction. But it, notably, wasn't an observation at all. Instead, it was the sort of enquiry that made her head scramble with invisible question marks, her brow furrowing as she processed what was going on.)

"W-What?"

"My nose," Archer repeated. 

He hadn't even looked over at her as he spoke, just continued to stare at Nick's scans as Lexie wobbled and struggled to follow exactly what was going on. He could see her in the corner of his eye, bewildered and lost as he waited for a response that would, quite possibly, never come.

 "The patient keeps talking about my nose," Archer said, "Is it really that bad?"

It was nonchalant, he hadn't meant anything bad by it (but behind him, Lexie seemed vividly caught off-guard.)

(Silently, her head was running at full speed, attempting to pick apart his question as if it was some sort of secret spy message. This was a very different cypher. She still had no idea what to make of the oldest Montgomery-- was this some sort of trap?)

(He clearly didn't like her much. Was he just throwing something out to trip her up and make her feel dumb?)

"I-I don't--"

The neurosurgeon (and part-time neurologist, apparently), let out a light sigh and seemed to tilt his head to the side as if inviting her to look at his profile. 

He held his chin upwards, blinking at the ceiling and waiting for the hesitant surgical intern to say something.

"I mean, I've always thought... Roman coin, right?"

Was that a rhetorical question? (Lexie couldn't tell) and, in all honesty, neither could Archer. 

Ah, how exhilarating it was to fish for validation in second-year surgical interns. 

They were good for something at least. In all fairness, it was a very important question,

"Like I was saying," Lexie began again, fixing her eyes on the scan in his hand. "Congenital metabolic disorder would probably make sense with the elevated--"

"I know I'm not an endocrinologist but I'm pretty sure congenital disorders generally don't wait till you're 46 to manifest," He interjected flatly in response, still not looking up from Nick's updated stats. He flicked through, humming to himself as Lexie froze in the background. "Like I was saying, I think I'm a little too old for a nose job, don't you think?"

"W-We don't really--"

"Be honest with me..." 

Archer cut her short again, turning his he so he could peer up at her through the dark gloom of the room. He met her furrowed brow as she very hesitantly met his eye. For the record, Archer had no ulterior motive to asking the question and completely missed how Lexie seemed to overthink it. 

"Is it bad? Is it too big--"

"Doctor Montgomery I--"

"I've always thought it was a flattering feature," He commented off-handedly, brow furrowed as if he was giving it some serious thought. "But now I'm seriously beginning to overthink it. I feel like it throws my face off, right? I've been surrounded by Plastic Surgeons for half my life, my sisters have both dated one, well, the same one-- and no one has ever mentioned anything--"

"I don't want to talk about your nose."

Oh?

Archer blinked, eyebrows raising as he looked over at the youngest Grey sister. 

She'd said it so quickly and winced directly afterwards, as if she was expecting something to explode-- in reality, Archer just stared at her, noticing how she seemed to be bunched in discomfort. 

His brow furrowed slightly; he was completely lost about what was going on.

What the hell was wrong with his nose? Was it really that bad? 

He couldn't tell whether Lexie was just trying to be really nice and trying to avoid being mean, or whether she was completely repulsed by even addressed it-- really, was it bad? 

Was he some sort of genetic freak that she couldn't even begin to unpack?

(Meanwhile, Lexie was on the verge of a mental break. Archer, admittedly, terrified the life out of her. He was unpredictable and he reminded her so much of Beth. Too much for comfort.)

"Look," She said, starting with a short breath as she gussied herself up to continue. "I apologised to your sister, okay. I regret that I said what I did and I feel really bad for everything that happened. If you want I can get swapped off of your service. I can tell that you're not interested in any of my suggestions--"

Archer continued to stare at her.

"If you don't want to teach me, that's okay, but I'd prefer to spend time with someone who does," She spoke with apprehension as if she'd recited the words to herself but faltered on the grand delivery. Archer's frown deepened. "I'm a good surgical intern. I have a lot of good ideas and it's unprofessional for you to listen to a psychiatrist and ignore someone whose job it is to deal with the biology of the patient. You're a great doctor and everything but I just don't feel comfortable with--"

He held up a hand, cutting her short.

(Oh fuck.) 

(Lexie's adrenalin had run dry.)

(The words had tumbled out of her chaotically as if she couldn't make them stop. It'd been the same fire that had kept her tunnelling through her initial confrontation with Beth-- and what came after was the same flush of panic. Fuck. She'd just spoke to an attending like that she--)

Archer, on the other hand, was completely lost. 

While Lexie expected some sort of hellfire to rain down on her (in lieu of Addison's peculiar temper), he was staring at the ground, trying to process exactly what had just been thrown at him. A few moments passed and, with the most bewildered sigh, he turned his head towards her.

"Addison?" 

Lexie blinked in confusion as Archer tried to gage which sister she was talking about. She just stared at him, her brow creasing. 

"Well, you said my sister... and I wouldn't take it personally," Archer shrugged, "Addie hates everyone in this city. You're welcome to blame your brother-in-law for that, I certainly do--"

"No," The surgical intern said, appearing breathless, "Beth."

"Beth?"

He sounded surprised. 

He was, for the record, very surprised. 

It hadn't occurred to him that her anger and frustration could reach outside of the wonder trio (Mark, Addison and Derek always seemed to be the root of every issue in their lives). 

He stared and stared and stared until there was multiple Lexie's swimming across his vision-- those bottomless doe eyes watching him with a sheen of apprehension as he repeated his little sisters name back to himself over and over.

Realisation settled in slowly.

"Let me guess," He licked his chapped lips and rolled his eyes, "This has something to do with Sloan, doesn't it?"

(Lexie felt her jaw lock and, with all the reluctance in the world, she nodded.)

Archer sighed. 

All he'd wanted to know was whether he was a clown with a stupid nose and now he was having to unpack drama between his sister and her dirtbag ex-boyfriend-- fantastic.

"Great!" He all but exclaimed, halfway tempted to get out of his chair and go slap the asshole himself. 

He had no doubt that Mark had probably stirred something between the two of them; sure, Beth was the jealous type but she definitely didn't care enough about the Plastic Surgeon anymore to go to war over him. By looks of things too, Lexie looked pretty harmless. "

That's exactly what I needed today--" Archer groaned.

"I'm happy to go ask my chief resident to transfer me onto another service--"

(Continuing on Archer's service today was her idea of hell.) 

(Not only had she made an ass of herself in front of a senior member of faculty but she was also sandwiched in between her ex-boyfriend and a woman who Lexie was sure he still cared about a lot-- and, if Lexie had to be candid, she missed Mark deeply. She was not over him by any means and the thought of watching him sulking in the corner made her want to--)

Again, Archer cut him off.

"I'm sorry if I've made you feel uncomfortable today," His words were unexpected (by both of them.) His hand was raised again, making Lexie feel like a kid being interrupted by a teacher. "It was not my intention. I had no idea that you have some unfinished business with Beth. I'm not that much of an ass, just to be clear."

Lexie didn't speak.

"Between you and me," He continued, "Everything I've done in this case has been mostly to get under Sloan's skin. He's easy to rile up. I like to mess him around because he's done one hell of a number on my family over the years. I'm sorry you got caught in the cross fire. You seem like a good doctor, a good kid, if you want to be transfered, be my guest, but I think you're going to be disappointed because you're gonna miss one hell of a case."

(She definitely had not expected an apology, and he didn't seem to show any sign of stopping.)

"Oh, and whatever Mark's said about New York," She stiffened at the change in conversation topic. He noticed that with eyes that were so close to Beth's. "So I'm right, right? He said something-- he always fucking says something-- great, okay," Archer heaved a disappointed breath, "Don't listen to him. Whoever he's made you think that Beth is, right now, is false. The person she was then... she's changed and I don't think you're doing anyone favours by holding her accountable for her past."

The words felt so much weight to them. He meant it. 

He understood why Beth was so frustrated by people holding her past over her constantly. It was as if the New York Beth had truly died and someone had taken her place-- someone who was far more resilient and determined and seemed to throw caution to the wind and get married. 

The longer Archer thought about Mark ruining that for his sister, the more he was tempted to follow Beth's lead and bury a very neat fist in the centre of his face.

Opposite him, Lexie seemed to internalise his words. 

She appeared distant, her eyes glazed over slightly as she processed what he'd just said. Archer nodded, as if to close the chapter of their conversation, and turned away, back to the case at hand. 

He raised Nick's scans back up and sighed to himself.

"If you still want to work with me," He missed how Lexie seemed to raise her chin at his words, her eyes flickering back to the notes. "Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia is still quite a viable option, maybe it would be worth ordered an oncology consult—"

"He's stable on the dialysis," Lexie countered, implying that she wasn't going anywhere. Archer smiled to himself softly; she was right, he hadn't given her enough credit. If Beth was resilient so was Little Grey. "Nothing to indicate abnormality on the CBC-- His daughter has a neurological condition, right?"

"There are dozens of congenital conditions that fit our parameters," Archer responded thoughtfully, this time taking an opportunity to glance over at her. Lexie's eyebrows were bunched as she, once again, strained to recall an option "We can't spend time gene testing for all of 'em, especially when we're only guessing it's congenital."

"We can narrow the testing down to 40 likely candidates. Test for peripheral nerve damage--"

"He's got brain damage. He's likely to have peripheral nerve damage no matter what the cause."

"I still think that diabetes could be a very possible candidate--"

Realisation filtered through Archer and he paused.

"Nick has brain damage," He repeated that established fact to himself, making Lexie's brow furrow. "That's why we should not test him for it. Test the daughter. Run a nerve test." 

Her eyebrows raised and she nodded, realising what he was alluding to-- it was possible. It was possible that this was neurological and that he hadn't taken this case on for no reason. 

"You also might be right about diabetes," Archer hummed lightly, "Take lunch away from the patient and run a glucose tolerance test-- if you want extra practise I'd suggest drawing blood yourself."

A pause.

"Good work, Doctor Grey."

With a smile, Archer handed her the chart back, not missing how Lexie's eyes seemed to light up. 

