𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙑𝙄𝙄𝙄.
MOTHER'S DAUGHTER

──────

tw for drug use
please take care! if you're not comfy w topics of
drug use etc feel free to skip this one out. don't worry.
your readership is not and never will be more important
than your mental and physical health!

oh and tw for new york bark too

✧

NEW YORK

HOW COULD SUCH a little thing cause so much anguish?

That was the thought that settled in her mind as she stared at it. 

It balanced on her palm, smooth, unassuming and perfectly lethal. 

It was smaller when it was in her hand, she felt like a giant or a child playing with miniature toys. Such a tiny little pill, one that she could roll between her thumb and forefinger, imagining the feeling that it would evoke through her body.

 It was blue in colour, she supposed that it almost looked like a candy. If she thought about it hard enough, she could imagine being a kid again, eating raspberry sours from a bag and smearing blue powder across her clothes until Bizzy Forbes was almost brought to a scowl. 

Sure, it wouldn't taste too great and it wouldn't be sweet nor sour, but it would be sweet to her for a little while.

She crushed it against the restroom countertop with the back of a store loyalty card.

In the process, her eyes flickered upwards to meet her own in the mirror, seeing the reflection that calmly went through each step as if it was ingrained in her brain. 

She glanced at herself in fractures, seeing a woman who, beneath the makeup and the hair, was exhausted beyond wits end, desperate for something to make her feel connected to herself again.

 Somewhere at the bottom of those slightly bloodshot eyes, she saw that same girl, the one who had raced around the streets of suburban Connecticut with a passion and grit for life, a hunger to make something of herself and do something worth noticing. 

That same girl was horrifically dissatisfied with what she was about to do––

She stooped against the countertop.

When she straightened, she was obsessively checking her hair, trying to pick out any visible flaw in her appearance. 

She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand, inhaling hard until she felt her mood pick up. She dusted the powder that lingered, briefly chuckling over the fact that it did, indeed, make her look like a kid who had been eating too many raspberry sours. 

(For a moment, she felt the same sort of secrecy she'd felt then, hiding in bushes away from the eyes of her mother, scoffing them all before dinner.) 

The face that met her, again, was still marked with tiredness, with exhaustion that bruised easily under each eye. 

But there was something new there, a new fire that was pushed forwards by the help of something so little and obscure.

She looked more like her mother than she did herself. 

Beth was not particularly the name that came to mind when she stared at her own reflection. This woman was a picture of socialite fantasy, of hair pulled back too tight and lipstick painted too thick. 

She smoothed down the front of her dress (she'd been so careful to pick it out, his favourite) and straightened her posture until her shoulders ached–– everything ached these days, it was almost impossible to pick it out from the other parts that inherently wanted to shake. 

With a quick glance, she checked her watch on her wrist, rubbing her lips together to blot the colour.

Beth had been awake for seventy two hours.

She could hear each second tick by.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick–

"Beth?"

Two rooms away, she heard him call her name across the apartment. 

The sound of the front door thudded distantly. 

He was home. 

With a sense of urgency, Beth gave herself a final once over in the mirror, trialling a blistering, perfect smile that she knew he'd love. It felt a lot like a puppet show, strings pulling until one by one until each muscle twitched and fell into a cohesive smile. It was painfully synthesised and brash to the eye. 

She blinked quickly, feeling her blood tremble with, what was slowly becoming, the familiar effects of a high. 

A quick but clumsy palm cleared any traces of her indiscretion from the counter. 

She slid her loyalty card into an unseen crevice.

"Just coming!" Beth called back.

***

─── Mark didn't know what was going on.

He didn't know where to look. 

His eyes wheeled around what he'd walked into, brow furrowing as he set his apartment keys on the countertop. 

He had to squint, eyes struggling as he walked from such a brightly lit stairwell and hallway into a room that was lit by candles. 

For a split second, he wondered whether there was a power cut that he hadn't been made aware of, a chaos lurking behind such a dark but peaceful space. 

(They'd had one a few weeks ago, accumulating with a very long and painful shift of patients caught up in the gloom. But he'd managed to steal a kiss from Beth in the back of a very dark room, so he considered it somewhat a success despite how badly he hated every second of the nighttime.)

Candles were gathered on furniture tops, casting a warm glow that lit just enough for Mark to be able to see in every crack and corner of the room. 

He wandered through the shadows, hesitantly looking around for the woman he was surprised was even home. His gaze bounced from the closed door in the distance to the dining table that was fully dressed. 

An open bottle of wine sat beside two set places, a candle in the centre illuminating the edges of buffed cutlery. In the corner of the room, the stereo was softly playing Frankie Valli; he could hear it so faintly, accompanying his steps as he crossed the room and gently laid his jacket on the back of the couch.

It was needless to say, this was far from what he'd expected.

Mark had anticipated an empty apartment. 

He'd anticipated everything dim and lifeless, with maybe a crack of light lingering just beneath Amy's door. 

He'd anticipated that sort of emptiness to the apartment that would drive him to briefly consider going to his own apartment on the other side of the city, watching something on his VCR and then coming back purely for the few hours he'd be able to pull Beth's body into his own. He'd anticipated the same sort of quiet and disattached loneliness that he'd grown so used to in his childhood–– but then the door to Beth's bedroom almost burst off of it's hinges.

His girlfriend appeared with an almost ceremonious fanfare, her clean saccharine smile shiny as if she'd been buffing it behind closed doors. 

He had to blink at her, at her suddenness and her clarity; it was like a cloud clearing past the sun, a sudden blast of bright energy and Mark was, momentarily, stunned.

She was holding a Martini in either hand, making him off-handedly wonder what exactly she'd been doing in the bedroom with two cocktail glasses. 

A pair of heels clicked against the hardwood floor as she walked and, if Mark strained long enough, he could feel the reverb of each impact through the rubber soles of his shoes. She walked so definitively, so concisely. 

Her hair was in a tight ponytail, slick and sleek, and her red lips were still pulled into a smile that made his chest tremble slightly. A very familiar black dress swished with every stride, the hem glazing the skin just above her knee.

Mark just blinked again.

"Hi."

His greeting was hesitant. 

The sound got tangled at the back of his throat, the sort of sound that was more of a breath than it was a spoken word. He was still half stooped from laying his jacket and had to straighten so abruptly as Beth approached him. 

She came in a cloud of perfume, swirling through his respiratory system until Chanel No.5 was baked into his DNA. 

Now closer, Mark managed to look at her in fragments: the red lipstick, the gilded edges, the sparkle in her eye––

Beth's lip twitched as she whispered back to him:

"Hi."

She said it as if it was a secret, passing him one of the Martini glasses in her hand. 

He gave her a similarly hesitant smile, a dent appearing between his eyebrows as she pressed her lips against his cheek. 

Her hand squeezed the top of his forearm and, before he could register what was happening, she was gliding past him, off into the kitchen. 

For a moment, Mark just stared at the glass in his hand, his mind and heartbeat racing a little too quickly for someone standing perfectly still.

Slowly, he turned to face her. He just stared.

