𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙑𝙄𝙄.
DEREK AND MARK

──────

hahahhaha oh no

✧

MARK had a plan.

He wasn't exactly the plan ahead type when it came to things, excluding surgery of course. He was the roll with the punches type (his mind thudded with the echo of Derek's fist crunching against his skull) and just go with the flow (yeah, he hated that saying too.) 

Usually, he just took things as they came–– 

Oh, you want to break up with me because you don't see a place in my life with my daughter turning and giving birth to my grandson? Sure! 

Oh, you're leaving me behind in Manhattan? Fine with me! 

But, this time, there was something about this whole situation that made Mark want to plan ahead.

It wasn't a plan plan. It was just a ruminated idea. A series of goals that he wanted to accomplish. He had a rough idea of where he wanted to start and where he wanted to finish, the rest he figured he'd just improvise. 

When Amelia left him outside of Derek's office, (the black sheep of the Shepherd family hight-tailing it to the furthest corner, out of reach) Mark tried to give himself some sort of a pep talk. 

He walked a thin line down the centre of the corridor, making passing staff and patients glance at him weirdly alike. He spoke to himself, muttering very soft words of encouragement. 

He nodded, he paced and he imagined the day ending without the end of the world.

He was going to march in there and he was going to give Derek a piece of his mind. 

He was going to set the man in place. 

Years of watching Derek call the shots and Mark was finally, finally, going to make his voice heard.

It was something Mark didn't ever really talk about, the feeling that he got when he and Derek stood side by side. Derek was his best friend, he'd kill for the man and he liked to think that Derek would do the same. They'd been inseparable until they hadn't and they'd relied on each other so many times over the years. 

They were tried and true and Mark was so thankful that Derek had taken him back (over his actual ex-wife too) and that he could stand here and still consider Derek a friend. But then there was this office and the weight on Mark's chest that he got when he glanced at it–– the Plastic Surgeon sighed through his nose.

God, why was he doing this? 

Amy was right. He wasn't supposed to be here. 

If he had to choose anyone to fight for Beth's honour, it sure as hell wouldn't have been him. 

He was the better evil when it came to him and Amy. He was so tempted to go find Archer, to have the Montgomery have his way with Derek just like Mark knew he wanted. 

Did Archer even know? Was all of this shit that Amy theorised even true?

"Doctor Sloan."

He was almost startled by the sound of Derek's secretary. 

She was stood on the other side of the hallway, directly in front of him, watching as he screeched to a stop in his pacing. 

He almost winced at the sound of his sneakers squeaking against the floor. 

She did too, he watched the slight grimace pinch her perfect smile as he looked up at her. 

There was a brief pause, the flash of his signature (if not apologetic) smile.

"He's ready for you."

It felt oddly formal, Mark thought. 

His best friend was locked behind a stacked timetable, a classy secretary and some shiny windows. It was so professional and Mark felt so out-of-place; his usual stagnant arrogance and charm dwindled into the curt thanks he gave to the employee ("Thanks Tanya") and he had to fight against the urge to shove his hands in his pockets. 

He'd had to book an appointment, get it cleared with Derek before he even entered the room, like asking permission to even talk to him.

Crap, when had things gotten so serious?

Opening the door felt a lot more dramatic than Mark would've liked. 

He stared at the plaque holding Derek's name on the door, proclaiming him Chief like he was an overlord of some very tiny kingdom. 

Mark felt his chest ache a little bit–– if he had to describe the feeling that filled him, with all irony pushed aside, he would've said always the bridesmaid and never the bride. 

There was something about this big flashy office, Tanya and the big important desk that bought Mark back to where they began: two kids who were a little too lost for a city like Manhattan.

Derek didn't greet him as he entered. 

He could see him sat there at his desk, working away as if the whole world was against him all at once. There was a stack of papers on the table top and a frown in the corner of the surgeon's mouth. 

Mark wiped his palms, of which were slightly clammy, on the pant leg of his scrubs and gave his best friend an earnest smile. He was nervous and he had a sneaky suspicion that he knew why... He gently picked his way across the office to stand in front of the Chief of Surgery. 

Derek was in the middle of hurriedly writing something, the sound of a pen scratching against paper causing Mark to, unceremoniously, drag in a very long breath.

"What do you need, Mark?" Derek spoke with a short tone, "I haven't got much time."

He didn't look up from his work either. 

There was so much urgency in him. It reminded Mark how slammed this man's work schedule was today, and how he'd only been able to negotiate the tiniest, slimmest time slot imaginable. He supposed that he should've even felt lucky to have such a grand audience with him.

He had five minutes. Usually, Mark was perfectly five with five minutes. 

He'd handled five minutes. He'd executed five minutes extremely well in the past (to very good reviews, he would've liked to add.) 

Time, on a normal day, was far from an issue.

But today... Today Mark had a little bit more to say than he quite knew what to do with. 

The words tumbled around his mouth like balls in a bingo machine. He almost gargled them, sorely unsure of what would pop out. Would a coherent statement come out or would it just be a number five? 

Mark was sure that something like a nightmare sequence, gussying himself up to speak, opening his mouth for only a ping pong ball to bounce around the room. 

Would Derek collect all of his letters and syllables, arrange them into a line, and then cross them off one by one? 

Mark had never been good at the game, luck never seemed to be on his side.

   "Uh, not much."

 What a strong start. 

He almost felt like patting himself on the fact. 

Good job Sloan, for such a smooth talker you sure have a way with words. 

  "I just..." He said, "I heard that you were talking to Beth––"

Mark noticed it this time. 

Amy had tried to explain in length, how over the years she'd developed the sensitivity to feel when things weren't quite right. 

She'd tried to compare it to the spider bite in a Marvel comic, but instead of it being a bite it was a long term oxy and alcohol problem (that, technically speaking, happened to bite her in the ass more than she would have liked to admit.) 

That's what all of this balanced on top of, the one inflexion in the face of Bethenny Ballard's own secretary, the way a woman had grimaced at the mention of Elizabeth Montgomery's name.

And he saw it. 

He saw the way that Derek seemed to pause for the tiniest second. 

Tinier than the five minutes he'd given up for Mark. 

There was the smallest breath of a moment in which Derek seemed to realise where this was going to go. 

Mark didn't often talk about Beth to Derek, it was, by all means, a conversation topic that he tended to avoid when it came to his everyday conversations. But lately, he'd been discussing her more and more–– and besides, last time he'd started a conversation like this, it had been to berate Derek for hiring Addison while Beth was out of the game. 

Mark was sensing to see a pattern when it came to their conversations, and he wasn't exactly sure yet whether he liked it.

