𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙑.
FAVOURITE CRIME

──────

SEATTLE

    "I OBJECT!"

The room halted completely. 

Suddenly, the air caught in the back of their throats and heads turned to the back, eyes raising to stare at the newcomer as they burst dramatically through the door. 

There was a moment in which time seemed to halt; it was as if someone had raised a remote and pressed paused, a thumb nail digging into the rubber cap and freezing them all in their tracks.

 Not a word was uttered as the silence ticked over, completely caught up in the clear expressions of surprise on their faces as they all just stared back.

It was almost cinematic. It made Amy realise exactly why those words were the apex of so many of Beth's crappy romcoms. Was it romantic? It felt very briefly like a grand romantic gesture if she concentrated hard enough. 

Between the complete confusion and disarray, and the looks exchanged between people as a certain someone slowly descended into complete madness—it was there, the romantic undertone, the moment where hearts skipped a beat and eyes flushed the sort of vague horror that made her want to take a picture.

Right?

It sure was dramatic. If there was one thing they had down, it was the dramatic entrance. 

The looks on their faces were dramatic, the feeling of a room devouring itself with its own tension—it was more than dramatic, it was almost delicious. 

God, why hadn't Amy ever said something like this before? 

Not just in a courthouse but just any room she'd ever walked into ever.

She'd been able to pinpoint the exact moment that Mark seemed to transcend into a whole different plane of being—she'd never seen him look so deeply flustered and caught off-guard. It was as if she could feel the moment where he realised what was happening. His whole body clenched and his jaw slackened as if those two words were enough for him to rethink his whole life. 

She could see it tick over in that little Beth-infected brain of his, shutting down thought processes and rendering him slightly pale.

Huh, maybe this wasn't as well thought out as it had first appeared.

Amy cleared her throat.

"Yikes," She whistled lowly, half expecting him to go into sudden cardiac arrest. "Tough crowd."

It was a very, very tough crowd. She'd forgotten how surgeons didn't have a very good sense of humour; the past few months of her sitting in Sam Bennett's psychiatry office back at the Wellness Clinic in LA, had resulted in a lot of very prime one-liners that she was more than proud of. 

Her frosty reception had almost surprised her—Mark had had a sense of humour once, right?

He'd dated Beth at least, and they both knew how much of a joke that all turned out to be. Especially on the two of them.

She'd thought that Mark would find that funny. She'd thought of it while in the elevator and had cracked herself up. 

Screw romcom, this was just a comedy. 

Bursting into the Attending's lounge and exclaiming those two little words with such urgency and conviction that she'd sent him into a whole different dimension. Now that was her idea of cinema. 

Even standing there in the doorway, her eyes bouncing between Mark and an orthopaedic surgeon she'd only been introduced to the night before. Callie stared at her blankly, brow furrowed slightly as she placed Amy's face and then the insulation behind those words.

"It's a joke," Amy said after a beat, "Remember because of the whole—"

"Yeah," Mark's voice came out slightly strained. 

He was in the middle of reading a research journal, his back stooped slightly as he held a mug of coffee. Across from him, Callie was still slightly shell-shocked, her eyes flickering between the two of them as they spoke. 

   "Very funny," Mark said.

She didn't appreciate the sarcasm.

In all honesty, Amy hadn't known what to expect when she'd finally bounced into this hospital and past the reception front desk. 

Since arriving in Seattle, Amy had done her best to avoid her brother at all costs. They were not particularly on good terms after a very long argument about her sobriety and the sort of bells and whistles that went along with it. 

Therefore, by all means, standing in the hospital he was currently holding together with tape and glue, was not something she was very eager to do. She'd asked at the front desk for Mark, had been very amused when they'd started trying to tell her important and busy he was and had half a mind to tell his secretary that, this morning, she'd laid in his bed naked while watching him cry over his ex-girlfriend getting married. 

How important and busy of him.

And of course—there was nothing quite so busy and important about a mid-morning break.

 She'd caught the eye of a stray Meredith Grey, as introduced last night at the 'rehearsal dinner' and was told with a half-smile that Mark was currently sat in the lounge waiting to tap into the OR for his portion of a very lovely surgery. 

So that had lead Amy directly here, her eyes glimmering as she watched Mark try his very best not to squirm under her knowing smirk.

"Yeah," Amy nodded her head and then, remembering what she was actually here to do, she craned her neck and gazed around the room. "You haven't hidden her under a table or something, have you?"

Despite common belief, Amy had a reason behind her chaos. 

She had a very good reason, just as she had when she'd first arrived in Seattle. It had drawn her into the belly of the beast despite everything she stood for. 

Didn't they realise that she was quite literally risking her life to stand in this stupid building? 

She looked around the room, squinting into all of the corners and the crevices and eventually met the look of intense confusion on Mark's face.

"What?" His brow very slowly crumpled.

"I mean, I have to say..." Her face contorted too, a slightly perturbed smile stretching across her lips. "If you did get over yourself and did the damn thing, I have sorely misjudged you and I really should apologise for the whole pussy and poached egg joke—"

"What are you talking about?"

The blank look on his face was not pleasing. 

When she realised that Mark really didn't understand what she was talking about, Amy paused. She cocked her head to the side, buried her fingers into her jean pockets and chuckled to herself as if Mark was just joking around—she glanced at Callie, as if to say 'god, what a joker' and rolled her eyes. 

Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon just blinked at her, his mug of coffee still halfway to his mouth.

"Beth," Amy exhaled out. "I know she's around here somewhere—"

"Amy."

He said her name as if she needed to be clearer.

That caught Amy off-guard. 

There were three things that Amelia Shepherd was unwaveringly sure of. 

One: Beth had told her that they were going to meet each other outside the hospital at half past, ten minutes after the end of her meeting with Bethenny Ballard and an hour before her shotgun wedding. 

Two: Amy had turned up on time, despite her terrible reputation for being fashionably late to things, and she'd waited. 

Three: Even after standing there in the cold, shitty rain, Beth had never turned up.

In fact, Amy had been stood there for a while. She'd teetered on wet shoes in the fire and brimstone of a terrible storm and waited. She'd checked the time in regular intervals and had frowned when she'd watched the time tick closer and closer to the time that Beth had agreed to leave for the courthouse. But, ever so surely, Beth became a no show.

The bewilderment slowly built at the back of Amy's chest.

She'd never been good at party games and she sure as hell had never been the type to actually win one. When it came to guesswork like with Cluedo or Hangman, she'd always turned flustered and confused and eventually ended up at a funeral. Putting two and two was not Amy's greatest talent and, from the way that Mark seemed to stare at her intently, something clicking at the back of his head, she got the feeling that it was much more his sort of thing.

"Do you..." Her voice caught slightly, eyes flickering between the two surgeons as she realised that they, in fact, had no idea what she was talking about. She faltered visibly. An uneasy sense of something's wrong gripped her. Her eyes followed the very slow look of concern as it dawned across Mark's face. Her voice was almost breathless. "You haven't seen her–?"

"Seen who?" Callie contributed to this snowball of a conversation. 

She looked deeply bewildered, but Amy could tell that Mark was a few more steps ahead. His eyes didn't leave the neurosurgeon, and Amy watched the mug of coffee slowly descend back onto the table.

"Beth," Mark answered.

For a single word, Amy had never heard of something so heavy. 

She could hear it on his tongue and wondered whether it tasted bitter. In the background, Callie seemed to frown to herself, as if to think back through the conversations she'd had this morning—she slowly recounted how she'd seen Beth in the ER and Mark added how they'd made polite conversation in the elevator. 

Amy raised her eyebrows at him, as if to silently ask whether he'd said anything that could've caused her to run—

Runaway bride? Amy couldn't imagine it. I

t was the other half of her dramatic entrance, the image of Beth running through rain in a white dress. She felt as insane as she had when she'd bet against Beth and Mark making it to the end, but a romantic part of her thought that this had been it.

Despite how many times the psychiatrist had ran, she was so sure that Beth would stay for this one.

"Shit," Amy said as they all realised that they had no idea where the bride was, "Well, then where the hell is she?"

***

─── Charlie was still a creature of habit, no matter how much things had changed.

A hangover wasn't as much of a hinderance as it used to be. 

He'd regarded it as an old friend. If he had to summarise a lot of mornings he'd had, especially as a very young adult, he would've described them as generally pretty crappy. 

Despite all of his shiny faces and sides, he'd had his fair share of moments like these: eyes squeezed tight to minimise the glare of daylight, chin tilted into an awkward position to minimise the pounding in his head, a very vague sense of what had happened the evening before and the sticky aftertaste of liquor in his mouth. It almost felt nostalgic.

Although things had changed, he was still subject to the same cycle: 

He still woke up at 7:00AM, even on the day of things changing for good. He still started his day as Beth showered and smiled at him through clouded panes of glass. 

He still made the woman he loved breakfast and exchanged a cup of coffee across the dining table, amongst the boxes that had accumulated on every odd surface. She still pressed a kiss against his cheek as she passed to wash their plates in the sink, with the additional 'No I mean it, go back to bed.' She still looked at him with that warmth that made his bones ache a little less, still expected the best from him.

Beth still left at 8:00AM too. Even on her wedding day, she was ready at the door like clockwork. She left the apartment in the same manner, like a chaos that couldn't be contained between four walls. 

As always, He just leant against the couch, cell phone in his hand and coffee in the other and watched as she flew around the apartment like a hurricane, sweeping up everything she needed and tossing it haphazardly into her bag. She was giving the rain outside a run for it's money, but there was one thing different—the smile that wouldn't waver, even as she accidentally tossed everything onto the floor and nearly tripped over herself while racing out of the door.

By 8:15AM, Charlie was alone.

In a way, he found the silence of the apartment oddly uncanny. How chaotic today felt against how peaceful this space was; empty floors, walls and covered furniture that felt oddly impersonal. 

He trundled through a new apartment of boxes and sectioned memories, intersectional objects from different parts of her life all contained in cardboard squares. Charlie paused between a box labelled Boston and a box named New York; his eyes wavered between the two of them, his mouth dry as he same how the tape on one was puckered and pulled, as if it had been opened and closed many times. 

His green mug, half way to his lips with the promise of something to help rouse him, suddenly felt a lot heavier. Charlie moved onwards.

In the absence of the pieces of her wrapped up in the furniture and the lack of her smile across the apartment, Charlie felt as though he was in a parallel universe. This whole day in fact, felt like it was a complete subversion from the familiar—he found himself stretching his tired, stiff muscles under a shower head and smiling to himself as he thought about his wedding day. 

His wedding day. A day he'd been waiting on for a very long time.

There was a suit laid out on the bed, not a full one but a suit all the same. 

He'd had it laundered the day before and had paid double to get it to the front of the priority. Beth's dress, a white off-the-rack due to the short notice, hung in the closet. 

It was indicative unspoken theme. Fast. Their wedding was fractured into quick little pieces, as if they were on the verge of being packed into a box too. Idly, Charlie wondered whether that's what this would be in the future. 

He asked himself whether, in 20 years, he'd look back at this part of his life, of all of the stress and the ultimatums and the hardship of Beth's recovery and his own—and whether he'd see it packed in a cardboard box in the corner of the attic of the home they make together, labelled Seattle in Beth's nondescript hand.

At 8:30AM, Charlie sat by the window and watched the torrents go down. 

He watched storm swamp the city and felt very little sympathy for the occupants of it—sometimes it astounded him, how he'd managed to spend so many years profiting off of other people's despair. His brother had built a whole company off of the misfortunes of disaster victims and sometimes the money they made felt a whole lot like bloody money. 

His career, itself, felt meticulously pieced together by connections and promotions that weren't particularly earnt or deserved, but Charlie was taken it all with a blasé smile.

The job in Seattle, for example, he'd been handed that on the spot.

He wasn't particularly sure why, but figured that Andrew must've had some sort of hand in it somewhere along the line, if not even consciously. 

Maybe they'd looked at Andrew, the crown jewel of the Perkins' lineage and assumed Charlie was as breathtakingly clean-cut with all of the crisp edges and clarity. 

Andrew was as clandestine as they got with his Harry Winston smile and his Tiffany's charm. (Notably, Charlie, as the younger brother, had always had noticeably less carats to his quality. He'd had more chips and defects and wounds, something that he'd learnt to sand over with time.) He was sure that they'd taken one look at his last name and assumed that Charlie was as polished as the rest—

It happened more than you would've believed.

As guilty as he felt about not being able to make it into the hospital to hand his resignation in person, Charlie appreciated the quiet morning to himself. 

With a head full of static and eyes that squinted through the gloom, he attempted to make something of the quiet. He skirted past suitcases and packed boxes while envisioning the way Beth would take his hand as they boarded their flight and left this city in the past, burying all of the bad things associated with it. 

He very briefly found himself lingering over boxes of belongings from the office he'd shared with his fiancée at the hospital—

Yeah, he thought to himself, this is going six feet under.

He'd had plans for the morning, things that he needed to do. 

Amongst all things, getting married felt like an pretty important task on his to-do list. 

He found himself smiling to an empty room, despite how the deep itch in his bones stirred and turned his back on the mountain of boxes. He'd been waiting for this for a very long time, almost three years to be exact; three years of watching Beth flourish into herself, three years of standing by, gently pruning her petals and helping her bloom into a pretty fucking incredible flower.

He was getting married.

Whoever said nice guys finish last?

At 9:00AM, the scheduled time of Beth's meeting with the Head of Psychiatry, Charlie started to work towards his goals. 

His plans had been wrapped up in the endings of things, of finishing packing, of organising storage payments and leaving things wiped clean. While Beth handled their business at the hospital, he floated through an empty, liminal space, wondering whether this was just in their DNA—they shared that between them, being visitors in their own homes, never destined to stay.

Just disappearing off of the face of the earth was not an easy feat. 

They'd prepared at length despite how last minute everything appeared to be. 

Tickets had been printed, things had been packed and the jig saw puzzle of a bright future was slowly piecing together. It almost caught him off-guard how prepared for everything Beth was, how she was able to just shut down parts of brain, break friendships and move on. He wasn't exactly sure whether that terrified him or not.

She'd told him all about last time: of how Derek had phoned her just as her pregnancy test result came through, of how she'd just let everything go in that moment and realised that she needed to leave. He wondered what it was that signalled endings; was it a feeling of finality? Was it looking at a city and deciding that it had nothing else to offer? Whatever it was, he knew that Seattle had nothing to offer either of them. 

Nothing good, anyway.

At that thought, he watched his phone vibrate like an angry wasp against the dining table. It sat just where they'd been seated, all that time ago at the dinner party with all of Beth's friends, and some particularly unwelcome guests. 

He read the name on the ID: D FOX, and grimaced, ignoring it as if it was just some pest that would fly away.

(Dom wouldn't fly away. Not alone, at least.)

He ignored it, just as he'd ignored so many things. 

Pretending things were fine happened to be his greatest talent. Today was a happy day and he was going to treat it as one—he was happy, the world was happy and the weather was miserable.

He raised an eyebrow as the walls shook with thunder.

Happy.

(Charlie was happy as the world around him fell apart.)

At 10:00AM, Charlie ignored a phone call from his brother too.

