𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙄𝙄.
BUT WHAT WILL WE DO WHEN WE'RE SOBER ?

tw: drug abuse
discussion around relapse

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ADMITTEDLY, DOMINIC FOX was a West Coast kind of guy.

He loved the Pacific Ocean, loved the sun and loved the time zone. He loved the gold rush of the western States and the way that everything seemed to be tinted with warmth.

He'd been living in California itself for a few years now, enjoying the hot weather that San Francisco, in particular, had to offer. 

He'd always been a sucker for the heat and the lifestyle, the unapologetic nature of the people and the way he could always inevitably always find a party. He was innately a social being, forever entertaining a wide array of guests and keeping himself occupied when not working. 

The West Coast, for him, had been the perfect place for it—after all, he considered his character to be defined by one thing: the sexual tension between his love for professionalism and just getting completely fucked up on a Friday night. 

The whole coast seemed to be a hive for the sort of energy that played perfectly well with his fast-paced lifestyle—

Seattle, however, seemed determined to challenge that.

It was the one place that seemed to be perpetually sad, as if the whole city just couldn't stop crying. It was the rain; Dom didn't like it, the way that the heavens seemed to open, and he'd get completely soaked to the skin. 

West Coast? He considered it Wet Coast. 

Dreary and depressing and no fun. 

The heavy looking clouds and the slick sidewalks just spelled a limp tie and a depressing conversation over a shitty sandwich (with extra mayo because Derek Shepherd was an inconsiderate asshole). It was enough for him to grimace whenever he stepped off of that plane and onto that tarmac at the airport, draw up his collar and scowl at the floor.

This was beginning to happen more often than he would've liked.

The second time in two weeks, he estimated. This place was more familiar than he would have liked. This ground was the same and the sky was still as shit as it had been last time. 

He thought he'd been done for when he'd jumped into that cab after serving Chief Shepherd papers to stop him from blabbing medical secrets. Was he truly that irresistible that Seattle was just begging for him to return? And here he was thinking he'd always been such a sight to watch from behind.

What the fuck does Beth see in this place? He asked himself as he scowled at the gloominess. Why are they even still here?

He guessed that it was a fitting place for things to end. That's what him turning up signified, right? 

As much as the weather and the wind and the scowl on his face set the mood, his presence in the city was a signifier. He supposed that he'd become used to being at client's beck and call; it was the unsaid cost of being a partner for one of the leading medical law firms in the Northern Hemisphere. 

He'd spent years getting hauled out of bed in the middle of the night, torn away from whatever thing he'd been doing in the exact moment—whether it had been entertaining beautiful men, women or even a night out in Vegas, being Dominic Fox meant making compromise, dropping everything in the matter of seconds and catching the next flight out—

Yeah, he was the end. 

Dom was the sort of person who finished things. 

Sometimes that was shutting down billion-dollar medical corporations and then sometimes, on the other side, that was a relationship. It varied depending on the client, he found. He'd spent a lot of time with an array of different people with different problems and, a few times, he'd resolved to watching the love between two people wilt and wither. He'd broken the hearts himself and he'd done it all for the greater good. Usually, the prospect of doing something like that made him drag his heels--

From the five calls he got in succession from Seattle, Dom figured that, this time, he couldn't have gotten there quicker.

He had to settle for arriving when the rain was the worst. 

By the time his flight landed and the plane grinded to a halt, the weather had kicked up into a wailing wind and rolling thunder. The turbulence had already jostled his mood, making the grimace on his face was as prominent as the gloom across the city. It was a world away from what had, originally, been his morning in Los Angeles. He'd found himself a very nice guy in a very nice bar and now, this was his reality—

God, the things he does for money.

(Although, he guessed, maybe it was doing him a favour. The nice guys never were just nice, were they?)

He had to remind himself of that as he descended off the nice warm and dry plane. 

The pay-check, the fat pay-check, the reason why he'd left a very handsome man in his bed. Dom counted each step with a plan for his next weekend off: Step. This will pay for a nice house in Napa Valley. Step. Maybe he'd even splash out on a nice bottle of Moet. Step. Maybe, if he was really fucking great at kicking ass, Andrew would add an extra zero to the end of his pay-check—

(God but the handsome man had had a very pretty smile.)

Dom frowned at the rain already speckling the collar of his suit jacket. It was enough to reverse all of the money he'd put into getting it laundered just yesterday morning.

(Yeah and make that two extra zeroes, Andrew.)

It wasn't that he didn't appreciate being people's first call. For the record, he did. When he'd first started working with Calum in their little start-up office in Toronto all those years ago, it had been rough. They'd spent the last seven years building clients from across the USA, bouncing through pitches and trading business cards. They'd worked hard to get the clientele they had and Dom couldn't name a time he'd ever been prouder than the day he'd been given his law account at his Aunt's foundation. He earned every goddamn dime of that pay-check. He liked getting the recognition he deserved.

The money was good, and he'd been a materialistic bastard for a long time now.

 (He blamed his family, where the money was just too good to be true and everything just seemed to come to them without question. His Aunt had worked hard for it, he knew, but sometimes he felt a little too out of touch. He blamed his friends too, running around with the elite had worn down the Black kid that had grown up hauling his ass through college. Although sometimes he questioned whether they considered him a friend at all, or just a staff member on payroll to clean up their slip-ups.) 

He wasn't kidding when he said that he was thinking about all of the ways he could spend it even before he'd earned it—a nice night in Malibu, a fast car ride down to San Diego... Dom craved the feeling of the California sun.

But then there was the mess at hand. 

A big mess, quite possibly the biggest, inevitable mess he'd ever seen in his twelve years working at March & Fox Solicitors. 

This mess was the reason why he'd been so thankful that he kept pre-pressed suits already packed and ready to go, and why he'd had the thought to do a teeth-whitening strip the night before, alongside a fresh fade at the barbers only days later. 

This mess was the reason he came to Seattle just raring to perform.

Even still, there was a sense of panic deeply entrenched in him, the awareness that Andrew's phone call just three hours before Beth had started leaving voice mails, had been far from a courtesy call. 

It was enough for him to second-guess ever dabbling with the unlawful, ever becoming the sort of guy who could bury the dead before they'd even had their last breath.

Lord give me strength, he thought to himself as he asked the taxi driver to burn rubber on the way to Seattle Grace. 

He wasn't the slightest bit religious, but sometimes even sinners felt the need to put it out there.

Today's going to be a big one.

***

In the meeting room, Derek Shepherd cleared his throat.

They were all too aware of the empty chair in the corner.

He averted his gaze to the congregated board, notably avoiding Archer's eye.

Derek's knee bounced nervously, his palms slick against his slacks.

"Anyone want a coffee?" He asked.

***

The first time Beth had met Dominic Fox, she'd been drunk.

It was not, by any means, her finest hour and seemed to be a reoccurring theme when it came to her acquaintances from both Boston and Manhattan. 