Derek let out a very short breath, moving onwards as if he hadn't already given away the fact that something was very, very wrong.

"Right."

Crap, Mark clasped his hands in front of him, Maybe Amy was right.

He really, really, didn't want Amy to be right.

"She's uh, she's disappeared..." 

Mark couldn't have sounded more scattered and aimless. He listened to himself, to his voice and wondered what the hell had happened to the man who spoke every sentence with such gravitas. Now he sounded like a kid struggling to give a PowerPoint presentation to his class. 

  "We... we wanted to check that she was okay––"

   "We?"

Maybe that's what he needed. 

Maybe Mark should have prepared more. He could imagine this going so much smoother if he'd bought in a presentation, something a bit more visual to help him communicate the exact sort of crisis that was going on. 

He'd use pictures, maybe a laser pointer or some sort of pointing stick and he'd wave to a diagram detailing how Amy's stress levels had increased over the past hour. He'd jab his hand at an image of Seattle's courthouse downtown and then back at the hospital, showing the place she was last seen and the place she had never arrived at. 

Or maybe he'd draw Beth's outline in the elevator with chalk and buy aviators, really commit to the role of a detective who was too emotionally estranged to really string a sentence together.

Mark pressed his lips together.

"Me," He said so simply and then realised Amy was the last person in the world who wanted to be implicated in all of this. He scrambled slightly to finish his sentence as Derek's eyebrows rose. "Me and Charlie."

Derek actually looked up for that. 

Mark was given a very exclusive front-row seat to the incredulousness brewing in Derek Shepherd's soul. 

Despite all of the tension that Mark could feel in the room around Beth and whatever Derek had done this morning, there was some amusement on Derek's face. 

It was as if the ex-neurosurgeon simply couldn't imagine the two men in a room together talking about the two of them working to find Beth together. It'd caught Derek off-guard, a dent appeared between his eyebrows and, for a moment, Mark thought he was going to laugh. 

But he didn't, he just repeated it back to Mark as if he didn't believe a word that Mark was saying:

"You and Charlie?"

He said it with all the disbelief he could muster and Mark felt it in his soul. 

Derek even laughed too, a shallow sound that echoed around the Plastic Surgeon's chest. In almost an automated response, Mark gritted a chuckle out in response–– it was a nervous one, built off of the foundation of wanting to laugh with and not be laughed at.

"Yeah," Mark said with a nod, his energy manifesting into a twitchy, misplaced smile. He shoved his hands into his pockets. "We uh, we can't find her. Thought she might've been hidden under a table or something but uh, no one can really get in contact with her and she, uh, she didn't turn up where she was supposed to."

It didn't miss Mark how Derek's smile seemed to shift; it was as if for the sharpest moment, Derek had forgotten what this was. 

He looked over at Mark, a man who was so deeply out of his depth that he could feel the water in his veins, and seemed to fumble with his concern. 

Mark watched the smile fade until it was a single lifted muscle in the corner of the man's mouth, shuddering slightly as Derek looked back down at his work and sighed.

   "She's not locked in my cupboard." 

Derek tried to make a joke but it didn't fit with the tightness that was building in Mark's chest. He didn't like the weird tension in the room that seemed to dictate exactly how the conversation progressed. 

   "If that's what you're asking–"

   "We're worried about her."

If there was tension there was also this: Mark's words being said without a second thought. They rushed out of him like water finding a crack in a pipe, or a vein being accidentally nicked with a scalpel. 

Derek, again, didn't look up. He kept his chin tilted downwards as Mark silently begged him to give him something, to give him some sort of hint or clue as to exactly where this was going.

He didn't like being out of the loop and, lately, that had been happening a lot. 

Hadn't it been in this exact office that Mark had watched Beth, Addison and Derek exchange heated words, all while completely lost on the topic? 

He was perpetually in a state of intense and very persistent confusion, and Mark didn't like it. His ego didn't like it. He wanted to be involved, he wanted to immersed–– but at the same time, he respected Beth a whole lot more than to just dive into her personal life like that––

Well, that was until Amy was very vocally concerned about the woman's safety. 

(Mark hadn't said it, but there was something about Amy of all people being able to sense when something was wrong, that terrified him. She was the most relaxed and easy-going person he knew (aside from her extracurricular activities) and the thought of her being unsettled was exactly what led him into asking the difficult questions.)

"Charlie's really worried," It was almost a correction but almost not. 

Mark had to bite back the urge to get agitated. It reminded him of the last time he'd spoken to Derek, how he'd really tried to grill the message home that hiring Addison was not a good idea. 

  "He's scared that she might be––"

   "She might be what?"

Derek didn't sound as concerned as he should have been.

For a moment, Mark just stared at him as those Derek Shepherd baby blues raised to meet his again. 

The two men, who had often been far more like brothers, just stared. 

Mark wasn't sure what Derek was trying to accomplish with his stare, but Mark was passively trying to search for something at the back of his eyes. 

He knew Derek like the back of his hand, probably better than Meredith or Addison even had. He knew Derek's giveaways, he knew Derek's deadpans and right now, there was an emotion that was a little too familiar at the back of Derek's eyes.

Mark looked away first.

The tightness was getting stronger in his chest. It travelled through him, maybe by blood or by air, either way, that choked feeling appeared in his voice, keeping his syllables short and his sentences shorter.

"If this is about Beth's sobriety–"

"This is a private matter between myself and a staff member."

There was something distinctively unfriendly about the way that Derek spoke back to him. 

He could feel the very distant, almost backwards hostility that simmered underneath those words. Mark's jaw clenched as a reflex and he fixed his eyes on the nameplate at the front of Derek's desk: a symbol of achievement, of all of that hard work. 

It very briefly amused Mark that, in Derek's busy schedule and his own, the only time Mark ever spent time in here, it seemed to be due to an issue that was directly caused by Derek's own hand.

  "Wasn't that the problem last time?" Mark asked.

He couldn't help but take some of that bitterness with him, leeching off of Derek's stand-offishness like microplastics in water. When Mark swallowed, he realised that his mouth was dry and there was a lump at the back of his throat. 

   "Beth being mad at you because you violated her privacy?"

He could tell that Derek hadn't expected him to say that. 

He would've described Derek's reaction as blindsided, almost deliciously so. Mark didn't know why Derek was so surprised, hadn't he stood up against him before? 

Of course, he had. 

Mark was fairly sure that he, Beth, Meredith and Amy, were the only people who bothered to put him in his place. Naturally, the others more frequently than Mark. 

Had Derek forgotten that? Did he need a very short and sweet refresher?

The glance that Derek shot Mark was estranged. It was almost cold.