She returned the gentle gesture, nodding as she held Nick's chart tightly in her aching fingers. There was a pause, one in which Archer debated whether speaking further. 

Half of his head was filled with the normal shit: he was a workaholic by genetic predisposition, so most of his being was constantly submerged in numbers and blood charts and brain scans. The other half seemed to pause on the way that he'd probably made himself out to be a giant asshole. 

Archer, admittedly, had never been good at being a people person. 

Where Addison and Beth had always just gotten by with socialisation and being perceived as friendly, he'd always come up short-- he shook his head lightly to himself and chided himself for being such a revenge obsessed brat.

Lexie went to exit the room, but he hesitated on the threshold. 

He didn't notice the way that she seemed to pause, as if debating whether to speak herself. A few seconds ticked by and Archer, consumed by the case at hand, was almost startled by the sound of her voice, not even realising that she was still there.

"I like your nose."

"Hm?" Archer started in his chair, looking over with a furrowed brow. He'd only heard her voice and not particularly what she'd said. The surgical intern hesitated again.

"Your nose," Lexie repeated, feeling her cheeks flush, "It's fine."

She left after that, leaving Archer to stare after her-- noticeably, he was caught off-guard, his brain struggling to process what had just happened. He leant backwards in his chair and a dent appeared between his eyebrows. 

His nose was fine. His nose was fine. His nose was--

His lips twitched slightly.

His nose was fine.

***

THE DINNER

"Everything?"

He shrugged in a very vague way that made Ballard's eyebrows raise higher than professionally acceptable. 

He almost wanted to tease her about it, that his use of a grossly misjudged cliche had caused her to break a little bit in whatever sober professionalism she'd managed to claw back. 

But he just swashed a mouthful of whisky around his mouth, throwing a reckless glance over at the couple on the next table.

They must've been celebrating an anniversary, right? They were dressed too nicely for just any old dinner. He'd know, he'd been to his fair share. 

They looked as though they'd put a lot of thought into their evening. He wondered what their plans were: had they bought tickets to go up the Space Needle? Were they planning on driving around the city at dusk and taking in the half-empty streets? Did they know a little spot at the back of some dive bar that no else ever looked at twice?

"Yeah," Mark said, dipping his head in confirmation.

"Any specifics?"

That caused him to pause. He didn't exactly want to-- 

Oh god. Thinking about specifics felt dangerous. He didn't need to think about the specific little details. All he needed to know was that he supposed he'd loved her once and that it had brought them both a lot of bad will because of it. 

If he hadn't loved her, he wouldn't have taken everything so personally and he wouldn't have acted out so--

"I think what I've learnt this week..." Mark's voice was tight as he shifted in his chair, "is that everyone needs to let go of the past."

He hunched over slightly, resting his elbows on the dinner cloth as Ballard turned those words over in her mind. He could practically hear the cogs whirring, the letters tumbling as she picked apart every inflection in his voice. 

He pressed the lip of his glass to his chin and thought about how much of a mess the past week had been. 

When he blinked, he found himself back in Derek's office, watching the back of Beth's head as she, with hints of deep-rooted and ancient frustration, threw out her arms and begged the universe to stop throwing her worst times back at her.

"How is your relationship with Beth now?"

Fuck. Why did that feel like a loaded question?

That was the problem with a tell-all. It meant that things were supposed to be told, that things were supposed to be opened and examined. 

He guessed that therapy happened to be some sort of mental surgery, in which his thoughts were cracked and his subconscious examined. Was she going to run his train of thought through her fingers as if it was a bowel? Was she going to take a sample of his emotions and do a full workup on them? Was she going to conduct a scan off a shitty array of inkblots on a page?

"We're polite." 

Was polite even the right word? He wasn't sure whether every conversation they had had over the past nine months had been diplomatic or genuine. He would've made a good politician (lying, check, the extra-marital affairs, check). 

"It's weird," He added after a beat.

"How so?"

"It's just..." It was weird, right? It was very weird. He didn't know how else to describe it. "Well, I guess past tense now."

"And was that what you wanted?" Ballard questioned, always on time with the painfully candid prompts. (What he wanted? He echoed silently, his eyebrows bunching) "Did you want a semblance of a friendship or a... work relationship with your ex?"

"I don't know," Mark's skin prickled with the weight of Ballard's watchful gaze. 

He found himself flattening into a very compact version of himself, one that was bewildered by the smallest details of his friendship with the psychiatrist. Was it even a friendship? 

"I mean, we were good friends once," He said, "Back in New York before everything, she was a good friend. For a while, I guess it felt like nothing had changed. I liked the fact that she stopped throwing Addison in my face ten times a day... but then..."

A pause.

"Things changed."

Things had changed. They'd changed quickly and he was still trying to process it.

"What happened?" The prompt made Mark's eye twitch.

"The shooting."

Fuck.

He was trying his best not to meet her eye, but he felt it travel. He felt the exact moment she looked away and down at the table as if she could begin to feel the wall that Mark had built so tightly around that topic. 

He cleared his throat and reached for his drink, like a reflex that he couldn't suppress; it was only while the alcohol burned at the back of his throat that he idly wondered whether this was how Beth had felt all of those years ago. 

It didn't surpass him that he was drinking so much. 

He was pretty sure that Beth had not been able to drink during her therapy session.

"Do you want to talk about the shooting?"

Again, the thought of that boardroom flashed across his consciousness. 

It felt like a shooting star, a particularly shitty shooting star that made the air wrangle his lungs dry. A muscle twitched in his jaw and Mark distracted himself just gently tapping against the table top.

It was ironic, in a way, how a split second ago, he was preaching about letting go of the past, yet the past still felt very present to him. 

If he stayed idle long enough, he left the third person that was seated at the table.

"I, uh," His brow furrowed slightly. He cleared his throat. "I don't have anything to say."

That was a lie. 

That was a very blatant lie, and he knew that Ballard knew that too. 

Her poker face wasn't seasoned enough to cover up the miniscule jump of her eyebrow as she read into his body language. The dipped shoulders, the way his chin almost seemed to drag on the table-- was that what people were to psychiatrists? 

Ballard didn't push. 

The water she'd been chasing for the past half hour seemed to bring her to a very professional baseline, the sort that was so wildly estranged from Mark. 

She didn't say anything. She just stared at him, letting the silence fill with the unspoken between the two of them.

"Did I mention that I slept with her best friend too?"

Ah yes. A nice diversion topic. 

When in doubt, throw Amelia Shepherd into the conversation to make things more interesting.

 Again, this wasn't exactly something that he'd anticipated talking about; it'd just slipped out like a nervous tick that he hadn't been able to swallow. (Nervous? Since when did he get nervous?) 

Ballard didn't react. She was trained well. He held the lip of his glass to his lip.

"Yeah," He chuckled, finding some dry amusement in how he could've probably sat here for hours and told her about his every conquest. It was an exhaustive list, one which, just by thinking about it, reduced him to slumping in his chair. "Let's talk about that."

"So you slept with both your girlfriend's sister and her best friend?"

"I slept with a lot of women," Mark said flippantly, feeling the rush of air that seemed to travel deep down into his body. "Not as many as Beth thinks... but I can count them on two hands." A second pause. Ballard didn't speak. "But Amelia. I had sex with Amelia in her apartment on her couch. Her best friend. My best friend's sister. I slept with Amy and I didn't tell until I saw her again nine months ago, and then, when I told her, it was during an argument and I only said it because I wanted to hurt her-"

Fuck, that's all he seemed to ever do.

"Why?" Ballard questioned, her eyes briefly dropping so she could scrawl a thoughtful note in her pad. 

Mark's attention followed the movement, suddenly grasped by the curiosity of what exactly was on those pages-- would he recognise himself if he was to read them? Was it some haphazard, drunk dissection of his subconscious? 

When he didn't respond, she just nodded to herself, "You're going to ask me what it says about you, aren't you?"

Mark didn't respond. Not audibly, at least.

"Okay," She said, nodding very slowly as she thought his words through, "Well, from experience, I can say that usually when people cheat with intimate family members and friends... such as best friends or siblings of their significant others... usually it's because you want the other person to notice."

Another lack of response from the Plastic Surgeon on the other side of the table. 

Ballard tilted her head and kissed her teeth. She crossed her ankles and nursed her glass of dry white wine, reminding him of a poor mans Sharon Stone as she regarded him.

"Did you want her to notice?"

He shrugged at the question, "She didn't really pay attention to anything but pills and her job... so probably." Mark dragged in a long breath. "What does that mean?"

Ballard tilted her head to the side.

"Did you feel lonely?"

He let out a scoff, "Lonely?"

"Dating addicts can be a very lonely experience," The therapist answered, her eyelash barely fluttering as she rested back in her chair. "I've had patients who have been both the addict and the partner. I can only imagine that, for someone like you with discomfort surrounding commitment and inexperience with relationships... that must have been very hard."

Mark just stared at her.

So this was therapy, huh?

Bethenny Ballard was looking at him as if she understood all of the secrets in the universe. 

He couldn't exactly understand whether he liked it or not, all he knew was that his heart skipped a beat-- he screwed up his nose, trying to shake off the feeling. His glass was half empty and he really wanted another refill. 

His eyes flickered towards it and Ballard's followed-- she didn't say anything about his pending alcoholism.

He was going to need so much more alcohol if she kept saying shit like that. 

Was he a walking billboard for unsolved mental trauma? Did he light up like a neon beacon, attracting all of the Psych moths? He'd thought he was fine. Sure, he knew that he hadn't come out of that relationship well but... but holy crap.

"I wasn't lonely," Mark said with a shake of his head, "Fuck knows I had enough people to keep me company."

"That's not the same," Ballard interjected.

Mark cleared his throat. It wasn't. He knew that.

"It's not the same," She repeated, her elbows resting against the table as she leant forwards. "I don't think you need to be told that there's a difference between spending the night with someone you care about and just some girl you've picked up in a bar." 

In response, Mark just sighed out of his nose. 

"I've found that when people cheat, sometimes it's for the rush of it," Ballard continued, "Sometimes they don't believe in fidelity... sometimes they just don't care. But, sometimes, it's because they need to gain control back over something. They like to be in control and... if anything... the opposite of control is dating an addict."