He didn't want to place what she reminded him of, pausing to take a sip of her dry Martini as she went to adjust something on the cooker. 

He squinted–– no, he knew exactly what this was an image of, and why it was making his head spin. 

There was something about the suddenness of her, of the flawless perfection of every folded edge and buffed corner of her: it felt like Addison, or, more precisely, Beatrice Forbes.

"What's going on?"

He sounded so tentative, so very vaguely concerned. 

Her chin lifted and she gave him another blistering full smile, one that was enough to cause the hairs to raise on the back of his neck. 

Mark, very carefully, placed his glass down onto the dining table. 

In the kitchen, Beth was stooping to drag something out of the oven, producing a meal from the back of the appliance. His brow furrowed even further.

"We're celebrating!"

It didn't really help.

He was still deeply confused, stuck in between the nonchalance of how she spoke and the way that she seemed to bubble with an energy that he almost didn't recognise. 

She was too energetic for late in the day, but it came with the whole image–– when he blinked, he almost mistook her for her mother again, the perfectly pieced together hostess who could throw together a meal with nothing but grace. 

(Mark had met Bizzy Forbes a total of three times, at Addison and Derek's wedding, at Addison and Derek's vow renewals and at the wedding where he'd pretended to be Beth's date. He knew that she was a very peculiar woman, harsh and unwavering in every sense of the word. But he also knew that she had a front of very overwhelming perfection, like a mannequin that was a little too clean. It caught him off-guard to watch Beth show any trace of her Mother's genetics.)

"Okay," He said very hesitantly, his eyes following her as she brushed past him. 

Every time she passed she gave him that same, overjoyed smile, the candles somehow burning brighter with every pass. She encouraged him to sit, so he lingered beside the dining table, brow still drawn downwards. 

  "Okay––" He repeated, then his brow furrowed, "What... what are we celebrating exactly?"

Mark, honestly, hadn't had good news in a very good time. 

He was completely lost as to what exactly could warrant this: the candles, the home cooked meal–– a home cooked meal?

 He stared at it as she passed with plates. 

He'd become so accustomed to take out and evenings that it was almost alarming.

Fuck, he thought, hit with a sudden cold sweat as Beth pulled out his seat and nudged her chin down for him to sit, Did I forget our anniversary?

No, Mark was fairly sure it wasn't their anniversary. 

He squinted down at the food on the table and then at Beth as she opened a bottle of wine. Her Martini was already half drained; she must've been drinking it in the bedroom before he'd even arrived. 

Mark sat hesitantly, more inclined to follow suit just out of the novelty of having Beth here, having her in front of them––

It wasn't just her energy that was out of place. It was this. 

Seeing her smile with such love in her eyes, enough for a lump to grow at the back of his throat.

 He felt a little too small for this chair, all too aware of the fact that he'd almost grown accustomed to her absence. 

She'd taken to avoiding him again, diverting long conversation by placing her lips on his and the ungodly bargaining chip of sex. 

(Although, admittedly, Mark hadn't exactly put up much of a fight. In fact, he'd agreed with her to some extent; frenzied touching and the kind of sounds he could elicit through those lips of her was a whole lot better than talking things out. He couldn't handle the long discussions, but he could handle her body.) 

This, this suddenness of Beth and something that felt very domestic, of something that felt unlike anything he knew.

"It's just some good news," was Beth's belated response. 

She beamed those words over the table with all of the light she could muster. 

He wondered whether it illuminated the slight dent in his brow.

He couldn't think of any good news. 

Well, that was other than the good news of his professional life. 

He'd had a patient pull through today after a very long, taxing surgery. 

But Church and State told him that it was very unlikely that that was exactly what she was talking about.

Beth was sat directly opposite him, on the other side of a table that was dressed like a page ripped from a decorum magazine. From this angle, moreover, it almost appeared as if she was on fire. 

The candle flames danced in her eyes, making Mark wonder whether he'd accidentally walked into some distorted purgatory, one in which Beth felt off and the whole world felt too warm under his collar. 

Her pupils shone with the flicker of it, drawing him in deeper and deeper until it was all he could think about. 

She looked beautiful, that was one thing that Mark couldn't deny–– this liveliness, this excitement and, what he vaguely identified as, love looked astonishing on her.

When it became clear that Mark was bewildered as he was underdressed, Beth seemed incapable of keeping it in anymore. 

She seemed to swell in her chair, her shoulder rising as she loosened the bottle on the table and took in a very long breath.

"Okay, so Derek might've let it slip..."

That wasn't a very promising sentence opener.

 Immediately, Mark was rushing through his memories trying to pick up any little clues of what Derek might've let loose. Within seconds he ran through weeks upon years of conversation, scanning any inflexion or tone for anything that could be––– 

Oh.

The ring box in the dresser back in his apartment suddenly had his full attention.

He wouldn't, right? Derek wouldn't, would he? 

Mark hadn't even said that he was considering it. 

No one even knew that he had it–– 

Well, he wasn't even considering it. 

No, he wouldn't say that–– 

No, he wouldn't go as far as to say he was considering it.

 No, it was just more of an option––

Oh fuck.

He looked at Beth's happiness, the way that she seemed to hum so brightly like a live wire. 

She'd been torn out of her socket and now she sat there, unapologetically loud and overt in her joy. Inwardly, Mark felt a little tiny piece of himself die. 

If Derek had told Beth that Mark had mentioned proposing at Christmas (even in the most off-handed of passings), then Mark knew he was fucked. 

Undoubtedly fucked. Fucked harder than anything he'd ever experienced in his life. 

He knew what Beth was like. He knew that in between the professionalism, the career-oriented tunnel-vision and emotional dedication to keeping her life as intact as possible, he knew that she was a Montgomery, through and through.

Experience from Addison and her relationship with Derek had taught Mark how determined women could be. 

The elder Montgomery sister had been so focused on her future, not only on her career but Derek too. 

The neurosurgeon had joked too many times that Addison had chosen him, not he her. 

She'd walked into that room and decisively chosen him and he'd went along with it, falling her lead even when it came to falling in love. 

She'd had her whole life planned out with him from the moment that they'd met. 

Beth had even joked about how, after their first date, she'd received a phone call from Addison claiming that this was it–– that she could book their wedding venue now for three years time and send out save the dates. 

Mark didn't doubt it.

Even when things had played out exactly like she'd predicted, Addison had sniffed her engagement ring out like a dog smelling infidelity on its owner. 

Derek had known, he'd been able to see tampering on his hiding spot from a mile away ("Don't use the sock draw," Derek had drawled over a sticky bar top in their college bar, "She found it within the week.") 

She'd been like a dog with a bone, relentless, focused, strategic. Beth had said she'd practicised her surprised reaction in the mirror for a week. 

Again, Mark didn't doubt it.

It was who they were. His own girlfriend had been like that too. 

He hadn't missed how Beth had been so concise and organised when it came to her ex-fiancé, Calum. 

She'd been so invested, cracking a wry smile when Mark had congratulated her on her own engagement. 