It'd been the running joke that had hidden behind her alcoholism, of how she was incapable of making distinctively sober first impressions. 

It'd been funny the first handful of times but, in retrospect, Beth knew that it was pretty fucking depressing.

He'd first come up in conversation with Calum, with her then-boyfriend mentioning how he'd become friends with Dom while at school in Boston. 

They'd been roommates, two Black kids who, by no means, fit the usual crowd at Harvard Law School. They'd stuck together like blood cells trying to heal a clot. Fox and March been partners from the moment they'd shook hands over the threshold of their college room, and it had been funding that had drawn them into separate directions. 

It had been their desire to start their own firm and find the money and resources for it that had sent Dom to California and Calum to scout for their startup. 

It wasn't until a year had passed, funds had been collected, and Beth firmly sanctified in Calum's love life, that the infamous Fox had blown into Manhattan on an East-bound wind.

All too often, seeing him in rooms often felt like the first time. 

He seemed to approach everything with such dryness to it that Beth could've sworn they were strangers. She knew that Dom didn't particularly like her (which, in all honesty, she didn't completely like herself either so they had at least that in common) and that running after her was not something he particularly enjoyed. She was filled, like always, with the same sensation of apprehension, as if every time Dom appeared, something was about to go terribly wrong.

(Was that how Mark felt about her too? She could imagine it: being a bad omen that he outright loathed and feared.)

She still didn't know what to make of whatever friendship she had with him. 

Her brain had been trained, over the years, to associate him with things getting messy. Dom arriving in Manhattan a decade ago had signified the beginning of the end of her relationship to Calum: sure, the Canadian had proposed a few days later, but he'd cut the string 3 months later after Beth told him she couldn't leave with him and Dom, back to his hometown. 

Dom, then, on the other side of New York, helping her organise her great escape, had been there to signal the messiness of Beth's despair too. 

He'd been the shot of reality in a summer of romance in France, the guilty hands of a half-affair in the back of a hotel in Dublin and the lawyer with those same fingers stuck to incriminating papers due be received by a one Petunia Vanderbilt—

And then there he was, in the centre of a meeting room in Seattle Grace Mercy West.

She'd been standing in the corner, her back turned to the door as she stared out of the window.

 A hand pressed against her mouth as her head ran faster than the downturns of the weather. Her eyes had picked at every cloud, at every jostled tree and every gust of wind—it had only been when the door had opened and then curtly closed, that she'd ever allowed herself to breathe. 

Spinning around to face him, the expression on Beth's face hitched slightly with relief.

"Dom."

The lawyer paused when he realised the room was empty. 

She wasn't exactly sure what he was expecting, but the room was painfully silent—it had been for a while now. Whatever intervention Derek had planned had gone on a recess, leaving her to wait in a room with a predetermined queue of 'No comment(s)' on her tongue. 

She felt her skin prickle and her arms squeeze to her chest as she fought to hold everything together.

The relief came out in a long sigh of his name as he set his briefcase on the table. 

She stared at him, at the neatly dressed man in the rain-speckled suit with a graveness about him, as if he was stood staring into the sun. He squinted slightly, his face impassive as he looked over at the woman on the other side of the table. 

Beth squeezed her arms tighter to her chest.

"Hey doll," was his slow, almost tired response. 

There was a noticeable lack of life about him, a complete shift from what she'd seen last time. There was no bright smile, no eagerness to rip Derek Shepherd's to shreds with his fingertips—he just seemed to incline his head and chew over his words. 

"How have you been?"

"Shit," was Beth's response. It came out with a long chuckle as she fought to bury her head in her hands. "I don't know what to—"

"Yeah," the snap of his brief case's clasps echoed around the room, acting as the punctuation to his reply. His head bopped in a nod that felt too big for the room. "I can imagine."

"It's just..."

The words were stuck at the back of her throat. She could feel them. They were there, begging to make their debut, but wedged behind something that felt awfully like a confession. 

(A confession? A confession for what?) 

There was something so familiar about this particular chokehold, every word in the English language just completely failing to even touch on how she felt. She bit down on her tongue and shook her head, giving Dom a very faded laugh. 

Her shoulders slumped and she pressed a hand to her forehead.

This was not how she'd envisioned her day going.

He watched her with a pair of eyes that had seen her at her worst. 

Just the sight of him, of the lawyer with the greatest Monopoly card on the board, was enough for her to think about all of the other times he'd appeared to save the day. 

She was reminded of New York, of how he'd weathered the fallout with Calum and spent hours burying appointments and check-ups on her medical record. In fact, the familiarity with how every had ended the first time, of the destruction and repetitive heavy blows—it made Beth squeeze herself a little tighter out of the fear that she wasn't going to survive this one this time.

"How was your flight?"

Her question didn't fit the mood.

"Pretty crappy," He said off-handedly and with a candid sense of morbidity. Beth nodded to herself, trying to suppress the impulse to tear at her own skin while screaming. "I could only get economy last minute so... I was... stuck in between a screaming kid and an old man who smelt a lot like fish—"

Beth chuckled, but it was oddly empty. 

She could feel it echo across her body, hitting and fitting into all of the cracks and crevices that the last eleven months had gouged into her. 

It was a lifeless sound chipped through cracked and numb lips. 

Briefly startled by it, the lawyer looked up at her, just in time to catch her eye as she turned towards him.

He scanned her head to toe, in an almost parent-like way, as if to check her for bruises.

"You should sit down," Dom began with a sense of exhaustion. 

It made her wonder who he'd spoken to this morning. He'd been halfway to Seattle before she'd managed to get a hold of him (He'd been stooped in the back of the plane toilet, calmly telling her that planes didn't just fall out of the sky because he was making a phone call. Plane crashes didn't just happen.) and it made Beth wonder exactly who had called him first.

Was it a sixth sense? Did he just wake up in the dead of night, gripped by a cold sweat and filled with the sudden urge to book a plane ticket? 

Beth could imagine it, the sudden stab at the chest that something was wrong. Her gratefulness of having such great friends (on payroll) that would drop everything in order to immediately fly here was significantly buried by the thud of distress that had now become her resting heart rate.

"No," Beth shook her head. 

She'd been pacing for the past fifteen minutes, wearing a thin line into Addison's Louboutin's. She could hear them squeal on her sharp turns, the sound slowly working its way into her bones. 

"I'm fine standing," She said, "But thanks."

"Beth," he tried again, inclining his head towards the other side of the table. "Sit."

"No." 

Again, Beth declined the instruction, her brow furrowed as she was caught deep in thought. There were too many things in her head, too many words to think into existence. Her whole body was racing with a hit of adrenalin far larger than any pill she could've popped. 

"They had me sat in that meeting room for half an hour just throwing questions and things at me..." She said, shaking her head, "Accusations and... trying to throw some 'it's because we care' bullcrap at me..."