He looked up at her, his eyes taking their time to fix on the therapist on the other side of the table.

"Beth she..." 

Just saying her name almost made him want to close off completely. Sometimes, it completely bewildered him; how was it that five years could pass and he was still so...? 

"She couldn't help it. She couldn't control it..." He paused and grimaced to himself, "It was my job to make the right call."

"What was the right call?"

"Not cheat," Mark replied almost dryly. He felt the whisky catch at the back of his throat. "The bar was very low."

A pause.

"Sometimes," He began, the word feeling bitter on the tip of his tongue, "Sometimes it sucks."

Ballard looked up from her notes and tilted her head to the side.

"What sucks?"

"I'm hot shit."

 Mark said it plainly, throwing in a shrug to make things appear so casual-- but they didn't feel casual. These sort of words were two scotches and one whisky words, the sort that wouldn't have been given the light of day in any other situation. 

"I feel like everyone just automatically has an idea of who I am. I feel like I am stuffed into this very small box of being some hot asshole that just fucks and... and fucks..." His brow crinkled slightly, "They're not wrong. But sometimes I just get really fucked up over how that's what I'm gonna remembered for. Not as a great surgeon or a great boyfriend or husband-- just as the guy that couldn't keep his dick in his pants."

He'd been thinking about death a lot. 

He'd been thinking about how, if he died tomorrow, there wouldn't be much that he'd leave behind. When Beth had been bleeding out on that bathroom floor, her eyes had welled at the thought of leaving Charlie, of not making it to lunch. 

It hadn't taken Mark long to figure out that he didn't exactly have an equivalent. 

He didn't have Lexie anymore. Sloan was god knows where and he wouldn't have exactly put money on any of his one night stands shedding tears over his demise--

"People get surprised," He continued, "People get surprised when I seem to actually care about shit. Strangers I've never even spoken to before are so sure that they understand exactly who I am. I think Addison started shit with me because she just automatically assumed that I'd be into it--" Mark shook his head, "I wasn't even paying attention. I had so much shit to deal with and I didn't realise what was happening until Beth was..."

He bit the tip of his tongue.

"When I first met Beth," Mark exhaled it quietly, "She gave me hell for who she perceived me to be. Hell, I know I deserved it, but when there's so many people who are so convinced that they know you better than you do..." He paused, "Beth is one of the only people in my life to give me the chance to change her mind."

Lexie had given him that chance too.. He'd figured that it was just the sort of person she was. She was young, really young, even for his standards. 

She seemed to romanticise everything, see everything through rose coloured glasses-- she was so naive, he could recognise that now. She'd looked at him and she'd cast him as some sort of good guy, the sort that she could love unconditionally until all of the conditional slots were filled and she was out of the door. 

She'd been sorely let down. They both had.

Addison had known who he was from the start. She had not been let down nor had she been proven wrong. She'd known exactly who he was and, when he'd served his purpose, she'd thrown him aside, all under the guise that she was so convinced that he'd never be able to have a functional, healthy relationship.

He'd never admitted it before, but he found some bitter amusement in the fact that Derek had found someone better.

(Mark just wondered whether Addison felt the same way about Beth and Charlie.)

A pause.

"How did she make you feel?"

"Beth?"

Ballard nodded.

He shook his head slightly, "It's not even worth thinking about."

(It wasn't. Not when Beth was happy.) 

He felt like talking about shit about what he'd loved about her and how he'd felt was almost disrespectful. It was pulling on a thread that was buried so deeply that it'd become an invisible string; impossible to see but just ever so faintly there. 

Talking about things like this filled him with the same hesitation that he'd been filled with when he'd tirelessly debated visiting Beth in hospital at Seattle Pres.

(It wasn't worth the problems it'd cause.)

And yet the words were just there on the tip of his tongue.

"Okay, whatever you're comfortable with--"

"No person had ever looked at me like Beth did."

That was the alcohol. 

That was one hundred percent the sort of confession that made Mark immediately realise the downside of having had so many drinks. He could taste it in his mouth as those words slipped out. He was even too out of touch to even realise what had been said until Ballard's pen was etching it onto her pad. 

His eyes dropped to it, his ears filling with the distant scratch of it on the paper-- his brain was slow, so behind that,he leant forwards only after a few seconds had passed.

"You don't have to write that down."

"Do you think that Beth saw past all of the expectations that other people had for you?"

His mouth went dry.

That sounded like a very poorly written cliche. 

It felt like the sort of thing he'd hear in one of the romantic comedy movies that Beth used to make him watch. It felt like the sudden declaration just before the credits ran, in which the misunderstood misfit engaged with the fact that the love interest had been the only person in the world to see the true them. 

It felt overused and didn't settle well with him.

"No," He didn't. "I'd say she was pretty aware of what she was getting into."

"How so?"

"She wasn't surprised," Mark felt like a kid saying it. Like a shameful kid who was admitting they'd broken something. He shrugged. "In the end.... No one was."

"Okay--"

"Beth called me out on my shit," He said, "She would be clear about what she wanted-- y'know, I used to tease her about it, about how she had such a clear idea of her future-- she had everything planned out to a tee. She would tell me when I'd messed up and she would tell me how to fix it. It pissed me off sometimes but, but that's what you're supposed to do, right? Be honest?" 

Mark's brow furrowed at the train of thought. 

"She tried so hard," He said, "She tried so hard for both of us and then I let her down."

"You let her down?" Ballard repeated as if she wasn't quite following.

"As I said, the bar was very low."

He didn't appreciate the split second of scepticism that flickered across the psychiatrist's face, as if she was trying to find exactly where he'd come to that conclusion. She looked down at her notes and then back up at him, only pausing to clear her throat with a mouthful of ice-cold water-- he watched the movement, his foot twitching under the table. He'd worn his nice shoes. 

This part of the conversation didn't feel particularly nice.

"So," She pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded slowly along with her train of thought, "Do you think that by cheating on her, you let her down?" He frowned at her. Wasn't that pretty much what it was by definition? "How so?"

"What?" He questioned back, feeling more miffed than anything else, "D'you think I did her a favour?" 

After a pause, Mark shrugged. 

"I probably did," He sighed, "I understand how addiction works now. I didn't then-- I understand that Beth didn't have control over most things. Sure, she's responsible for shit, but I did have control. I was the bastard that chose to just--"

"So, you're a bastard," Her words made his eyebrows rise slightly. Only slightly. She said it so lightly as if she was commenting on the weather. "You're a cheating bastard who can't keep his dick in his pants. You're an ass who slept with your ex's sister, best friend and half of Manhattan. You're narcissistic and self-involved. Volatile, self-obsessed and you don't play with others..."

He waited for her point, his brow furrowing as he stared back. 

Mark wasn't quite following. He knew all of these things. In fact, these were all the things that he'd been telling her over the last two courses. 

She was just repeating his words back to him, watching as he stared blankly back. He didn't understand exactly where this was going; was this supposed to be some sort of self-actualisation? 

Ballard was looking at him as if she was trying to provoke some sort of cinematic inner realisation within him-- really? He just felt like shit.

"You're hot shit," She added, a reminder of his earlier words. "Shit, but hot."

"Is this therapy?" His voice pitched apprehensively, eyes flickering over the way Ballard smiled.

"It is," She said, head bouncing in confirmation of what was rapidly becoming his worst nightmare. 

Why did he feel as though he'd just been skinned alive? Why did he feel as though she'd just peeled back half of the flesh from his bones?

 "The only thing I've learnt about you over dinner is that you're completely convinced that you're a terrible person," Ballard said, "If this really was the first date... I don't think we'd be off to a good start."

Mark didn't quite know how to respond to that.

"There's a lot to unpack there," She continued, clearing her throat as she leant forwards on the table, "But the main thing I heard, is how hard you are on yourself. The amount of self-criticism you're experiencing, it's a lot."

Mark felt his whole being twist.

"Yeah, well," He drawled into his glass, "I'm sure a lot of people would say that it's necessary."

"Necessary?"

He hummed lightly in confirmation, "I've always been the sort of guy you don't invite to meet your parents."

"Why?"

Mark faltered slightly.

"I'm an asshole," He shrugged, "If that's not enough for self-criticism, I must be crazy."

There was a pause in the conversation. 

Ballard shifted in her chair; her fingers dipped under the tabletop to smooth out her skirt. She brushed her hair over her shoulder and set down her wine glass; Mark found himself staring at her the little details and tale-tale signs of how she'd been so precarious about her appearance.

See, another example of him being an ass. He had invited her on a date and she'd clearly made some effort. She'd expected courtesy and now here he was, beyond drunk and bringing the mood down.

"You're not crazy, Mark," Ballard said quietly, interjecting his train of thought. "You're just a lot harder on yourself than you probably should be."

Mark didn't speak.

"Acknowledging that is important."

"Yeah," He sighed, rubbing at his jaw, "But also, what about all the crap that I did. I mean-- telling Lexie about all the shit with Beth... I thought it would do something. I was thinking about myself and not about her, y'know? I thought it would stop Lexie from leaving. I thought that it would solve my problems and I didn't think for a second what it would do to Beth." He frowned to himself. "It did jackshit and hurt Beth instead."

Ballard's eyes felt heavy on him.

"And the only reason we were in that position," Mark continued tightly, his jaw clenched, "was because I wouldn't listen to Lexie. I wanted my grandkid in my life and I didn't listen to her when she said that she didn't... She refused to be second to something and then she found out something, something that I didn't tell her and I refused to even think for a second that--"

He broke off.

(They were not unpacking that right now.)

"Why did Lexie leave?"

"Because she wasn't happy."

"About your grandchild?"

He heaved in a breath, "That's how the argument started, yes." And then he chuckled, "Isn't it always about kids? About secret fucking love kids and children popping up out nowhere?"

Ballard barely even blanched, "And how did the argument end?"

He just shook his head tiredly. 

He meant it when he said that he wasn't going to talk about that argument. He didn't want to admit out loud what had happened. 

The confrontation between them had already been too much. 

The more he thought about the way he'd ended with Lexie, the more he wished that he'd never agreed to this at all.