It wasn't something that he'd even considered. 

An astray glance in the direction of his cell phone was enough of a dignified response. He snorted to himself as he made his second coffee. 

Yeah right, as if that was going to happen. He knew why Andrew was calling and he had no intention of letting that happen. It amused him, really, the image of Andrew Perkins pacing the length of the airport's passenger lounge, making a last-ditch effort to make his life excruciatingly difficult– he liked to do that, Charlie had found.

There was an irony in it, Charlie guessed, that a man who spent so much of his professional career soothing mental wounds and applying mental band aids, seemed to thrive off of tearing Charlie's world apart. 

It seemed as though everyone was lining up today: Dom, Charlie, the shitty Seattle weather, everyone wanted to rain on his parade—

Not so fast, Charlie thought to himself as the floors rumbled with the electricity and toil of his own personal storm cloud. 

He knew how this went and he was going to stop it from spiralling any further—he was happy and he was functioning and he was handling everything perfectly. Why did this have to end up exactly like it had last time?

Last time. He had a last time too. He didn't talk about it often, but it was there. Just like Beth had a version of New York in boxes. Devastating. 

He had a life in Boston that was tucked very tightly underneath all of his edges. He had everything condensed down into a city, into a lump at the back of his throat that arose when a room got dark and into the tense pause when Andrew looked at him in that way. He had everything completely compartmentalised. That was the past, this is his future. Charlie really wished that Andrew could just move on—

God, Charlie thought to himself as he frowned at the weather again, Seattle's pretty crappy, isn't it?

He was excited to leave. There was too much here, he found, too many things that had gone wrong or were inevitable to go awry. 

He liked going to places where no one knew him, where he could start afresh and build anew. There was something about starting over in a new city that made him feel almost giddy: new streets, new buildings, new people, new first impressions—it was the fresh start, the clean slate, the ability to build himself new opportunities and new networks.

He figured that Beth would end up with him in a new city, far away from Seattle and far from Boston. 

Maybe they'd go to Philadelphia or Chicago? He liked the East Coast, it was comfortable. 

They'd get a new apartment or maybe even a house with a little picket fence. Yeah, he liked that. They'd get a house in the suburbs, maybe even get a dog (Charlie was a dog person through and through) and they'd make friends with all their neighbours. They'd build a new friendship group, make new connections. 

Charlie was good with people. he knew people, he knew how they ticked and how they looked at him and immediately thought hey, that's a nice guy.

He'd get a job in the city, maybe as a trauma counsellor or a psychiatry consultant. 

He'd avoid anything clinical, just because he had the feeling that Andrew would fight him this time. He could see how it was going to end up, his ass on the line whenever he dared to apply to a job. He'd avoid that, avoid anything that would require any sort of clinical referral. 

Maybe he'd avoid his family completely—a clean cut, fully sanitised and sutured shut.

Beth would thrive. He was sure of it. She'd love their life together.

Their life, not his. His own life was carefully constructed like a house of cards. Piece by piece. He'd spent years gently slotting cards together. They were very thin cards, built together, themselves, by a very shallow sense of reality. His life was completely dependent on the weather, whether it was windy, whether it was wet. 

His life was also completely dependant on the solid ground beneath it: Andrew, that had been his base line. The only problem, Charlie had found, was that it was storming in Seattle, windier than it had been in months, and Andrew had found the agency to move on his own accord.

His eye twitched as a car backfired down the street.

Yeah, their new life would be great.

At 10:30AM, Charlie knew that Beth was running late.

It was half an hour until they were supposed to be at the courthouse.

She was late.

They'd done this before: a very brief memory of the last time Beth had been late crossed his mind. 

Generally, Charlie avoided the thought of it; it made his mouth dry and his ears throb slightly, taking him back to that road, the chaos, the feeling of sickness in the air. (He'd never felt so helpless. He'd never felt so incapable. He'd stood there in the road, forced to be useless while Mark Sloan held his fiancée's hand and tried to comfort her when she needed someone the most.) 

Whenever he did think about it, he thought about how he'd spent a week sat across from Gary Clark, gently trying to help him process the loss of his wife and ultimately failing.

That sense hadn't left him, not once, the feeling that Charlie had been invertedly responsible for what had happened. 

He'd tried to ignore that too, the nagging thought that if he'd just worked harder that Beth would have been put in so much danger, that eighteen people wouldn't have died. The thought of it made Charlie's chest clench and his jaw ache a little too much. The sensation of being inadequate or not enough, as always, was like a thorn in his side.

That brought him to the bathroom, catching his own eye as he hurriedly adjusted the cuffs of his dress shirt. Everything was fine. He was going to continue with everything as planned. Sure, the weather was shit, sure Beth was half an hour late, but things were going to be fine—fake it until you make it, that had always been his code of honour.

Charlie had always been very good at pretending that things were fine when they weren't. 

He'd perfected the right kind of calculated, blasé smile that could sway any sort of foreboding. His mother, in fact, had always had the right idea: the right smile could solve any problems, your mind governs how things happen. 

Charlie had been smiling for years and today would be no different.

He caught his own eye in the mirror. 

His finger slipped and the cufflink in amongst the fabric slid against his skin, scratching a shallow line against his wrist. 

Amongst his numbness, he didn't feel it. As if to remind himself of pain, he swore to himself quietly.

Today would be no different.

At 10:45AM, Charlie found himself thinking about that day again. 

He thought about how he'd run down that street with his heart pounding his chest and his cheeks flushed. He thought about how he'd watched those helicopters spin and those police push him behind barriers and cars. He thought about how Andrew had been there in his ear (fucking Andrew) telling him that the holes in Charlie's constructed reality had little holes shining through—bullet holes, clustered across Seattle Grace and letting the blood escape so gradually onto the boardroom floor.

There were too many holes now. He could look through them.

 He felt like a kid trying to look out of a window, a milk crate pushed flush against the wall. 

Andrew had been adamant on them. Somehow, the time ultimatum that his brother had set, had begun to feel a whole lot like a sinking ship. The holes in the bough and the floor stretched from port to starboard, and this ship was destined to sink at any moment today.

His phone buzzed with another call, this time Amy, but Charlie didn't see the caller ID. 

He shined his shoes and pieced together the sort of groom that didn't appear as stressed as he felt. He ignored the sound of the world tearing itself to pieces outside, behind those rain-stricken windows, and concentrated on the steady warmth of wedding day jitters and nerves.

He was getting married. He was getting married. He was getting—

God, would that phone shut the fuck up?

He grabbed it with a hand that trembled slightly. 

His movements were sharp and concise. 

It was thrashing against the tabletop with a persistence that unlocked a very impulsive need to throw it against the wall. The caller ID was nothing but a monument to the deep agitation that had settled so deep within his bones.

Couldn't they just leave them the fuck alone? It was a conundrum that he couldn't quite understand. 

Why couldn't people just let him have one morning, one peaceful city, one goddamn, fucking peaceful moment. 

Why couldn't they just leave the two of them alone?

At 11:00AM, Charlie's foot started twitching.

It began how it had outside of that café. 

A gradual spasm in his body that couldn't be contained. It was a ticking clock, a pace that marked every second as it passed. 

It ascended through his body, infecting every muscle and every organ until he'd picked up a slight pace across the width of the bedroom. He crossed the room back and forth, gently tugging on his tie as he thought about how the last time he'd felt a deep pit of foreboding in his stomach, just like this, things hadn't exactly gone to plan. People had died, Beth had been injured and then he'd been stuck with...

He found himself stood in the bathroom again. It'd already been packed, toiletries tossed into suitcases and boxes. He stood there in the empty room and watched his reflection move aimlessly. Twitching. So many jolts and shuddering breaths. He couldn't bear to meet his eyes in the mirror. His arm was extended to the medicine cabinet as if on reflex.

Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck it. What if Andrew—

No. He was handling this. 

Charlie had things on his side. He knew Beth, Beth knew him, he loved her and she loved him. He liked to think that she wouldn't take things at face value. 

If Andrew... if he managed to call Beth or if she listened to him then wouldn't it all just... Wouldn't she reject it? Wouldn't she come to him first?

Charlie didn't like this. He was sure everything was fine. He was sure that Beth had maybe just gotten completely side-tracked by an oncoming case. He knew her. He knew that she was married to her work and had been for years before she'd even consider being married to him. 

But even so, he hadn't felt like this since he was a kid. 

It was such a deep-rooted sense of unease, like the sort that came before a bad storm season when the air didn't taste quite right. There was a building pressure in his chest that made his heartbeat relocate to his ears.

(Maybe it was just a reflection of the weather? Maybe it was just because he was moving on autopilot, moving into the main room of the apartment and stooping for the rucksack he'd packed in preparation for the flight? Maybe it was because things had changed so drastically without him even knowing?)

His stomach lurched as his fingers made contact with that cylindrical bottle—

Beth.

Oh. 

...

Beth was here.

He noticed her just as she noticed him. 

She was a figure in the corner of his eye, quietly pulling open the door and appearing inside without him realising. It felt out of place; she was so loud in her presence and her affection—yet there she appeared, damp and withered from the storm. 

Her hair was wet, her eyes flickered between him and the bag on the floor and Charlie felt his breath catch at the back of his throat. He cleared it and felt the beat play itself out.

His smile returned, bright and blistering.

"Hey."

I'm glad you're back, he wanted to say. 

He also wanted to tell her how stupid he'd been for the past few moments, caught up in some sort of hysteric pandemonium. 

He wanted to laugh about it, tell her how, for a few minutes, he'd been convinced that she'd got struck by a car or something, or that she'd just changed her mind and decided that she didn't want to marry him at all. 

He wanted to tell her how stupid he was for having that moment of panic, the sort of fear that gripped the groom of a runaway bride at the end of a Rom-Com. He wanted to make a joke of it, push it all aside. 

(A wanton, traitorous voice at the back of his head, that sounded a lot like Lexie Grey, reminded him of those words spoken across a therapy session, over a stained desk: I think Mark's still in love with Beth. Charlie felt his heart jump into his mouth.) 

But no, no, no, there she was—

He watched the hazy smile twitch across her face. 

She appeared windswept and overwhelmed, her hair tousled and her eyes roaming the space wildly, as if she couldn't stay still. 

The more he looked at her, the more he reminded himself that this was his future: this woman, spaces like these, the feeling of relief and love that filled his chest as her smile warmed up.

   "Hey," Beth murmured back, but she wasn't looking at him. 

She was looking at his clothing, at the suit, at the shiny shoes and the cuff links that caught in the overcast lighting. The sky was still so dark outside and the room was so muted as if someone had dimmed it to obscure something between them. 

   "Sorry, I'm late I uh—"

   "Yeah," His energy didn't quite fit with the feeling in his chest. "I was wondering where you got to—"

"The meeting was uh," She paused, dropping her purse down on the dining room table. 

He heard the thunk of it against wood. In such an empty space, every sound felt echoey and magnified, as if, if Charlie strained hard enough, he could hear the erratic pounding of her heart against her rib cage. Beth seemed to rinse her words around her mouth as if they were mouth waste, breathing deeply. 

   "It was longer than I expected it to be," She said, and then she apologised again, "Sorry."

Charlie shook his head, smile almost erratic, "No, that's okay, you're fashionably late. That's the brides' thing, right?"

He blitzed the feeling of unease that filled the room; an extension of the suspense and the dread that had plagued him, mixed with the rolls of thunder that shook the floor. He chased everything away with the swift kiss that he pressed to her cheek, her lips twitching as he squeezed her shoulders fondly. 

Beth appeared tired, looking at Charlie as he turned on his heel. The excitement bubbled up in the back of his chest and suddenly, Charlie just couldn't stop smiling. He bounced on the balls of his feet, swept up in the sensation of her being here, of being dressed ready for a wedding, of being so close to something that meant so much to him—

Beth cleared her throat.

"Charlie, I—"

Giddy, Charlie placed his hands on his hips.

"What do you think?" 

He turned back to her, striking a pose. He drew her attention to his outfit, to the shiny shoes and the shiny buttons. Everything so squeaky and clean. He felt just like the rest of him: perfectly composed and measured. She was halfway through a sigh and paused, gripping the back of the chair as she looked him up and down. 

  His smile turned flirty, "Not too shabby, right?"

"The suit looks great, I just–"

"I know it's not a lot," Charlie's words almost tripped over themselves, a childlike rush filling him as he numbly traced the scratch left by the slipped cuff link. He shot her an earnest smile, adjusting his sleeves as Beth paused again. "But I reckon we'll look the part when you get dressed. You're going to look all beautiful in that dress and I'm going to be looking all charming and we're going to put all this bad weather to shame—"

He was smiling so widely that his cheeks were throbbing. 

God, this was a high, wasn't it? 

This was an unbridled high, the feeling of his life getting stitched together into a way that made sense. Beth was here and they were going to get married and Charlie couldn't stop smiling about it. 

He was filled, very ceremoniously, with this light feeling. This feeling. His heartbeat in his fingers and his toes, his chest woozy and balanced against the perpetual numbness that never lasted long enough. He felt his muscles twitch with the weight of being loved, of loving someone so much that he would willingly dismantle and rebuild the whole world for her. Their whole world.

He held onto the way that she looked at him, heavy eyes that he'd weighed up against the comfort of her touch. 

She appeared subdued and thoughtful, her smile faint as he blazed through with his socialite's smile. (Sometimes, when Beth looked at him for too long, she realised that she was right where she should be. Wasn't this what her mother wanted? A man from an affluent socialite family, a good cook, an excellent and attentive host. This was exactly where she was supposed to be, under the adoring gaze of a man who was tied so tightly to himself that he'd gotten lost in translation somewhere between English and French.) He missed the way that her eyes worked their way through his little cracks and crevices, right down to the bone and crux of the issues.

She bit the tip of her tongue and leant against the chair in front of her as Charlie paced back and forth across the floorboards again—but this time, it wasn't out of anxiety. 

No, that feeling was locked tightly at the back of his chest. This was excitement, bounding back and forth, restless on his feet like an excited puppy. His giddy expression and the wistful air that left his lungs made an enticing cocktail that had his blood rushing in an electric high.

"Calum said the weather's going to be beautiful," He continued to adjust his shirt and his pants, smoothing down every jagged edge and crease. It was subconscious, as if he'd been doing it for so many years that it was as easy as breathing. Beth watched his hands slide against fabric. "It's going to be that good heat. Dry heat. Not swampy like Louisiana. It's going to be really something, I think. Perfect for that little cottage—"

He could imagine it so vividly—that little guesthouse on the corner of Calum's wife's family estate. 

The place they'd met, the full circle moment of standing in that kitchen between those crumbling walls. Maybe Beth would sit on the window ledge again, humming to cicadas and watching the clouds cross a burning sunset. Maybe he'd even revive his summer seated on the deck, shading himself with a burnt palm and listening to the distant crash of waves against rock.

"Charlie."

She said his name again. It was the second time. 

Pursed lips, a slight sigh at the end. 

He didn't notice. 