"Shep, I don't know what the hell is going on–"

"Exactly," Derek responded tepidly, "You don't, so don't start on me, Mark. It's already been a long day–"

I'm sure it has.

"Of course, because you're busy."

It was almost bizarre. 

Mark wasn't sure where all this frustration was coming from. 

It made an appearance in that reply, making Derek's eyes flicker to him so sharply and indicate that he could feel it too– maybe it was the apex of all of this, all of the secrecy that Mark had been surrounded with, the feeling of being stuck at the kid's table while all of the grown-ups talked business. 

But things went deeper than that, it was the submerged knowledge that Derek was to blame in everything each step of the way. things went deeper and deeper the more Mark thought about it: Gary Clark, ManWest and the gradual breakdown of his relationship with Beth––

Maybe it was also the fact that he'd never quite found an outlet to scream about how he had to stab his ex-girlfriend in the chest and spend hours keeping both her and his other exes new beau alive.

Mark had had chaos in his bones for a long time now. 

He supposed he'd been waiting to take his turn. 

There seemed to be a queue outside of Derek Shepherd's office these days, and it wasn't just to discuss research budgeting.

"I am," Derek said. He didn't sound fazed, he just squinted over at the Plastic Surgeon as if he was trying to read his mind. Derek lifted his pen as if to prove his own point. "I have a very busy schedule today. If you're going to waste my time, I suggest you come back when I have some time for you––"

"This can't really wait, Shep."

"I'm sure it can."

He didn't understand how Derek could be so dismissive of things. 

He should've been as terrified as the rest of them were. 

In fact, Derek was the polar opposite of Amy, he tended to take everything too far; he was the overreactor, the person whose behaviour had rubbed off on Mark and drove them both crazy. 

He blew a mosquito bite out of proportion and side-eyed when Amy drank anything that other than a clearly marked, untampered juice box.

"You're just looking for a fight," Derek said. It made Mark wonder whether other people had stood in this office, doing the exact same, "I can tell. I know you. You're looking for someone to yell at. It's a waste of time. I have more important things–"

"I just told you that Charlie is scared about Beth's safety."

He'd been in New York too, just as he liked to remind everyone, he'd seen how bad things could get when things got out of control.

"Our friend is missing." 

Mark made sure to dictate every word with a determination that he usually only reserved for the OR. 

(Friend.) 

He felt the blood curdle in his veins and his skin crawl with desperation for Derek to understand how important it was for Beth to be okay. 

  "She was supposed to meet Charlie outside her apartment forty minutes ago and she never showed," Mark said, "People are concerned that Beth didn't turn up to her own wedding. How exactly is that a waste of your time?"

Derek didn't speak.

There was something about his silence in particular that elicited various chemical reactions in Mark. He was starting to understand exactly what Amy meant–– big reactions were noticeable, blow up reactions like a fist in a face or a smile or a cracked stare between two rivals, now that Mark could somewhat handle. 

But it was the devil in the details: the way that Derek appeared so impassive and unbothered.

Mark's stomach twisted. His head twisted to the side as he kissed his teeth, finally realising what was happening.

"Unless you know where she is?"

Again, the ex-neurosurgeon was silent. Mark couldn't stop the scoff that fell past his lips.

"At least tell Charlie what's going on––"

As much as Mark didn't like hiding behind Charlie Perkins, it was sure doing the damn job. 

He watched Derek heave a sigh and flip through his paperwork. 

It was almost sloppy of him as if he couldn't be bothered to engage in a conversation so he just crinkled papers as if it would be the equivalent of faking phone static down a healthy line.

"Is she upstairs?" Mark's next question bounced around the room with determination. He was going to get answers even if it killed him. "Do I need to go upstairs to the hospital rehabilitation unit and get Charlie to apply for a visitor's pass so he can take his damn vows? What's my move here, Shep?"

"You need to do anything," Derek replied, his tone clipped, "You've done enough."

Mark bit the tip of his tongue.

God, there were so many things he could say, so many things that he could throw against Derek at this moment. 

Could he physically bring himself to bring up the fact that Derek had put them all in such danger? That it was because of Derek and his incapability to de-escalate the Clark incident, that all of those people had died? 

Mark locked his molars, not appreciating the way that Derek seemed to stare at him as if he was so much smaller–– he wasn't, he was taller and he was older and Mark knew that Derek forgot that more often than he remembered.

Mark had done enough? 

(How funny that was. From what Mark was beginning to realise, he hadn't done anything at all. He hadn't helped Lexie and he sure as hell hadn't helped Beth. Call this making up for lost time.)

So, Mark decided to cut to the point.

"Is Beth okay?"

Derek seemed to prickle at the question.

"Beth's Beth."

Mark's brow furrowed, "What the hell does that mean?"

An indifferent sigh.

"Mark–"

"No, don't Mark me."

He really was sick of everything being so cryptic. 

Why couldn't people just say what they meant to say? Why couldn't people just be honest? 

Mark didn't want to spend the next four and a half minutes trying to figure out some sort of shitty riddle. He didn't want to have to fight information out of everyone. He was tired. 

He just wanted everything to be okay.

Derek was staring at him. 

His brow was very slightly lifted as if he hadn't expected that response. 

(What did Derek expect from him? Mark had a feeling that it was nothing that the Plastic Surgeon could give to him.) 

He was stuck to his chair, his whole body unmoving as Mark felt the weight of all of these past weeks truly crash onto his shoulders–– he sagged slightly, dragging in a breath that was strong enough to blow some sort of sense towards him. 

Mark shook his head and, then with the tightest, most concise composure he could managed, managed to speak as clearly as humanly possible.

"I don't know what this thing is that's happening between you and Beth and Archer and everyone..." Thing, somehow, felt like an understatement; he could tell from the way that Derek's jaw clenched slightly as the Chief of Surgery continued to silently marinate in his own bitterness. "And honestly, I don't think I want to know– But whatever it is, it shouldn't be getting in the way of the safety of people that you're supposed to care about. What happened to looking out for her? What happened to being the good guy–?"

Derek scoffed lightly, "I'm helping her, Mark–"

"It doesn't look like it from where I'm standing," was his very precise response, "She's supposed to be getting married. She's supposed to be moving forwards with her life, leaving everyone behind, being happy– you're not doing any favours by holding her back. Are you really that desperate to ruin things for her? What did you do? Ambush her with an intervention––?"

(His words made Derek stall. Not only was it the accuracy, making Derek feel as though Mark was some omniscient presence that could see and hear all, but it was the grit behind it. He could tell that Mark was wound up, that the man had reached some sort of wits end with everything. He didn't appreciate the criticism and he sure as hell didn't appreciate being made to feel dumb.)