"Beth."

"The way they looked at me..." She continued, caught on a wind that was the desperation in her chest. She'd been silent throughout the whole 'intervention', but now she could speak. She could talk to the man who, very slowly, drew out his own chair and sat. "They looked at me as if they forgot that just two months ago I was fucking shot all because of that asshole. Did I sue? Did I make a single fucking noise about Derek's lawsuit—"

"Beth."

Dom sounded so tired. 

He had the sort of presence that could bring a boardroom to its knees, the poster child of one of the most prolific medical boards in the world—and yet he sounded so overworked and exhausted, in exhale of her name. 

He rubbed a hand over his chin and just watched as she continued to stalk back and forth, taking expressively with her hands. 

A pipe had burst at the back of her throat and she couldn't suppress the flood of words that came pouring out of her.

"I feel like I'm going insane," were her next words. 

She shook her head wildly, ignoring the way that Dom sighed. A shaking hand pressed to her forehead as she continued her walk back and forth. 

"How dare they fucking call that an intervention! It was an ambush. That was a dirty fucking daylight robbery—"

"Elizabeth."

There was something about hearing Dom say her full name. 

It made goosebumps spring up across her skin as if someone had just walked over her grave.

 What did that make it now? Twice in the span of two hours? Her name fit differently on Dom's lips than it did to Mark's. She'd expected to hear it today from the mouth of a court official, someone who had all the power vested in them—but here she was, frozen in her tracks as she looked over at her lawyer.

There was a light turned off. 

Somewhere, at the back of Dominic Fox's charm and suave nature, there was a light bulb that had been dimmed or a switch that been flipped. 

She stared at him, eyes fixed on the way that he lacked his usual vividness. There was an absence of energy, of the sort of raw power that had hyped her into fighting her last battle. 

Gone was the power that he'd bestowed upon her—if he'd told her to get a camera to take a picture of Derek's face, this sight needed to be painstakingly painted with every single sordid detail.

His hands were clasped on the table in front of him and, for the smallest moment, Beth wondered whether someone had died. 

That's what it felt like. It felt as though someone had passed away. 

That was the energy that Dom held as he stared over at her. 

Her pacing had stopped and now she was suspended in the middle of the room, caught between movement and complete stillness. 

Her hands were shaking, her whole body was shaking, and it was taking her a lot of effort to appear as calm as she really needed to be.

Dom licked his lips as it his mouth was suddenly very dry.

"Sit," He repeated it and, this time, Beth understood that it wasn't a suggestion. 

Her face contorted very slightly, her brow furrowing as she stared at the man who had been her first call for many years now—well, actually, technically, that was Calum. Her ex-fiancé was on her speed-dial list, but he had better things to do than put in the physical labour. 

Dom sighed for the second time, "You're going to want to sit down for this."

After a beat, he grimaced.

"Please," Dom added.

Those words felt ominous. 

So she did.

After a prolonged pause, Dom drew out a pen. 

Her eye twitched with his every movement. 

She was so sensitive to it, of how he appeared, of every single breath and glance. 

She studied him, watching as the man across from her seemed to draw up some sort of speech within him, dragging in a breath that felt a lot something he'd do before a cross-examination. Beth wasn't stupid, Dom wasn't that sort of lawyer. He didn't grill witnesses, he didn't push for convictions, and yet, today... there was something off.

"Okay," He breathed out, arranging his papers in a line. "I need to know everything that is going on. I want you to tell me everything that happened before and during that meeting. I want to know what they're accusing you of and I want to know exactly what's happened to make them think that you've..."

Dom seemed to pause.

Beth wondered whether he was back in Canada too, mentally at least. 

Standing in Calum's apartment watching the world pass as they were stuck in a loop of Beth's sobriety. 

She watched his jaw bounced as he looked up at her, peeling his eyes off of his briefcase like a band-aid from a wound—his client sunk down in her chair, arms tightly crossing over her chest and tongue suddenly feeling way too big for her mouth.

"Relapsed," Beth's voice, suddenly, sounded too loud for such a small room, "The word you're looking for is relapsed."

Slowly, Dom nodded.

She knew that it wasn't as glamorous as his other accusations that he probably saw in his career.

 Usually, his clients were fighting over doctor negligence, pointing angry fingers on the behalf of deceased relatives or disabilities that had come as a result of a botched surgery. For a moment, Beth saw Gary Clark sat in a seat just like hers, jaw locked and eyes watering as he demanded retribution for the death of his wife—the image caused her skin to ache. 

She wasn't suing for negligence and she wasn't sure whether she'd be held for whatever negligence that they thought she was responsible, but she knew that the allegations against her were equally as devastating.

Beth bit back the impulse to shred skin under her fingernails.

"Yes," He said after an extended pause.

 Admittedly, Beth wasn't sure whether she'd ever seen him so outwardly uncomfortable. It lasted for just a second and then he swallowed what looked like a very bitter pill. 

"I need to know if you're—"

A breathy scoff fell through her lips.

"Don't," Her voice was tight as if someone was squeezing her throat tightly. The words felt like glass in her mouth, her gums bleeding as she ground them between her molars. "Don't ask me—"

"Beth," Her name had been said so many times in the past hour that she was beginning to hate the sound of it. She shook her head as if to warn him not to continue. "I need to—"

"No."

Dom didn't appear surprised by the change in mood. 

Suddenly, the stormy weather of Seattle had settled in the room, above their heads. 

The air felt tight as if they were sat inside a pressurised container with electricity crackling beneath their feet. 

When Beth looked over at him, her brow furrowed and nails embedded in her elbows, she wondered whether he'd felt the storm break around them. He must've. 

He held her gaze and allowed her pause, waiting for her to say whatever she needed to say.

"Don't ask me that," Beth said. It was strained. Still uncomfortably tight to an almost distortion. "You know what that... don't ask me that question, Dom."

She wondered how many times he'd been in this situation, faced with a client who very clearly didn't want to be asked any questions at all. 

"Do you know how..." 

Her brow folded as she cast her gaze, suddenly, over towards the window. She watched the Seattle skyline, how the clouds broiled against each other on the horizon. 

"Do you know how shitty it is for people to ask you that question after all this time...?"

Dom didn't speak.

"It sucks," Beth answered her own question, shaking her head as if she couldn't truly put into words how much. Then she swiped at her nose and leant back in her chair, shuffling uncomfortably. "And on top of that, I've got all of them saying that I'm some... horrific doctor that's faking prescriptions for my withstanding patients... that I'm taking advantage of people who trust me and..."

She paused as if she still hadn't wrapped her head around the whole situation.

A slight laugh fell past her lips, "This is supposed to be a happy day, y'know? I'm supposed to be happy and—and I have Derek Shepherd telling me that I shouldn't leave the state because then this could become a federal investigation."

Beth trailed off, shaking her head slightly at the thought of what she'd just said.