Charlie was so wrapped up in France that nothing existed outside of it. He could almost feel the warmth of the sun against his skin, the bite of a burn that seemed to settle despite the strongest sunblock on his skin, the cat winding itself around his legs as he sat for dinner. It was so close. It was so close that Charlie could taste it—

"They've still got that cat too," He turned his back, hauling a case onto the table and chuckling to himself. "The same little cottage all set up for us. We'll be able to take those evening walks in the groves and go into the town, actually spend some really valuable time with the locals. I've been practicing my French and sure I haven't had a Rose to teach me but I think I'm doing pretty well—"

"Charlie."

Her interjection went ignored.

   "I mean, imagine!" Charlie almost exclaimed, his eyebrows shooting upwards as he busied himself with a mundane task.

 In the corner of his eye, he caught how Beth's phone seemed to vibrate too, her caller ID flashing with Dom's name just as his had. Much like with Charlie, Dom's call went unanswered. Charlie missed the way that Beth glanced at it and grimaced. (He, apparently, was not the only person who wanted to avoid him.) 

   "I think it'll be exactly like it was when we were there the first time–"

   "Charlie."

Her voice raised slightly.

He stopped and looked over at her.

There was something off about the way she said his name. She spoke as if her tongue was numb or as if it was a word that had an insurmountable weight to it. 

When he met her gaze head on, she seemed to pause, as if whatever emotion she held within her didn't correlate with the softness of his reaction. The breath seemed to catch at the back of her throat and, as if his foot slipped while climbing, his gaze descended to gaze at her hand. It clutched the back of the dining chair with startling determination, as if it was singlehandedly keeping her upright—his brow creased with concern and he turned to face her, looking her tenderly up and down.

The engagement ring on her finger glimmered almost maliciously in such low light.

   "Are you okay?"

He tried to avoid asking that question. It was a packed question, one that he knew Beth didn't appreciate. But now, now he felt the need to ask. He hadn't asked it even when she'd been bloodied and bruised, padding gently across the threshold of this apartment for the first time in weeks, back when he'd been helping her change her gauze dressing. 

(It occurred to him, in that moment, how much things had changed. It felt like yesterday that Beth had been barely even able to breathe, but now she let in a breath that could so easily flatten mountains.) 

The room was so cold and she appeared so distant, blinking at him as if he was finally coming into focus.

Beth cleared her throat. 

She adjusted her weight between feet, swaying slightly from side to side. 

He watched as she dipped slightly, stooping to run her finger down the back of her heels and gently step out of them. Her hair fell across her face and, in that moment, Charlie had the strongest need to walk to her. He barely made it three steps towards her before she spoke.

"No," That was such a definitive answer. No, she wasn't okay. "I'm not."

He felt his stomach twist. It wasn't a delicious pain, more like a bitter pill that fermented deep within him, making every inch of his body flush cold. The icy bite of that response (No, I'm not. No, I'm not. No, I'm–) settled into every crack and crevice. 

Charlie's brow folded even further, and he quietly assessed her, as if for damage. There were no hairs out of place, no visible crinkles or imperfections; but when she looked up and met his eye, Charlie could see a great, deep pain within her.

His heartbeat stuttered.

"Beth, what happened—"

"You should sit," Beth said tiredly. 

Her chin inclined in the direction of one of the chairs. Charlie heard the clatter of her swiped Louboutin's against the hardwood floor. It reverbed around his empty chest.

"Beth—"

"Sit."

His eye twitched with the thud of the second heel.

There was a certain flavour of fear that burned through his body. 

Charlie was fixed so tightly to the spot, staring at his fiancée as if she was a very bad omen. Maybe she was, or at least, the expression on her face. He was frozen, chilled to the core and fixated on the knowledge that Beth was, indeed, not okay and she appeared to have something to say.

"Charlie, please," Beth appeared so disheartened, almost begging him just to sit down at their dining table. He didn't. He just stared at her, wondering what the hell was going on in that head of hers. Her sombre sigh did not fit the excitement that had previously filled the room. "Please just sit down."

She's relapsed. That was his first thought.

He'd seen her through her worst. France, by no means, had been pretty. 

She'd been detoxing then, clawing her way back to reality with bleeding cuticles and a chipped smile. He'd seen her through the long nights of insomnia and the hours sat by that window, a single cigarette extended just out of the eyes of an anal-retentive Rose Deschamps, the only woman who Beth would let slap her wrist since the Addison debacle. Charlie had, for all in purposes, fallen in love with her during her worst too—

But fuck, she'd come so far.

Charlie didn't sit. He stayed standing, perched on the balls of his feet.

"Did something happen at the hospital?" He asked instead. 

He had so many questions. He wanted to know that she was fine. Maybe not okay, but fine. He was staring at the woman that he was supposed to marry in just over an hour, silently willing her to say something that could relieve the slow build of tension in his chest. 

   "Is it your meeting? Was there a problem with Archer–?"

He was a fixer by trade. He'd spent years in the business of applying band aids to peoples bumps and bruises. He'd wanted to be a surgeon in the beginning, just like Beth. He'd wanted to help people. 

Charlie just perpetually wanted to fix everything, everyone—that fire drove him to keep speaking, to trip and tremble over his words.

"I don't—"

"Are you hurt?" His energy turned slightly frantic. 

There was something about the past few months, about everything they'd been through, and the tightness in Charlie's chest when he realised that this was what his wedding day was reduced to: the look on Beth's face and the shift in the atmosphere. 

  "Is it about your surgery? Did Addison—"

Outside, a particularly violent roll of thunder made the floors tremble.

"Beth, was there a problem with—"

"I had sex with Dom."

That got his attention.

Those words seemed to bring the whole world to a deadly stand still. 

The air in his lungs caught in such a way that he almost choked. He stood there, frozen in time as Beth's words registered in his brain—brow crinkled, mouth dry and heartbeat thudding in his ears. At first, he thought he'd misheard her, but then he saw the look on her face; there was a calculated calm about her, the human iteration of the eye of the storm. 

She stood and stared at him, burning, unwavering and startling him with her determination.

Charlie felt his heart crack slightly and a lump built at the back of his throat. Suddenly, everything felt too tight. The air flattened him into something malleable, something that could be so easily squashed under Beth's discarded heels.

"W-What?"

His voice was so small. He felt so, suddenly, tiny.

Beth pulled out a chair.

"Sit the fuck down, Charlie."

This time, Charlie did.

***

─── What an unlikely pair they were.

It did not miss Amy how unlikely it was to the see the two of them strolling side by side through the hospital. She was sure that when people envisioned Shepherd and Sloan this was not what they imagined: a visibly bewildered pair skulking the Psychiatry floor of Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital with their own personal rain clouds over their heads. 

Their footfalls were heavy and she had the thrilling experience of watching the vein in Mark's forehead throb with his every breath. He pressed on through doors and corridors, joining her as their gazes scoured every inch of what Mark had assured her was the place Beth really should've been.

In all honesty, Amy didn't know how she felt about Mark. 

She'd spent the whole of her childhood staring at him with a child's curiosity, confused at how Derek had dragged him in by the straps of his rucksack into their Astoria home, and set him on their doorstep. He'd appeared without warning or fanfare, just a sudden occurrence that had no explanation. One day Mark wasn't there and the next he was. 

At the age of 7, she'd been fairly sure that the only way new kids popped up in the world was via stork, and even then they only arrived as babies. But no, there Mark Sloan was, a kid as startled by her as she was of him–– That alarm had never left. 

Now, watching Mark peer around corners and walk with a very clear urgency, Amy still felt herself wondering what exactly went on in that head of his. Twenty eight years ago she'd annoyed the hell out of him and swung off of his arm, desperate to figure out what exactly made Mark tick, and now, just slowly, Amy was beginning to figure it out.

"Derek's gonna kill me."

It was whispered between pulled lips and a very disgruntled expression as Amy veered around yet another empty corridor. 

She wasn't exactly sure how big this department was, but she was fairly sure that they were running out of places to look. She stared at the back of Mark's dumb head, tired of imagining Derek in every passing head. 

They'd garnered a few odd looks: the random woman and the Head of Plastic Surgery, each breathless in their own right. She made Mark stop and pressed a hand to a stitch in her side, grimacing as a pair of psychiatric nurses passed them, whispering between them.

"He's not going to kill you," Mark breathed it out, still craning his neck as if Beth would materialise out of a wall or the floor. 

It seemed as though he couldn't stand still; she watched him wobble from side to side, wiping his palms on his pants as if he was restraining himself from telling her to hurry the fuck up. She grimaced for a second time. 

   "Even if he finds out you're here, he's not going to get that mad–"

   "Well," Amy said, her voice slightly strangled, "Here's the funny thing uh, what if– what if Derek was, I don't know? Under the impression that I was in rehab in Los Angeles–"

Mark's head snapped around to stare at her.

"You were in rehab?"

"Yeah," She said flippantly, and then let out a very long breath as if to make up for the amount of cardio she'd just put herself through. Amy wheezed slightly, murmuring a 'fuck' as she fought to fill her lungs. She waved a dismissive hand. "Yeah... like a year and a half ago. I don't think... I don't think Derek realises they let you leave. Oh god, those stairs were no joke..." Another breath. She looked slightly red in the face. "I think he thinks it's like a daycare... A really expensive daycare."

He did, for the record, he seemed to think that rehab was like some pretty little boarding school he could send her to like she was a misbehaving child. For the record, it wasn't very pretty and Amy, despite how she acted sometimes, was far from a child.

Mark just blinked at her. 

Unlike Amy, he seemed to be barely fazed by the amount of frantic searching they'd been doing in the last ten minutes. He stood there, his head cocked to the side and brow pulled down into a look of contemplation. He looked away and in that moment, Amy was half inclined to ask what sort of cardio he did to look so effortless–– but then the right amount of oxygen reached her brain and her nose wrinkled. 

(Of course, it was Mark.) 

She shook her head to herself.

There were a few things about today that had gone awry. Finding herself on some sort of super mission with Mark was not exactly on her agenda. Nor was, admittedly, losing a bride that had a tendency to run away even when she wasn't getting married. 

It sucked, really, because Amy had had plans. She'd gotten distracted by a brochure for the Space Needle in the airport and had decided that she was going to take this weekend for some touristy self-care–– then, if she happened to give herself enough of a pep talk (and only then) she might find herself knocking on Derek's office door.

Only now she found herself in the dragon's lair, struggling to catch her breath as she imagined Derek hunting her down like a shark catching scent of spilt blood.

"Maybe..." Mark said, still very much distracted and not on the same wavelength as Amy at all. She'd been watching him practically vibrate with nervous energy since the early hours of the morning; it was uncomfortable, it didn't suit him. "Maybe Beth just... maybe she just decided she didn't want to go through with the wedding–"

God, they were going to have this discussion all over again? Really?

"Everyone needs to stop making me the optimistic romantic, it's ruining my life," Amy grumbled, mostly to herself as she willed herself to stand straight. Her voice raised and, even though she was sure she didn't have Mark's attention, she slammed out a response through gritted teeth. "Beth's a really good liar but not even she's that good of an actress to make me believe that she's actually happy with her decision–"

Mark heard her, she could tell by the way that the grooves in his forehead seemed to become a little bit more pronounced. 

(She knew what Beth would've said if this had been New York, or if Beth had been here at all as a figment of good tidings and goodwill. She would've slapped Mark on the arm and quipped something about Bizzy, botox and frown lines.) 

He seemed very slightly flustered, as if he couldn't decide whether or not he was bothered by any of this– Amy sighed again, for what felt like the hundredth time in conversation with this idiot today, and shook her head so abruptly that she almost made herself dizzy.

"Maybe she changed her mind–"

"God!" She all but exclaimed, her eyebrows raising as she stared at the man she'd practically known her whole life. "Do you even listen to yourself? Stop projecting! She loves Charlie!"

It was almost hard to remember that they'd come to the hospital for an actual purpose. Now Amy recognised that they'd been going around in circles as Mark had some sort of extended crisis edition where he was confronted by the thought of Beth changing her mind. Changing her mind? It was Beth. She was the sort of person who was dead set on everything, never wavered or changed direction. Amy was fairly sure the only reason Beth hadn't walked out on Mark earlier was exactly because of that–– She'd chosen Mark so she went down with that ship. (And boy, did she go down hard.)

Amy wasn't exactly sure how Mark didn't realise that. He knew Beth as well as she did.

It was Amy who started walking again, figuring out exactly what sort of direction they needed to walk in. There was exactly one place they'd yet to look, and that was the Head of Psychiatry's office, the exact place Beth had been headed to when Mark had last seen her. The logic behind that was some form of working backwards, starting at the last place she'd last been seen (the elevator) and across the Psychiatry department in every crack and crevice. It was the same method that Amy used when she lost most things, however, Beth wasn't exactly a set of car keys.

"What did you even say to her?" Amy asked, knowing that Mark had no choice but to trail in her wake. She heard his heavy footsteps as he followed her, his hurried energy dwindling very slightly with a long sigh. "If something has spooked her, not saying that it's happened, it must've been you. She was fine this morning."

She was fine this morning, that's what Amy couldn't wrap her head around. Being fine was like a goddamn blue moon, it was a solar eclipse and it had already made this all feel weird. 

It was funny, Amy thought, how there was almost some sort of correlation between a sad Mark in a bar and a happy Beth dancing around her apartment, excited for her day. 

It was as if one could simply not exist without the other, restoring some sort of perfect balance or equilibrium to the universe–

At that thought, Amy abruptly turned on her heel, making Mark screech to a very alarmed stop behind her. His eyebrows raised as she stared at him intently, studying his facial expression. She raked her eyes across his aloft brow, those baby blues and the way that his mouth seemed to permanently fix in a line––

Nope, she thought to herself, a frown of her own beginning to form, Still a miserable bastard.

"I didn't do anything," He appeared slightly apprehensive of her and that made Amy scoff, the sound catching at the back of her throat. Mark wiped his palms on his pants again, struggling to answer her question quick enough. She turned away again, shaking her head with every step. "I saw her in the elevator and then I... I don't know, we talked and then I just–– Do you think it's my fault? That I caused her to... freak out or something–?"

Tuning people out in regular intervals happened to be one of Amy's proudest skills. Her eyes unfocused from Mark and his very rough recount of the minute and thirty seconds he'd shared with his ex-girlfriend in the elevator, and instead zeroed in on the secretary seated at the end of the hall. 

She tuned out Mark's rambling and his babbling, and devoted every single part of her being to just staring at the woman seated beside a very specific door. 

Even from here, Amy could see the newly secured plaque with all of its printed numbers: Bethenny Ballard, Interim Chief of Psychiatry.

God, she thought to herself again, not another Beth.

"–said anything bad," Mark was still talking, a distant voice in the background of Amy's critical thinking. He was slightly garbled, as if her deep deduction was distorting everything around her. "I just told her that I was proud of her–"

Hang on.

Amy's head snapped around to stare at him, "You said you were proud... of Beth?"

Tentatively, Mark nodded.

"Jesus Christ," She heaved in a long breath, feeling her whole body shudder with the movement. "What were you trying to do? Make her cry?"

The Plastic Surgeon didn't seem to have an answer.

Mark, despite all of his dumb flaws and pretty clear crisis, was a very useful half of her pair. 