"I'm not holding her back," Derek's tone reared to me the confrontation in his voice, making Mark's stomach twist almost deliciously. "If anything is happening here, it's Beth who is holding herself back. She's perfectly capable of ruining things for herself. If anything is happening right now, it's exactly that. Beth doing what Beth does and getting herself in too deep––"

It was Mark's turn to scoff lightly. It was a clumsy sound that made his mouth dry.

"––and needing someone to drag her out of it."

The more Derek spoke, the more Mark became convinced that Amy was right. 

It must've happened; something about Beth's sobriety must've made this day go astray. 

Beth ruining things for herself. 

He could see the sparkle in Derek's eye. 

It was almost self-satisfied as if Derek had warned them all so long before it had happened. 

He could imagine it so clearly, mostly because he'd seen it before: the fall of her face as she realised exactly what she'd walked into, the clench of Derek's jaw as he donned his shining armour and monologued as if he was the tragic hero of a Shakespearean drama.

Hear ye, hear ye, Mark could almost hear Beth saying it in the distance while sticking up her middle finger. He felt like saying it too: Derek Shepherd's full of shit.

"Do you hear yourself?" 

What he actually said felt a lot more professional and composed. 

"Do you hear what you're saying?" Mark's face scrunched, "You're talking like Beth's a criminal. I know Addison didn't want Beth to leave–– and you what? Did you team up with her again? Make up some shit about Beth relapsing to stop her from going?"

Derek just sighed, as if he was disappointed in Mark.

"I told you I don't have time for this–"

"And I told you that Beth has people that actually give a damn, that are out there worried about her," He almost felt like raising an arm and pointing just for dramatic effect. If only he could knock down the wall behind them to expose the raised heartbeats and pacing feet (although Amy would probably murder him with her bare hands, and get away with it too.) "People like Charlie that actually want what's best for her–"

"Then why isn't he here?" Derek questioned, brow raised almost in defiance. It caused Mark's heart to skip a beat. "Why isn't Charlie telling me this himself? Why are you here, Mark?"

"I told you–"

The Chief of Surgery just shook his head and adopted a more apprehensive, almost authoritative tone: "You're not Charlie, Mark."

There were so many connotations to those words. 

Mark didn't like how sudden they hit him, how they seemed to stun him for a handful of seconds. 

He knew he wasn't Charlie. That had been made abundantly clear. 

Amy had grinned it across the floors of his apartment and over the top of his scotch glass. It had glittered across Beth's gaze and yet, there was something about the way that Derek said it and the flicker of his facial expression, it dug deep under his skin. 

Derek seemed to say it with a very brief moment of pity, a sigh as if he felt sorry for him. 

You're not Charlie. 

The sentiment seemed to dismiss everything Mark had felt over the past week. 

Suddenly, Mark was just as he had been when everything had just blown over, so deeply overshadowed by his own thoughts and feeling so insignificant that his whole body felt like a burden.

Mark bit on the tip of his tongue.

"And you're not Archer," He fired those words like they were bullets. Mark wondered whether Derek had any blood left to bleed. The man across from him paused. "Yet here we are."

How ironic, Mark thought. They were two people charading in the place of others.

If Mark was trying to be Charlie (which he wasn't, he swears. God, for once Mark just wanted to be Mark and just that alone, be enough), Derek had been playing the role of Archer for far longer than a single reprise. 

He'd slipped into the older brother role in Archer's absence and had never given it up. Mark knew it was because Derek wanted to think of himself as selfless, the sort of guy who could give the shirt off of his own back–– but that wasn't true. Mark knew him too well:

Derek liked the power. He liked the power of being the saviour, of the being the one person in the world that could save the day.

Mark let him internalise that, just for a second, that no matter what Derek did, he was not Archer.

 There was no familial obligation there anymore. Beth only had one brother and that, very notably, was not the ex neurosurgeon with the hero hair. 

Derek being involved in Beth's life was as redundant as Mark, he had no right to involve himself, there was no impending and immediate need for him–– Derek seemed to realise that too, for a split second in the world, Mark almost saw humanity in his eyes. 

They were in the same position. They were bystanders. Neither of them were any use to the woman they had once spent hours trying to talk off of metaphorical and physical ledges.

"She's not high."

The Plastic Surgeon decided to take the opportunity as it was given to him. 

A stretch of silence was too tempting to make his point explicitly clear. 

He didn't want to engage in Derek's cryptic games. He was going to be clean and clear-cut, get straight to the point and deal with the fallout from there.

Derek's face contorted slightly, "Mark..."

"No," He shook his head, "This is what it's all about, right? You think Beth's drinking or... or she's high again and you've dusted off your high horse to drag her off to rehab to stop her from leaving the country–"

"Mark."

That's what Derek thought. He thought that Beth had fallen back into old habits again. He could see it written across Derek's face, the ghost of a man who thought that someone close to him had failed in some sort of way. 

That made Mark's blood curdle. There was a pinch in the corners of the Chief's mouth, a restraint even in the way that he held a pen in between his thumb and finger.

"She's not high," Mark would repeat it for hours if people would listen to him. "Beth wouldn't do that. Not now. She's not high, fuck, I think she's just happy. Maybe you don't recognise that on her but I do–– it's... she's not on drugs, she's just really happy to get rid of all of us and finally move on from this place. We were happy once, y'know? This is what it looks like– not pills."

Admittedly, vouching for Beth like this felt a little belated. 

There was a passion in his gut, a certainty that the Beth they'd grown familiar with, this distorted New Beth with all the shine and the little 'I miss you sometimes, too's' would never make the same mistakes all over. 

It troubled Mark more than he would've like to admit, just the principle that Derek couldn't see that–– that he couldn't see that Beth had grown beyond hurried self-medication and intricate webs of little white lies.

"She fought so hard to get sober," Mark continued, growing slightly out of breath, "Last week she stood outside this office and begged me to let her go, to let her stop holding her back with the shit she did. And I get it, okay? New York was hard. It was hard. It was shit. But, I agree with her. She's changed, Derek. She's clean. It's not fair to constantly hold everything against her–"

"You don't know her, Mark."

"Neither do you," He replied.

Mark couldn't deny it.

Sometimes, Mark found himself caught up in a whole different web. 

He found himself struck by the fact that someone could feel so familiar but so different, all at once. He'd said it time and time again, how Beth was different through small changes, like tiny tiles swapped in a greater mosaic. 

In a way, they all were, but Mark supposed the sudden disappearance and appearance of Beth had made it so alarmingly apparent. What had happened in his home city had felt so defining. None of them had escaped unscathed. 

Minds had changed, skin had been weathered and Mark was confused as to how Derek couldn't see that; did he really think Beth would dig up old graves?