"Just like with Beth," Mark said in the smallest voice he'd ever used, "She left."

"Okay," Ballard said, tasting the hesitation in the air. (It wasn't particularly okay but he appreciated the sentiment.) "Tell me more."

"About what?"

"Anything," She said, shrugging casually as if, again, she was inviting him to comment on the weather. She ran a finger around the rim of her wine glass and gave him a long look as if she could stare through him. "But... I think Lexie's a little bit irrelevant."

"Irrelevant?" He echoed, not exactly understanding what she meant.

"You know how you feel about Lexie," was all that Ballard said, "You miss her. You know how the two of you were left-- Beth, on the other hand..." Mark dragged in a long breath, "You haven't exactly given me a straightforward answer to any question I've asked about her." A pause. "You don't know how you feel about her, do you?"

Oh.

He didn't like that question. 

It slipped under Mark's skin and settled there as if she'd just sliced him in two with a scalpel. Paired with those innocent, round eyes, he felt as though he'd just been completely ambushed by a single questioning lift to her sentence. 

He couldn't tell what was worse: the fact that she'd asked him that question or the fact that she kept watching him.

"You want to hate her, don't you?" She continued, despite how badly that Mark wanted her to stop. He couldn't quite bring himself to say it. Ballard tilted her head to the side. She even had the audacity to smile softly. "It's complicated, I understand. Nothing is ever black and white. Emotions are messy, believe me."

She observed the way that his gaze flickered away, back over towards the couple on the next table. 

(They looked so blissfully unaware of the bad things in the universe, caught in a little bubble that made his chest tighten.) 

Mark took a very long mouthful of scotch.

"It's okay to not know," Ballard's voice almost made him start in his chair. He'd almost forgotten that she was there. Almost. She was staring at him still, with those heavy knowing eyes that made him want to tear out his hair. "Don't feel like you need to--"

He felt like scoffing, "That's not helping."

"Do you hate her?"

Jesus Christ.

Mark paused.

"No, I don't hate her," Another beat, "I couldn't."

"Okay--"

"I think I confused concern for hate," Mark's brow furrowed with the words as he spoke them, "I don't think I knew what to do with it..."

"The concern?" Ballard echoed and he nodded hesitantly, "For what? For Beth and her addiction--"

"I was fucking terrified."

He had been. 

Relationships were enough to break him into hives. 

He'd been more than terrified.

"We had everything figured out," He began, not exactly sure where this was going as it started. "We talked it through a bit. Beth made it clear that she understood that we were both responsible for how things ended. She said that she'd fucked up too. I'd hated her and she'd hated me-- it was weird, after being blamed for everything for so long..."

"The affair?" Ballard asked in a pause, then after a beat, she shrugged, "Or the affairs, I guess."

"Yeah, when I slept with her sister while she was in rehab," Mark's voice almost didn't sound like his own. "After that she left New York and disappeared off into the world and came back four years later--" He broke off, annoyed that he seemed too just be repeating things he'd spoken about a thousand times over the past nine months, "But we spoke about it. We were both at fault. We were fine and then..."

And then what? Nothing changed? Or, did everything change? Mark couldn't exactly decide which one it was. Either way, all he knew was that his anger wasn't there anymore. 

He'd carried it for so many years, so much hurt and anguish over the fact that Beth hadn't been there. (

That had been his problem, his reason, he'd been as lonely as Addison had been. They'd been one in the same.) 

He'd tried to look for it but it was gone, leaving something strange in it's place.

"And then?"

"I told her I missed her."

(Sometimes.)

"Okay."

"And she said that she missed me back."

(Sometimes.)

"And then what?"

Ballard's question made him sigh. 

It came from deep within him, travelling from the tips of his fingers and his toes. It made him feel lighter, but he knew that he was bound to be crushed by the weight that hung over them at any moment-- that's what Seattle felt like these days. 

Every word, every move he made, it felt important. 

It made him cautious and unsure of himself. He'd fucked up so many things in his life and he was trying so desperately to avoid da mistake again.

He could tell from the way that Ballard looked away (after a prolonged silence) that she wasn't expecting an answer. 

Was he that bad of a patient? She'd taken to expecting his silence, to avoiding things instead of facing them head on. 

"And then I killed her," Mark answered so off-handedly. It was paired with the sort of shrug that felt so dismissive. "I mean, what sort of asshole does that? I have such a high success rate and then I got in that room-- and-- and I killed someone who just..."

He didn't finish his sentence, but the silence such a statement left, now that was deafening. He'd thought that the silence in an empty hallway in the hospital had been a lot to deal with; he heard it sometimes when he was laying in bed late at night or resting his eyelids for a few moments. 

He heard the sound of the hospital in lockdown and felt the same rush of alarm and panic. He thought the same thoughts, felt the same pang in his chest as he walked away from a room that held an ashen-faced Lexie Grey and a Beth Montgomery on the brink of death.

Mark decided to order another scotch.

"Earlier," Ballard said so quietly, her eyes resting on the way his hand seemed to grapple with his napkin. It was an almost nervous, repetitive twitch, one that gave away how deeply uncomfortable he was. His pupils bounced around, his mouth pressed into a line and suddenly, Ballard could taste the diagnosis on the tip of her tongue. "When I asked you if you knew anyone in the incident--"

"Everyone knows someone..." 

Mark's answer felt robotic and practical as if he'd been preprogrammed with it without even realising it. Across the table, the psychiatrist seemed to debate whether to order another glass of wine. 

"Everyone in the hospital knew someone who was hurt or died," He said, "Eighteen people died. And Beth-- Sure, she was resuscitated. But she died. I made the wrong call. It was Beth and I made the wrong call."

They held each other's gaze.

(She could see it. Ballard could feel the burden of his words. His voice was strained, his blue eyes seemed to sear through her and chill her to the bone. When she blinked, she no longer saw the smooth-talking, confident man from the bar.)

(The man across from her was haunted. She could tell from the way that everything within seemed to process in slow motion. He seemed to struggle to move onwards from that thought--)

He'd made the wrong call.

The emphasis on that phrase was fifty-per cent his ego speaking. 

He was a good doctor-- no, better than good, he was excellent. His craft was his passion. He was the best damn surgeon that he'd ever met. Derek was good, Callie was good, Addison was good too-- but Mark? He was phenomenal. 

He knew that he had an ego, but it was founded somewhere, and the foundations of the Mark Sloan phenomenal had been built on the sutures he lay.

So why had he made a wrong call? Why, when it felt as though he needed it most, had he made the worst surgical mistake in his career? (Or, more importantly, was it really his worst mistake, or did it just feel like it?)

"Do you think about it a lot?"

He didn't answer.

(Yes. He did. He thought about it a lot.)

(He thought about it when he was trying to sleep at night. He thought about it when he was waking up in the morning. He thought about it when he passed Charlie in the corridor or strayed a little too close to the boardroom-- He'd thought about it whenever her perfume crept into his nostrils.)

"Do you feel any guilt about what happened?"

The couple on the next table kissed across the centre of the table. 

He watched as the guy pressed his palm against the woman's chin. 

The image of Beth, bedraggled and bloodstained, floated across his subconscious. It was a familiar sight, the sort that liked to plague him-- it'd been what he'd thought about so vividly when he'd held the psychiatrist back from attacking Derek. How close she'd been. How alive she'd been--

"I just feel shit about it," He said, a very heavy pause in between his words, "But that doesn't mean I have a Beth problem."

"I'd like to listen," Ballard said finally, once Mark seemed to have gathered his wits about him and stopped mentally running over that day over and over. She gave him a faint smile. "If it's not too hard, tell me about it. Pitch it like it was any other patient. I'd like to hear what you think went wrong."

No one ever wanted to listen.

"Fuck that--"

"Mark."

He didn't like the way she said his name. It made him freeze. Was it obvious? Was he some sort of billboard of PTSD? 

That's how she said his name; it was disarming and tender and it made him so aware of how vulnerable he'd been throughout this situation. Suddenly, the tops of his ears were burning almost bashfully.

"What do you want me to say?" He asked, appearing almost exasperated. "Do you want me to say that I think about Beth dead on the floor all the fucking time? Do you want me to say that I would have rather it been me in that position than her--"

"If that's how you feel," (She'd interrupted him. He was pretty sure that it was the first broken rule of therapy. Wasn't she supposed to allow him to ramble on and on and--) "I promise you, I have no agenda. I just want to help you understand--"

"Understand what?" Mark said, his voice dragging at the back of his throat. 

It was the vocally equivalent of a kid digging their heels in deep in the ground, reluctant to get hauled into the car to go to the dentist.

At first, Ballard didn't seem to have an answer. She was as caught off-guard by it as he was-- what was there for him to understand? 

He felt as though he had a very concise grasp on things. He'd fucked up in New York. He'd fucked up badly. Beth had too, but his had been far more malicious and aimed directly at her in retaliation for her absence. 

He'd fucked up with Lexie too, he hadn't taken her needs in consideration when he'd made large life decisions. And then, to top everything off, he'd killed Beth. 

He'd caused her death by incorrectly overestimating is expertise and doing a procedure that he should have never attempted. 

He'd watched her die. He'd felt her die--

"Did you see anyone after the incident?" 

Her soft voice continued and he looked back away towards the couple on the next table. He watched their fingers touch across the centre of the table, in their own little world-- he stared at the table until it was two, swimming across his vision. 

"Did you see Doctor Perkins or anyone on his team--?"

"I figured that I couldn't tell Beth's brother-in-law that I think about her dying all the time," Mark spoke with his eyes fixed on the lovers. He was surprised they hadn't noticed him. In his peripheral, he noticed how Ballard seemed to stiffen in her chair. "I mean, look, I shouldn't even be talking to you about this--"

"I'm not going to say anything," Ballard said, although Mark didn't quite believe her. He wouldn't be that lucky. Things weren't that easy. "Anything you say at this dinner table stays between you and me."

It felt like a very shitty rendition of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but it convinced Mark to order another drink-- whisky this time. 

They watched it appear on the table with heavy eyes, all too aware of how suffocating conversation was beginning to feel. 