She knew secretaries, knew their inclination to wrinkle their noses and spitting out the words 'that's confidential' faster than humanly possible. It was as if they had it preloaded in there, settled so comfortably like the bullet in the chamber of a gun. 

So she sent him forwards with a shove of his arm, turning her back to pursue a potted plant as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. She knew how his charm worked, how it fluctuated like a switch that he just needed to touch on and off; Amy knew that Mark's gilded smile and the little tilt of his head (done in a way that would make him appear so deeply interested in conversation and, in turn, the person he was speaking to) would be their ticket to getting some information out of this hopeless dead-end mission. 

All she had to do was wind up the key in Mark's back and let her little tin soldier march into the war zone.

It was as she toyed with the plant beside her that she overheard his smooth drawl: Hi, I'm looking for Doctor Montgomery, paired with a very off-the-cuff lie that he was able to come up with so easily. 

Amy pretended to be background noise, simply a person who was in frame with very little meaning–– however, as Mark thanked the woman for her time and turned on his heel to return to her, she couldn't help but catch the look on the secretary's face as soon as Mark's back was turned.

"Apparently she left an hour ago."

The answer didn't make sense.

Mark had his hands on his hips, brow furrowed so deeply that Amy could almost see bone. 

Her eyes flickered between the bewilderment on his face and over his shoulder, back towards the woman sat behind the desk. She couldn't quite shake it, the way that she wasn't the only person sneaking looks. 

Amy was sure that Mark was used to people watching him walk away, but this, this felt a little different.

"You could've just missed her," Mark suggested, seeming to not only be eager to talk her down but himself too. (Interesting, Amy thought to herself, interesting that Mark is worried about the prospect of ruining Beth's life when he'd done it with such natural finesse the first time.) "For all you know... she could be getting married right this second."

Almost mechanically, her head moved from side to side, "No, something's not right."

Admittedly, Amy hadn't had the best luck with her intuition. 

When it came to her gut, she wasn't often lead in the right direction, that had been made clear by her very precarious life choices. She supposed that it was why she'd gotten along with Beth so well; two women united in their tendency to make the wrong calls. 

However, she did like to think that she was good at reading rooms. 

It was another talent in itself, being able to place the looks on people's faces and gaging the ambiance from the taste of the air. Maybe it was the upside of walking into so many different interventions over the years and getting completely blindsided, but it was almost as if Amy could tell what that secretary was thinking as soon as Beth's name had passed Mark's lips.

She'd caught the way that the woman straightened in her chair slightly, chin lifting as if that name, in particular, was worthy of a little more energy and engagement.

 That, on the surface, didn't really make sense–– why would a conversation about Beth need more attention than any other, if she'd left an hour ago and not been heard from since? That led Amy to bite her tongue, trying to weigh up the odds on the woman lying. 

She'd sat up in her chair, her smile had swelled and her voice had been only just out of shot, but noticeably fast– but why would she lie? What could she possibly have to cover up?

"I don't know what to say," Mark said, sighing heavily and leaning against the wall as if they'd been defeated. Amy, however, didn't respond. She was tapped into a very interesting train of thought, one that she was hoping would lead her straight to wherever Beth was hiding. "I don't really know any other places to suggest. She doesn't really spend any time in radiology and her office was empty so I'm not sure–"

Amy wished that she was the sort of person who could stick her ear to the ground, rub dirt in between her fingers and sniff the air, leading her directly to a person deep into the desert or something. 

Those were always the dependable side characters, right? Those were the ones that people came to in their hour of need. How crappy it'd be for Beth to race to her getaway car to find out that their driver wasn't there––

No. Wait, what was that?

There was something in that woman's facial expression, something that she recognised. There was something there. 

Ten seconds of that secretary's reaction held some sort of answer, she was sure of it. 

Amy didn't like it how the woman kept looking over at them amongst filing, her head turning ever so often as if they needed monitoring. There was something specific about the way that her eyes had shifted at the mention of Beth's name, and how she carried that same manner about herself too. 

It reminded Amy of things she'd long suppressed, of the way that people's whole opinions of your changed with just a single–

But then, Mark sighed.

"She told me to go after Lexie, you know that?" 

In her peripheral, Amy caught the way that Mark grimaced to himself as if there was something not quite right with that sentence. A miffed laugh fell through his lips and he shook his head. 

   "She told me to be with Lexie," Mark said, "She told me that Lexie would make me happy. She said that if I love someone... tell them and no matter how much it hurts or how much it takes you– She told me that Lexie is my Charlie. My Charlie–"

There was a reason she recognised that look. 

It'd been an expression that had followed her around New York during the nineties, passed from the face of acquaintance to friend and back again, in a long string of dizzying and overwhelming succession. 

It was a small inflexion that was enough to make the hairs on her arms tingle and a lump grow at the back of her throat– suddenly, emotionally, Amy was stood in the kitchen of a brownstone in Manhattan, watching the distaste in Addison's eyes as she set her eyes on a Beth who kept slipping down and down and down.

It was a badge that had come with the life that Amy lead. 

She'd spent too long defined by it; the odd off the cuff scowl, a sharp breath at the back of their throats and the very subtle displeased twist. 

If Amy had to recount a specific instance, she'd resort back to a New Years Eve nearly ten years ago, a night that had fallen apart by her own doing. She'd been drunk, devastatingly so, and yet she could still remember the way they'd looked at her. In a room of Addison's friends, the social elite who were all so conceited and above everything else, Amy had been a trainwreck with no breaks. 

They'd looked at her like that, displeasure across their faces and alarm, as if they couldn't understand would cause someone to bring such disgrace–

"I just..." Mark was still talking, completely oblivious to the fact that no one was listening. "It's hilarious. I don't think... I don't think Lexie is my Charlie, y'know? I mean, what we had was good but it's not... It was never... I think I know who my Charlie is and I think it's probably just–"

Fuck.

As much as she enjoyed Mark's spiral, she was fairly sure that she was onto something. 

Alarm bells were ringing and, if she concentrated hard enough, she could see the fractured morse code communicated by the woman's eyelashes. Why would Beth disappear? Why would this woman, famously sober and resilient in her strength, suddenly go awol out of nowhere–– and why would that secretary grimace at the thought of her name, as if Beth had done something so heinous that they weren't aware of––

Oh.

Amy's breath caught at the back of her throat.

Oh no.

No. No. No.

"It's just stupid, don't you think?" The Plastic Surgeon hadn't caught the way that Amy's body had suddenly gone rigid with panic. He didn't notice the way that the blood drained out of her face and she was suddenly unable to think of anything else: drunk Beth, high Beth, half dead in an alleyway Beth. "Like... after all this time, I don't think she gets it. I didn't get the girl and I don't think I will––"

"Mark."

She had to interrupt him. 

There wasn't enough space for both of their crises all in one corridor. 

Amy finally peeled her eyes off of the woman at the bottom of the hall and looked at him, directly at this man who was so desperately charading as something he wasn't. He fell silent immediately, caught off-guard by the urgency in her voice. 

He looked at her, a frown brewing as the words piled at the back of his throat like a mass accident on a freeway.

Amy didn't want to say it. 

She didn't want it to be real. 

For twenty-four hours she'd been part of this, of Seattle, of whatever new life Beth had built for herself. It was warm. That constructed reality of that apartment, of the yellow lights and the way that she looked at Charlie, that was tender and soft. She'd made Seattle into something that was so different from what she'd left in New York. It felt real. It felt tender––

Mark stared at her as if he knew something was wrong. Maybe he had a sixth sense too? Or maybe he was just too used to things going wrong to expect the best?

Her voice caught at the back of her throat, dragging every syllable and letter on irritated skin as she forced it through chapped lips. There was something so disorientating about that moment, but Amy knew that someone had to speak. Someone had to say it––

"Mark, I think–"

He must've seen it in her face. 

It was lost on her that, although she knew him well, he knew her well too. 

Did the expression on her face fill him with the same level of deja vu as that woman had? Where they just silently communicating with lungs that were too bruised to speak? They'd seen this film before. 

They knew how this ended. 

Amy couldn't control the overwhelming wave of sadness that rushed through her like a very poisoned high; when she breathed in, the air almost tasted like Manhattan and the look in Mark's eyes almost felt like a very tiny apartment in Bloomingdale, dazzled in coffee mugs and cracked DVD rentals––

He shook his head.

"No."

She'd never heard so much weight put on one word before. It was a very heavy pair of letters, so heavy that Amy found it very difficult to carry them on her own. Mark did too, she could tell; before she knew what was happening his shoulders had dropped like a stone. His head seemed incapable of stopping its impassioned shake.

"Mark–"

"No."

Admittedly, Amy had thought that the most emotion Mark Sloan was capable of, had all played out during his morning brainstorm in his apartment. 

She'd thought that indecision and doting was the extent of his capabilities. 

He was so immature with his emotions, so unsure and inexperienced with them, that she hadn't thought he was physically capable of anything else–– but then Amy was brought to this moment, to the slightest sheer agony in his eyes and the lock of his jaw as he refused to accept what she was implying.

Amy's eyebrows rose at his very definite response. 

He was so sure. It caught her off-guard. 

The last time they'd been here, stood in the same space, thinking of the same things, it'd been the reverse. Mark had stood there, saying yes with such certainty that Amy had almost been blown off her feet. Whenever there had been doubt, Mark had always chosen the worst scenario, consistently and without any hesitation. Now she stared at him with half-side eyes, wondering what exactly had changed.

(Everything. Everything had changed.)

"Don't," Mark said. He appeared almost breathless. She couldn't decipher what exactly was playing out in those baby blues of his. He seemed to still completely as if hanging on what was unsaid. His voice was strangled, his expression strained. "Don't say it, Amy."

He was speaking as if by saying it out loud, she was going to cause physical pain or damage–– at this point, those words felt interchangeable. She saw the muscles brace in him and he averted his eyes from her, his jaw locking as they soaked this very brief moment in time in. 

Nothing grievous had been said, but maybe they could both feel it–– maybe it was more than just the look on that woman's face, maybe it was the way that this hospital felt quiet as if they had appeared on the tailwind of a hurricane. Amy looked up and down the corridor, half expecting to see something in disrepair, a broken window or a toppled chair. But also she saw was the way that Mark continued to shake his head in denial.

She had no doubt that he was thinking the exact same thing that she was.

"Have you noticed anything?" Her voice sounded hoarse, low as she dropped her tone and glanced at the woman over Mark's shoulder. "Anything unusual–– anything that just––?"

Did he think that it was easy for her too? 

Amy had spent the last few months hanging onto the sound of Beth's voice on the other end of the call. For as far as Amelia had been aware, Beth had made it out. She'd made something out of the shit storm they'd caused for each other and she'd been a lighthouse for when things got crappy (which, for Amy, they often did.) 

Beth was the sort of hope that this prolonged struggle wouldn't last forever–– But this feeling, this rolling wave of foreboding that fill the corridors and stained everything in its path; it didn't feel like a light at all.

"Nothing," Mark chipped it out between his teeth and, it occurred to Amy in that instance, that he appeared more upset than he did angry. Unusual. "Amy, it's not... She's not... This is Beth. This is... No."

His train of thought was so visibly scattered that, for some reason, she almost felt sorry for him. Was he silently rethinking every exchange? Amy knew how this went. She knew how behaviour was broken down into seconds and shorter, how every word was analysed and suddenly, a whole relationship became examined. 

Amy was doing the same. In the matter of minutes, she was wondering if anything had been out of place the evening before, or even this morning–– Sure, Beth had been happy. 

She'd been ecstatic and Amy hadn't seen a smile quite like that in years. Years since New York. Years since pill bottles and... Was that... did that mean that...

"She's worked so hard," Mark said, his voice low, "It's different... It's not––"

Again, Amy wasn't used to this optimism. She stared at him, eyebrows hitched and breath caught at the back of her throat. He'd never vouched for her. All of this time. Mark had never vouched for Beth and her sobriety. Not even once.

It really was different.

They held each other's gazes for a beat, long enough for Amy to remember where and who they were. 

Neither of them were particularly involved in Beth's personal lives anymore (phone conversations really were not the same as living in the same apartment, and Amy's brief cameo in Seattle was nothing compared to the long months Beth had been here.) 

She could see it painted all over Mark's face, this burning surety that Amy could not replicate. While she wanted to be on the same wavelength, she was far more familiar with how these things worked–– specifically, Beth.

The woman could pretend everything was fine so easily that she'd drop dead without raising suspicion.

"Mark," Amy's lips were numb as she repeated his name, swallowing air so she could stay upright. "You know Beth. You know what she's like––"

He shook his head.

"No," Mark didn't sound as though he was capable of even thinking about it, "No. I would've.... I know what it looks like.... I've seen it before. I don't–– She's not high, Amy."

A beat passed.

"I would've seen it," He continued, out of breath. 

Amy's stomach churned and she found herself looking back over at the secretary. She was watching them, watching as Mark lowered his voice and his face very briefly betrayed some sort of deep-set frustration and pain. (Amy could tell that Mark was may more invested in Beth's sobriety than he would like to admit.) 

  "I know the signs..." Mark insisted, "I would've... I would've noticed something like that. Or... Charlie would've. It can't––"

Amy had the worst feeling that she was right.

But it didn't make sense.

She would've seen it too.

He cut himself off and stared off down the hallway at nothing. He was deep in thought, Amy too. But she was looking in the opposite direction, right at the woman who seemed to know the answers to all of these unsaid questions. (There must've been a meeting, right? Amy could imagine a very chaotic intervention last minute. There must've been something, some sort of catalyst for this all to go downhill.) 

As Mark silently recounted the red flags, Amy exhaled sharply out of her nose and placed one foot in front of the other. The plastic surgeon, at first, didn't even realise she'd gone until he realised he was alone.

Behind her, she heard the squeal of Mark's shoes as he turned to watch her fake a very courteous smile to the woman behind the desk.

"I'd like to file a formal complaint about Doctor Montgomery..."

Amy wondered whether this had been how Derek had felt the first time; all the way down to the stripped Shepherd socialite smile. 

From the moment Beth had told Amy, confirmed the smallest suspicion that had lingered at the back of her head, Amy had been able to see it so clearly. There was something about this whole situation, about Beth turning her back on everything and starting anew–– that tasted a little familiar to her. 

She cocked her head to the side, biting back the misery that threatened to descend on her as the secretary's eyebrows raised. 

Amy's smile twitched into an almost deranged expression.

"Who should I talk to?"

***

─── It was hard to describe how this felt.

There was a feeling at the bottom of her throat that she couldn't quite swallow.

It was stuck there. 

She'd been trying to remove it for a long time. Her coughs had been periodic, frantic at times, as if she was worried that she was choking. 

That's what it felt like: choking. 

It felt like the emotions and the words were a bitter pill that had congealed and stuck and she was unable to breathe with it there. It'd been inserted so skilfully that she could feel it, a weight that made it barely possible to think of anything else. 

Small, round, a heavyweight that made her eyes burn from the strain.

Foreign object retrieval, a wanton thought reminded her, as if a momentary stillness had managed to stir knowledge that she'd, for a long time, thought was lost. 