There was no logical way that Mark could see Beth derailing her whole life like this. No matter how much Derek made Beth out to be a kid who couldn't take accountability and responsibility for her own actions, she wasn't. He'd seen it, how desperately she wanted to move on from everything. How much she'd worked to turn her life around and push Manhattan so far behind her.

Was Mark the only person who could see how much things had changed?

Derek let out an annoyed breath, shaking his head.

"I'm not the one holding her past against her–"

"You are," Mark retorted, dissatisfied with the response, "I think it's damn time you realise that. You say that you the one who drags her out of things, but most times you're the one that drags her into it too–"

A pause.

"Really?" Derek sounded miffed. His eyebrows raised and Mark really had to wonder whether Derek had heard a single word of what he'd just said. "You're going to criticise me for helping?"

"I'm just saying," Mark said in the evenest tone he could muster, "Sometimes, you make it worse. Like now––"

"Let's not talk about making things worse," was Derek's curt interruption. 

This time, Mark could feel the agitation under his words. 

Mark couldn't remember the last time they'd had an argument, but he was so glad that this was all happening today. 

(He had so much energy to invest in something. He had so much to give.)

  "At least I actually try to be there," Derek said sharply, "At least I can make the hard calls and be the bad guy–– are you gonna forget what happened last time? How I was there helping Beth through her worst and you were off too busy screwing my wife––?"

"Oh, because getting her fired from ManWest really fuckin' helped." 

Mark could feel his heartbeat in his ears. The room felt a little smaller than it had a few moments ago and his chest felt a lot tighter. Each breath he took was clumsy and felt misplaced.

 "Right?" Mark said, slightly out of breath, "I told you not to get involved and you screwed me over way fucking before I screwed Addison, don't give me that."

"Of course," Derek said curtly, "Because that really outranks all of the things you did to her–"

"I never said that," Mark said. (He never had. He still hated himself for what had happened. If Derek only knew.) He cleared his throat and shook his head. "But Beth's forgiven me for it, but she sure as hell hasn't forgiven you. Says a lot, doesn't it?"

He could feel Derek's silence. 

He could feel the contempt. He could feel the way that a deep distaste burned right inside his soul–– 

Good, Mark thought. He wanted Derek unsettled. 

He wanted Derek to feel as stressed as he felt. 

He'd spent all of these years watching Derek trip Beth up as many times as he'd helped her to her feet, only to act as though he was a hero. 

Mark knew that he had not helped in New York by any means, by for Derek to hide behind helping while they both knew that ManWest had damaged Beth beyond belief. 

If Derek wanted to criticise him, Mark could criticise him too.

Neither of their hands were clean in any of this.

"Real mature," Derek said scornfully. 

He said it like a kid who had just been told off. He looked too small for his desk. Mark wondered whether he felt like that sometimes. 

This was such a big office, such a big desk, and sometimes Mark felt like the same kid that had befriended Derek and introduced him to hair gel. Did Derek feel that way too? 

  "Are you just going to blame the whole destruction of your relationship with Beth on me?" Derek asked, "Because you didn't need any help with that, did you Mark?"

Wow. A low blow.

It was weird, the line that they'd crossed somewhere. 

It was the same line that Derek had been toeing ever since Mark had come to Seattle: the forbidden topic, the one that now Mark was steam-rolling through with reckless abandon. 

Mark had refused to talk about Beth, refused to talk about how things ended or how he felt about it. 

He'd locked it all behind tightly pursed lips until, eventually, Derek had just given up trying. They hadn't talked about it at all. But now, Mark needed to make Derek understand. He really, really did––

A light, bitter chuckle fell past his lips.

"No," Mark shook his head, "No, I fucked up. I know that. But you fucked up too and continue to. I've stayed out of Beth's way. Fuck, I couldn't even bring myself to visit her in the hospital because I didn't want to get in the way. I've left her to live her life but you... you keep getting involved. You keep inserting yourself... you keep involving yourself and involving your ex-wife, even though you know there isn't any space for you in her life anymore."

Derek didn't speak.

"You don't look at Beth and see a person." 

Mark couldn't stop himself from speaking. He thought of his patients, of how he had to wire jaws together during palette reconstruction surgery–– that, that was the only way that this conversation was going to end. 

A length of wire and some sterilized pliers. 

   "You look at her and you see something that needs to be fixed," He continued with all of that rage he'd never been able to clean himself of, "You look at her and you see the five minutes of some high horse for you to trample all over her with–– this isn't about Beth being high or drunk or... even about Beth at all."

Derek's jaw clenched.

   "This is about you, Shep," Mark said, "You and the fact that you don't think she can live without you parenting her."

(She didn't need them. That, Mark, had come to terms with.)

(It was why he'd let her walk out of that elevator, despite how deeply he didn't want to let go. He knew a part of him was still tied to her, even after all these years.)

(He'd tried to undo it, he'd tried to ignore it, but it was there and it seemed pretty fucking reluctant to leave. Maybe Derek had it too?)

"You have this complex," Mark said so sharply, "About addiction... about blaming people for things that can't–– you blame people and you forget that addiction is something they can't control. It's textbook medicine." 

He felt his mouth go dry. 

  "I know you do because I had it too," Mark said, "I spent the last five years hating Beth, cursing her under my fucking breath thinking that everything that went wrong was all because she loved pills more than she loved me–– but she couldn't help it and I feel like an asshole for taking this long to realise it–"

"Don't give me that crap," Derek snorted slightly, cutting Mark off. "You didn't care what the fuck happened to Beth. You told her that you'd be better off without her and what happened? She locked herself in the bathroom––"

Mark really didn't need him to finish that sentence.

His mind was swamped with the memory of it. 

His jaw clenched and he found himself stuck in a very bizarre minute. 

He could've trapped there for a second or for a lifetime, Mark wouldn't have been able to tell.

 All he could distinguish was the feeling of that restroom door breaking under his hands and the knowledge that something had gone so disastrously in the next room. 

A lump appeared at the back of his throat.

He didn't care?

Oh. He didn't care.

A long laugh fell past the Plastic Surgeon's lips.

That was a pretty funny joke.

"Oh, I cared." 

His voice caught at the back of his throat slightly as he struggled to express how stupid Derek sounded. The Chief just raised his eyebrows in defiance as if to say 'well, you couldn't tell.' Mark shook his head. 

  His voice lowered, "Do not say I didn't care."

Mark had cared so much he hadn't known what to do with himself. He hadn't known what to... what were you even supposed to do?

 Stand there and just watch the woman you loved kill herself? 

More than just Beth had almost died that night, that was for sure. 