Dom cleared his throat, "That's what I'm here for." 

His words sounded pre-meditated as if he'd rehearsed them in the mirror. She looked over at him, her head half buried in her hands. 

"The legal stuff. The important stuff, Beth," He said, "I'm not here to lecture you on what you have or have not done... I'm just here to make sure that you can walk out of this unscathed, but for that to happen, you need to be honest with me, okay?"

Honest. Oh, how she hated that word.

"This feels like New York," was all she found within herself to say. "I was labelled a liability. I was labelled a danger to my patients and I was condemned for it... for things that I didn't even..." Another trail that failed to meet its destination. Her voice scraped along the bottom of her throat. "I told myself that I would never put myself in that sort of situation again—"

"This doesn't have to be New York, doll," Dom said, regaining some firmness in his professional voice. "You don't have to lose your career this time."

"Oh, like that's something that's negotiable!" She exclaimed, appearing more frustrated than despaired. "It's Derek. He said he was sorry and that he'd never put my profession at risk again and—"

"It's like clockwork," He finished for her, "I know."

He didn't know. How could anyone but Beth know exactly how this was going to go? Or even, how this all felt?

Beth wasn't sure what was more prevalent, her deep-rooted guilt and shame, or the rage that boiled underneath all this hurt. 

Her hands were shaking, fingers trembling as she tensed them for a degree of control in the situation. She'd lost control a long time ago, stopped being able to say what she wanted and what she needed—and now she was massaging circles into her palm to stop them from clenching into fists. 

Her anger was electric, it was fast and deadly like the storm rumbling outside—she bit down on her tongue, almost hard enough to draw blood.

Was this what Derek wanted? Did he want her to make another scene? 

Did he want her fist buried back in that stupid fat nose of his? 

Did he want to watch her implode and feel a rush of superiority, of righteousness? 

Was this what he got off on while his wife couldn't even bare to side with him—?

"We can handle this," Dom said, interrupting her inner monologue. 

(He could see her body shudder from the stress of the situation, so his voice appeared gentle, as if he was talking to someone stood on the edge of a very tall structure. Beth's dark eyes raised to stare at him as she put all of her weight onto trembling elbows, holding her clasped hands under her chin. The wobbling woman was silent.) 

"Don't forget who I am, Beth," He said tightly, "You want the best? You've got it. You saw what I did last time for you. For the baby, for the Vanderbilt lady..."

There was an unspoken addition to that list too: Dublin. 

She could hear it in his pause. He was reminding her of how he could be trusted, of how he'd kept his word and he'd buried their love affair just like every other job she'd given him. He was, first and foremost, a professional, no matter how dirty of a flirt he was.

Oh what a history they had together.

"I'm the best," He repeated and, if Beth had been in a better mood, she would've warned his ego. "I don't want to seem like an ass, but professionally, I don't care whether you're in hot water or not—"

"Relapsing."

Her voice was strained, but it rose up against his lawyer-ly speech. 

He halted in mid-sentence; eyes caught on the way that she pulled her arms closer to her body. She appeared indifferent, suddenly emotionally detached from the same word that had caused her to flinch only five minutes ago.

"You can say it," Beth sucked on her bottom lip, eyes casting aside, "It's what this is, right? A relapse? That's what they're saying. Call it what they think it is. It's not a dirty word. Relapse. It happens. No one should be ashamed of it—"

She didn't like how it felt like the elephant in the room. 

She also didn't like how her words felt like she was trying to convince herself. She was trying to convince herself.

"It doesn't affect my job if you've relapsed or not," Dom repeated, dropping the euphemism and staring her straight in the eye. "Either way, I'm going to get you out of this mess. Even if the prescriptions are yours... even if you're going to refuse to go to rehab after this, I'm going to do my job and I'm going to do it well. I'm not going to lecture you on your life choices, Beth. I just need to know what's going on. I need to know what's true."

"They don't care," Beth murmured, pressing her fingers absently against her chin. "Derek doesn't care about what's true. If I said it wasn't... he wouldn't believe me. I don't know Archer would either—"

"Beth, I don't think that's—"

"No," She shook her head, "You weren't there the first time, Dom."

He paused.

"You don't know what it's like to walk into a room where everyone is just... just looking at you," Beth's mouth turned into a subconscious frown and she dragged in a breath, one that caught at the back of her throat as if she was about to cry. "Last time, I was lying through my teeth. Last time, I was doing everything I could to convince them that I was fine—last time, I kicked and I screamed and I said things and I was hurtful and I just..." Her face contorted, "I lied to them. I was dishonest and I played dirty and... and after that... when it comes to my sobriety, I don't think they'll ever believe anything I have to say."

Dom didn't speak.

"They have prescriptions," She continued after a beat, "They have my medical records. They have chemist documents saying that I checked out months' worth of narcotics, regularly all through my recovery from Teddy's surgery. They have my history of drug abuse and lying and manipulation and they... they have character witnesses and Derek's deep-rooted belief that someone out there always needs to be fixed one way or another—"

In a way, Beth was so deeply thankful that it wasn't Amelia who was going through all of this.

 She knew that Amy was so behind in her recovery, so barely pieced together that a situation like this would shatter her—Beth wasn't stupid, she saw the disconnect behind Amy's smile and read behind the insistence of her appearance in Seattle. 

At least Beth was somewhat sure she'd be able to weather this storm, Amy would've been completely washed away.

"Just give me the word," Dom said evenly, "Give me the word and I'll crush it all for you. I'll do you a favour."

Favour. God, how that little word sunk under her skin.

She wished that she was the sort of person who could deal with things on her own. 

She'd always prided herself on being independent to some degree—she'd never valued herself on the perceptions of other people, no matter how hard people made it. 

She'd been able to persist and persevere, no matter what was thrown at her, no matter how hard things got—but Dom, Dom had been a key asset to it.

Dom and Calum and their little favours.

What a mess this must have all looked like from the outside. She'd been able to see it painted all over her brother's face: Archer, pale and slightly peaky, revisiting things that he had never become fully acquainted with last time. 

She wondered what it looked like to him, seeing all of those prescriptions and all of those time logs and those letters—to her, it just looked like a paper trail for a paper person she didn't know or recognise. To him, she was sure it looked like the reason he'd stuck around in Seattle so long.

And then Derek... Beth almost wanted to scoff at the thought of him. Fucking Derek. Yeah, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of watching her career crumble for a second time.

Very slowly, with a hand against her forehead, Beth nodded.

"Do it," Beth said in a tiny voice, "Fix this."

***

Across the room, one of the board members was talking about their weekend plans.

In the corner of his eye, Derek watched Archer twitch, as if on reflex.

On the other side, a stormy looking Andrew got to his feet and exited the room, saying that he needed to make a call while the meeting was at recess.

Derek watched him go.

****

God, he was fucking good at his job.