Manoeuvring into the oesophagus to remove the foreign body from the airway. It was a textbook procedure. She'd seen it done hundreds of times—the only problem was, she didn't know what to do when she was the patient.

Was this how it was supposed to go? 

A scalpel to the throat and a mouth full of bile. 

Was she supposed to hack and saw and rid herself of this feeling? 

She didn't know how to extract things anymore, never mind things that weren't physical. 

She wasn't a surgeon anymore, a dream that was long extinguished into a dust bowl of broken promises at the back of her head. The realisation of this lingered as if the failure was permanently branded across her skin.

And then there was this. Whatever it was.

"When?"

It'd taken a lot of her patience to get Charlie to sit, but she needed something dignified and simple. 

Sitting on either side of the dining table, half cast in a dark room and subject to the periodic flashes of the broiling storm outside, that felt like a good place to start. 

She sunk into her chair and held onto the edge of the table so tightly that she felt her heartbeat in her fingertips. In fact, she felt it everywhere: in her toes, in her mouth, in her ears—If Beth concentrated hard enough, she could feel every single tremor in her body.

There were many.

She cleared her throat.

"Three years ago," Beth's voice dragged through her throat. 

It was callous, almost like a very rough estimate of what she was supposed to sound like. Over the past hour, she'd gotten so lost that she'd forgotten her own voice. She didn't want to look at him either. She knew that if she looked at him, she wouldn't be able to talk at all. 

  "Uh," She cleared the bile from the back of her throat, "Dublin, in between my connecting flights for France and Boston."

Charlie didn't speak. 

She wondered whether he couldn't find it within himself either. That was the funny thing about adulthood, having to communicate things that you didn't have words for. 

It was also the funny thing about their career; two therapists sat across from each other, two psychiatrists who made money from their words and yet, in that moment, either of them seemed incapable of speaking. Beth, however, pressed on.

It was so surreal. She'd never envisioned herself telling Charlie. She'd never envisioned a lot of things– just twenty-four hours ago things had felt so simple and straightforward (even then, fleeing Seattle like a bat out of hell). Oh, how time flies when you're having fun.

  "What did the..." 

He sounded so disorientated and Beth supposed that, on any other day, her heart would've broken. He appeared so lost, brow folded and mouth downturned and what appeared to be a perpetual cloud hanging above his head. She watched it join the circle of storm above them and reminded herself of the morning she'd had. The lump reappeared in her throat. 

  "What did it– was it a long term thing or–?"

"No," That was what triggered the regret in her. She hadn't thought this through. Her brain hadn't gone further than the impulse to get Charlie listening to her and sat in that chair. She shook her head and fumbled with her words. "No, I-I was just drunk... it happened one night just... just in my layover in Dublin. I don't wanna–"

I don't want to talk about it. 

That felt pretty redundant when she'd started the conversation herself. 

She'd just laid it on the table, something she'd spent years balling up inside of her. 

She'd just blurted it out to stun him and initiate some discourse and now she was feeling bruised and stunned by her own action.

She'd spent the last three years telling herself that she didn't remember it, that it was just a drunk mistake that was completely non-existent in her memory, but it wasn't true. 

She remembered it in very short, scattered fragments: the drinks in the airport lounge, the taxicab through the Irish capital and then the feeling of Dom's buzzer beneath her forefinger. 

She remembered it too, the feeling of his lips against her skin, the way she'd told him that what she'd had with Charlie was just a summer fling— all while knowing that he was waiting for her, hoping that she'd choose him when she arrived back in Boston. It was a weight that she carried with her all of these years.

"I was drunk," Those words felt sharp and clunky in her mouth. They hurt. Her eyes trailed on his hands on the tabletop. He was unmoving. In her peripheral, she watched Charlie's fingers twitch against the tabletop. "It didn't mean anything."

She hated those words. They'd been said to her so many times that, when they passed her lips, she knew that they were more Mark's than her own. She could hear him saying it, his voice hidden under hers: It didn't mean anything. 

She wondered whether it indicated the same thing to him as it did to her; the very fine line of rock bottom was just inches away and, in speaking Mark's favourite catchphrase back in New York, Beth was sinking quickly. Wildly and out of control.

No, it didn't mean anything. Beth, I swear. It was just a—it was just a mistake. You need to stop taking things so seriously.

She spoke those historical words with chapped lips and a numb tongue and an urge to scratch herself to the bone.

Fucking christ this wasn't going the way she'd wanted it to go.

She just wanted Charlie to stop and to look at her and sit down at this table. 

She wanted something from him too, something more than the okay that had always felt so disingenuous. They'd never fought, they'd never screamed and Beth had this deep discomfort and rage that was so deep in her, a scratch she couldn't itch alone– all it had taken was that look from Andrew and then those ten minutes of her listening to whatever words he set on the table. 

How little time it'd taken for him to dismantle everything and how long it felt like it was going to take to rebuild.

She wasn't good at this.

She didn't know what to say.

Beth didn't know how to hold herself. 

She didn't know what she was supposed to start with or end with or–– She's a psychiatrist, she should know this. 

Beth also, similarly, wasn't a stranger to this whole thing either. If she had a nickel for every time she had to have a hard conversation... She'd at least have collected two today. What she wasn't used to was being the one calling the shots, making the difficult conversation and making this man sit in a damn chair––

She'd never run one of these before.

"Fuck," Beth buried her teeth into her bottom lip as Charlie seemed to process everything slowly. His eyes were buried in the centre of the table, a look of bewilderment still very present. "This wasn't what I wanted to... to start with. I just wanted your attention..."

"Well," Charlie said, "You have it."

Beth, admittedly, had also spent the last three years telling herself that she didn't know why she'd slept with Dom. 

She'd pinned it as a drunk escapade, the sort that really didn't mean anything at all. She'd pinned herself in the same category as Mark and her own father, the sort of person who could just do that in spite of the relationship they'd been kindling with someone they'd grow to want to give the world. But, again, that was a lie. 

(There were so many lies here, so many lines, Beth felt herself crossing herself with every breath.) 

Three years later and she still didn't know.

She also didn't know what she expected from Charlie––

"Okay."

A single word. 

A breath and a nod. 

It was excruciatingly diplomatic and reserved. 

When Beth's chin raised to stare at him, the pallid man on the other side of table, she felt a sudden flood of tears raise within her. 

It was like a tidal wave, slowly eroding the composure she'd spent half an hour rebuilding in a hospital restroom. 

She stared at him with glassy eyes, watched the earnest man with the earnest smile and the earnest manner. She heard echoes of years of envisioning this moment, of having her lies and her favours creep back up on her. But what she saw did not correlate with the severity of her confession.

He said Okay.

"Okay?"

She'd just told him that she'd cheated on him. 

That she'd fucking known that it would hurt him. 

That she'd crossed a line in their relationship and all he had, all this man had to say, was okay?

No. That wasn't right.

The Charlie that looked at her seemed oddly disengaged, but he cracked a slight smile that did not fit the conversation. 

A chill ran down her spine and she found herself so deeply perplexed. 

Suddenly, Andrew's words, the conversation she'd had when Dom had left the two of them in that boardroom, prickled at the back of her subconscious. To sit here and talk to Charlie so calmly, Beth had done her best to bury it as far as she could, but she felt the grave stirring as Charlie continued to nod.

"Okay," He repeated, his voice strained as she stared at him with her heart in her mouth. He paused, as if wrestling with his brain. "Like you said... it was three years ago... and it didn't mean anything—"

Beth felt sick. "Charlie—"

"It's okay," He continued, cutting her off once again. His eyes dropped to the table. "We weren't technically together anyway. It's not like we were engaged or anything, right? And plus you... you'd relapsed and your judgement was impaired and then you were in rehab for a very long time and... It's fine. It's okay—"

She just stared at him.

For such a blasé and positive to response to something that had weighted on her for such a long time, Beth wasn't sure how she felt. 

The way she stared at Charlie... she stared at him as if she was recognising all of the parts of him that had been buffed into an impeccable shine. 

She noticed the muscle that twitched at the corner of his mouth and the way that his smile felt a little too much like plastic, something that could melt under the right degree of heat. 

(Later on, she'd discover that Charlie's fleeting eye contact and his fingers dragging across the table, were markers of Charlie's dishonesty.)

(Things, as they had been for a very long time, were not okay.)

It reminded her of that argument that had failed to smoulder over her sneaking back into work. In fact, it reminded her of every argument that they'd ever failed to have—no matter what happened, no matter what issue that Beth bought up or wanted some sort of conflict over, they were always okay. 

It wasn't in the particularly reassuring way either, or the way she'd known that Mark had just never known what to say and didn't want to raise his voice in their first conflicts. 

Beth, regrettably, was being to think that maybe Charlie was just keeping her in a very well air-conditioned, oxygenated bubble, extinguishing any fires until this lil bubble exploded into a mass explosion and wiped out everything he'd built—

He'd built. Beth felt her chest collapse slightly. God, he'd built all of this around her.

"No." The word escaped her lips in a long breath. 

One that had been trapped for every single day of those three years. She shook her head from side to side. Something about all of this did not settle right with her and she, for the first time when it came to this man she'd spent years thinking was too good to be true, was going to make herself heard. 

   "I don't... I don't get how you can do that."

Charlie meanwhile, just blinked at her, caught off-guard by her response.

A slightly perturbed shadow fell across his face.

"Do what?"

She inclined her head at him, "That."

"Beth–"

"Pretend like nothing is wrong..." 

Beth almost crackled with the same electric storm that was lashing against the window. Eyebrows pitched high up on her forehead in an incredulous gesture. Her voice was tight and almost squeaky, like a balloon that was being filled rapidly and nearing its limit. 

  "You used to do it in Indonesia too... all of our jobs," Beth said, "I used to think it was professionalism. Used to act like everything wasn't so awful as it was, that you were able to just... not take all of the trauma work home with you. But uh, I don't get it. You can't sit there and look at me like that. Not after what I just said to you. It's not okay. I just told you that three years ago I fucked your best friend after telling you I loved you for the first time. Nothing about that is okay, Charlie."

It was so different from Mark Sloan. So different from anyone she'd ever loved.

She had cheated before on Mark. It'd been done with spite, with a heart that was severely bruised that it had been clearly very logical to do. It'd been a quid pro quo sort of thing, a lash back at the man who had treated her with so little regard. 

She'd been so blatant about it and she'd been met with incredulousness and rage. That had been for something. Even Calum had had his vaguely jealous moments, rolling his eyes when a girl hit on her in a bar or a guy offered to buy her a drink not realising she was with someone. (He had, notably, hated Mark with a passion for all of the hours the Plastic Surgeon had stolen.) Beth might not have been a saint, but she was pretty sure that Charlie's tendency to martyr himself at every turn was not normal, even by heavenly standards.

She didn't know why he was caught off-guard by her response. 

Hadn't he sat and watched her at that dinner? 

Hadn't he watched her take on Addison and throw some very intense and accurate punches? 

Did he forget that she'd been that person too? 

That she'd heard this whole speech and watched all of this happen? 

That she'd been the one who'd taken back Mark over and over, just based on some delusion that they were the one thing that she got right?

Beth perpetually had a fire in her, one that was more than capable of melting through whatever flimsy material was thrown at her—and Charlie, well, Charlie just shook his head.

"Okay," There that word was again. She felt her eye twitch. Charlie let out a breath and the way he spoke reminded her so vividly of how a parent would talk to a child. "Okay, I'm hurt. I am, but I trust you, Beth. I trust Dom too. I'll admit that I'm not happy about it but I still don't want this to affect us."

There was a beat silence, one that Beth would remember for many years to come. 

She'd remember the way that it felt, like pressure against her skin and her ears and her bones. She'd recount the way that Charlie looked at her, with shiny eyes and a shiny smile and a complete lack of understanding of what she was trying to say. 

God, it was, it was the way he looked at her, as if she could do absolutely nothing wrong or he was trying so fucking hard to keep some sort of peace. Beth didn't like it. She didn't like anything about this.

She dragged in a long breath and sat back in her seat. 

Her eyes flickered from her fiancé to the door behind him in a very long sweeping motion. That was when Andrew's words revisited her. A small voice at the back of her head. She was filled with the urge to scoff. The impulse almost bought tears to her eyes again. 

There Charlie was, appearing so gracious and kind and accepting and Beth couldn't help but think about all of the times that she'd thought he was way too good for her. 

She'd spent all this time thinking that her half-affair with Dominic Fox had dirtied her, that Charlie, from the moment they'd met, had been doing a service or an act of charity to love her.

"I used to think that was romantic," She said finally, her voice low as she forced every single word out, despite how desperately that delusional part of her brain wanted them to stay locked away. Beth couldn't bring herself to look at him as she spoke. She didn't want to see his face. "The whole... love despite my flaws thing... I'm lucky, right? I have so many flaws."

"Beth–"

She couldn't suppress the way that her shoulders rose in response to the way he said her name.

 It was the way he spoke, it almost brought tears to her eyes. She dragged in a very short tight breath and kept her eyes trailed on the chaos outside of the apartment block. The rain was coming down in thick torrents, leaving gloomy trails against the window. 

From here, it looked as though the sky was crying (Oh fuck off with that cinematic bullshit, Beth thought to herself as she buried a row of fingernails into a crescent stretch of skin.) There was nothing cliche about the tight feeling in her chest or the way that Charlie wet his bottom lip before speaking. He seemed to weigh each syllable on his tongue before letting it surpass his lips.

"Whether it's... forgetting to do the dishes... not cleaning out the shower drain or even taking a job in a different country and ghosting you for weeks," Beth shook her head as she spoke, brow crumpled as she mentally ran through all of the shit she'd done to him. (Wasn't it funny how, in comparison to what they needed to discuss, her list didn't look too bad.) A slightly perturbed chuckle fell past her lips. "Or even fucking your best friend... you don't react. I can do no wrong."

There was something about her lover's gaze in that moment.

 That raw moment in which two people stared at each other and just--- She had to look away just as the moment ran itself thin. In the corner of her eye, she watched Charlie's composure stumble a little bit. 

There was a moment in which she was so sure she didn't recognise him; there was a movement in his jaw, a muscle that clenched that she had never seen before. 

She could see him in her peripheral, this man changing shapes, he nodded his head as if he was catching onto what was happening. It ticked over for a few minutes and then he sighed it out:

"Andrew."

"I can't tell what's worse," Beth talked over him with all of the composed chaos that she could contain in her body.  "Mark was mad. Mark was furious with me. He berated me. He hated me–– But you just... okay? No. Charlie that's not real."

Its not real. Its not real. None of this is fucking real–

"Andrew spoke to you."

He'd been expecting it. S

he didn't like how he said it as if it'd been inevitable. Was that it? 

Was that all he had to offer? Beth's emotions were so interwoven that she didn't know what to say. The words got tied at the back of her throat and all she could do was nod. 

Nodding, it felt pretty crappy compared to all of the other things she wanted to say. 

She sucked on her tongue and nodded, mostly because if she spoke then she was pretty sure she'd cry.

Charlie, meanwhile, appeared to have some sort of acceptance. 