He'd cared so much that he'd bruised a bone in his hand that night breaking that door down that had stopped him from performing surgery for weeks. 

Caring was not the issue, it was how he'd processed and acted on that care that had fallen short.

"Sure," Derek remarked, "Like you cared when you had sex with Addison while she was recovering, all on the same night?"

Case in point.

Mark's eyes narrowed slightly.

"Because Saint Derek was there to hold her hand, right?" was his response, "What are you going to tell me you were a better boyfriend to her, too? A better brother than Archer?"

A pause.

   "You convinced Addison not to tell Archer that his sister had OD'd, you convinced Addison and me to ambush Beth and put her into rehab, causing her to have a nervous fucking breakdown, Derek," Mark was almost out of breath with it all: "Did you care then? Did you?"

"You're a fool, Mark," Derek just scoffed, "At least I tried to do something."

"I tried too," Mark's voice was rawer than he would have liked. He found himself almost gasping for air. "But I can at least read the room when people want nothing to do with me. All you do is try, Derek, and now you're projecting problems onto people because you can't imagine that they're fixed."

A beat passed.

They hadn't argued like this before. Not once in their long

"You think Beth's fixed?"

Well, maybe fixed was a little generous.

Mark snorted, "She's clean, she's happy––"

Derek's head shook slightly. "She's not clean."

Mark just sighed.

"Do you hear how obsessed you sound?"

"Oh, Please–"

"You're like Addie," Mark said, "You search for flaws and then you pick at them and you make sure that they never forget it. It ruined your relationship with Amelia and it's ruined your relationship with Beth too. Both of you, both you and Addie––"

"Do not bring Amy into this–"

"Maybe then you'll realise how crazy you sound–"

"I sound like I know what I'm talking about," was the preloaded, automated response that the Chief gave. It made Mark want to laugh and say okay in a voice so sarcastic that it would've made Amy proud. "You talk about Beth like you know who she is, Mark, like you know everything she's done. There's a lot of shit she hasn't told you, that we haven't told you–"

(So many things, Derek thought. So many things.)

"Just leave her alone, Shep."

"She can't take care of herself," Derek insisted and Mark just rolled his eyes. (Jesus, he really did think Amy and her were kids. Did he really think rehab was just a daycare too?) "She's a compulsive liar, Mark. I trusted her too when she first came to Seattle. I thought that she was different, but she's proved that she's not. She's dragging herself into the same situations and hiding things all over again."

"God," Mark exhaled the word through his nose, "She's always the villain, isn't she?"

It'd occurred to him not long ago how unfair it'd been to blame her for everything. 

Mark had had such a perception of Beth, of how cruel she could be, and he'd blamed her for everything. For the breakdown of their relationship, for his own personal failings, for the affairs and the complete ruination of a city that he'd loved. 

Those few months he'd spent with Addison, locked in some sort of hyper-realistic socialite fantasy, he'd hated every second of it and he'd hated Beth for leaving him there. For abandoning him, subjecting him to a life that he'd never wanted–– but now, Mark was realising how similar they were. 

If he was cast a villain, so was she. 

Beth was the typecast bitch who could never leave her role, no matter how much she begged or pleaded.

"Mark, you need to look at it from my perspective," Derek said, almost appearing resigned. "I don't know what it is... but no matter what, no matter what Beth did to you, you never left or had respect for yourself. I had to step up, just like I do now."

Mark, once again, rolled his eyes.

  "I don't see anyone else that's really trying to be productive here," the Chief of Surgery said, "Mark, you don't know Beth. You don't see what's really happening. You never did. You're the same and she's the same. Nothing has changed. You're the same people... Beth's still under your skin."

His words made Mark's jaw clench.

"This isn't a petty vendetta," The Chief continued, "Despite how badly you want to make me out as some bad guy who just wants people to suffer, I'm not. This isn't just my ex-sister-in-law, this is a member of this hospital's staff too–"

"Then it's an issue for Doctor Ballard," Mark interjected, "Not you–"

"So I have to do what's best for my hospital and my patients." 

That sounded like a very political statement. So deeply impersonal. 

It made Mark's lips curl with mirth and he had to avert his gaze so he could collect his temper. 

He felt it bubble underneath his skin; Mark wondered whether Derek could physically see it, churning like hot lava within him.

   "I have to make the difficult decisions–"

   "Oh because a public execution to make yourself look good is really difficult–'

"I've been here for her every step of the way," Derek said tightly, "New York... I was the one who had to break the news of the affair to her... I was the one who offered to take her with me to Seattle... I was the one who had to sit in my office and listen to her panic about how coming here eventually was all a bad idea... that she couldn't understand how you were so okay even though she was still so hurt–"

"Yeah, well," Mark's mouth tasted bitter, "I wasn't okay either."

"I was the one who had to offer her support when she admitted that she that she'd had a glass of wine on the plane in Seattle," Every word made Mark's chest deflate, "I was the one who had to comfort her in a supply closet when she had that issue with Lexie–"

"I get it," Mark gritted out, "I get it! You're a saint–"

"No," Derek shook his head, "You don't get it. I'm not trying to be Archer, I am Archer."

  "Oh, please––"

  "I'm the closest thing to a brother she had. As much as you guys want to throw around things about me making things worse, if I wasn't for me nothing would've happened at all," Derek insisted, "You sit here and you talk about New York like I'm not the person who had to deal with it all on my own. I'm the only person who thought about Beth when you were off screwing my wife and Archer was busy back in his clinic."

A beat passed.

Mark shook his head.

"This isn't New York," He balanced each syllable on his tongue and watched as Derek paused with the revelation. "Archer's here."

This isn't this, this isn't that. It's been five fucking years. Let everyone move on.

"Yeah, Archer is here, this time," Derek breathed it out, "He wants to help. So I thought he'd be the best person to speak to Charlie about it."

Mark couldn't quite gather his thoughts on that. 

To him, this all appeared as some sort of big, mass conspiracy to stop Beth from leaving Seattle. There was something about Archer being involved, at Derek and the Montgomery sibling working together that made things, very suddenly, feel too real. 

The image flickered across his head: Archer grave and out of his depth, unsurely feeling his way around a perimeter that he didn't recognise while Derek was a guiding hand. 

Mark had once had so much contempt for that man too, but he couldn't find it within him in that moment–– his heart just twisted with a blindsided sense of pity.

"I mean it, Mark," Derek said after the silence had worn itself thin. He was collected but there was something so faintly brash about him, like violent music that had been turned down to its lowest volume. Mark didn't speak. "I'm trying to do what's best. You think I enjoy this?"

Mark was fairly sure that Derek wouldn't have wanted an honest answer to that question. 