There'd been a flicker in her eye then too; it was almost self-satisfactory, as if she'd won in some way. Something had been accomplished, a door had been closed––

A Montgomery was, and always would be, on the hunt.

The thought of it falling to him, now, made Mark's heart jump into his throat. 

He averted his gaze down onto the table and he took a large mouthful of his Martini to stop his mouth from desiccating. 

Every muscle in his body felt tight. 

The candles felt too much. 

Was it hot in here? 

Was it only him that was sweating?

Mark watched the olives bop around sadly at the bottom of his cocktail glass.

"He let what slip?"

He'd almost forgotten about the conversation, getting too caught up in the cold feeling of being caught out.

 It was as if she'd poured a glass of ice cold water all of his head, leaving him chilly and completely unprepared for the direction of this conversation. 

Beth's eyebrows raised, as if she hadn't expected him to be so lost. In reality, he was just playing dumb–– He, honestly, couldn't think of anything else that it could be. 

This was it, she was going to tell him that she knew about the engagement ring and he was going to be dragged into something he wasn't even certain about-–

"I think he was too excited," Beth said. She reached over and filled her glass, asking Mark very shortly whether he wanted some red too. He shook his head, jaw too tight for him to really say anything more. "I could tell that he wasn't supposed to tell me... but you know... Derek's Derek and he gets carried away in the moment and he just couldn't help himself––"

"What?" 

  He chipped it between clenched teeth, a turmoil in his stomach making it impossible to even think about eating. He watched as Beth chewed on a piece of rocket, doing a very Addison thing of setting out context before getting to the point. Mark wished she'd hurry up. 

  "What did he let slip?"

Please don't say the–

"The proposal."

Oh crap.

Mark couldn't remember the last time he'd been physically winded by two words before. 

He felt his body go into a very deep state of internalised panic but managed to keep his exterior completely unbothered. 

It was a talent of his, Mark figured, a little neat skill that he'd been able to develop over years of being an undeniable ass; he could appear so unfazed despite how much his heart rate raised. And oh boy, did it. 

He felt his organs curdle with an intense, deep rooted stress that he had to swallow and fight against so strictly.

She'd said it so nonchalantly too. There was no fanfare, no glamorisation. 

Just those two words: The Proposal. 

It was as if it was any other day and any other topic. 

Meanwhile, Mark felt as though he was going to throw up.

Calmly, he picked up his Martini glass and fished the olive from the bottom of it. 

Skewered and soggy. Mark felt as though there was a metaphor there somewhere. He dragged it off with his teeth and, as he chewed, he feigned a deep look of confusion, as if he had no clue what she was talking about. 

In reality, he was surprised she couldn't hear the thud, thud, thud of his heartbeat as it threatened to tear its way through muscle, vessel and bone.

"What proposal?"

His equally nonchalant response was met with a head turned by a fraction, lips pressed into a hesitant line. 

Beth had been watching him closely, her eyes tracking the way that he had to press his fingertips into the table clothing for an extended moment, just to stop them from trembling. She appeared more confused than suspicious. 

She didn't look crestfallen either. Wasn't that what women were supposed to be when a man played dumb over a marriage proposal? 

Disappointed? Crushed? 

Mark was used to disappointment in women, he'd once joked that it kept him looking so young, but this didn't feel quite right.

It wasn't like Mark enjoyed lying to Beth either, he just didn't particularly want to feel it. It, being the sense of embarrassment that he felt whenever he thought about how tight of a hold this woman held on him–– C'mon, he was Mark Sloan. 

He had women begging at his heels, throwing themselves at him and look what he was reduced to... a man at a mercy of a woman who, sometimes, didn't even want him. 

While he was, indeed, Mark Sloan, she was Beth Montgomery and it scared him at all times, what he'd do for her. 

There was something so excruciatingly painful about the thought of Beth knowing that he wanted her so much that he was willing to throw aside a whole lot of his pre-established morals for her.

So much for I don't date, Mark thought to himself.

A proposal was, quite frankly, the worst thing that Mark could think of.

Despite the detour in the mood, Beth didn't seem fazed either. 

Her confusion was fast-tracked, blazing through by the time Mark had safely swallowed his first olive. 

He started on the second as she seemed to linger in the pause between his question and her answer. 

In that silence, Mark theorised about what she would say next: would she call bullshit? Would she shrug it off as a joke? Would she call him an asshole and demand for him to answer for his lies–?

She did neither of those things.

Instead, Beth just blinked at him.

"The proposal," Beth repeated, a little slower this time, as if she was sure he knew what she was talking about. 

A little haphazardly and a little too quickly, Mark just shrugged, shaking his head to indicate no, he wasn't following. Across the table, her brow folded and she adjusted her skirt. 

   "They accepted the proposal at the private clinic over in Brooklyn––"

Oh.

Mark's chewing stopped.

Realisation was very slow to settle in but Mark imagined the sensation of it to be a whole lot like a dying man being given a life-saving cure. 

His muscles softened, his heart skipped a beat and the world seemed less harsh. 

Within a matter of moments, Mark's blood pressure had levelled itself out, his heart had stopped it's marathon and he felt as though he could actually breathe.

The proposal. Not that proposal. The other proposal. 

The business proposal. 

The proposal involving Mark, Derek and Archer's private practice. 

The offer that he and Derek had put down to assume complete control over all of the practice's assets–– yeah, that one. 

Not an engagement ring, not a Central Park carriage ride, just crunched numbers, a signature on paper and a crisp handshake over a corporate desk.

Mark swallowed his olive and nodded slowly. He eased out a very light, effortless, chuckle.

"Damn it." 

He sounded cool and collected and not at all like the very time-efficient mental breakdown he'd been having over the past few seconds. His plan was to play it off casually, as if Derek letting slip on a business proposal was, indeed, the worst case scenario. 

  "He can't keep his mouth shut for the life of him–"

"It's big news," Beth said, oblivious to the moment that had just played out across from her.

 Mark hummed lightly, smiling as she expressed her honest, genuine excitement for him. 

  "It's incredible news Mark," She corrected herself, "I'm sorry if I ruined whatever surprise you wanted it to be for me. I know it was your news to share... I just got excited and I wanted to... I thought I would do something nice to celebrate."

She raised her arms and gestured to the table between them. In all honesty, nice was an understatement.

 Sure, if she'd asked him, outright, what his idea of celebration was, he would've said something canonically douchey. Sex, that was his pre-programmed answer, really nasty and dirty sex. The sort that reinforced his manhood and pandered to his ego–– but this, this was the sort of softness that satisfied a very deep part of him. 

He followed her gesture down and looked at his plate, at all of the things she'd put a lot of time, thought and effort into. His chest filled with a fluttery feeling and he was, for a split second in time, so grateful for her that it almost caused him physical pain.

He was filled with the same feeling that had discovered him in that on-call room at Christmas. 

It was the sensation of being thought of, of being accommodated and celebrated–– when Beth leant forwards in her chair, resting her chin on clasped hands and looking at him with round eyes full of pride, Mark had to clear his throat to stop himself from getting too swept away.