She watched his head bop again and he rubbed at his chin. Beth could only watch. His face slid into a look of perfect bewilderment. There was concern there too, apprehension somewhere behind those eyes. 

She could pick every emotion out like ingredients in one of his meals. Perfectly prepared and perfectly cooked. The silence lasted a little too long and Beth didn't like how he seemed to sample his words before saying them; she saw them tumble around his mouth as if he was wine-tasting.

(God, what she would've done for a bottle of wine in that moment.)

"We're not talking about Andrew," Beth shook her head when she found the sanity to speak again. She swallowed the lump that was still threatening to choke her. "We're talking about honesty, Charlie. We're talking about how you just sat there and lied so easily through your teeth."

He didn't respond to that. How funny it was to Beth– she could see the way that Charlie's eyes glazed over slightly, as if there was a very covert crisis meeting going on within his head. 

Was it a DEFCON with all alarms blazing? Brain-cells crowded around a shiny table? 

She liked to imagine the emergency pinging around different parts of his body, resounding somewhere nice and deep where his happy go-lucky everything's fine couldn't quite reach.

Beth looked away. She pulled a face, one that was so vaguely characterised by displeasure.

"You feel something..." 

She couldn't believe that she was telling this man that he was angry at her. She couldn't believe that she was trying to convince someone that they were hurt. (This wasn't normal, right? She couldn't believe that she was in a situation where he either cared too much or not at all. Beth couldn't tell which part terrified her more.) 

"You can't say it's okay," She encouraged, "I know it's not okay. I wasn't okay. I know that you're lying when you say that it doesn't matter, because it mattered to me when it was my last relationship. I wasn't okay.. Not with Addison... not with any of it–"

"What do you want me to say?"

Her skin bristled at his exasperated reply. He sounded tired.

Good, Beth knew that it was the most she'd gotten out of him in a long time. The lump rebuilt at the back of her throat. They were getting somewhere.

"I don't want you to say anything," There was something about his wording that didn't settle right with her. As much as she was a psychiatrist, he was one too. He should have needed directions on how to appease her. That wasn't how this was going to go. "I'm not going to script you. I'm not..."

She didn't really know what she wanted at all. She hadn't for a very long time, that was only becoming excruciatingly clear.

"I guess I just thought you'd want to know the person you're about to marry," Beth tried to keep her voice even, just like the way Andrew had spoken to her. (He'd appeared so steady, so collected, as if what he was saying wasn't the verbal equivalent of a deadly earthquake. He'd destroyed everything in his path and Beth was still quaking from the aftershocks of it.) "Because I uh, I realised there's a lot we still need to learn about each other."

Another pause.

"Andrew," Beth managed, but she sounded winded. Her voice struggled very slightly and she cleared the flem that had built at the back of her throat with the back of her hand. "He was surprised to hear we were getting married–"

She saw Charlie's head shake.

"Beth–"

"Almost as surprised as I was to see him," She continued, voice stripped of any discernible emotion. "I was under the, uh, under the impression that he was working– that he was so busy and stressed that he couldn't make it to his own brother's wedding––"

"Beth."

He looked as though he was in deep thought, thinking through every word just as he spoke them. Andrew had thought hard about everything too. 

She'd been able to tell. 

He'd kept talking and talking and talking and Beth had felt herself get completely caught up in his words. He'd reminded her so quickly of why he was so successful; he was so well-spoken, had spoken to her with the same gravitas as he would if he was presenting to a room of hundreds. 

But no, it'd been a table for one: a very small reckoning that had felt like a funeral by the end of their five minutes together.

"Beth, please," Charlie didn't sound like she thought he would. 

He sounded hushed as if she'd pressed her hand against his lips to stop him from speaking. He paused again and she felt a shiver fall down her spine. 

"It's not what you think," He said, "I don't know what he said to you, but whatever it is, it's not true."

She didn't know what she'd expected from Charlie, but she watched as he spoke to her with a strangled sense of apprehension. She wasn't sure what she wanted either-- actually, no, that was a lie. 

She knew exactly what she wanted: She wanted Charlie to tell her that Andrew was a liar. 

She wanted Charlie to methodically pick apart every word, every letter and every syllable, embody Dominic Fox in a way that was exciting and electric. 

She wanted Charlie to take a heart that was beating a little too quickly for her chest, and cup it so warmly and softly in his hands, like a person trying to coax and convince a bird to fly again-- he just sighed and looked away.

His apprehension was somewhat refreshing. 

Suddenly, he seemed cautious. He looked at her so warily, as if he wasn't sure why she'd moved away. In reality, Beth could feel electricity building up in her fingertips, an electric storm brewing so deeply in her soul. She cleared her throat and wiped under each eye with her thumbs. 

She held her breath, rolled out her shoulders and swallowed back the single hope she'd held onto for all of this time, all of those minutes since Andrew Perkins had looked at her and asked her to sit down. 

Beth pulled her skirt down over her knees and crossed one leg over the other.

"I can see it," Beth said softly, "In your eyes... you've had more of a reaction to me mentioning Andrew than you did to me saying that I... I cheated on you--"

(It crushed her inside and out to assign that word to herself.)

"Beth."

He went to rise in his seat, she could see the urge rise up in him and clench at the muscles in his body as he went to move towards her. 

She wasn't sure why he was gravitating nearer, maybe it was some sort of urge to hold her hand or establish some sort of touch-- but whatever it was, he very clearly did not like what he was hearing.

Beth shook her head.

"No," She said and he paused, half risen and looking at her. She leant away from him in her seat and shook her head for a second time. "No, I need you to... you need to stay seated."

All of the things that had happened and had been said over the past hour were locked so tightly at the back of her head. 

When Beth looked at Charlie, she was almost able to forget it, to just see Charlie as he looked: like a man she loved. There was something so bittersweet about him sitting there in his suit, looking like the groom that she'd always pictured in some way. He was an image of romance and Hollywood endings– but god, there was an aftertaste to the whole picture that didn't settle well with her.

He stared at her and then, after a very extended moment, slowly descended back into his chair.

She let out a breath that she hadn't even realised she wasn't holding.

"Great," Beth said to the far wall, not quite able to meet his eye. She dug her teeth into her bottom lip and nodded, trying her best not to let her emotions get the best of her. "Good, okay... Uh, there's a lot that we need to–"

"Beth," Charlie began. His voice sounded oddly disattached. Her eye twitched very slightly at the sound of his voice. "I don't know what he's said to you but whatever it is it's not–"

Beth, again, just shook her head.

"No," She said almost breathlessly, although she still appears cold and impassive to the bone. "No, we need to talk. We've needed to talk for a very long time."

A beat.

"We should be honest," Beth continued and suddenly became so aware of how tight her chest felt. (Honest. Honest. Honest. It scared her how Charlie could look her in the eye as she said that word.) "With each other. If we're going to do this..." Another pause. She felt her skin chill. "I want you to be honest."

Charlie didn't even blanch at the word honesty. He looked at her as if he was completely bewildered.

Maybe she'd got it all wrong?

(Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck—)

"Beth—"

"I have hated myself for a very long time, for being dishonest to you," She said every word as she rain her thumbnail down a grain in the wood. She figured that she wouldn't be able to say it all to him when he looked at her like that like she was some strange woman saying gibberish that neither of them could understand. "All of this... All of this dishonesty and I just... what Andrew said, the things he showed me..."

The room, suddenly, felt a lot colder and Beth's eyes raised just to watch something shift, something very deep in Charlie's being. 

She was finally able to dislodge the foreign object at the back of her throat, and when she spoke, her voice was hoarse. 

Tears flushed the back of her eyes once again and her fingers trembled against the wood. She couldn't place the emotion that flickered across his face. 

But whatever it was, it wasn't anything like the man she'd fallen in love with.

"Charlie," She didn't know when his name had started to taste so bitter, "I don't think you've ever been honest with me at all."

***

─── Mark was walking quicker this time.

Amy felt like telling him to slow the fuck down. 

Compared to him, her legs were shorter and she was having a hard time keeping up with his long, determined strides. It felt like two of her own made up for one of his, leaving her trailing wildly in the background as he continued to steamroll his way across hospital floors. 

Even from behind, Amy could sense the warpath he'd made for himself–– definite, precise and directed in a very specific direction.

He took the stairs, too. Amy, again, felt like telling him that she wasn't exactly made for cardio. Her lifestyle had not left much room for walking up steps with power and intensity. 

He took three steps at a time where she stumbled over one. He opened doors and did not wait for her before closing them, resulting in a lot of huffing whenever they inevitably swung for her face. Amy shot daggers at his back, at the dumbass powering along in those navy blue scrubs, and told herself that today she'd let it slide.

There were more pressing matters.

"Why does it have to be my brother?"

She decided to make conversation despite how little air there was in her lungs. 

They'd scaled two floors and were now making their way through the surgical department, cutting their way through crowds of bewildered patients and staff alike. Nurses seemed to look over at them, their brows furrowed as they watched their Head of Plastic Surgery blitz through everything while on a very clear mission. 

Amy just shot each person strangled smiles. She was trying her best not to die from asphyxiation, all while silently coming to terms with the fact that maybe she shouldn't have made fun of Beth for jogging fairly often.

"Isn't there like a Head of Psych?" 

Her suggestion didn't particularly go anywhere. He didn't look back at her, nor did he slow down–– She felt as though she was talking to a brick wall. Amy, however, after spending her whole life being the younger sibling and the designated annoying one, was not waived off. 

  "Doesn't Beth actually have like... Like a boss or something?" She questioned, "Why, out of everyone in this damn hospital, is it Derek?"

She hadn't exactly seen it coming. When she'd asked the secretary who they'd need to talk to in order to file a complaint against a staff member, Derek had not been the person she'd expected–– although, after a few moments of deliberation, Amy answered her own question. Of course, it was Derek. Why the fuck wouldn't it be? 

This whole situation was very particularly Derek in design. If Beth had... of course Derek was involved.

"Ballard's only interim," was Mark's delayed response. It wasn't exactly the answer she'd been searching for either. She grimaced to herself as Mark forgot about her in the middle of a door, the fire door nearly flattening her nose. "She's on some sort of trial. I'm guessing that she probably went to Derek for help––"

"Right," Amy inhaled sharply, nodding her head, "Because they made my brother Chief of Surgery." She paused. "That's a choice. Were the other members of the dictator club not available? Mao busy?"

Mark didn't laugh at her joke.

"Well," She persisted, nonetheless, "I guess it's either she went to him for help or... y'know, it's Derek and he likes to get involved in everything." That sounded far more plausible in Amy's opinion. She knew her brother well. A dry chuckle fell past her lips to cover the discomfort of the memories that revisited her at the thought of this all. "Nothing says Derek Christopher Shepherd like a kamikaze intervention for relap––"

"Amy."

He seemed to be paying attention now. 

She'd noticed that he was so sensitive to it now, the fine line that had become conversation at that particular topic. His head moved to the side and he seemed to look at her out of the corner of his eye. She noticed, she noticed every little flinch that came out of her attempt to provide some sort of comic relief to this situation. 

She noticed how he seemed to tense whenever she glossed over the mention of a possible drug situation, theorising the possibility that Beth was far from the happiness she'd masqueraded. It both intrigued her and amused her; he was acting like a dog being told they were going to the vet.

It was so tempting to spell it out letter by letter as if he wouldn't understand it in a broken form. Tricked like the scrambled mind of a sick labrador, it'd slip right past him:

B-E-T-H - R-E-L-A-P-S-E-D

Amy swallowed the word until she could feel it clink at the bottom of her stomach, along with everything that she was not allowed to say to Mark or in his presence. Beth had hidden most of her best-kept secrets there.

"Why do you know so much about Beth's boss anyway?" 

Changing the subject was like changing the weather. It required patience but not one like the current storm that was going on anyway. Her eyes tracked the way that, again, Mark seemed to react to such a simple string of words. The realisation settled in. 

   Amy felt like scoffing, "Oh, of course, you slept with her–"

"She's my therapist," Mark said so matter-of-factly, taking her by surprise. Amy's eyebrows raised even higher-- he even looked back to see the expression on her face and then seemed to sigh. He corrected himself with a grimace. "Technically, she's my therapist, too."

"You're in therapy?" Amy echoed. Admittedly, therapy was the most un-Mark thing she'd ever heard of. If there was one thing that she did not associate with that man, it was talking about his feelings. She paused and then nodded lightly, "Good choice."

She was thankful that he knew where he was going. 

This hospital was bigger than the clinic back in LA, and possibly even bigger than the hospital they'd come to for their surgeries. She was momentarily completely disorientated by all of the doors and walls; while she gazed around little corners and desks, fully aware that they were officially walking into the belly of the beast, Mark did not falter once. 

Amy, idly, wondered whether this was the same sort of focus that he fell into when he was in surgery. Every single one of his movements felt precise and, if Amy hadn't known better, she would've thought this was a life or death situation.

"Don't you have patients to look after?" it was an off-handed comment that came from a very spontaneous thought that popped into her head. Didn't he have better things to do? It wasn't as if Amy had invited him on this mystery tour, he'd taken the liberty to just insist. Didn't he have a job that he was supposed to be doing? "Isn't there someone out there that needs a nose job or a butt lift or something?"

Mark just sighed.

It was a fair point, Amy thought. 

She wondered how anyone in this whole hospital got any work done with all of this drama that she was hearing about–– between a literal shooting and all of the arguments that Beth had relayed in explicit detail, Amy was surprised that they were still even open. 

Surely Mark had patients that needed him, surgeries that needed to be prepared for? He was the Head of the whole ass department, didn't he have more pressing and important things?

"I mean," Amy continued with a shrug, "If you've got things you'd rather be doing–"

"Amy."

"Go find a nice boob job or an intern to sexually harass or something–"

He sighed.

"I'm sure there are probably more important things in the world," She ignored his interruption. "I mean... shouldn't we really be talking to Charlie? Why don't we go find Charlie? Or... Or where even is Archer? Maybe he... maybe we should go talk to Archer if Beth has relapsed––"

There it was. 

The biological response seemed to wind its way under Mark's skin. He turned to face her abruptly, catching her off-guard as they both stopped so suddenly in their path. He made sure that she was looking at him, his tone steady as he spoke directly into her soul.

"Amy," Her name was softer as if he was a teacher talking to a child, "Beth has not relapsed, okay? She is not high, she is not drunk. She has not relapsed."

Amy just stared at him. He was so convinced. She could see it in his eyes. 

Where there had once been so much animosity, now there was determination and conviction. She was half surprised that he didn't reach out and shake her by the shoulders. There was a very brief moment in which Amy searched his eyes, looking from one to the other–– She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but whatever she found made a slight gasp fall past her lips.

It was shortly followed by a choked laugh of disbelief.

"God, you're whipped."

She watched his brow fold in a very prolonged frustration. 

His scowl was immediate, he rolled his eyes and stepped away, as if any form of conversation with her was completely pointless. 

He shook his head and went to speak, but Amy just continued chuckling, eyebrows raised high on her forehead. There was something so addictive about seeing him momentarily so flustered, a vein pulsing in his forehead as he hastened to talk over her.