For, in that moment, Mark was feeling years worth of agitation, of professional and personal jealousy that he'd never been able to vocalise. 

(Yes, Mark thought, Yes, you enjoy appearing like the better person.) 

This office, that name plate, they were all symbols of it: of how Derek always needed to be best, no matter what, even if it meant pushing down everyone else around him.

He loved Derek. He was a good friend when he needed it. But fuck, Mark had spent too many hours thinking about it, keeping it locked so tightly behind his ribs that the thrum of it sometimes almost felt like a second heartbeat. 

He could sense the familiar feeling of it in that moment. 

It was a mixture of anger, embarrassment and pain-stricken confusion.

Jealousy. Derek always got it. The marriages, the jobs, even a car that they'd competed over back in Manhattan (which Amy had eventually crashed, thank you Amelia.) Mark hadn't even been considered for the role of Chief, despite the fact that he knew so deeply that he worked just as hard as Derek did. 

Hell, Mark probably even had a better surgical record than Derek (had he been the one sulking in a forest after throwing all of his toys out of his stroller? No.) Derek came away from New York with two women fighting for him, while Mark had barely even been able to hold onto one.

And now here Derek Shepherd was, involving himself in Beth Montgomery's life, doing the one thing that Mark was terrified beyond his wits to do. 

Mark didn't know how the fuck he did it. 

Did he just not care? Was that what Mark was supposed to do? Be the sort of heartless bastard people expected him to be?

Was that all he needed to do to stop being second rate?

Mark's silence lingered like the granules at the bottom of a finished coffee cup. 

He swallowed his words so hard that he could feel each one clink at the bottom of his stomach. He wiped his clammy palms on his pant leg. Clearing his throat felt risky, but when he went to speak, Derek was already ahead of him.

"You can't trust her, Mark."

God, this whole thing was really beginning to truly pee him off.

"Fine," Mark said, feeling his skin crawl and his ears ring slightly. It was as if something had detonated in his face: the scathing sensation that maybe Beth wasn't fine. That everything he'd said over the past few minutes had been misplaced and misled. "You said she's hiding things? Like what?"

Across the desk, Derek appeared, for a moment, caught off guard.

"What?"

"You say she's a liar, right?" 

He was still confrontational and full of frustration, in a way that felt like echoes of a very plausible cause that once was. 

  "But if I remember correctly, we're the ones who have lied this whole time," He said, "Beth hasn't. I mean let's look at it all, yeah? We're all liars, isn't that what she said?"

"Mark," Derek said his name so warily, as if he was warning the Plastic Surgeon from going any further into that particular territory. "I don't think it's best to–"

"I mean, I had an affair," Mark said, continuing despite the warning. 

He was far too caught up in the moment to even breathe. He could feel the blood rushing through him, chilling his limbs and causing his heart to jump in his mouth. 

  "If anyone is a liar, it's me," Mark almost scoffed, "I lied about sleeping with Addison both in New York and at Christmas.... And... and god knows how many fuckin' other women? I lied to Lexie and caused that issue there. I lied about her engagement ring. I lied about –"

"Don't."

"You. You lied about ManWest and I let you. You lied and told her that Archer didn't want to deal with her back in New York," Mark continued despite the warning, feeling too caught up in the moment to even breathe. "You lied and told her that even though we both know that if Archer had known what was going on, fully, that he would've come running back and you wouldn't have been needed––"

"Mark."

He could see a muscle jumping in Derek's temple. 

Good, he wanted him pissed. 

Mark didn't have enough energy to emote for all of them. He felt as though he'd been feeling all the panic and chaos for everyone. 

It was about fucking time that Derek stepped up and actually took accountability of his own emotions.

"And Addison!" Mark took great pleasure in announcing her name. It was as if each time he spoke he was opening a new round of a one v all boxing match. "She lied about the affair too! She lied about whatever the fuck she was doing when Beth was shot! About god knows what else––"

"Mark."

"We're all hypocrites," He said it so loudly that he felt his whole body tremble with the weight of it. Derek seemed to sink deeper into his seat, the breath catching at the back of his throat as he watched his friends sanity shred very slightly. "Beth was right. We're all the bad guys here. We've all hidden things and been shitty to each other. We've all stabbed each other in the back and we all continue to. She had the right idea leaving. Hell, maybe I should––"

"Mark."

He didn't like how Derek was so able to control himself. 

Physically, he looked bothered. There was a slight red tint to his face that told Mark whatever his friend was about to say, was definitely not going to disarm anything. 

They'd long surpassed peace and, in true Mark fashion, he was so tempted just to pump the gas until everything spun so wildly out of control. The Chief of Surgery appeared so affected, but his voice was calm–– like gentle waters in the eye of a storm.

"You have no idea what Beth's done," He said it so carefully, as if he was a poker player so delicately thumbing his cards. 

Admittedly, Mark was pretty good at poker; he'd always been able to lie with a perfectly clean poker face, never give things away and was fairly good at slight of hand. But that didn't stop the foreboding feeling from sinking in his bones as Derek, so suddenly, appeared distracted by his own thoughts. 

   "You wouldn't be defending her––"

   "What?" Mark said so tightly, the whole world lodged at the back of his throat. He had to bite down on his tongue to avoid throwing down his hands. "She doesn't want trouble, Derek. What the fuck has she done for you and Addison to keep going after her?"

He didn't like the pause.

Derek looked so comfortable in his chair, but from the waist upwards, he was stock still. 

If Mark had thought that verbal conflict was the most remarkable part of the conversation, mental conflict was a whole different level–– he could see it, flickering on and on behind Derek's eyes as the man seemed to debate whether this was even worth touching on. 

It irked Mark, the deep sense that, once again, Mark wasn't allowed to know what was happening. He was forever on the outside, watching as people he'd once cared about so deeply were getting on perfectly fine without him.

Mark snorted to himself.

He'd tried his best. He had tried to bring some sense to this man. He'd bit his tongue for years, let Derek walk all over this hospital with entitlement in his step, oblivious to how much grief and pain he'd caused. 

He'd wanted to put an end to it, but Mark could tell that not even he, the person who had stuck at Derek's side since the beginning, could stir anything in those deep, desolate waters.

And now, Derek had nothing to say.

"Of course," The Plastic Surgeon said, his lip curling slightly. The silence amused him. "You don't have anything at all–"

"New York."

Derek's interruption, this time, caught Mark off-guard.

He'd been so prepared to leave. 

He'd gotten barely any information, but he'd gotten enough and, if he wasn't mistaken, his timer was almost up. What a short-fused, fleeting confrontation it had been, a handful of minutes that were stuffed in between all the others that seemed to pass a little too quickly. 