It carried a high (which, in retrospect, probably wasn't the best terminology for the moment) and kept him afloat as he got to work. 

Phone calls were made, plans were erected, and Dom was subjected to watching Beth's stress fade very slightly as he made it very clear that he could handle this.

Of course, he could. He was Dominic fucking Fox. 

Sometimes, he figured that this was just all ego service. 

Did people really just make it too easy for him? Sure, this situation sucked, sure it was a straight-up minefield where Beth's career was just seconds away from detonation—but he could deal with it. He had a plan. He'd flown all the way from sunny California, into a city that was beginning to feel a lot like a warzone, and he had a plan.

There was just one problem.

Beth wouldn't tell him if she was sober.

He held his breath as she skirted around answering the question, instead lamenting over whether her answer to that question even mattered. 

Admittedly, Dom had meant what he'd said about her sobriety not impacting his job; he'd had his fair share of cases where he'd represented people who were guilty (and, naturally, had had them acquitted because yes, again, he was fucking fantastic at his job) and he knew that it was just all part of the job. 

Sometimes his clients would be guilty and sometimes they wouldn't be, it just happened that, more often, they were just a tiny bit of a criminal. Only the slightest.

Beth, however, didn't look like a criminal.

She looked defeated as if this week had been too long. 

There was no fire like there had been the last time Dom had been here, just a cold sense of smouldering, as if she was a coal fire that had been extinguished. He watched her wilt in her chair as their meeting went on.

It was a haggled twenty-minute window, one that left him with more questions than answers. He watched Beth sink lower and lower, her eyes sharp and mouth downturned almost permanently. 

A few times in the conversation, Beth couldn't quite meet his eye; as he spoke about the worst-case scenario, of federal investigations and bail bonds, she looked distant. 

Every part of him wanted to grab her and shake her, and tell her that he could do this, that he was as damn good as everyone said he was, and he could come through for the fourth time now.

If he had to be honest, he liked Beth as a client. 

Sure, she was a pain in the ass at times and was the reason he was leaving cute boys in his bed, but she was exciting. 

She made his job interesting, to say the least, like an electric storm rumbling the planes of his desk job. And, it helped that she just happened to leave a very nice pay-check whenever she blew through—but on top of that, Dom knew she was good.

He didn't know many people like Beth Montgomery. She was good, good in the sense that she did everything with the best intentions. She was trying her best and was innately flawed, like the rest of them. 

Dom could name a hundred people who deserved this sort of intervention more than she did (someone closer to this very hospital than others), people who deserved to have a wakeup call and their own reckoning, but Beth. 

Beth was almost too good. 

She hoped and she pretended she didn't have optimism, but she had a lot of it. 

(It was the hope and the thirst and pursuit of goodwill that had dragged her through the morning.) 

There was good in her, the sort of good that couldn't be drowned by pointed fingers or labels, and that made Dom even more motivated to make sure that she didn't go down on this ship.

She was a good person. She didn't deserve this.

He just wished she'd tell the truth for once instead of running from it.

"Okay," He said, at the end of a fifteen-minute conversation. With a sigh, he placed a small container onto the table. "They've asked for a test—"

A test, something that couldn't lie no matter what. The container made a slight thud against the table and he watched her eyes fly to it, as if it had a magnet attached to it and her whole soul was metal.

"I have to pee in a cup?" Beth looked at it with distaste, arms crossed over her chest and face made up into a grimace. He nodded and she made a tsking noise. "Humiliating."

"I know it's not glamorous," was Dom's next words. Briefly, he debated telling her about the time he'd had in college, on how he wasn't a saint by any means either. He wasn't a stranger to recreational drugs and was a little too familiar with the idea of a standardised drug screening test. "But it's what we need to do—"

"I know how this goes," Beth sighed. "I've been through all of this before—"

"Great," He said, "Then this will be easy, doll."

Easy.

He didn't miss how she scoffed at that word.

But it was easy. He wanted her to know that it was very easy. He watched as she avoided direct eye contact and held that container in between her fingers and stared at it as if was a threat against her personal safety. This could all be so easy—but why did it not feel it?

He paused.

There was something off, something off about the way that Beth seemed to react to the prospect of taking that drug test. 

(Admittedly, Dom had been so solidified in the belief that these were all just allegations, and that she was sober. He'd been so sure of it, from the moment that he'd landed in Seattle—even despite seeing her at her worst and being the guy that appeared whenever things got worse. He'd been so sure that Beth was innocent, but the hesitation and reaction in her, that made him question it.) 

He watched the way that she twisted it in her hands, studying the small text on the side.

He recognised that look. 

He'd seen it once upon a time, a very long time ago. 

She'd stared at a pregnancy test in the middle of Calum's apartment, heart in her mouth and nothing but dread written all across her face. 

There had been so many pregnancy tests, so many little sticks from so many different stores-- she'd blinked with tears in her eyes, a wobble in the corner of her mouth and the knowing flush of someone who knew exactly what the answer was going to be, even before the results came in.

"Beth," Dom's voice was even and tender. He said her name with the gentle equivalent of a driver approaching a wounded deer after striking it half-dead in the centre of the freeway. "What did you take?"

It wasn't the question that she had begged him to leave out of the conversation. It was a different one, an albeit higher risk question that made the hairs rise on the back of his arms. He was standing now, head cocked to the side as her chin rose to look him dead in the eye. It was such a startling contrast to what had come before, the fleeting glances and the avoidance—now she was staring him head-on, her eyes searching his as she formulated his response. Dom just waited for her to speak.

Beth looked away.

"I don't—"

"For this to work, Beth, I mean it, you need to be honest with me." 

She did. She really did.

 He needed to know what those test results were going to say before Derek Shepherd got his hands on them. He needed full transparency. He could handle it, but he couldn't go in blind. 

"I need to know what's going to show up on your drug test or whether we need to find some guy in the ICU with a colostomy bag so we can fake this—"

He watched a muscle in her jaw jump.

Jesus. This could be so easy. He thought it was going to be so easy, but Beth seemed reluctant to help herself. Was this another act of self-punishment? He couldn't tell. She wasn't co-operating on something that was so simply straight forward, and Dom felt like taking back everything he'd said about her being one of his favourite clients—

Oh, how he missed that cute guy from San Francisco. He'd been a very good kisser.

He could see the physical strain in her body as she dragged in a very long, pained breath. Her eyes averted and she shook her head slightly. Don't ask. It was another pledge of the fifth amendment and Dom fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"Beth—"

"What do you want me to say?" She said immediately, cutting him short before he could say anything more. "Do you want me to say that I'm fine? Because I've been trying to convince myself that for the past two months and it's not fucking working."

Dom felt his skin chill. It felt like the sort of silent confession, just behind the flicker of her eyes.

"You need to trust me," He began very tenderly. 