"No–"

"She's not going to sleep with you for saving the day, Mark–"

"Will people stop assuming I just want to fuck everything all the time!?"

That made Amy pause.

A prolonged pause, one that she felt in her soul. 

The floor felt a little too hard under her feet and there was a little bit too much emotion in Mark's eyes–– that's what the day seemed to be, a day of high emotion in a way that would be expected for a wedding. 

But this day was already in fractures: Mark was not the groom nor he was the bride, and yet he was looking as though this was faring to be one of the longest days of his life.

Suddenly, a laugh came bubbling out from between Amy's lips. 

It was spontaneous and alarming, some sort of hysteric pressure that had come pouring out from a fissure in a major artery. It was loud too, loud enough for it to surprise both her and the Plastic Surgeon in front of her. 

Halfway down the corridor, a patient turned around to stare at them, catching the way that Amelia Shepherd pressed her palm to her lips, her shoulders shaking with the laughter that she couldn't suppress.

"Oh my god–" Her eyes watered as she tried to speak, "I'm so sorry but that's––"

Did he not know who he was?

Mark turned on his head, sighing to himself.

"Screw you," He mumbled under his breath.

"You did, yeah."

"You're worse than Derek," was all Mark managed to say.

***

─── When Charlie came back to Boston after that long, windswept summer romance in France, the first thing that he had accomplished was a movie marathon of all the Romantic Comedies he could find.

He'd kept a note at the back of a notebook of all the movies Beth had mentioned, notated, and dated them with the Director and the year. 

He'd appeared in his local Blockbuster and cleared the shelf, determined to keep himself informed for the hopeful moment that Beth appeared at his door. 

He wanted to understand what she loved, work out her mind and her motives, see what exactly it was about Patrick Swayze that made her tick. He'd spent hours holed up in his apartment, studying hours of people falling in love, loving despite flaws and learning to persevere—

The look on Beth's face, however, did not feel like a Hollywood, cinematic ending.

Charlie couldn't find a word to describe it.

Today was supposed to be that sort of day: tender, happy, the ending that he'd needed. 

It was supposed to be a smile on that woman's face, but from here, Charlie could see the opposite written across her face. But the feeling in Beth was nothing compared to the coldness that settled in his bones. For a moment, he thought that the storm had thrown open a window and come tumbling into the apartment between them; but no, there was no visible entry, no gaping wound in the structure of the building—there was only the impact of those words settling so deeply into his pores.

His face scrunched into a look of deep confusion.

"You don't think I've been honest?"

He sounded breathless, winded. 

He felt that way too. He didn't like how quickly this conversation had shifted, from Charlie carefully reaching out, to Beth holding her own elbows and looking at him with distance in her eyes. 

She'd retracted herself, removed herself, and now he was watching from afar. There was something oddly emotionless about the way that Beth let his bewildered response flicker through her ears; she drew in a breath and, when she released it, she seemed to withdraw even further into herself.

"I don't think either of us have been honest," Beth said with brutal honesty. It made his eye twitch slightly and he knew that the giddiness in his chest had met its crushing end. "I don't think... I just want to hear you say it. I want you to tell me... I want to hear it from you."

He wasn't used to her looking at him like that. 

It made his skin crawl and his throat prickle with a distinctively sour taste. It was the same way that Andrew had looked across at him in that office as he'd begged Andrew not to let Beth back into work. 

It was the scalding 'I know' glance, one that had followed him for a very long time. If he'd been decades younger, he would've been affected by this, but now, in what felt a lot like wisened rage, he understood– but god, he'd had hopes for this one. He'd really hoped that Andrew would just let him be happy.

Charlie wished that he could say that he hadn't been put into this situation before.

Andrew was a very particular person. As the older brother, he'd really taken it as his duty to gatekeep Charlie's whole life. Idly, the psychiatrist wondered which version Beth would prefer to hear: the sob story of a kid who'd grown up in a family that had preferred to bury the hard truths instead of hugging them or the squeaky clean, buffed statue of a family that had been immortalised in the glamorous culture of the perfect home life. 

Would Beth believe him if he told her that he'd seen this before, that he was fairly sure how this was going to end– he'd stood in front of a woman like this before, he'd had this conversation. Andrew had ruined things before.

This time, Charlie's eye twitched.

"Is this about coming here?" He could tell that his question didn't amuse her. Her chin turned away and she almost appeared disappointed. Her head shook from side to side. "What haven't you been honest about––"

"I don't know what I've done to make you feel like you can't be honest with me–"

"Is this about work or–"

"And I don't know why I've made you feel like I need to be kept or protected or something but I just–"

"Is this about Mark?"

His question came out in a long breath, a hurried one, one that felt as if it came from his soul. If he had a soul, he knew that it would've screamed those words so loudly. He watched the muscles jump in her neck as her face twisted.

"No," She almost scoffed it out. He could see the agitation bubbling beneath her skin. Look at them, two paper people scared of emoting and things getting out of hand. "This is me giving you the benefit of the doubt."

The blood rushed to Charlie's ears.

Again, he couldn't describe it, the swelling crush that fell onto his shoulders as he watched her speak to the wall behind him instead of his face. 

Immediately, he felt as though he was sat back in Andrew's office, watching the flicker of his older brother's authority and Andrew did what he did best: getting involved in things he didn't have precedence over. An irritation stirred that was deeply ingrained in his DNA that Charlie almost had to grit his teeth. He let out a sigh that reminded him so much of his fathers, an exhale of disappointment as he tried to shrug off the panic that threatened to appear.

"Beth, I don't know what you're talking about."

He tried his best to pretend that Beth and Andrew in conversation wasn't the worst possible thing that could've happened.

"I don't know what this is about," He repeated it. It was an automated response. Hazy and uncertain. He squinted at her as if to deduce what was happening in her head before she said it. "I don't know what Andrew's put into your head. But whatever it is—"

"No," She said it again. He didn't know whether she'd ever said that word to him so many times in succession before. It didn't fit the version of Beth that he'd grown to recognise. She still wouldn't look at him either. "No, don't–"

"I haven't lied to you. Whatever he told you, it's not real–"

"You told me that he couldn't make it to the wedding," She said everything in one long, consistent breath, "You told me that you'd spoken to your Mom. You did lie to me, Charlie, don't—"

Lie. 

That was a word that he'd heard at least once or twice. It was a series of letters that had been all but branded into his skin, like a criminal that repeated their crime. 

Charlie Perkins was a liar. 

She said those words as if she hadn't admitted to lying just seconds ago; but there was something about it, setting the two of them out as liars as if she couldn't understand why he'd felt the reason to be so dishonest when they were so similar. It made his body clench and his jaw ache--- they were, they were so similar. More than she'd ever realised.

He'd lost count of how many times he'd had to build something. His family ancestors had all been working men, a long line of tradesmen, the type that used their hands and built skylines. Half of Boston had his name weaved in their somewhere, in little by-lines, street corners and pillars. He wasn't sure where things had changed when building architectural feats had turned into words, constructed mistruths and misdirection. 

His grandfather had written books, his father had become a politician and now Charlie was staring at the foundations of a woman he'd attempted to build up into her own skyscraper.

"Okay."

He exhaled the word out so long and drawn as if to buy himself time. 

Maybe he was. His palms were clammy and he was leaning on the table as if it was keeping him upright– Beth, meanwhile, appeared fine. 

She was standing, balancing on a very thin line that she'd drawn for herself. Just looking at her, at the amount of effort that she was putting into not looking at him, not physically associating with him at all... Charlie felt exhausted.

"Okay," Another exhale. He nodded to what felt like an empty room. "Beth, it's uh, it's complicated–"

"Then uncomplicate it," She said, her voice strong and unwavering, "Tell me the truth.."

He froze, a muscle catching in his jaw.

It was complicated. It was intricate and it was confusing. It was his whole life, something that was so convoluted that even Charlie was lost on multiple years. 

He'd gotten caught up in too many crossing lines, loose ends that didn't even touch talk about tie together. Beth shook her head at him again, looking exasperated, exhausted and slightly disheartened. He couldn't bring himself to imagine exactly what Andrew had said.

The truth was tricky. It was incriminating, it was pretty fucking dark. It was so far behind him that Charlie couldn't even remember where it started– it was something that he knew that he and Beth shared, the fight for survival. The impulse to lie his way out of things instead of facing them head-on.

This time, he actually allowed himself to crease slightly. 

He ran a hand along his jaw and tried to fit into Andrew's narrative. He could only guess what was going on in Beth's head– she overthought many things and she knew how erratic it could get. All he had to do was meet that and spin it so elegantly on his forefinger, like the wedding ring that wouldn't fit.

"I can't–" Charlie said quietly.

"I need you to say it," She repeated those words again. (What exactly did she need him to say? Charlie hated that he knew exactly where this was going.) From her standing position, she somehow appeared small. She was standing away from him, a table apart, and yet it somehow felt further. "Or deny it... or just... just stop pretending everything's okay. Be angry with me, be honest... yell, do something Charlie because I can't emote and be honest for the both of us."

Those words sounded earnest, but the message was lost somewhat in translation. It didn't correspond to her facial expression, to the emotional withdrawal and the way that her jaw clenched. Charlie didn't like this.

"Okay."

His repetition made her shoulders fall.

He drew in a breath.

"He does this," He said, and he was sure that he'd never spoken so sharply to her in his life. His voice caught at the back of his throat and he leant across the dining table, placing an even palm on the dining table. "Andy does it every time. He ruins things for me—makes up things—"

Admittedly, Charlie had been so sure that Andrew wouldn't do it.

He'd called his brother's bluff. 

Andrew was the sort of brother that was built off of empty promises and threats, things that were never followed through. But the thought of it actually happening elicited more of a response than he would've liked: the image of Beth and Andrew in a room, maybe with Dom in the wings like the lawyer always was (always in the know, always aware of every single event in the universe). It made his mouth dry, but he persisted—despite all of that, despite the aching suspicion that Andrew had done exactly as he'd threatened to do, Charlie persisted. He always did. So, he shook his head and denied it.

Deny. Deny. Deny.

But, he was telling the truth about Andrew. He had done it before. 

Charlie had been through this before. His relationship before France, the breakup that had left him stewing in the cottage in the room beside Beth. Andrew had made a single phone call and Charlie's whole life had been turned upside down—he couldn't do this again, he wouldn't. He wouldn't lose another engagement, another prospective future, another woman that he loved.

Andrew couldn't watch Charlie be happy. He didn't care how Charlie felt. He didn't care how great things were going or how bright his future was– he only cared whether his little brother was an honest man.

It was pretty fucking funny to Charlie when both of their lives had been completely false to begin with.

"I didn't tell him about today because I wanted to avoid this," that was his even and steady response. It was the vocal equivalent of a nonchalant wave. "Beth, I had the feeling that Andy would do something like this. I'm sorry for lying about that but it was for us. It was because he has a history of screwing things up for me—"

That was true. That was very, very true. It was why he'd neglected to Andrew know about the wedding. He had had a very strong feeling that things would go wrong (of course he had, at least this time Andrew had had the sense to warn him first.) 

Angela, regrettably, hadn't had the heads up. She'd been caught blind. Somehow though, the thought of this ending sourly hurt more. The history of things going bad at Andrew's hand was a little too long for Charlie's comfort–

"Like firing you from the clinic?"

Admittedly, that did make Charlie falter. 

It was unexpected. She looked at him too, in that moment, and Charlie realised that yes, Andrew had followed through with the things he'd promised. 

He'd taken all of Charlie's loose ends and, instead of tying them, he'd knotted and frayed them to no glamorous or clean conclusion. Charlie tried to cover his reaction, the breath that caught in his chest and the way that his chin tremored slightly. He swallowed and he, for the first time in a long time, he faced a lie.

Charlie nodded.

"Yeah," His eyes dropped to the table, in a projected shame. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Like firing me from the clinic."

He could see behind the expression on Beth's face. 

Her eyes flickered to him and he saw the clench of her jaw as it bobbed, the realisation setting in that there was a degree to truth to whatever it was that Andrew had said to her. Charlie didn't like it that he didn't know what was in that head of hers—usually, he was able to predict every single word she was going to say before she said it. 

Usually, Charlie knew her better than he knew himself. Andrew following through with his threat felt like he'd extinguished one of the only candles that Charlie had left.

Charlie wasn't accustomed to being in the dark. 

He knew how to assert control these sorts of conversations and situations—when had this dining table begun to feel a desk, Beth his psychiatrist and he, the patient? He was accustomed to a certain degree of control, one that he'd been trying to keep for a very long time despite all the odds against him: Andrew, his family, even Mark fucking Sloan. 

Charlie heaved a breath and placed his elbows on the tabletop, trying to embody the charisma he'd been raised to have.

"You need to understand, Beth," But she wasn't looking at him, her eyes were fixed on her hand. It was pressed against the wood, her engagement ring still seeming to sparkle despite the low level of light. "My family... it's not... we're not exactly functional."

The snort that left her didn't fit the ambience of the moment. Beth didn't need to use words to present her point: Look at my life, look at what I have. Look at Addison and Derek and weigh them against Andrew. 

He paused, his mind wavering as he just watched her sigh through her nose and rearrange herself in her chair as if she couldn't decide how to approach this conversation. He watched her pick at herself, at her cuticles and at her sleeve, looking at everything but him.

"I wanted to leave," Charlie was so even and measured with his words that even he believed them. He watched Beth's eye twitch very slightly, refusing to look at him but still listening. Good, he needed her to listen. Listening was their whole world, their whole careers, if she listened, everything would be okay. "Beth, I wanted to leave but Andrew thought that if he fired me and put me on severance pay that I'd be okay to try and find another job. He didn't want me to struggle—"

It made sense in an unethical broken way, one that Charlie knew Beth couldn't argue with.

"I wanted to be here with you," He continued, his voice almost falling into the professional rhythm he used with patients. Beth shifted in her chair as if she sensed it too; he wondered whether he could turn this conversation around, shift the focus back onto her. "I love you, okay? I know it's unethical for Andrew to do what he did, but I'm thankful that he did. I didn't tell you because I just..."

(Why would a guy with a trust fund like his need severance pay in the first place? It was a silent question that went unasked. Beth knew the answer, but she really didn't want to believe it.)

He had, for the record, wanted to leave. 

He'd left with urgency and suddenness, upping and leaving in the middle of the night. 

Charlie had been desperate to leave his home city; he'd stood in that airport and wondered whether he could even touch on how desperate Beth had been to leave New York—he'd clutched onto his plane ticket so tightly that now, just thinking about it, his fingers ached. At that thought, his eyes wandered to the tickets on the edge of the table, their getaway to continental Europe, fresh ink and slightly crumpled edges, as if Beth had picked them up and looked them over many times.

He wanted to leave now. He'd always had such a strong fight or flight response. It was something the couple shared. The only problem was, Charlie's instinct had always been to run to Beth, somewhere safe— leaving this conversation, leaving things unsaid, he didn't know how safe that option would be.

So, he sighed and wondered whether she'd buy what he'd built for her.

Her head turned from side to side in a very small shake.

"Charlie—"

"I'm sorry for being dishonest."