His head bobbed in a nod. 

His mouth tasted sour and his eyes grew uncharacteristically wet. 

He distracted himself with another mouthful of his Martini. 

As if she knew, Beth smiled, the gesture soft and tender this time.

"I know it's a bit... unorthodox," Beth continued, her fingers attempting to flatten a fold in the table cloth (He didn't know where she'd even found this. He'd never seen it in his life.) "But, uh, I thought it would be nice to just sit down and... have some time to the two of us–"

"It's really nice," Mark interjected. 

He didn't need an explanation. His voice cracked very slightly from the pressure in his chest. Beth's eyes lit up and he recognised the insecurity at the back of her eyes as it faded away. He needed the movement to move on so he adjusted himself in his chair. 

  "I feel weirdly underdressed––"

His post-work clothing of just a tshirt and jeans didn't match her flawless presentation. He felt as out-of-place as he did at most dinner tables, maybe even more.

"Oh it's..." 

She made a dismissive noise at the back of her throat, shaking her head. Then Beth paused and chuckled as if her whole train of thought was silly. 

  "It's stupid," Beth said, "I just wanted to uh–– Don't worry about it."

Her eyes glazed his and he just quirked an eyebrow.

She snorted to herself, "Okay. Fine. It's kind of a tradition, y'know? Uh, back when my Dad signed his first contract for the practice back home, we hosted this big fancy meal. My Mom did it all... she invited all of these friends and family members and... and she had all this food and these desserts and cocktails and..."

 With a slight smile on her face, she inclined her chin down at the Martini glass in his hand. 

"She made my Dad his favourite drink," Beth said, "Never even had a hair out of place. Then, when Archer got his own practice, Addison did the same for him... but she had it at Eleven Madison Park because of course..."

Mark watched her lips as she faded off into a memory that seemed warm to her. 

Her smile persisted, through every word, through every dip and turn in her thoughts. 

With every passing moment, Mark felt his chest fill with an indescribable lightness; he felt as though the sun was shining through him, meeting every organ, every muscle and every bone with an unparalleled softness. His lips twitched slightly.

"But I just," Beth shrugged, dropping her eyes to look around at all the dishes, "I thought we could continue it. So here I am, making Martinis and looking pretty and you're joining the tradition." A pause and she made sure she held his gaze. "You deserve tradition, Mark. This is major."

He couldn't quite contain his smile.

He'd learnt fairly early on that the dinner table was a sacred territory for their family. 

It'd been established immediately with introductions, meeting Addison over a Michellin Star soup that did not fit Mark and Derek's usual college bar haunts. 

But he could feel how the interpretations of it differed between them–– there was Addison with her weekly restaurant reservations, stiff upper lip and hundreds-of-dollars-bottles-of-wine. But then there was Beth, his girl, and this moment right here, with her take on a gently made homely meal and (decent) attempt at a dry Martini. 

They weren't sat in a fancy skyscraper with a view over the Hudson or a room that was so dreadfully lit that Mark struggled to read the price tags. 

It was her apartment and the tea lights he could so vividly imagine her lighting one by one, occasionally swearing under her breath as she just about caught her finger on the flame.

"Now," Beth added, her face twisting as she looked down at her plate, "I know I'm not Bizzy Forbes when it comes to cooking––"

"It looks good," Mark encouraged, being truthful as he looked down at what he recognised to be the only home recipe Beth had carried with her. 

He'd had it before. He liked it and he was fairly sure he'd like it again. His chin rose with the urge to sway her attention away from her intrusive doubts. 

  Dryly, Mark gestured around them. "But I'm not seeing any family or friends––"

"No," She said lightly, raising her freshly filled wine glass across the table, "It's just you and me."

He didn't miss how she seemed to smile even wider at those words.

"Me and you?"

 Mark lifted his Martini. Beth hummed under her breath, nodding her head. There was a look in her eye that made his heart skip a beat. 

  Feigning a moment of deep contemplation, Mark eventually nodded back. "Yeah, I think I can work with that."

Their glasses met in the middle with a very small clink.

***

─── She didn't feel half as exhausted as she thought she would.

The pills had done wonders, as they did every time. 

Beth found herself alert and attentive, just as she had been when she'd thrown this all together–– her stress and anxiety had congealed into a lump at the back of her throat as she'd navigated dinner prep and spirits and skewering olives on cocktail sticks. 

She would've loved to say that she'd been able to pull it all off with the same gravitas and elegance as a one Bizzy Forbes, but it really hadn't been the case. 

Movements had been flustered, timings had been screwed up and she'd spent an hour despaired over everything just going to shit––

It had occurred to her precisely five minutes into this whole thing, that she was completely out of her depth. 

This wasn't her thing, Sure, she'd been good at the cocktail part but that was only because her alcoholic father had started teaching her how to make them for him when she turned fourteen. The rest of it, however, had been a very large and impossible task.

But no, Beth had saved it. 

She'd tried to approach it with the same orderly sensibility that she used in her work, and she'd rationalised everything until this felt like her and not of a middle-aged burnt out socialite who had made her husband sleep in a different room until she'd gotten around to divorcing him.

 Water had been re-poured, sweaty brows had been wiped and Beth had skillfully chipped burnt flakes off of chicken as if she was in neurosurgery isolating a bleed.

And now, sitting opposite her boyfriend, she felt like it was worth it. 

She felt some sort of semblance of what Addison and Bizzy had wanted her to be: a dinner table that was somewhat cohesive, a dress that was neatly laundered and a evening that seemed to be going okay. 

(Suck on that, Beth thought to herself as she nursed her wine and ate her food, I'm putting Addie in the dust.) 

But then again, she knew that this whole thing was built off a lot more than just a celebration–

Whenever Mark met her eye, she thought about that fundraiser and it filled her with a sense of dread. 

She thought about how Isaac Cochran had stared straight into her soul and gutted her like a fish, leaving all of the world to see how exactly she'd been trying to juggle some sort of double life.

 She'd lost all sense of self that evening and Beth knew that she was still really struggling to come to terms with it. It'd left a distance between the two of them and Beth didn't like it.

She wanted Mark here. It broke her heart to know that he would ever think of feel otherwise.

Beth dropped her chin to clear food onto her fork, but was momentarily distracted by a line of blue in her thumbnail, a traitorous sign that she was no longer living on her own. She wasn't holding up her own head and she was not moving her own feet––

She spent the remainder of the meal trying to chip the Adderall out from her cuticles.

***

─── Mark couldn't remember having meals like this in his childhood.

His family definitely hadn't been the sit down and have a home meal type. 

His parents had both been workaholics, his Dad in law and his Mom on Wall Street, and they'd never had time for this. 

While Beth's whole childhood had orbited around the dining room table, he'd never sat it at his.

No, it'd been more of a sorry looking monument, one that was greeted by a thin film of dust in between the visits by their cleaners. 

It'd been round, picked out of Architectural Digest, and had more chairs surrounding it than a young Mark had friends. 