He wasn't, usually, the tender type, but today felt like the band-aid sort of day. He'd never been nurturing in the slightest, never the sort of person to heal broken wings on injured birds-- but god, didn't Beth look like the saddest little broken rescue he'd ever seen. 

"I just need the truth, Beth."

"That's always what people want," She sighed to herself, "People always want the stupid truth--"

Ah crap. He thought to himself. She did. She relapsed.

"I got shot," were her next words. 

Beth raised a hand and pointed straight through the door, as if they in the surgical department, just outside the room where it had happened. "Two months ago, Gary Clark walked into this hospital and he shot people. Eighteen people died. I fucking flatlined in the back of an ambulance and was kept alive on a ventilator. Two months ago--"

She was shaking again. 

It started in her chest and seemed to reverb around her body like the thunder outside. 

It rolled from limb to limb, spanning the bumps and bruises and scars that she'd accumulated over the years. 

There were so many sharp edges to her, so many opportunities for paper cuts and little knicks in the skin-- for a moment, Dom was so caught up in the tragedy of her, of a woman who had been melted down to a couple of fleeting moments between life and death. 

A woman who now, in these moments, depended completely on a succession of documents that Dom secretly hoped so deeply were forgeries.

Beth shook her head.

"--and I got labelled a miracle recovery," She seemed to scoff at the word. "I heard all about it... about how Mark saved my life by relieving the pressure on my heart. How if he'd been five seconds later then there would have been too much pressure in my chest and I would have been beyond fixing. Everything about me is a damn miracle. I should have died and I... I don't..."

Her sentence broke.

"I don't feel like a miracle."

Her voice broke too.

Beth seemed to pause for a second, her contorting as if she was holding back tears. 

Her head dropped to stare at her fingers, at the engagement ring on her finger. Dom followed her gaze, his jaw clenching at the thought of Charlie, blissfully oblivious to the horror show that was happening just across the street from him. She heaved a long breath, one which caused her shoulders to rise and fall. And then, in the smallest voice, Beth began speaking. Honestly.

"I had a check-up yesterday," Dom watched as she, once again, refused to look at him, "She examined my chest and... it hurt... all of that poking and pressing. It's tender and I just... I've been pretending to be fine for so long and it just, it hurt. it hurt a lot and I, uh, I just..." She swallowed uncomfortably, "I've been in a lot of pain. All the time. I didn't give myself to heal and just... everything hurts. It hurts so fucking much."

He didn't speak.

Beth turned her ring on her finger, unfazed by how badly her hands shook.

"Charlie... he had some medication left from Thanksgiving," Her voice felt oddly detached and she appeared so small. Standing with his arms on his hips and his jaw clenched, Dom felt oddly like a principal watching a pupil admit to a very heinous crime. "Painkillers... I knew that they were narcotic and I just..."

She paused, as if to prolong the inevitable. 

There was a heart-breaking halt in her speech, one that brought Dom all the way back to the woman that had stood in front of him in Toronto. 

Even standing here, five years on, Dom could remember how fragmented she'd been, swept in pieces through Calum's door by the North-Bound wind. 

She'd looked at him in the exact same way she looked at him now—her head raised, in that moment, in the exact same with the exact same eyes. Her chin tilted with a cinematic slowness, and, with a sad smile, Beth shook her head again.

"I'm tired," Beth said, as if an echo of something that had been long forgotten. "I'm so tired of everything. I knew what I was doing. I knew that even taking Charlie's medication would bite me in the ass and I still did it—after all this time."

Dom inclined his head.

"When was the—"

"Last night," was her curt response, a long inhale that sounded choked. "It'll still be in my system."

"Okay," He nodded, "Thank you for telling me, doll. We can find someone to—"

"No," Beth shook her head again, "Nothing is going to stop this from spiralling out of control—"

"Beth."

"This is Derek," She said, and then blinked as if tears were imminent. "He's persistent. It's good for a dying patient that needs the dedication. But if you're me... it's pretty fucking inconvenient."

"Oh, I can take Derek Shepherd," was all Dom replied with. 

It was said with all of the Avery ego he could draw upon and he scoffed at the expression on Beth's face. She was hunched in her chair, eyes darkly studying the way that his eyebrows raised at her. She didn't look too convinced. 

And even so, Dom gave her a wicked smile, "I already have kicked his ass once, haven't I?"

"Oh god," Beth murmured to herself, submerging her head back into her hands, "He could get me on assault charges too."

"He's a small fish--"

"He's the reason I lost my job last time," She said bluntly, "I spent all those years hating Mark for something that Derek did... I spent all those years thinking that Derek was in my corner and that Derek was the one person who could understand exactly what I meant through and all along... all along he was almost worse--"

"Beth, we can take Derek Shepherd."

She groaned to herself, "With all due respect, you couldn't stop him the first time. You couldn't save my internship, could you?"

Oh for fucks sake.

This was not the ego service that Dom had signed up for.

He dragged in a very, very long breath.

"Do you not know who the fuck I am?"

His question was both rhetorical and not. 

His voice was suddenly too loud for the space, filled with the incredulousness of a lawyer who had so much invested in her as a client. 

Beth looked up at him, squinting slightly as if she knew no matter what she answered to his question, he was going to tell her anyway. (Actually, she looked at it him exactly how she used to look at Mark back in New York, whenever his arrogance had become a little too much; with equal parts dread and admiration, as if she did not need to be reminded in the slightest.)

"I'm supposed to be in London this time tomorrow," Dom said stiffly, making sure that she held his eye this time. He wanted to make sure she heard this, heard his every word. "I'm supposed to be headlining a conference for the Harper Avery foundation. There's just under three thousand people attending... all to listen to me talk some crap about medical liability. I'm a big fucking deal. I have people that care about what I have to say... would pay a lot of money to hear what I've got to say... But I get the feeling that, when we leave this room, I'm going to phone up my secretary and tell her that I've got a more important issue that's popped up."

He raised a finger and pointed straight at her.

"You." Beth barely even blinked as he singled her out. "I'm sorry you relapsed, okay? It's crap. It's the crappiest crap to top this crappy time you're having. I'm sorry that you're in pain. But you don't deserve this, and it's my job to get you out of it. This is not a swan song. I'm in demand, okay? I'm the real fucking deal and I'm right here... I'm here for you and I'm not leaving until this is all fixed. You have me right here, one hell of an asset. I'm here for you all because Cal was dumb enough to fall in love with you ten years ago and felt bad that he dumped you on his ass—"

She grimaced to herself, as if to say that this really didn't help the situation.

"If I say I've got, I've got it," He continued. "But you need to let me do my damn job and either piss in that fucking cup or let me find someone who will."

He was assertive and direct, and he could see the cogs turning at the back of her head. 

She stared at him, watching the plan stand tall in front of them. They'd spent the last ten minutes talking about it, talking her through every single detail that needed fine tuning. 