Mark felt his eye twitch with every breath he took; he was sure that Ballard wouldn't mind him walking away. Even when she turned and asked for the dessert menu, he felt as though he could've walked away-- but something kept him stuck in that chair.

"Beth dying..."

He hated how his throat tightened at the end of the sentence.

"It's been six years and Beth dying still..."

He found himself looking back over at that table again, over at the couple. 

He watched the man get up to leave for the restroom; he placed a hand on the woman's shoulder as he left and she smiled at him. She watched him leave, not looking away until he was out of sight-- the observation made something burn in Mark's chest. It was deep, almost forgotten. He knew what it was. It was yearning. It was the desire for something a little bit more than a one night stand-- and that terrified him.

"I don't know what it is," His voice was almost a whisper. It dropped so low that he could see Ballard lean forwards in her chair just to catch it. "You think you're doing great and then you're standing there washing your ex-girlfriend's blood off of your hands and watching it all fuck off down the drain..."

Mark stared at them, at his hands as they grasped his glass. His million-dollar hands. His prized possession. They looked alien to him, for a second; it was the weird phenomenon of looking at something for too long to the point where it changed right in front of your eyes. 

These fingers had caused so much pleasure and they'd caused Beth so much pain-- how was it that he could change one person's life and wreck another?

"Mark," Ballard said tenderly, "You didn't shoot Beth."

I know that, he thought to himself. He knew who did. Everyone knew who did. Gary Clark was the unspoken phantom that no one really wanted to talk about at work anymore. 

It was Seattle Grace Mercy Death's equivalent of Macbeth; suddenly, the whole concept of operating theatres made perfect sense.

He knew that he hadn't shot Beth. He knew that. He wasn't that dumb-- But that didn't mean that his hands were clean.

"In New York--"

(He regretted opening his mouth the moment that it happened.) 

(A thought had decided to make itself known, the sort of thought that he really didn't want to talk about at all.)

(However, sometimes, his mouth just went on its own accord. Words came from nowhere, gushing like blood from a new wound; the funny thing was, Mark was pretty sure that this was an old wound.)

(It was clotted, blistered and aching. It tore itself in half and drenched the shiny wooden floor under their feet.)

(Such a smooth talker, right?)

Fuck, he'd been trying to avoid thinking about this for a long time.

"--When things got bad, Beth didn't want me to live with her..." 

His tongue went numb with the acknowledgement of what he was about to say.

We were supposed to get an apartment together and we agreed that we should wait until I had a good at this practice that her brother had left to Derek and... and Beth was going to finish her internship... " His tone was surprisingly monotone. "When I say bad I mean, Beth was just... I was going out more and I was never there and she would call me all the time just to yell at me... I hated her. But I hated her because she terrified me."

Ballard's face was impassive. Her eyes were watchful.

Mark sounded oddly detached as if he'd decided to sit this one out and let his body speak on its own. Was it even him speaking, or just a very small part of Mark Sloan that he'd almost forgotten about. 

The same kid that had turned all the lights on when his parents weren't home because he was scared of the dark.

"And then one night I came home," His mouth was dry. He wet his lips with his tongue. "I came home to Beth to make things okay-- I hadn't returned her calls and I..." A pause. "She'd locked herself in the bathroom."

There was no way to describe it, he found. He spent a good few moments trying to put it into words, but, for the first time in what hadn't been long enough, Mark found himself lost for words. 

His head was full of static, but in the distance, he could hear it:

(His voice echoing around the apartment as he called her name.)

(Amy had said she'd be there. He'd asked.)

(She had a night off and he'd wanted to talk. He could hear the way he'd grown slightly annoyed, an amounting suspicion that Beth had slid away into some bar on the other side of Manhattan or was just ignoring him-- but then he heard that start too: The dull thud of the lock sticking on the bathroom door when he noticed it wouldn't open, followed by the frantic rattling of the doorknob when he realised that it'd been locked from the inside.)

(The sudden rise in his voice when he realised exactly what was going on. The pounding of his fist on wood when he realised he wasn't getting a response--)

Beth! Come on– Open the Door!

In retrospect, it felt like the sort of moment where things should have stopped. It should have been the crux. 

It should have made something in him click, a realisation that he should have picked up the phone when she called. It'd felt like a milestone-- Beth's first flatline. 

It felt like the sort of shit you needed to get on commemorative plates or something. It should have been enough for him to re-evaluate things, and what had he done? Nothing of the sort.

Beth! Don't do this to me--!

"I had to break down the door," He continued after holding his breath for a while, "It's fucking hard to break down a door." His lips twitched, mostly because he didn't know what else to do with himself. A pause and then he shrugged almost haphazardly. "It's also fucking hard to do CPR on your own girlfriend."

Don't you dare fucking die on me. Not now.

He couldn't quite read Ballard's expression, but what struck him so much was the lack of reaction-- oh, she was really good. Really, really good. 

Lexie had been so responsive to things. 

He hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her about Beth's overdose, but he'd tried to express the frustrations, the anger, the qualms that still lingered. 

He'd reassured her that Beth wasn't an issue for the two of them. 

He'd reassured Lexie that he could never put himself in that sort of situation again, the sort where he wasn't sure whether he couldn't guarantee that he'd lose someone without warning.

Talking about that night in Beth's apartment (Beth: unresponsive, pale and drowsy. Mark: desperate, terrified and in love with a woman who was half-dead.) meant admitting what had happened next. 

While Beth had been in hospital with a doting Derek at her side, Mark had fucked Addison for the first time.

"That's what I thought about when Beth was bleeding on the floor..."

 Admitting this out loud felt a lot easier than he'd anticipated. From the moment he said it, he felt his shoulders fall slightly and muscles unclench deep within his chest. 

"I kept just... kept thinking about how I've seen her die before."

They'd resuscitated her then, too. But just like in that boardroom, on the cold and bloodstained floor, Mark had been unable to do anything. H

is hands had been tied. He'd been rendered useless, too caught in the past-- they were all so caught in the past. 

It was the realisation of that day, of the revisit of the past, that now allowed Mark to understand why Beth desperately wanted to be let go.

He hadn't realised he was holding his breath.

"I didn't shoot her," Mark said firmly, not missing how Ballard seemed unsure of what to say. It felt like a morbid victory. Not even the psychiatrist knew how to unpack all that, "And I know I didn't force her to become an addict... She was an addict long before I even turned up. But I played a part in it. I didn't help save her-- I made things worse. I helped kill the woman I was in love with."

***

THE HOSPITAL

It turned out, as Lexie found, Archer Montgomery wasn't as scary as she'd first perceived him to be.

He carried this gleam in his eye, one that felt so similar to something she would've seen on Beth's face. 

It was one that had made her so paranoid that he carried the same vengeance that his sister did, that had left the youngest Grey on high alert and watchful. 

She'd been so apprehensive about being on his service, so terrified that the rumours of unrest behind the Chief of Surgery's office door would overflow onto that one confrontation she'd had with Beth in the cafeteria--

But no. Actually, it turned out that Dr Montgomery was as unsure of everything as she was. Despite his apparent flare for drama and revenge, he was behind on the gossip of Seattle Grace Mercy West. He'd looked at her with such confusion and, eventual, disappointment when she'd admitted that Mark had stirred something between them. 

Admittedly, he'd raised some very good points and she'd made sure to run them through as she prepared herself to continue on his service.

Look at her, she thought to herself with a small smile as she left the Neurosurgeon alone on his lunch break, Successfully breaking down doors, one day at a time.

The only problem was, Beth Montgomery was a pretty hard door to knock down.

She was already in the room, helping set up the equipment ahead of the page she'd been sent by her brother. 

Nick's kid sat on the examination bed, her eyes watching Beth as the psychiatrist carefully attached sensors to her limbs. 

The same lips that had twitched into a enamoured grin at her father's joke twisted into apprehension, brow furrowing as Beth very gently explained what she was going to need to do; Lexie could imagine the explanation from all the way on the other side of the door: This can become either hot or cold. As soon as it starts to feel uncomfortable, I want you to tell me. 

It was a simple test that would hopefully give them a lot of answers.

The smile on Lexie's lips dimmed a fraction as she softly stepped into the room. 

The only person who looked up was Maja, Nick's wife, who seemed to have her cell phone perpetually glued to her earlobe. 

"But you don't think there's something wrong with me?" The kid, Marika, responded, her brow furrowed in confusion. 

Lexie stepped forwards, taking some of the sensory equipment and joining Beth in preparation-- she didn't miss how the brunette seemed to tense slightly at the proximity between them.

"No, baby," Maja said, squeezing her daughter's shoulder in comfort, "They're testing you to help daddy."

"Yes, what you're doing is very important," Beth added with a bright smile that felt too plastic for Lexie's liking.

 It crept under Lexie's skin, causing her to shift out of Beth's way whenever she got too close; she wasn't sure whether Beth noticed, but either way, it was mostly a way to ease the unease that Lexie felt. 

"But it's really important that you tell me when you can feel it, okay?"

Marika nodded, but the dent between her eyebrow did not fade no matter how much Beth tried to soothe her. Even up against Beth's most brilliant, blinding smile, the little girl was not swayed. Lexie glanced between the two of them, noticing how Beth glanced over warily in her direction.

Was this what her life was going to be now? Tiptoeing around people because she'd tried to be an adult. 

(An adult?) 

Archer's words followed her as she finished preparing Marika for the test. She didn't feel like an adult, not right now. She was circling around a kid, wary of the proximity between her and her ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, who coincidentally happened to be the same woman who had saved her life. 

She didn't feel like an adult, she felt like the very underwhelming punchline of a very sorry joke.

"Is it going to hurt?" Marika asked. 

Lexie found herself pausing, her head tilting as she looked over at the kid; all the met her was two round, blue eyes that seemed so sad and scared at the same time--

"It's going to be okay," Lexie swallowed the lump at the back of her throat, smiling softly. "It's really easy, okay? It shouldn't hurt as long as you do what Doctor Montgomery says. You're really helping your Dad. It's like the better you do, the better we know your dad is."

Those words felt right to say. They must have been, as the fear in Marika's eyes slowly faded and she nodded slowly, turning her head away.