There'd been a bowl of fruit in the centre of it, albeit plastic bananas and grapes, and he'd spent hours maneuvering around it, accepting it as part of the scenery and part of charade–– he would eat his meals in the kitchen with his Nanny. 

His parents would eat hours after he'd been put to bed.

Even here, when Beth was working, Mark had gotten accustomed to eating on his own. He'd taken to cooking in her kitchen and making things that resembled somewhat healthy, put together meals. 

Mark did have structure to his day, he did have a life that he'd for himself, fitting things into the gaps that Beth left. 

Every morning, before work, he'd make his granola, do a semblance of a work out routine and make a coffee with Beth's French Press for just the hell of it. 

Sometimes he'd see Amy, giving her a slight nod as she passed through the space after whatever she'd done before. 

His life without Beth present was unanimously peaceful in the same way his childhood had been: empty chairs at empty tables and the almost childlike way he navigated them.

His shiftless evenings were much the same. 

He'd contemplate going to the gym and more than often go, just happy to find himself in somewhere that wasn't silent. 

He felt like a mosquito, forever just wafting from one place to the next, perpetually tensed as if he was going to be swatted at any moment–– he liked the night the most. 

When there was a body beside him that he could wrap his arms around and hold on tight to and sleep without a care in the world.

"So, do they have a timeline?"

Beth's voice brought him back into the moment. 

He found himself back in his chair, watching her eyes glisten over the rim of her wine glass as she waited for his response. Mark's eyebrows raised, having zoned out for the good part of the last few minutes.

"Hm?"

"For the practice," Beth specified, not exactly exasperated by the fact that he hadn't been listening. They were both very busy, tired people, it was expected. "Have they given you any timeline for when you'll be up and open––"

Mark paused.

There had been a reason that he hadn't told Beth about the practice.

"Uh," His brow crumpled as if to recall information that was lost at the back of his head. It was, he supposed, a repressed thought that he'd tried to bury as far as it would go. He shook his head slowly. "I don't think we have anything right now, but, uh, I'm sure it'll all get figured out––"

"It's exciting!" Beth interjected, her smile almost blinding for him. "It's a whole new chapter for you, Mark. I'm so proud of you."

Exciting, Mark felt his own smile twitch at the conviction in her voice, Very exciting.

Idly, he thought about the meeting, about how he'd been thinking about it for the past week without bringing it up in what limited conversation they had with each other. 

If he had to describe it, Mark wasn't exactly sure whether exciting was the word he'd use. The meeting itself had been long and taxing, Derek had lead everything with a presentation and Archer had been absently sat in the centre, nodding along to every word of the pitch as if he hadn't heard it three times over. 

It was the other people in the room who had resurfaced time and time again in Mark's subconscious, the distant faces of people who were in the private practice industry, slightly glassy eyed and noticeably flushed from the lack of adrenaline in their veins––

Mark didn't like it.

He wasn't sure what it was about those two hours, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to be happy when Archer had phoned him, two days later, to say that their proposal had been accepted and that the documents were almost ready for them to sign. 

It was the first time that Mark had ever heard anything close to pride in Archer's voice; where the eldest Montgomery had always looked at him with disdain, he'd phoned up and his tone had so clearly praised Mark for this decision, for getting into the practice industry. 

Archer thought Mark was doing something right.

Mark, however, wasn't too sure.

"It's going to be a lot of work," Beth commented idly, pushing fallen hair up out of her face as she continued to drag along the conversation. Mark just watched her cutlery scrape against plates that she'd thrifted over in Williamsburg. "It's like you've got a little project, right? It's going to be a lot of organising and I mean... if you need help I can spare a hand–"

"You're already too busy."

It was a very passing statement of concern and wariness.

Beth's chin lifted to give him a slightly frazzled smile, "I'm sure I can find time for you."

Mark just stared at her, his thoughts a little too messy for him to decode. 

It didn't occur to him until that moment that he hadn't really eaten anything–– he wasn't hungry, just as he hadn't been from the exact moment that Archer had made that phone call. He just couldn't stop thinking about that room full of those corporate drones; how they'd all looked so cool, so collected. 

Mark couldn't remember the last time that he'd had anything less than a heart murmur. 

They didn't look stressed, in fact, they'd looked carefree, a room full of men who were almost bored in their presentation, the top investors in private healthcare on the island and they all looked so––

"Are you thinking of changing the name?"

Her question made Mark shrug.

"The Montgomery Clinic might raise some eyebrows," Mark said indifferently, throwing in a second shrug in place of punctuation. Beth chuckled and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. "I mean... we're buying it from the son–"

"And you're both in cohorts with the two women."

"Cohorts?" Mark's eyebrow raised very slightly and she smiled into her wine. He nodded after a moment of contemplation. "Yeah, I guess that's how you'd put it, huh?"

He didn't particularly want to be in cohorts with Archer, that's what he'd been struggling to say to anyone for the past week. 

He'd been hesitant on how to word it, but maybe cohorts with the way–– He'd been put off by that meeting and then everything else had fallen in suit. 

He'd had so many thoughts, so many realisations about what he wanted to do with his career and none of them particularly aligned with the private industry.

He was a surgeon. He wanted to practice surgery. He and Derek had done the statistics: their job would be primarily admin and consultation and surgery wasn't guaranteed. He hadn't trained to do paperwork, he'd trained to change lives. He was good with his hands, he saved lives with these hands, and the insurmountable dread that filled him at being office bound made his tongue tie.

"I can imagine it," Beth said after a beat, sitting back in her chair so she was balanced on the hind legs. "The two of you in that office, changing lives one after the other, in that little private OR that Archer built using the money from that fundraiser at Frevo. You in that suit that you got a few months back the one with the red pocket square..." She drifted off thinking about it, sighing as if it was more of a dream than a nightmare. "Playing rock paper scissors for the corner office, getting it and then you have that beautiful view over the river–"

Mark managed a laugh.

"Oh, I'd win it."

"Yeah," Beth said, her laugh meeting his in a way that made goosebumps draw out on the back of his arms. "Yeah, you would. But Derek would put up a fight–"

"Not a good one."

"He'd try," She chuckled, shaking her head as if the thought of the two of them in business was enough chaos to even begin with. (Mark finished his Martini, barely even fazed at how quickly he demolished it.) Beth rolled her eyes at her own thoughts. "But you know what he's like... he gets backed into the corner and before you know it, he's taking the ankles out from underneath you."

Mark nodded, "Sounds about right."

"He's a weird one that Derek Shepherd," Beth breezed, "But I guess he has to be if he married my sister of all women––"

"And what about me?"

His question was very vaguely amused, the sentiment behind the words just enough to shift the weight off of his chest. 

He raised his eyebrows, tilting his head to the side as he watched Beth's head spin with the calculation. Her lips were parted very slightly, as if she hadn't expected him to ask. It was at that moment that Mark started eating, picking at food that wouldn't rumble a stomach that was already unsettled.

"Smart," Beth said after a pause, "I'd say you're smart."

"Mmm."