Mark had been fully ready to turn and make a dramatic effort, a scoff at the back of his throat alongside the knowledge that, at least, if things were bad, Archer might at least have Beth's best interests at heart.

But then Derek spoke and Mark found himself looking back. 

He was half turned towards the doorway and had to look back. His neck twisted slowly to watch the change in Derek's expression. 

The ex-Neurosurgeon was grinding his molars, pen down on the desk and hands clasped in front of him. 

There seemed to be a look of very brief regret on his face, one that flickered over as surely as Mark's brow crumpled.

"What?"

Derek closed his eyes for a brief second, shaking his head.

"Mark..."

There was such a gradual change in the feeling of the room. 

It became so evident that Derek had misspoke. He mumbled his best friends name with a voice that did not match the energy that had been here just moments ago–– 

No. Mark didn't want sudden softness. The change in Derek's facial features, the sudden dip of the Chief's chin as he looked down at his desk and inhaled sharply, deeply. Suddenly, the sleepless bruises underneath Derek's eyes became more pronounced.

He appeared so heavy, as if he'd been carrying something for such a long time––

  "No," Mark's voice was far sharper. 

He still held something so disastrous inside of him, something so wild and unkept. When he looked at Derek, he was full of insistence, of encouragement for the man to continue despite how reluctant he appeared.

    "What is it?" Mark asked, "What the hell happened?"

It must've been heavy. Really heavy. 

Mark watched Derek's shoulders sag. Was this his equivalent of Mark's past few days? 

The physical collapse of everything that had been building around them, of everything that had been unsaid? Or, had the miracle happened? Had Derek actually listened to anything he'd said––?

"Mark..." 

He wouldn't meet his eyes. 

This had thrown their dynamic off balance–– now there was nothing Mark could work with, no fire, no coldness, nothing but a very tired man in a very big chair. 

Mark almost had half a thought to look under the desk and see whether Derek's toes actually touched the ground. 

   "I don't think we should––"

Mark felt something in his chest snap. His emotions got caught in his mouth and he listened to them bleed through, letter by letter until his heart was staining the corporate carpet between them.

(He supposed, in retrospect, that maybe it was his heart. Or his patience. He was too clumsy to differ them from each other.)

"Please."

Derek's eye twitched at his tone.

There was such a fine line between anger and desperation.

Weeks of not knowing. Weeks of watching the people around him go to war over things that were widely unspoken. Weeks of wondering but being too afraid to ask. Weeks of just never knowing what to say in consolidation––

"Is it to do with that thing?" Mark asked, his voice so quick and so clogged with emotions that appeared with desperate flutters in his chest. It was such a familiar feeling. It was the same feeling that had driven him to break down that bathroom door with knuckles that were bloodied and bruised. "The surgery and the–"

"I don't want to–"

"C'mon Shep," Suddenly Mark sounded more desperate than he did mad, "Please. Give me something here."

(When Derek blinked, the sight of Mark was scoured on the inside of his eyelids like the outline of the sun. The sun was burning too brightly in downtown Seattle despite how the sky was dark and Derek had had to turn all of his lamps and lights to continue his work. He felt blistered too, struck embarrassed by the slip of his temper and the devastation that he knew would follow. Mark was there, bright and burning like a candle that was on the verge of being snuffed. His eyes silently pleaded for Derek to say it––)

(But what to say?)

(He'd come too close too often. He'd almost said it so many times. He'd almost said it out of spite and he'd almost said it out of pity too.)

(He knew how badly Mark wanted things. He knew how intensely and alien Mark loved. He knew how much this would ruin the man.)

(And he knew how bad it would ruin Beth too.)

Mark was thinking about how he'd been so convinced that Beth had hurt herself when she'd left New York. 

How what little information he'd been left with had lead him to fill in very small blanks–– how Beth had been on her own, in a dangerous situation and how things had been covered up so neatly that no one had even thought to ask questions.

Ultimately, too, he was thinking about how he would've never forgiven himself if Beth had taken her life because of his affair with Addison Forbes Montgomery.

Derek cleared his throat. 

In a series of very short and unceremonious movements, he reached for a draw in his desk. Mark watched every second, watched every movement and every twitch of the man's very serious and conflicted face. 

Mark, suddenly, felt breathless, as if all of this running and all of this cardio over the past twenty minutes, had left him robbed of any co-ordination or cool. 

He watched, with aching lungs, as Derek pressed a medical file into the table top, his hand lingering as he seemed to put together the pieces of what exactly to say.

A beat passed.

Mark stared at the very familiar manila folder in the centre of the wood.

"Mark I just–"

"No," Mark cut him off, his brow furrowed as he thought about the last time he'd held that tangle of papers in his hand. Confusion burned where tears were biologically inclined to linger. "What is--?"

Derek took a deep breath.

"She was pregnant."

At first, Mark thought he'd misheard.

There were so many words in the English language. He would've known, he was the sort of guy who never stopped talking, always finding something to say, always finding new words to weaponise into some sort of seduction–– but that, those words seemed to slip right through him as if he'd never heard them before.

A numbness settled deep into Mark's bones.

His chin raised to look at his best friend.

"W-What?"

(Derek swallowed a lump at the back of his throat, watching as Mark's eyes suddenly went glassy.)

(He took a step back, processing the words and grimacing as if he'd just been shot. For a very brief moment, Derek looked downwards, expecting to see the blood pooling from beneath Mark's scrubs, watching dark spots appear like the blindspots Beth had left in all of their lives.)

(Derek felt tears bite the back of his eyes. He looked over to the window and was confronted with the reflection of himself, a pale faced, tired man eclipsed against the dark, stormy Seattle sky. He saw Mark too, a frozen man stuck in time, hanging onto his words as the world kept moving on and on and–)

"I don't think she left New York because of you and Addie..."

It was all spoken so slowly, but it was still so fast. 

His ears were ringing again so he had to strain to hear. His body was tight, his chest was too small and his heart was beating too fast. 

Mark hadn't breathed in a minute and his whole world was beginning to scream. He felt his vision blur very slightly and it occurred to him that he hadn't cried since he'd washed Beth's blood off of his hands.

Suddenly, Mark was that kid again. Sitting on a bench, looking over Derek as the two of them bonded in their loneliness. 

A band geek too estranged from the world to fit in and the jock who was too out of touch to feel anything. 

He stared at the man who he'd once secretly believed had saved his life, and listened at his whole life fell to ash. 

Maybe he melting, maybe Mark was dripping away into puddles of candle wax, far more potent than the salt water that stung his throat.

A roll of thunder shuddered the world around them.

Derek's eyes met his.

"Beth left you because she was pregnant, Mark."