Great, Lexie exhaled, mentally giving herself a pat on the back, Today was going better than she expected.

The test, as mentioned previously, was extremely simple. 

In fact, it was so simple that there was quite possibly no logical reason for Beth to stick around; Lexie had already overheard Archer say that to his sister, telling her adamantly that there were probably so many other things that she could have accomplished in this time. However, she'd also heard Beth's response too: a slow pause, an unseen shrug, 'I think it'd be interesting to see this case to the end'. 

The surgical intern was more than capable of running it herself, and yet here she was, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the psychiatrist in an examination room.

Maja had been asked to wait outside. The room was silent, perpetuated by the familiar tension that was built so heavily in Lexie's shoulders. 

She could taste the ambiance, it was sour and stodgy on her tongue-- they were going to such awkward lengths to avoid each other's gazes that Lexie was caught wondering what exactly it was that was keeping Beth from walking out of that door.

"Okay Malika," Beth called out over the intercom system. 

It was a room not not dissimilar from the radiology department, making Lexie have brief deja vu of being hit on by the patient's father. Absently, Lexie looked over towards the woman beside her, thinking about how everyone seemed to prefer Beth over her these days. 

"We're going to start with the warm setting, you need to let us know how long it takes before you can feel it, okay?"

It was Lexie that pressed the button. 

Beth gave the signal with a soft nod as Malika responded in a quiet voice. Through the window they could see the intense look of concentration on her face. It filled Lexie with pride-- at least she'd done one thing right today.

"How long is it going to take before she feels it?" Lexie questioned, once again wondering why she was asking this to a psychiatrist of all people. S

he didn't exactly understand why it could have been Archer running this test, or at least Kher or any of the other doctors-- looking towards a doctor of Psychiatry felt missguided. Oh, that and the fact that it was Beth, of all people.

Forever the professional, Beth barely bristled, "It can vary. Best case scenario is as quickly as possible. It's very gradual so even then it will probably take a while." 

In her peripheral, Lexie saw the brunette heavily sit back in the chair, absently itching at her forearm as she kept her eyes on the monitors. 

"I used to run these tests all the time back in New York. You'd be surprised how long it can take sometimes--" A pause and then she pressed down on the intercom, "Everything okay, Malika?"

They heard a distant "Yep" through the speaker.

Lexie didn't respond. The mention of New York felt so tempting to chase up. 

The whole city, now, felt like some sort of honeypot, as if she was a tiny bee just getting blown around a windstorm, wondering where the hell she could land. New York. Even Lexie knew what sort of stories that city held. She glanced over at the psychiatrist, absently wondering whether Beth could feel the weight of that tiny reference too.

(Of course Beth could. New York had been hers.)

An impulse filled her. 

She wasn't exactly sure what it was. 

It made her tongue bunch until it felt as though it was too big for her mouth. It was anaphylaxis and it wasn't glossitis, it was something different, something that Lexie wasn't able to diagnose until Beth looked over towards her. 

The psychiatrist blinked, catching the flush in Lexie's cheeks and the way that she seemed to freeze completely to the spot. For a moment, Lexie was so determined to speak, to say something. 

She wasn't sure what was going to come out of her mouth but she knew that, whatever it was, it was probably going to undo all of the good work she'd done today.

Lexie opened her mouth but no noise came out. 

It was underwhelming, the sort of tongue-tied silence that made her feel foolish. The vowels and constants just jumbled around at the back of her throat, as if they didn't know which order to follow. That assertion felt very true; she wasn't sure what she'd expected. An apology? A further scalding? Lexie's expectations weren't exactly high--

Beth spoke first this time.

"Do you know how many women I've fallen out with because of Mark?"

Her question gained two very distinctive reactions. 

One was the surprise: surprise that Beth was the one who had bridged this gap, surprise that Beth had, in particular, chosen to open with their mutual ex in the first place, and surprise that she implied that she wanted to hear what Lexie had to say. 

The second reaction happened to be a very deep, intense hope that Beth's question was rhetorical.

Thankfully, it appeared that way. 

A few moments passed and, in the absence of Lexie's response, Beth chuckled to herself. She shook her head, dropping her chin to stare at the red trails of scratched skin along her forearm.

"Too many," Her answer made Lexie shift from one foot to the other, "Too fucking many, that's for sure."

Lexie found herself staring at her, really staring at her. 

She was pretty sure she hadn't paid this much attention to another human being since she'd seen Meredith for the first time across the ER. She watched as the air seemed to rush out of her in one long, tired sigh. Lexie's eye twitched slightly as she was reminded immediately of Archer's words, about how Mark had presented someone so unfamiliar to the present day Beth. 

The reminder made her want to speak, but her better judgement made her bite her tongue-- she had a feeling that Beth needed to be left to her own devices for this one.

"You make the inner feminist in me want to scream," The continuation made the surgical intern stiffen slightly. Beth was shaking her head again, smiling to herself almost in exhaustion, eyes unmoving from the stat board in front of her. "When I look at you, I want to just... scream. I promised myself when I got involved with him that I wouldn't be the sort of woman who fights over a man. For the record, I've never been that sort of person at all..."

A dry look was shot in Lexie's direction and, oddly, it almost made her want to laugh. 

She wasn't sure whether it was out of despair or out of mourning of the fact that this was, essentially, what had happened, but either way, the sensation of the impulse almost made her eyes water.

"He's not a good reason to put another woman down," was Beth's next words. 

They felt rehearsed but Lexie couldn't tell whether it was more of an inner mental mantra that had been said over and over for years or whether she'd practised this all in the mirror. Either way, each word felt almost diplomatic. 

"No man is. But Mark especially... I've spent the last four months trying to figure out how exactly I could get back at you for making me feel that shit." Lexie's brow furrowed slightly as Beth shrugged, "I've been trying to come up with some sort of way to repay the humiliation and frustration I felt after having all of those private details thrown back in my face..."

The same sensation that had gripped Lexie after she'd interrupted Archer now revisited her. 

It was the sting of something that vaguely resembled horror, a twist of guilt at the bottom of her stomach that made a metallic taste rise at the back of her mouth. 

She found herself staring at Beth, staring at the woman she'd gone to so much effort to avoid. 

There was a pause, another glance in Lexie's direction and Beth exhaled sharply, dropping her chin.

"You're allowed to hate me, if you want," She said, making the pit at the bottom of Lexie's stomach grow a little wider. "But I'm not going to waste energy on hating you back. I understand that you hate me, not for a good reason, but there's a reason. You're young, you're still in love with your ex and you think that's worth fighting for--"

She had the same way of talking as Archer had, the same logic that seemed to carry in every one of her words. They had the same pacing, the same tiny inflection in their faces when they finished a sentence. 

Lexie found herself desperately holding onto every syllable, her mouth painfully dry.

"I guess it's romantic in a way," Beth stated, her eyes warily swinging back over to check on their patient. (Marika, for all intents and purposes, appeared completely unbothered by the gradual build of heat in the sensors attached to her skin.) "We all make dumb mistakes like that. Especially for men. For stupid handsome men that we lose ourselves loving. Mark with his stupid honeytrap smile and his smooth pick up lines and... You're so fucking young, Lexie..."

She seemed to pause, as if that thought drew her back to her own youth. In a way, Lexie could recognise it-- Beth must've been around her age when she'd started seeing Mark. Or had she been younger? 

Lexie had always been the baby, the kid that was seated at the dinner table. 

For someone so smart, there were so many things that she still didn't understand.

"I made a lot of mistakes during my relationship with Mark." 

She was talking and talking and talking, as if all of these thoughts were rushing out of her. 

It was the experience of watching a fire hydrant tear and it's metal seams, spewing water with innate violence. 

"If you want to hate me for them, there's nothing stopping you," Beth said, "Personally, I think it's a shitty mantra but I've done my fair share of hating strangers for bad reasons. I was so hateful. I was so full of anger towards the women that intruded on our relationship... even though half the time they didn't know I was even there. It took me a long time to realise that Mark was solely responsible for that, not the women. I was so cruel. I'm sure Mark told you a lot of lovely things..." 

Her face wrangled into a half grimace. 

"And I'm sure most of them were even true," She said, "But, I'm tired of hating women. I'm tired of feeling like I need to fight over a man that I have no interest in."

Lexie didn't speak.

"I'm redirecting my anger to the assholes that actually deserve it," Beth exhaled with a nod and then, as if as an afterthought, she looked over at Lexie and smiled. It was a cracked smile that was very slightly strained, as if it was the best she could manage. "I'm sorry you're caught up in my brother's mischief. If you want, I could try to convince Arziona or Callie to take you on their service. Mark's not on this case anymore but I could probably harass him into getting you on a Plastics case if you want--"

"I'm sorry."

Those two words fell out of her with the resonance of an item falling from a very high building. It hit the conversation with a dull thud, neither shattering notwithstanding the fall. 

Lexie's lips were chapped, she chewed on the inside of her cheek as she struggled to find the right way to continue. Those words felt absolute in the face of the speech that Beth had just given. 

They felt completely redundant-- but they were genuine.

Beth didn't look over at her. 

Her head was turned so she was watching Marika with an unwavering attention. At first, Lexie mistook it as disinterest, as if Beth was still very adverse to anything she had to say, but then she caught it: the slight nod of her head as she turned her cheek away. 

There was a muscle that jumped in her jaw. She was giving Lexie the space to talk. She was listening.

"I shouldn't have said those things to you." 

It was a reprise of the apology she'd given to Beth last week, but this time, it felt as though it fit. Lexie didn't feel her knees knock together or a pressure build behind her eyes, all she felt was the need to make sure that Beth understood. 

"It wasn't okay--"

"Apology accepted," Beth interjected, seeming to second guess the notion of listening to yet another apology. 

It was a little too sharp and made Lexie realise that this was all out of necessity. Her interruption reminded Lexie so much of how Archer had stopped her from brown-nosing. 

"It wasn't okay, but like I said, we all make dumb mistakes for the people we love."

"No I--"

Lexie wondered whether this was the same feeling that had gripped her ex-boyfriend when she'd been seconds from leaving out that apartment door. 