"And you've got good taste," she continued with that impish smile that told him she was playing, that expression almost rendering him dizzy. "Really, really good taste. Like, impeccable taste."

Mark just laughed.

His eyes gazed around at all of the candles around them, flickering like the Christmas lights back in that On-Call Room. 

It was such a soft moment in time, filled with the thudding of his heart and the light clink of cutlery against ceramic. He listened to it, drawing it through his body until he could feel the warmth from the candlelight in every cell, muscle and vein. 

Mark pushed the thought of that practice contract aside, of how they were just waiting on his single signature while Derek's was already dried–– he'd told Derek that he needed time to think about it, that it was a big commitment that Mark didn't exactly know whether he was ready for. It was a different direction that he wasn't sure about. 

He just didn't know what he wanted––

"I mean it, y'know?"

"Hm?"

"I'm proud of you."

When he looked back at Beth, he recognised the expression on her face. 

It was delicate, tender, the physical equivalent of Archer's tone. 

It was the same sentiment: you're doing something right. 

He'd been able to tell from the first smile and the first note, she was far more excited about this practice than he was. He could see it in her eyes, something felt uncharacteristically bright about her, as if this news was the best thing she'd heard in a while. 

It elicited something at the bottom of Mark's torso. He couldn't place the feeling.

In retrospect, he'd call it guilt.

"I just..." 

Beth seemed to search for the words as she said them. Her eyes glazed over as she looked off in the far corner of the room, as if she could see everything in her mind laid out before her. Mark wished he worked the same, it'd make everything so much easier. 

  "You work so hard and I'm proud of you for taking the risks and for putting yourself out there," The words seemed to come so easily, "It's terrifying and it's different and I'm... I'm just so proud of you for taking this opportunity. You're going to love it, I know it."

He felt a lump grow at the back of his throat.

Was this the effect of the dinner table? He'd forgotten the last time that anyone had been in his corner. 

Derek had always supported him, but in the way that a sibling would. Mark had always get the sense that Derek, although supportive, had always been waiting for him to trip up. There was a waiting element to it, as if the two of them knew that they'd always be compared. They were perpetually waiting for the other to make a mistake–– but not Beth.

It was the way she was looking at him. 

Mark knew no one had ever vouched for him like this. 

There was such love in that look, in this food and in these candles, alike something that Mark had never felt before. 

It made his heart skip a beat and he tried his best to keep his thoughts on track.

She was proud of him, she was proud of him for something that Mark didn't want. 

Or at least, he was fairly sure he didn't want.

"It's the future," She said as he watched her eyes swirl with light. "And, uh, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the future and I just... I'd like you to be a part of it." A pause and then she corrected herself, "I'd love for you to be a part of it. Our future."

Mark felt his heart squeeze.

"It's you and me..."

Beth repeated her words from earlier and Mark, suddenly, felt as though he was full of helium. He felt as though he could float through the ceiling and out, into outer space. The only thing keeping him grounded was the way that she smiled. 

  "I keep apologising for not being here, but I mean it and I'm going to find time and I'm going to..." She sounded so hopeful that it made his chest hurt, "I'm going to be here for you and we're going to work it out, okay? I want this. I want you and I want... I want our future together."

He'd never been wanted like that before.

Beth wanted their future. 

He wasn't used to people looking at him and seeing something other than his arrogance and his charm. 

He wasn't used to people looking at him and seeing a future. 

But here she was, sat across this tradition that she'd included him in, smiling with all of the love that she could muster––

Suddenly, the concept of a proposal didn't sound half bad.

"I want to start looking at apartment listings," Beth continued, as if she hadn't already wrapped him around her little finger. He found himself watching her lips as they formed each word. "I know that I said I wanted to wait until the end of my internship but... We should do it, y'know? Move out of here and find some place closer to the practice. Maybe get a terrace or something? One we can sit out on in the evening and just... be happy. I have money saved up...We could get that cat or... I don't know... we could really make something out of this, don't you think?"

There were so many things in the air, so many sentences and concepts that were being thrown into this little space. 

It made all the blood rush to his head as he found himself teetering on the same moment as earlier: the second wave of a panic that he couldn't digest. 

The concept of the future was so terrifying to him. It caused his chest to flatten and his breath to catch at the back of his throat. He just stared at her, as if to commit this whole moment to memory.

"I know it's scary," Beth said very quietly. 

She was speaking as if she could read his mind, as if she could feel how much the future terrified him. There was a feeling to her, as if she was talking to a wounded animal who she was so scared was going to take flight on her. 

  "But I want it," She said, "I want it...I really do. I just... I look at my future and I can't imagine it without you."

Mark couldn't imagine it without her in it either.

(It felt silly to think that he was so embarrassed of being so in love with someone; that's something that Mark would establish ten years in the future.)

(There was nothing wrong with her, nothing to be embarrassed about this woman. It was him. He was sure it'd been all him. He'd spend a long, painful moment, imagining if things had gone the way that Beth had pitched them: the terrace looking over the Manhattan skyline, the cat that he'd pretend to hate but secretly love, the office job with the corner office overlooking the river. It might not have appeared like paradise in the moment, but in retrospect it'd be something missed, like a dream that Mark didn't have time to cherish or value.)

Sometimes, Mark wanted Beth so much that he was mortified. 

He got clumsy and self-conscious in the intensity of it. Pretended that he didn't want it as much as he did. He scoffed at the conversation between him and others, downplayed how much Beth's smile made his chest hurt. 

And god, did he want that future too––

He wanted her. He wanted her too.

"So apartment listings?"

Mark sounded slightly winded. 

He watched her perk up as it became very clear that he wasn't going to run away. 

(He'd made a promise to her back at that wedding in Connecticut, back when he'd returned after turning on his heel like a coward. He'd told her that he wasn't gonna run, that if they were gonna do this, Mark was going to stay. And that was all he could think of in that moment. Of how he she'd asked him to stay and he'd promised. He'd given her his word.) 

Her held tilted to the side and she let it rest with him for a second, as if to check whether he was sure.

He just gave her a light, but stunning, smile.

"Addison said she'll print them out for us," Beth mused, but the spark in her told him that she had no intention of letting Addison choose anything for them. "She's got a friend in real estate, gave me his phone number. He reckons the markets best for buying right now... Renting is just a bottomless pit."

Mark hummed, despite not knowing anything about property rates, "Sounds like he knows what he's doing."

"Doesn't he just?"

"I think we'd do okay," He said, appearing oddly breathless. Beth's brow raised. A chuckle got caught in the corner of his mouth. "I think we'd do okay, you and me."

He couldn't move his mind off of it, off of the rare occurrence of someone being proud of him, of vouching for him–– for a split second, Mark figured that maybe working in that practice wasn't half bad. 

He'd still get to do surgery, sure not as often as he would've liked, and sure he wouldn't be doing any emergency cases (which, between you and me, were his favourite). 

He got to spend time with Derek, he got to be his own boss and surely his salary as the co-director of a private practice in New York was going to be more than enough to fulfil Beth's dreams. 

So what if he'd be bored? Wasn't this the sort of shit that he was supposed to sacrifice?