He'd coached her on what to say, how to hold herself, on how to look that fucker in the eye without decking him (again). Dom had this, he wasn't sure how many times he was going to need to say that to convince her—but he knew that this was going to be okay.

It was. She was going to get through this.

Beth chewed on the inside of her cheek, looking down at the table.

"Okay," She said and then closed her eyes, having a breath. "I'm sorry I just—"

"Don't apologise," Dom rubbed a hand over his forehead. He was pretty sure they were all thinking erratically this morning, he'd just chosen to go for decaf this morning to mellow himself out. "You're not having fun, I get it. You can't trust anyone."

Beth pity-laughed for herself, "And here I thought my worst issue was daddy issues."

"I shouldn't have sworn at you," He said after a beat, shaking his head, "Sorry that wasn't nice--"

"Don't apologise," She replied dryly, shaking her head too, "It was a nice palette cleanser from the corporate bullshit I've had to listen to."

Then she paused and looked up at him.

"I just don't understand it," were Beth's next words. "I don't want to walk in there and give him the satisfaction of seeing me grovel. Those prescriptions... those pills... Charlie's prescription was for Codeine." She frowned to herself. "I took Codeine. It was just one pill, Dom. I was being careful. It was wrong. But I was careful."

Dom's brow furrowed.

"What were the prescriptions for?"

She sighed at his curiosity, "Fentanyl."

Dom felt his jaw go slack.

Oh fuck—

"I just..."

Oh fuck, fuck fuck—

"It doesn't make sense... They have my crappy handwriting and everything..."

Fucking fuck fuck fuck—

"I couldn't have written those prescriptions. I would remember—"

Dom wasn't particularly in the responsive mood.

 On the contrary, he was fixated by a deep sense of dread. He turned his back on his client and closed his eyes, allowing him the tiniest window of unprofessional penance. 

He'd meant it when he'd said he'd never been religious but FUCK!, lord take pity on this bisexual Black kid who really must've pissed off a few too many saints.

"I was supposed to get married today," His eyebrows rose at that, newfound knowledge that he definitely had not known beforehand.

He turned back to her, staring at her with eyes that were on the verge of panic. She shrugged to herself, chuckling dryly as if she really couldn't be assed to be surprised at his surprise. 

"I get the feeling that they're not going to let me go anywhere..." There was a pause. "I guess calling the cops on me is Derek's wedding gift."

Dom really should have gone to church when he had the chance.

(At that thought, Beth's gaze flickered to her cell phone. God, what was she going to say to Charlie?)

(How was she going to explain what was happening? She didn't even know where to start herself. He was home, probably getting ready by now and expecting her to come through that door at any moment. She guessed that Amy was with him too, probably making some dry comment about how she never thought she'd see the day—God, Beth wanted to bury her head in her hands.)

(How the hell had she gotten here?)

"Is it possible to rain check your own wedding?" Beth asked humourlessly and, at the exact moment, thunder rumbled throughout Seattle Grace Mercy West. Her eyes turned overcast. "That's if he even wants anything to do with me..."

(He'd always been too good for her, she'd known it from the start. Ever since she'd come across him in France, that golden smile and that stupid Patriots hat, she'd known that something was bound to go wrong—this was it, wasn't it? This was the first bump in the road that had become her life. This was the time where she had to turn to him and admit that she'd been taking his medication for the past few weeks, that she'd been sneaking pills from the medication that Callie had prescribed from him after that surgery.)

"Do you remember what I said to you in Dublin?"

The mention of the city and all it stood for made Beth stiffen; he watched her solidify in the seat opposite him, turning to stone as if she'd just been stared down by a gorgon. 

Idly, he wondered whether she was as cold to the touch as she looked. She appeared oddly bloodless, as if she'd returned to that floor in that boardroom on that day. Another pause, one that Dom could almost count—he felt time tick over and the weight waver on Beth's shoulders.

(No, she wanted to tell him but couldn't quite find the energy to say, I don't remember anything.)

"I told you that Charlie isn't..."

  No, he had to be careful with his wording. He trailed off and shook his head, coming to the realisation that she, very clearly, hadn't retained anything he'd said to her that night. Dom wished she had, it would have saved her a lot of grief. 

"Charlie's not perfect, Beth."

She stared at him. 

It was a misplaced stare, the sort that made Dom wonder whether she was actually seeing anything. 

She was staring straight through him and, for the slimmest second, Dom wondered whether she was looking at it— 

It. Dom's greatest work. 

His magnum opus of side-hustles, hush money and gilded favours. If she thought that she was build and crafted from dishonesty, she needed to really pay attention.

"I don't know what you're—"

Their meeting came to an end.

Dom knew that they'd only had a very slim window of time, and he'd tried to make the most of it. 

He'd done all he could, made phone calls to the right people and said the right things and tried to brace his client (his friend) the best he could. But no amount of preparation could have ever fully armed Beth to handle what came next.

Their meeting's ending was signified by the opening of the door.

Andrew Perkins appeared in the doorway.

From just the look of him, of the state he was in, and the slight breathlessness of his stance, they could collectively tell that he had not had a very good morning.

The sight of him made Dom pause. 

Their eyes connected in a moment of understanding. 

There was so much that passed in between the two of them. It was a silent conversation built upon years of partnership, of midnight phone conversations, envelopes filled with Canadian dollar bills and summers in sunning French Rivera. 

Dom looked dead into the eyes of his old friend, his longest friend, and he nodded.

Yeah, he knew what was happening. Really, he should've known.

Slowly, Dom looked back at Beth. 

The brunette was staring at Andrew too, her forehead creased in such bewilderment at the sight of him. 

The meeting had worn her down further, an innate droop to her shoulders and heaviness to her petals, just like a flower that had been snapped in half under Derek Shepherd's heel. 

She was the next victim of Andrew's stare; he looked over at her and his expression changed—it went from stoic and strained to just a look of pure, inconsolable grief.

This was it. Andrew was calling time.

How much it held within it—Dom knew what that look meant. 

It was the end of something, of what? He didn't know. 

The impending conversation, the watershed, thrummed in the corner of the room and he had no intention to see it through. It was a storm of its own, a shitshow that was going to rival the worst storm Seattle had ever seen. 

Even Beth, as if sensing that things were about to get insurmountably worse, sunk even further in her seat.

Quietly, Dom picked his briefcase off of the boardroom table. 

He inclined his head over at his client. With a sigh, he allowed Andrew to do what he'd been wanting to do for a very long time:

"I'll let you two talk."

***

It ended like this:

"Good morning, my name is Dominic Fox and I'll be Elizabeth's legal representative during these negotiations."

Negotiations? Derek had been caught off-guard by that. 

In fact, that whole thing had taken him off-guard. 

He supposed that he should have seen it all coming—the door bursting open and spilling the Harper Avery Foundation's golden boy into Bethenny Ballard's office. 