It was something so deep within her that just needed Beth to understand why she'd acted as she had. Suddenly, her head was filled with the sort of thoughts that she had never envisioned sharing to anyone, much less to her exes' estranged ex-girlfriend.

She knew too much about Beth. Too many personal and intricate things. Wasn't it only fair for Lexie to now level the playing field by sharing things about herself?

"My Dad's an alcoholic."

Her words made Beth stiffen.

"I, uh..." 

Lexie's skin crawled with the suddenness of those words being in the universe. She found herself completely unable to look the psychiatrist in the eye, instead watching Beth's reactions in the corner of her eye. 

"I grew up watching him struggle with alcoholism and it's just-- I-I don't mean to say th-that I understand it's just..." She swallowed uncomfortably, "When Mark said what he'd gone through I just--"

"It reminded you of your childhood," Beth interjected. Her face was impassive and her voice was dry. Abruptly, Lexie's eyes clashed against hers. Beth flashed a wry smile. "Yeah, my Dad liked to drink too."

They were more similar than they realised.

"I'm sorry," Lexie repeated, "I think I just..."

She didn't finished her sentence.

"I'm sorry too," Beth responded, dragging in a long, exhausted breath, "But gatekeeping your relationship and telling you about Mark's life was not my responsibility--"

"I know that."

They held each other's gaze for a few moments. 

Beth seemed to bite on the inside of her lip, holding onto the silence that Lexie's interjection had left in its wake. What a weird sensation was it for them to have avoided each other for so long and now, here they were, shedding some degree of skin between them, sharing some sort of common denominator. 

The realisation made a chuckle begin in the depths of her chest. It was slow to rise and made Beth's eyebrows delicately raise. Lexie shook her head--

"Mark's got a very specific taste in women."

Beth's lips twitched into a grin.

"Brunettes with daddy issues?" She questioned and Lexie just silently agreed with a further chuckle. Beth rolled her eyes. "Yeah. Explains a lot," Then she paused, "Don't look at me like that, you're the one that's still pining after him--"

Lexie didn't quite find it within herself to correct Beth. 

She supposed that, a part of her, still felt attached to Mark.

"Saying all this," Beth said, just as Lexie had this internal revelation. The youngest Grey looked over at her, her eyebrows raised almost apprehensively. "If you ever tell anyone else my personal life or... or I don't know, hurt or get involved with my family in any way... I will be the exact bitch you think I am."

Huh, Lexie thought to herself as she watched the psychiatrist's attention get caught by the ongoing test, Fair enough.

It seemed like a very fair stalemate. 

By no means was this some sort of international declaration of friendship but it was something. It helped ease the lock in Lexie's jaw, relieve the pressure that she felt whenever she thought about the pain she'd caused Beth.

 She could tell that Beth was not the person who considered their forgiveness unconditional; it made Lexie hold her breath slightly as she thought about how misfortunate it must be to scorn her twice. 

Immediately, the thought of Lexie's therapy session with Charlie crossed her mind.

She'd said...?

Oh shit.

"Beth I--"

The psychiatrist threw up a hand, catching Lexie off-guard. 

In fact, everything about the next ten seconds seemed to catch her completely off-guard. For a split second, Lexie thought that Beth was going to slap her-- but then she realised that said hand was plunging in the direction of the intercom button with urgency. 

The crackle of the system streamed through the room as Beth's eyebrows bunched.

"Malika, are you okay?"

That's when it started, the faint shrieks through the intercom system that made Lexie's skin crawl.

 In unison, the two doctors looked over, eyes widening as they watched their patient writhe against the sensors that were attached to her skin. 

Beth's eyes flickered in between the screen and the sight of blood rushing into Malika's cheeks.

"Fuck." 

She swore under her breath, immediately slamming the machine off. Before Lexie had even properly processed what was happening, Beth was almost sprinting out of the room, shoving her way through the door into the examination area. 

"She's burning."

***

THE HOSPITAL

"Do you blame yourself for Beth's addiction?"

That question almost winded him. It was the sort of question that made Mark, momentarily, feel as though he was a lot drunker than he actually was. 

All of the blood in his body seemed to make a run for it, rushing to his head so when he blinked he saw little white stars. 

Within the chaos of a body dizzied by surprise, Mark struggled to digest each word, breaking it down into little syllables for his mind to chew on and eventually mould into a coherence sentence.

Ballard was still sitting there. 

It'd been two and a half hours and she hadn't left. If this had been a normal date, Mark was sure that he would've scared the woman off by now. He'd had his fair share of dinners that had gone wrong, fair share of dates that had gotten up and left without a moments hesitation. 

In his opinion, this date happened to be going the worst of all. 

The brutal honesty of conversation had left him weary and drained as if he'd actually nicked a vein and bled himself dry-- the eyes that raised to look over at the brunette were slightly glassy, as if Mark couldn't quite bring himself to fully be present.

"You ever watched someone die?"

His words were so sudden and abrupt that, this time, they almost took Ballard by surprise. He saw how her brow folded very slightly as if almost flirting with the idea of complete bewilderment. It definitely took him by surprise. 

He hadn't given the green light to that. He hadn't allowed his mouth to spew that kinda crap, it just seemed to decide to give itself the time of day-- it made his body clench and his skin sting with the realisation that maybe this was what Beth had felt when she'd sunk so low. He felt oddly out of control and he had a feeling it wasn't just the alcohol.

 Her lack of response told him a very firm no.

"I see people die all the time, right?" Mark raised his whisky and tilted it thoughtfully. He caught how Ballard's eyes flickered down at the movement. "It's part of my job. I always say to people: sometimes you lose, sometimes you win-- but it's not a game. You realise that when it's someone you care about. It's not just a big surgery that you can poach. It's someone's life."

Ballard just blinked at him.

"It's crap," Mark hauled in a very long breath, "I think I spent more time with Beth's memory than actual time with her. There's something about wanting to spend time with someone and they're just not there-- even when they're beside you or you're fucking them it's just--"

It's just?

How exactly could he explain it? How could he explain something that he didn't understand, even after all these years later? The pills had made Beth so disconnected from everything; she'd been stuck in a loop that had sent them both spiralling. 

The job meant the pills and the pills meant that she immersed herself in the job. 

And when he said immersed he meant it: there had been no breathing space or free thoughts, just stats, bloodwork, labs, surgical techniques, incisions, sutures--

"It sucks," He said, his voice quieter than it had been before, "She used to watch all of these romance movies. She was a sucker for the happy endings and the true love shit. In them they say that love can save things and people... I always knew they were crap. Life doesn't work that way. It sucks when you're already fucking scared of loving someone and then when it comes to it, just loving someone isn't enough to save them."

There was nothing dramatic about it, nothing glamorous or cinematic. 

He'd just been there twice, in the room, watching her fade slowly and silently. Nothing about Beth was ever silent. He'd agreed with her when she'd spoken about the plane crash with humor in her eyes and a quirk in her lip-- If Elizabeth Montgomery had to go, it was going to be a spectacular affair. It was going to be cinematic and newsworthy.

She deserved to have more than a handful of people mourn her.

"I didn't help," He repeated those words from earlier, feeling the weight that they carried. "I know that she needed someone to understand what she was going through... and I know that I wasn't that person." He paused, "But I wish I had been-- It was my fault, a lot of it. I think I'm the reason things got bad. I think that if I hadn't been there... Beth would have been..."

Better off? 

Was that how he would've finished the sentence if he could have? 

He knew that Beth was better off even now. She was happy, Archer had made that very clear. She was happy and engaged and going to have a very fulfilled and happy life with a nice guy that understood her. He was happy for her too. 

But still, the way Archer had worded it while they were scrubbing out in the OR had left him unsatisfied and troubled-- he'd made it out that Mark's only use in Beth's life had been to bring her to Charlie.

He didn't like that. She'd meant something to him and he liked to think that he'd been something more than just a taxi driver between two destinations.

"Okay," Ballard said softly. He watched as she leant against the dining table and pulled a hand through her hair, as if to distract herself. "When you say that you would have done things differently--"

"I would have tried harder."

She nodded.

"My whole life feels very..." 

He didn't know where the sentence was going, even at the end of it. He paused, the rim of his glass lingering on his lip as he frowned to himself. 

"I know that I fucked up," He said, "I know that I fuck up a lot-- and I know that from the moment I got to Seattle, I've just been fucking up every step of the way."

"In what way?"

"I shouldn't have come here," Mark said thoughtfully, fishing these thoughts from the bottom of his soul. "Earlier, Beth told me that she knew coming to Seattle was a mistake. She said that it was my city-- it's not mine. It's Derek's and I... I'm not even sure why I turned up. I don't know why I thought I could just..."

"You're talking about coming here after the affair with the wife?"

"Y'know, I told Addison that I came to Seattle for her," Mark almost chuckled at that thought, "That was a lie."

He lied too much. 

That's one thing that he'd realised from the office session with Addison, Derek and Beth; his ex-girlfriend had spoken so passionately about how they were all liars. 

She'd been right. Mark hadn't been honest about many things; he hadn't been honest about his breakup with Lexie, he hadn't been honest about how he was beginning to think he hadn't hated Beth at all-- and he hadn't been honest about why he'd come to Seattle. 

He'd told Addison that he was there because he loved her. He'd told Derek that he was there because he missed him--

Mark bit down on the tip of his tongue.

"And the truth?" Ballard questioned softly, "Do you know the real reason?"

"I think I do," He said, his voice even lower than it had been before, "And I think that reason is Beth."

A pause.

Mark pulled a face.

"Shitty, right?"

It sounded shitty, at least to him. 

That thought had plagued him all the way to Seattle. 

It had held him to his seat as a tiny part of him had wondered whether Beth had followed her, then still very much, brother-in-law across the country. 

It filled him with so much shame to think that he'd almost hoped that she was waiting for him, waiting for him to appear and ready to take him back--

She'd taken him back so many times before. 

"I was with Addison for eight months," He said quietly, chewing on the inside of his cheek as his eyes began to glaze over slightly from the alcohol. "We lived together and we were normal and we were a couple and... and she left me to go chase Derek. She loved him. She wanted him back and I think--" Mark sighed to himself, "I tried to do the same thing."