Idly, Mark wished his Dad had bonded with him more. 

He wished that he had more of a grasp on the whole future thing. 

Mark had never seen himself as a family man, the sort that could settle (and, in many ways, he didn't feel like one either), but Beth made him want to be it. 

He wasn't sure if he could do it, but he wanted to be the sort of guy that could.

Usually, the thought of having a whole life planned out ahead of him reduced him to pieces–– but in that moment, it felt like everything could be okay.

***

─── She could feel the pill wearing off by the end of the evening.

Beth didn't want it to leave. 

Dressed up like this, Beth imagined that she was some housewife waving her husband off to war, desperate for him to stay just another night so they could sleep with her cheek pressed to his chest. 

It felt a lot like that, the absence of every high, some sort of emptiness as if her house was now silent and her bed was now cold. 

She thought about it as she washed her hands under the faucet, back in the bathroom where she could find her card and stash from muscle memory.

All things good came to an end.

Beth took a moment, feeling the ache settle its way back into her bones–– it hadn't been long enough. 

The pill hadn't stuck around as long as it should've. It must've been the wine and the cocktails, forcing back whatever little euphoria she'd been able to find. 

She could feel a headache coming on, her mouth was dry, uncomfortably so, and her cheeks ached from the constant smiling. 

God, she'd been smiling for too long; she had to simultaneously restrain the urge to groan and massage her aching face.

Her eyes met her reflection again.

She looked like hell. Isaac hadn't lied when he'd pointed at her with an accusing hand. She had to squint through the harsh bathroom light. 

Candles couldn't illuminate the cracks on her surface, the gaps and the lines that were beginning to feel a whole lot like missing pieces. 

Beth let out a long shuddering breath and braced herself on either side of the sink, massaging her eyelids with a desperation to feel okay again. 

She hung her head and counted the passing moments.

Beth was pretty fucking sure Bizzy Forbes hadn't struggled like this. Neither had Addie. She didn't understand why she was different. 

Why was everything so painful in her life? 

Why was everything so hard? Wasn't this supposed to be it?

 Dressing all nice, cooking the man she loved a meal and pretending that she was fine? 

She'd thought that it would be a drug in itself, that pretending would finally catch up and make things feel fine–– 

But fuck, Beth did not feel fine.

She cracked a very muted chuckle as she opened her eyes and fixed her lipstick.

Addie almost sounded like Adderall.

She supposed that the world would've kept spinning as normal if it wasn't for her hand slipping against the wet ceramic. 

She barely felt her hand move, but her body jolted, striking her out of her slight daze. She looked up just in time to see herself knock a soap holder off of the top, the glass splintering as it hit the ground–– Beth swore that she didn't even hear it break. 

What she did hear, however, was Mark's distant call to ask if she was okay. She called back that she was, for she was physically, and just stared at it.

Beth didn't bother looking at the mirror again. She knew the woman that would look back at her and she didn't particularly like her.

That woman and some cheap soap dish from a thrift store were kindred spirits. 

Smashed into little pieces on the bathroom floor. 

Splintered across the chipped tiles. A hundred thousand little fractures, some small, some big.

Before Beth even registered what she was doing, she got to her knees and started plucking each piece up one by one, her scrambled head trying to believe that everything broken could be put back together again––

Beth didn't even feel the glass as it sliced her finger tips.

***

─── Mark had barely even blinked when he saw the blood.

It'd been quite a dramatic reveal: Beth with a handful of glass appearing from behind the bathroom door. 

Mark had had to pause for a very small moment, his hands wet from the cleaning he'd been doing at the bottom of the kitchen sink; he'd looked from her impassive face and her light, dismissive shrug to the mess in her hands and wondered whether she'd drank too much already–– 

She'd left a smudged and inconsistent trail of blood across the bathroom tile.

It felt like some sort of distortion on the image she'd presented to him: Bizzy Forbes, cleanly laundered and fresh. 

He watched her pass by him, toss the shards into the trash and then grimace, almost in retrospect, as if she hadn't realised she was in pain. 

Her chin dropped down to stare at her fingers and she inhaled sharply, her brow creasing at the sight of it.

Immediately, Mark asked her to sit down at the table.

This. 

This was something that Mark was going to miss if he took that job at the practice. 

His favourite pages at work were the trauma ones, the ones with incoming mysteries that he could piece together and solve. He liked the urgency, the distinctive shot of adrenalin that the people in that board meeting had lacked. 

He was good at thinking under pressure: telling Beth to sit down at the dining table once it had been cleared, drying his hands on a towel and telling her to keep her hands elevated as he went into the bathroom. 

He took everything under his stride, not letting his concern overcome the professional drive to gather what he needed. When he resurfaced, Mark was fully equipped to handle this as best as he could.

Beth winced when he turned on the light, rendering the candles useless.

"You feelin' okay?"

He'd always had very good bedside manners, but this was one of the first times he'd asked that question with his whole body. 

He watched as she nodded, her face contorted into a look of pain. He wasn't sure whether it was the light that did it or the fact that she'd managed to get a few nasty incisions and, what looked like, glass splinters. 

He sat opposite her, a pair of tweezers, some gauze and other assorted supplies, just laid out between them. 

She looked down at them and rolled her eyes.

"I see you're bringing your work home with you."

Mark just chuckled under his breath, "And I see you must've got too carried away while making the Martinis."

He held a hand out for hers, making Beth sigh and reluctantly pass them over. 

He took her as gently as he could, sensitive to the way that her fingers trembled very slightly as he assessed what she'd managed to do.

 It wasn't too bad. Mark knew he'd seen worse, but even so, there was still something very startling about seeing the amount of glass she'd managed to get trapped in her skin. 

He moved his seat until he was sat beside her, using a lamp for extra light so he could see the marks on her delicate skin and then, slowly, one by one, he started picking the splinters from her skin.

As he worked, he could feel Beth staring at him, her eyes trapped to his profile as he tried to handle her with care. 

She twitched ever so often, but seemed to feel very little pain. He glanced up at her a few times, meeting her gaze and noticing how tired she appeared, illuminated by the lamp and the lights overhead. 

But she was still the same, still as pretty to him up close as she had been across the dining table.

"What would you name the cat?"

His question seemed to catch her by surprise, but he felt the need to silence. 

Silences with Beth were different to people, either they felt like too much or too little. 

This one, in particular, had felt like the latter, as if both of them were too tired to let it be. 

In his peripheral vision, he watched Beth's lips twitch as she dragged in the sort of breath that told him to prepare for a very interesting sales pitch.

Instead, she just shook her head, "I don't know."

"Oh c'mon," Mark said, not believing it for a second, "You've spent half of the time I've known you talking about getting a cat. You have a name picked out. You know."

Beth chuckled.

"Oh, you have me all worked out, huh?"

"A little bit," He said, trying to hide his smile.

She seemed to challenge him with a tilt of his head. Mark was only happy to oblige. His tone lingered on the side of something fond.