He appeared with a golden smile and a golden greeting and a golden little cup of urine. All of the board blinked at him, at this hot-shot lawyer who was far more familiar with fast cars and hot models than the overcast, half-lit interior of a psychiatrists' lair. 

A newly returned Andrew jostled in his seat as Dominic took the floor as if he was about to recite a Shakespearean monologue.

"Negotiations?" echoed a baffled member of the board that Derek didn't exactly remember the name of. 

His head turned to watch the elderly retired doctor scoff at the gall of the lawyer. It barely even bristled the Fox, the man wheeling around to flash his signature charming smile.

"Yes," Dominic said simply, making Derek's eyebrows raise. "I'm sure when we all talk this through then we'll be able to come to a very civil understanding—"

"We've already talked."

Derek's interjection into, what he guessed was going to be a very long, winded and perfectly recited speech, seemed to come too premature for the lawyers taste. 

Dominic set his eyes on Derek with grace and precision, giving him the exact same stare that had appeared when he'd been setting threats on his desk last time; long gone was the friendly shake off hands and the Chief-lead courtesy tour of the hospital as they prepared to look after the great Harper Avery. 

Now, when Dominic smiled, Derek could almost see blood staining his incisors.

"So have I," the lawyer replied, "With my client. We've had a very productive conversation and we're ready to come to an agreement."

At the mention of her, Derek found himself looking over at his ex-sister-in-law.

Unlike her employee, Beth had been silent in her entrance. 

She'd sat back down in her seat, hands clasped in front of her. 

The first thing he noticed about her was her engagement ring, the diamond catching in the light at such an angle that it almost blinded him—he had to squint slightly just to look over at her. Her head was inclined slightly. She'd pinned her hair up. 

There was something so reserved about her, so compacted and so unnaturally dim that Derek found his concern raising once again.

"An agreement?"

Derek didn't miss the way that Beth seemed to twitch at the sound of her brother's voice. Much like his sister, Archer had said very little over the past hour. 

Derek had watched him slowly grind himself down into a picture of mindless anxiety, his body clenched so tightly that he was sure going to ache in the morning—it was very clear to everyone in the room that Archer was on the verge of a very prolonged panic, of something that was so familiar to Derek that he could've been able to predict the exact moment that Archer was going to break. 

He'd been there before so many times, with Amy and with Beth herself—Archer's voice made Beth close her eyes and drag in a very sharp short breath.

"We propose that my client receive the treatment that she needs..." 

The proposal felt recited and Derek looked over at Beth as Dominic outlined it. 

"I think we're all agreed that this is a very sensitive situation and no one needs the publicity of a doctor committing any crime, especially following the events of the past two months. It's also a deeply personal affair and it should be handled morally and with care. We're willing to do everything we can to ensure our client's safety and recovery from this," He paused and pulled a face as if a thought had just struck him. "With a very generous donation from the Harper Avery Foundation, of course."

There was a fatal pause, the sort that was filled with a scattered coupling of glances between board members as they shared the same thoughts about Dominic's off-the-cuff suggestion. 

He looked around the room, at the ring of investors and donators, as if he could read the word that swum through their head at the exact same time. 

His smile flickered with a sharp edge, a smirk that reminded Derek so much of Mark, a smirk that told Derek that he knew exactly what he was doing—

Derek just sighed to himself.

Son of a bitch.

His eyes stayed on Beth, on the unmoving statue that seemed incapable of anything but solemness. 

From her facial expression, Derek could tell that she was deep in thought—in fact, she appeared quite overwhelmed. His first thought was a traitorous one, one which asked him whether this was what she'd looked like when he'd phoned her that night; had she looked so tragically uprooted and caught-off-guard that she'd appeared so frighteningly small and fragile? 

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were heavy-lidded, and she appeared to grasp onto the sides of her chair suddenly as if to steady herself.

Derek's brow furrowed very slightly.

Meanwhile, as if to drive his point home, Dominic produced a very shiny cheque book from his back pocket. Derek could practically hear the rustle of people leaning forwards in their seats.

"I heard a rumour back in Boston that you're looking to build a nice new ICU extension," He appeared so blasé about it as if it was just a very casual, off-handed thought that he hadn't given much thought to. 

But Derek still stared at his ex-sister-in-law, imagining the conversations they'd had, the scheming that had gone on behind closed doors. How they'd revelled at the thought of bending the law again instead of facing it head-on. 

"We would love to play a part in that dream becoming a reality—"

"Is she going to talk?"

As always, Derek was so polite about his questions.

She didn't make any indicator to show that she'd heard him.

"Yes," Dominic responded instead, his responses always very curt and precise. He nodded with them slowly, his eyes fixed on Derek as if he was talking to a toddler. "My client is ready to answer your questions."

How nice of her.

She'd driven them to frustration with her reluctance to speak more than two words, having spent the whole of their questioning appearing stoic and completely unbothered—but now, now, Derek could sense that something had changed. She was the opposite of both of those things—visibly fighting against emotion and deeply bothered.

"Beth?"

Like before, Archer's voice seemed to bring her around to some sort of consciousness. 

He sounded so careful, so withheld, as if it was taking all of his energy to make himself appear softer and more approachable. 

A glance over at the neurosurgeon and it struck Derek how he'd never seen the Montgomery so unlike himself—not even when Beth had been on the verge of death herself and Archer had watched them scrub her blood off of the boardroom floor with his own eyes... 

His gaze was stuck onto Beth so desperately, his face stricken and attention unwavering, as if he was scared that if he blinked, she would fade right in front of their eyes.

Her head rose.

Derek wasn't sure what he'd expected but it wasn't that—the woman that faced them face on was so different to the woman who had just spent two minutes staring bottomlessly into the floor. 

Suddenly, she appeared indifferent again, characterised by the bold raise of her dark eyes as she looked each board member in the eye one by one. Derek was frowning by the time he met hers---

Something didn't feel right.

"Beth..." 

Archer repeated her name and Derek watched as Dom looked over at his client. It was a weird look as if Dom was as concerned as the rest of them. He seemed caught off-guard by her too, of her unattached almost robotic presence as her eyes zeroed in on her brother as he gave her a tender but tortured smile. 

"Is it true? Did you write these prescriptions?"

(In the far corner of the room, an exhausted-looking Andrew Perkins looked over at his girlfriend.)

)Teddy had been caught up in the whole drama of it, of the horror of watching someone she knew get picked apart right in front of them—feeling his gaze on her face, Teddy looked over and gave him a very hesitant, terrified smile, as if to show that she didn't want to watch but, at the same time, just couldn't look away.)

(What met her, in return, was the face of a very exhausted man who was deeply worried that he'd delivered a deafening blow.)

(Andrew's head turned back to face the woman who, he supposed, in another lifetime, would've been his sister-in-law, if things had gone right.)

Beth cleared her throat.

"Yes," She said without a moment of hesitation, just as the storm truly broke over Seattle. "They're all mine. I wrote the prescriptions."