"And do you regret that?"

Against his better judgement, Mark nodded his head, "I think I'd do it again if I had to do things over."

Then, he paused.

"But, then again, if I was doing everything over... I would have never cheated and I would have made the right call for once." He meant that, too. "If I feel guilt, it's because I never really knew what I was doing... I made the wrong decision at every given opportunity. I made wrong calls so much and I just-- I fucked it up. Y'know, Beth didn't come to Seattle, she wasn't waiting for me and I don't blame her."

There was another pause.

"I didn't know what I was doing," Mark muttered under his breath. He scoffed at the statement. (When did he ever know what he was doing?) He shook his head. "And it's taken me five years to realise that Beth didn't know what she was doing either."

God, they'd been so young; he'd been young but Beth had been scarily young. 

She'd been making important decisions about the direction of her life while he'd been just on the verge of reaping the benefits of all of his hard work. She'd been so ambitious, she'd been so hungry for success, so willing to sacrifice everything for everything her siblings had and more--

It reminded him of his final argument with Lexie, of how suddenly it hadn't been an argument at all. 

It'd been two adults with a table between them, staring at each other with so many things that were left to say. 

He could set the scene in his head behind his eyelids: Lexie, him, and the ring box on the table.

 She'd looked at him with sad, round eyes as she realised that there was more to Mark's story than he'd admitted. That he'd erased a whole woman's narrative inside of his years and that he'd tried to soften the blow only for everything to blow in his face. 

Mark, naively, had thought that could change it, that could make Lexie stay by making her realise that there was a reason why things hadn't worked.

"I didn't think about what-ifs until after the shooting," Mark said tiredly, "But now I think about it a lot-- what if I'd known what to do. What if Beth hadn't struggled with sobriety-- what if we'd... we'd made it? Been happy?" A moment passed and Mark had to wrap his head around that thought, "Because we were happy. I remember I had one of the best Christmas with her of my life and I just-- No one had ever cared like that before."

Soft christmas lights and touches. It felt almost scandalous to indulge in such a memory. The clatter of reindeer antlers on the floor and the click of the lock on the door--

His reminiscing was rudely interrupted. Everyone in the restaurant looked over in unison.

The couple on the next table. the guy had gotten to his feet. 

A shriek sounded throughout the whole building, tears streaming down the woman's face as she held a glass of champagne aloft. 

From this distance, Mark could see something lurking at the bottom of the flute, hiding amongst the bubbles as the woman's face split into a look of disbelief. The guy was smiling as he got down on one knee. 

It was the classical sort of sight, woman in tears, man appear dashing and handsome as he reached out and clasped his hand between his. 

He pulled the object from the bottom of the glass and the diamond caught in the light as he softly spoke to his sobbing date.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes--

Mark peeled his gaze away from the newly engaged couple and found Ballard looking at him, her head tilted very slightly to the side. 

She seemed to do that a lot and Mark was almost tempted to point out she was going to give herself neck pain. Her eyes seemed to sink into him, as if she was touching a part of him that he was now trying to very slowly reel back in. 

There was something so sudden and sobering about that moment, as if reality had slapped him across the face and forced him to realise what exactly was happening.

He glanced back at them just as they kissed.

Something clenched at the back of his chest.

"I'd like to see you again," Ballard said, although it didn't quite register in his brain. 

He was thinking again, which, historically, was never a good thing. She seemed to realise the double natured implications of her words and chuckled slightly to herself, shaking her head. 

"I mean professionally," She said, "I think you'd really benefit from talking to someone... having someone to help you though some of this trauma. I know that you think you're okay but I get the feel that repressing your thoughts about all of these things is really holding you back from moving on--"

"No," Mark's forehead creased, "I don't think it's worth it to just talk about the past all the time--"

"I understand how you might feel that way but--"

"History always makes things more complicated," He interjected with a shake of his head, "Everything was fine with Lexie and then Sloan turned up and I had to explain things about Beth--"

The dent reappeared between Ballard's eyebrows. "Why did you have to tell her about Beth?"

"When she found out she didn't think I was over Beth."

"Can I ask why she felt that way?"

Fuck, Mark felt his heart clench.

"In New York, around that Christmas I was talking about.... I kind of... I don't know... I think I was delusional," His body tensed at the thought of what he was about to say. He sat back in his chair so heavily that, for a second, he thought it was going to snap in half, "But I.. I was convinced that Beth was the love of my life. So... I went to this bank and went in my parents old box and I... I got my mother's old ring out."

Ballard didn't speak.

"It was stupid," Mark almost scoffed at himself, "Things were just going well and I thought that I could... I don't know. It felt possible, y'know? The sort of shit that I thought I didn't want... for a while I did and I- I walked around with that ring in my pocket for like a week. I was so terrified that Beth would find it--" It felt so weird to thing about now. "And then when Addison left me in New York I thought fuck it."

He felt the need to laugh.

"I brought it with me," Mark said with a shrug. "The asshole with the commitment issues came to Seattle thinking he could trap someone into marriage. I don't know? I think I was so desperate to keep Beth or... so convinced that she would be here-- I was terrified of the thought of things being finished that I was willing to trap her in a marriage just to keep her."

He felt those words sink under his skin. 

The thought of them almost made him feel sick, he didn't understand how the hell he'd thought that way. 

He'd really brought that engagement ring with him just in case, had had a moment between all of the anger and turmoil and thought so little of Beth to assume that she would have said yes. It filled him with disgusts.

 A part of him, a tiny part of him, wondered whether after this section of the conversation, Ballard would agree with his assertion that he was one of most egotistical assholes in the world.

"And then Lexie found it..." 

He admitted it out loud, realising that he needed someone to know where exactly things had gone wrong. His break up with Lexie had been completely on him. He'd fucked up just as he'd fucked up everything else. 

"She found the ring in my apartment and she freaked and started asking questions and I--" Mark took a long drag of his whisky. "I was honest. I was honest for once. I told her that I'd brought him from New York and then Beth came up and I...Well, I was honest. I thought I owed her that. She didn't like what I had to say."

He didn't blame her. He could only imagine what it must've been like to find out that your boyfriend was--

Oh fuck, Mark felt the impulse to massage his head, He has a Beth problem.

He assumed that the conversation would have continued onwards. 

Maybe they would have touched on the fact that Mark had actually wanted a life with Beth, once upon a time, and had been so desperate to hold onto it that he'd flown across the country with a ring in hand. 

Maybe they would have discussed how when he looked over at the engaged couple on the next table, his head was full of questions whether that's how Beth's engagement to Charlie had looked--

Had she cried? She wasn't much of a crier. 

Would she cry? 

Mark was startled by the revelation that he didn't know what she'd do anymore.

Maybe he would've also mentioned that in the aforementioned week where he'd carried the ring with him, his relationship had started peeling at the edges. 

Rumours had surfaced in the hospital that Mark had been trading sex for surgeries with surgical interns and Beth had been so crushed by that revelation that she'd begun to descend so gradually into whatever dark hole he eventually just left her in. 

Things had got bad, and then bad to worse, and then he'd been reminded why he hated the thought of marriage in the first place.

They were interrupted. They were cut short, although, surprisingly it was Ballard's device, not his.

She was caught off-guard by the sound of her cell phone ringing out in her pocket, so much to the fact that she profusely apologised before drawing it out of her pocket. 

Mark had just told her not to worry, feeling slightly embarrassed by his evening of confessions and drowsy from the amount of alcohol in his system. 

She'd flashed him a smile, but that expression had withered when she caught sight of her screen.

His eyebrows raised warily, "Is everything okay?"

Ballard blinked, her face twitching, "Uh, yeah- I uh," 

She seemed to pause, as if her brain didn't quite know what to do. She pressed hand against the table and looked around, seeming to debate on what to say. 

"This, uh, this just looks like a really important call I just--"

"Okay," Mark said, not quite sure what was going on.

(It seemed to be his default setting these days.)

"I'm going to have to take this," Ballard said quickly, getting to her feet before he could quite process what was going on. She set down the cell phone just after silencing it, reaching for the back of her chair for her coat. "I need to just step out if that's okay--"

"No, it's fine," Mark said, catching sight of the contact that flashed over her screen. "I've talked enough."

She chuckled as she grabbed her purse.

"I meant it earlier," Ballard appeared amused, "I'm happy to listen. You should come to a session. If not with me... just any psychiatrist that's not got the last name Perkins, hm?" But then her eyes flickered back down to her cell phone and she swore under her breath. "Okay, I don't know how long I'll be--"

"It's fine, I've got the bill."

She gave him a smile and, very briefly, held his shoulder as she passed. He turned his seat to watch her hurriedly leave the restaurant, drawing her coat tightly to her body. The suddenness of her absence at the table made Mark pause, as if he'd just frozen in the centre of something that had moving too quickly. 

He stared at the front of the restaurant, at the distant sight of her quickly pressing the cell phone against her ear and ducking underneath a streetlight. 

When he eventually did turn back to the table, it hit him, in the moment, how solitary it was to sit at a table for two alone.

It was indescribable too, how to explain how he felt following this exchange. 

He leant back in his seat so heavily and regarded the world with an exhaustion that was so deeply ingrained in his bones. 

He finished his whisky, avoided looking beside him and let out a breath that felt as though it had been rattling around his chest for hundreds of years. 

And yet, at the same time, he felt almost peaceful.

His truth had been bared, to a certain degree, and the world hadn't ended.

What a mystery.

Mark held a hand out to a passing waiter.

"Check please."

When Ballard didn't return to the table and left him to walk home alone across Seattle, it didn't surpass Mark how weird that phone call was to receive at eleven pm on a Wednesday evening. 

She'd asked the host of the restaurant to pass on a quick message that she had to go into the hospital for a very important last-minute meeting. 

He'd seen the contact, it was far from personal-- it made him wonder what sort of emergency was happening for Bethenny Ballard to get a work call this late at night.

Mark frowned to himself as he shoved his way into his empty, silent apartment.

Why do people get phone calls from the DEA anyway?