He knew Beth. He knew she wasn't used to an apology. 

Just like a clockwork he watched her twitch, watched the breath catch in her chest. Her eyes flew to him, as if she needed to visibly witness those words leaving his lips. It'd been something he'd learnt about her so early on, that she was so used to being surrounded by people who was completely unapologetic for their actions, no matter how much it affected her. 

Between learning about what she loved and what she'd cherished, he'd also learnt how easy it was to bring her to her knees—

Apologise. All anyone ever had to do was apologise.

"I'm sorry," Charlie hadn't said those words as many times in his life as he would've liked. They were hard words to say. One after the other. "I'm really sorry Beth. I don't... I don't like lying—"

She didn't speak.

"I knew he'd do this–– I knew he'd spin this around on me–"

Beth very slowly shook her head, eyes dropping to look at the floor.

"I don't even know what..." He paused and then shook his head. "What did my brother say to you?"

Charlie asked it again, with traces of exasperation in his voice. He wanted to fix this. 

He wanted to dispel every word, break down every single letter and claim. That was what he did. Cognitive behaviour therapy, breaking down every thought and challenging every claim— The only problem, Charlie supposed, was that whatever Andrew had said, was the unadulterated truth. 

The pressure was mounting in his chest, just like storm clouds circling over and over. He could tell whatever it was, wasn't good.

The psychiatrist leant against the table further, desperate to search the answer out in Beth's expression. 

There was very little for him to read into. Her lips were pressed into a line and she was still looking away from him, intent on keeping some sort of distance. So he asked the question he knew would cause more damage than good.

"Do you trust me?"

He wondered whether she'd wanted him to catch the flinch that ran through her body. He knew exactly what had caused it, that little word: trust. 

Her whole body seemed to react to it, each muscle clenching and tensing and her jaw tightening so quickly that he knew the tongue she was biting on was a moment away from bristling with blood. He watched her, watched her think before speaking, internalised the fact that he would even ask it in the first place. 

Trust, he knew, was liquid gold for a woman like her, a woman who had been broken and betrayed so many times by the people she loved. Her inhale felt like a self-inflicted wound, sharp and piercing, causing her to rise in her own chair slightly and raise her chin.

"I do."

Her voice was thick as if she'd built up a protective layer. 

She met his eye fleetingly. He let out a breath he hadn't even realised he was holding, giving her a gentle smile and a nod. 

Beth, however, just tilted her head to the side. A light sigh fell through her lips and, for a second, Charlie could see the turmoil underneath her wavering composure

It didn't surpass him that they should've been saying those words to each other today.

'Til death should they part.

"I do trust you," Beth cleared her throat again and this time, she got up from her chair. His skin crawled at the sound of it dragging against the floor. He stayed seated, just as she'd asked. "I... uh, I defended you to Andrew in the beginning–"

In the beginning.

"Good," Charlie breathed out, feeling a knot undo in his chest. Beth's back was turned away from him. He relaxed into his chair and nodded, casting a glance over at his phone. "I appreciate that. Beth, you know I do—"

"Why did you stay in Boston?"

The question took him off-guard, and, for a moment, Charlie's jaw slackened. 

She spoke while looking out of the window, her face hidden and voice chaste and casual. His brow folded slightly and he squinted over at her. 

There she was, backlit by a Seattle under siege, held upright by the chaos that was slowly working itself way through her bones.

"What?"

"At Christmas," She said, "You extended your trip. You told me that it was because of Andrew's work, because he needed help doing things—but if you'd gotten fired at Christmas then there was no reason for you to be there—"

He stared at her. 

Something not to dissimilar to his heartbeat pounded in his ears, his mouth running dry as she sighed lightly to herself. Christmas. 

How did he even begin to unpack Christmas—Charlie lowered his chin and frowned to himself, trying to figure out how exactly this conversation had gotten to this point. He sighed through his nose.

"I don't get what this has to—"

"Honesty," Beth said the word as if it was a weapon. "And my sanity, really. Andrew bought it up and the little voice at the back of my head wants to tell me that you were cheating on me and have some woman stashed in your apartment in Boston that you go to see on the holidays... but I–"

Charlie sighed.

 There was something about Beth thinking he was cheating that made him want to laugh. God. If only things were that fucking easy. 

He didn't quite have the mind to be hurt by that suggestion; again, it wasn't the first time he'd heard that accusation. It was the downside to being such a nice guy, when things started to look bad, people almost automatically expected him to be the worst– Well, Charlie wasn't exactly sure what these things meant anymore.

"I was at a clinic," The words were almost too easy to find. Half-truths that were expelled in a cloud of hot air. By the window, he saw Beth's hands twitch. "Not Andrews. Again, I didn't want to admit it to you... but I had to stay in Boston for a few weeks to organise a replacement and while I was there I, uh, I did some admin for a local clinic—"

"Back Bay?"

At the mention of the rehabilitation clinic, Beth turned around. 

In the dim light, he could see her, eclipsed against chaos with her appearing so calm. If he'd been sober enough maybe he would've been scared. 

He just stared at her, his mind ticking over for a few seconds before nodding.

"Yeah," Charlie's response came a little too naturally. He regretted his tone as soon as he said it. He held Beth's eye too, felt every word pass from his mouth to her consciousness. He wondered if she'd tear it to pieces in her head. (She would.) "They wanted someone to consult on their current research. You remember the thesis I worked on while I was in France–"

"Mm," Beth hummed lightly and looked back at the window, her hair flicking over her shoulder, "The development of pill dependency in recovering victims of trauma."

She recited his research interest back to him, quoting his byline word for word. With each letter he could imagine the title page burning on that screen on that computer outside the same cottage they'd planned to have their honeymoon within. His name, of course, was neatly tucked beneath it, under a few lines proclaiming him the researcher and paper author. There was a poignancy about the way she said it, as if there was something she was trying to imply by her tone– he just looked at her, trying to figure out where this was going before he was rudely surprised.

"They'd seen my research and they wanted me there to help with some clinic structuring," He spoke so smoothly, so easily. "I was out of a job so I thought why not–"

"But that's not true."

"Beth, I'm telling the truth–"

"You're good."

He didn't particularly appreciate the interruption. 

There was a rhythm to this sort of thing; he needed to get in the swing of these, pick up a pace– but there it was, the gleam in Beth's eye as she looked over at him, half cast in miserable light. She kept interrupting him before he could even make sense of what he was saying. He needed time, he needed space. 

He needed Beth to stop pushing forwards and give him time to breathe.

Those words: You're good, they felt congratulatory. 

Charlie felt something shift in his chest; he felt like he knew exactly where this was going.

"At this," Beth said after a short beat, "Damage control–"

(She was so sick of constantly being damage control.)

"Beth."

"Charlie, I know there isn't a paper," She ran a hand through her hair and heaved a breath, one that he felt in his soul. "The summer we met... you weren't there for a research grant. I tried to look for your paper... it doesn't exist–"

"That's not–"

"There's no paper and you weren't working at Back Bay as a consultant," Beth sounded so definitive in what she was saying and Charlie couldn't find itself within him to respond. She sounded so sure. What happened to trusting him? "I know because I called in a favour to check. They couldn't give you a reference because you didn't work there."

His jaw clenched.

"I thought you trusted me."

His words felt so alien to him and Beth seemed to stick in time for a few moments. She lingered there, in a state of between, her eyes stuck on his face as if she was physical incapable of looking away. 

She seemed to look through him as if he was a piece of paper– how stark it was against the few moments before when she'd been unable to meet his eye at all. The moment was a lot longer than Charlie was comfortable with. 

He was the one who looked away. 

His gaze fell to his hands, at the long jagged, red trails of his clipped fingernails against skin.

"Andrew was right."

He didn't lookup. She didn't sound resigned or disappointed. She just sounded empty, as if she had nothing left to feel when it came to this situation– Charlie shook his head but didn't speak.

 For the first time in his life, he was speechless.

"Charlie," He held his breath as she said it: "You were in Boston for treatment."

***

─── "What are we even going to say to Derek?"

Amy could tell that her question had caught Mark off-guard. 

They were nearly there, she could tell from the way that his strides started to slow and he became less concentrated on moving and more on thinking– was he asking himself the same question? Had she just read his mind? (Amy hoped so, she liked the concept of being a mythic bitch that could supersede physical form.) 

She stared at the back of his head, imaging the static that was crackling at the back of his head– Mark Sloan having thoughts? Why was that suddenly such an abstract concept?

He sighed, shooting her an odd look.

"We?" 

Mark's eyebrow quirked at the mention of their untimely partnership. He looked down at her, at the woman who was a head smaller than him but, arguably, the bigger man for all intents and purposes. 

"I thought Derek was going to 'murder you'," He said, "You really wanna walk into his office and see him right now?"

He had a point.

"Well, sorry that I don't exactly trust you with saving the day, Clark Kent," was Amy's response, looking back at him with nonchalance. 

Mark rolled his eyes, his intense manner offset by the way that his shoulders loosened up slightly at her jab. (Good, Amy thought to herself. She was impulsively cracking jokes to keeping everything together. Everything felt too serious and too make or break, she needed the relief from a second of Shepherd-lead-comedic-chaos.) 

And Amy continued with, "You don't exactly have a good track record–"

Mark quirked an eyebrow, "Oh, because you do?"

"I'm Beth's friend," Amy said with a breathless smile, "Lets be honest, I'm basically chaperoning you to make sure that you don't make things worse–"

"I'm Beth's friend, too."

Amy didn't seem very convinced with that. Her brow furrowed slightly and she made sure her scepticism was very clearly written across her face. 

(It occurred to her, in that moment, that she hadn't been in a room with the two of them since Manhattan. She'd only seen both of them separately. How weird it would be to watch them interact.) 

Mark sighed.

"Beth deserves people in her corner," His words were slightly strangled, perpetrated by the slight twitch in his eye. Amy chuckled to herself. Mark, again, seemed to react with chagrin. "She does. And seeing as you're convinced that she's high––" ("I'm not convinced") "–– and Derek is... well, you know what Derek is like."

They both knew Derek all too well. Amy, especially. 

That was how everything felt so familiar: the concept of an intervention behind a closed door, hushed voices and weird looks. She'd been here herself too many times, watching her brother sigh his way through a conversation with enough disappointment to keep a whole speech floating. 

Sure, it was an inkling, a tiny little scratch at the back of her head that reminded her so much of the itch that would settle in when she was in withdrawal. She didn't know it for sure, but Amy had a pretty solid hypothesis– and with Derek Shepherd as part of the method and Beth's disappearance the result, she was pretty sure she was on the right track.

"Beth has people in her corner," Amy murmured lightly, looking down at her cell phone as she tapped out yet another text message to Charlie. 

She scrolled down past all of their conversations prior to arriving in Seattle and sighed as she realised he still hadn't responded. 

"She has people in her corner that... y'know, haven't screwed her over in the past and haven't had very sudden character development that will probably mess with her head or be completely null and void when actually tested–"

Mark made a dismissive noise. "Amelia, one of us actively encouraged her addiction in the first place–"

"And the other slept with her sister," was her response, her eyes not once leaving the cell phone in her hand. 

She didn't look up to see the way that Mark's jaw clenched very slightly; he dragged in a very long breath through his nose. She, notably, was overjoyed by the way he seemed to have no intention of arguing with her very valid point. Amy's chin raised eventually, shrugging. 

"Look," She sighed, "I know I know I have a very questionable type when it comes to women, but Addison. Addison was a choice–"

"I slept with you too," Mark said, although he appeared more tired than irritated. "Twice."

"Yeah, you're welcome," Amy responded indifferently, "You looked sad and I felt bad for you. It was like a charity donation."

He didn't quite have a response to that.

"But I mean it, Mark," She continued, her brow folding very slightly at the prospect of walking into Derek's office without any idea of what was going to happen. "We should have some sort of game plan. We need to know what we're going to say before we say it–"

"And I mean it too. I do. I can do this on my own."

There was something about the thought of letting Mark do everything on his own that made her want to break out in hives. 

Here he was, a man who was responsible for the destruction of so many things, now looking at Amy as if he could solve it all. 

The fuck was he going to do anyway? Go in there and reel off some impassioned speech to Derek about how Beth was unflawed and clean? Was he going to bring a boombox, play Marvin Gaye and throw pebbles at a window too? Admittedly, Amy couldn't imagine Mark fixing anything.

He'd always been so much better at picking things apart than solving them.

When it came to people, at least.

"You're not ready to face Derek," He continued, seeming as though he'd already drafted a whole speech in his head. Amy's gaze dropped to the floor and they came to a halt in a corridor, just on the edge of a suspended walkway. "And if you start talking about sobriety to him, you know what's going to happen––"

Of course she did. 

She could imagine the scoff that would come out of her big brother, the long noise that would catch at the back of his throat. 

She knew what he thought of her, she knew how Derek worked, how his brain ticked over at the thought of anyone having any issues when it came to addiction. He seem to take everything so personally, as if someone suffering was a failure on his part that made him frustrated. Sometimes it was productive, sometimes it was the opposite.

Amy sighed.

He was right. 

As much of a consistent bastard that Mark Sloan proved to be, he was right. Derek wouldn't listen to her. He hadn't listened to her since she'd been a teenager, before she'd started with the pills and reckless rebellion. 

He hadn't listened since she'd done things and crashed things and caused so much chaos that he hadn't been able to look at her the same. He wouldn't listen to her, he'd tell her that she'd only been here for a few days, that she hadn't seen enough or heard enough. He'd tell her that she was just doing exactly what she'd done back in Manhattan, blindly protect Beth even though it only made the situation worse.

But even so, there were so many things about this that didn't make sense. As much as Amy knew Derek, she knew Beth too. 

Specifically, she knew high Beth, reckless abandon Beth, suffering in silence with so many pills in her system that she hadn't been able to remember her name. If this was an intervention, then why didn't Amy see it?

She looked over at Mark. He was looking at her with so many things in his eyes that she could almost pick out every individual emotion. His body was turned in the direction of an office on the other side of the walkway and Amy looked towards it, imagining her brother sat in there, a crooked overlord on his throne of bones. Amy paused for a second, wishing so deeply that she could help–– all she'd ever wanted to do was help, but she never had been able to. Before and now. She'd been high before and now she felt trapped.

Amy nodded her head.

"Okay," It was a breathless surrender that she couldn't believe she was saying out loud. Mark reached out and squeezed her shoulder. "You... uh, you talk to Derek. Try to figure out where Beth is and... and if she's okay."

"Okay."

"I'll phone Charlie," Amy said and then her nose wrinkled. "I feel bad for him. Their courthouse appointment is in half an hour and if we can't find then... then what happens? He loves Beth a lot and if this is my brother getting involved I just..."

(Beside her, Mark seemed to deflate very slightly. She found himself looking at him, wondering so lightly whether this was weird. If this was what they think it was, they'd been here before: was it weird for Mark to see Charlie where he'd stood? Was it weird to just be a bystander this time?)

In an almost mechanical fashion, her head shook from side to side. A slightly incredulous chuckle fell past her lips. Amy dropped her eyes to the floor, grimacing.

"I can't imagine what's going through Charlie's head right now."