"How do I even begin to describe Beth Montgomery?" He couldn't restrain his smile, "Well, she takes her coffee black with one sugar and she has a mole on her left butt cheek that kind of looks like Roosevelt on the dime..."

She snorted.

 "It's pretty cute, but she should probably get it checked out, either for melanoma or to see how much it's worth," His joke made her roll her eyes, "She thinks cats are gods given gift to humanity and, actually, would probably leave her boyfriend for a cat if given the choice, so maybe I'm in danger there––" 

(Beth giggled to herself but did not correct him.) 

  "Enjoys romantic comedy movies to the point where she can quote most of them, thinks that action movies are dumb, can taste the price of champagne and sided with Nicole Kidman in her divorce with Tom Cruise," He tutted at that, "distasteful."

The woman beside him just stared at him. 

He spoke as he extracted each piece from her hand, going about it as if she was any other patient that had appeared on a bed in the non-emergent clinic. 

The clink of glass against the table acted as punctuation to his every pause. 

He smiled to himself, oblivious to the way that Beth seemed to hold onto his every word.

"Back on the ass actually," Mark said, his brow crinkling as Beth's foot clipped his shin under the table. He chuckled. "Okay, okay–– but it's really nice ass, y'know? I like it–– alongside the whole Patrick Swayze obsession, that little thing you do with your nose if your coffee is too hot, oh and the way that you're trying to convince me to go as Baby and Johnny for Halloween this year and––"

"You'd look hot in leather," was Beth's throwaway interjection.

Mark acted as if she'd said something shocking. His chin lifted to look at her, eyes wide and face split into a grin.

"A compliment?" 

He pretended as if it was the rarest thing in the world. Beth just rolled her eyes again, trying her best not to slap him across the head with one of her aching palms. 

  "A compliment from Beth?" He said, "You sure you didn't hit your head in there––?"

"Your ego doesn't need that help," Beth murmured back, almost sounding exhausted as her hand twitched in his hold. 

She met his eye and silently asked him to challenge him on her assessment. Mark didn't have anything. She wasn't wrong.

  "But I'm right," She said, "The full leather with the sunglasses––"

"Oh?" Mark quipped. This time it was his eyebrows that raised, "So you think you have me all figured out then, huh?"

A beat passed. 

He watched a small grin fight against itself on her lips. They engaged in a very short and anticlimactic staring match, one which Beth inevitably lost–– add it to the list, Mark thought to himself as he went back to work with a laugh, terrible at staring contests.

"Mark Sloan," The way she held his name on her tongue made the hairs raise on the back of his neck. Mark bit down on the inside of his cheek. "Takes his coffee with a lot of creamer and irresponsibly sweet... like dentists hate him sweet. Does not have a mole on his butt, but does have this tiny bald patch just at the top of his neck––"

With alarm, Mark shook his head, "I do not have a bald patch––"

"––just a tiny one, baby! It's cute! I swear!"

Brow crumpled, Mark just sulked silently.

Male pattern baldness was not cute.

Beth laughed lightly and continued.

"Doesn't believe his girlfriend but that's okay, because his girlfriend only speaks the truth," Mark made a scoffing sound at the back of his mouth and she sighed as if he was completely intolerable. "Would pay over $10 for a beer in a fancy bar... Is an arrogant ass half the time but he's pretty to look at so that kinda makes up for it..."

"Kinda?"

"Kinda as in you're very correct in thinking I'd leave you for a cat," She joked and he recoiled as if she'd hurt him. Another roll of the eyes. "What else... oh, right, thinks that action movies are cool and that romance sucks... lame, by the way. That's very lame. Has a serious hard-on for Tom Cruise, to the point where I'm very worried that he's going to leave me for Ethan Hawke––"

"Oh without hesitation."

"I knew it!"

They exchanged a glance between them.

Mark's brow furrowed, "You forgot my ass."

Beth shook her head.

"Nothing too special."

"You're breaking my heart, Montgomery!"

"And you unironically like watching FRIENDS," Beth countered, but there was a deeply amused and playful jilt to her tone. Mark felt his heart flutter slightly as he heard her laugh. He liked the sound of her laugh. "I'm sorry but I think my taste is superior–"

"No offence, angel," Mark said lightly, noticing how Beth seemed to warm at the pet name, "But you listen to classical music––"

"Don't diss the classics."

Her sharp response made him laugh too. 

It left a good feeling in his chest, the sort that travelled throughout his whole body and answered all of the questions he'd left unanswered earlier. 

His grin was on the verge of sheepish, cheeks slightly tinted as Beth watched him expertly handle her shaking fingers.

You're just too good to be true...

(Her brow folded at how they seemed to tremble, completely out of her control as Mark carefully pulled splinter after splinter from her grazed skin.)

(She couldn't stop them, she couldn't stifle them, she was completely at the mercy of her boyfriend's hold.)

(She bit down on her tongue, hard, as her pain receptors began to shine through underneath the alcohol and the dwindling pill.)

(With it came the sluggish drag to her muscles as she attempted to straighten in her seat. It wasn't like she didn't like being here, being gently cradled in Mark's hand, she just really didn't want him to ask questions. She was supposed to be perfect tonight, and yet she couldn't keep herself still.)

Can't take my eyes off of you...

Mark glanced at her in the corner of his eye. 

The musical in the background had faded into one of Frankie Valli's most notable tracks, leaving him with a tightness in his throat. It felt like such a tender moment, Beth staring at his every movement and him attempting to cause her as little pain as possible. 

You'd be like Heaven to touch, I wanna hold you so much...

God, he didn't want to cause her pain.

At long last, love has arrived, And I thank God I'm alive...

"I've thought about it."

Beth's sudden statement almost jolted him. 

She spoke so impassively, but her brow was crumpled as if she was in deep thought. 

Mark was, for a moment, completely caught off-guard by the look of it on her–– it was as if she was digging deep, beneath their present and even past their future.

You're just too good to be true, Can't take my eyes off of you...

"About what?"

"Names," Beth said, letting out a breath and letting her shoulders fall. Her eyes flickered up to meet his and she rolled her eyes, noticing how he appeared so, briefly, victorious in reading her so well. "I've had a notebook of them since I was five. I asked for a cat for my birthday every year until I was fourteen."

"A notebook?" Mark asked, appearing more enamoured than miffed, "You kept a list?"

"Yeah," She replied, and then, as if the thought of admitting it completely mortified her, she shook her head, "While kids were making lists of baby names for their future children... I was writing names for my imaginary cat..."

There was a brief pause, as if hearing those words back, Beth became incredibly sad. 

A dent appeared in between her eyebrows and she stared across the apartment, off at something that Mark couldn't see. 

He resigned back to his work, not exactly knowing how to handle the sudden shift in ambiance–– the words got caught at the back of his throat and he tried not to linger on it for too long. 

But then something got loose and he was speaking before he even understood exactly what he was saying:

"You'd be a good Mom."

Beth's eyes flew to him and he was frozen there, stuck in a time loop of those words floating around them over and over. His stomach fell out of his ass. 

Was the music still playing? Were they still in Manhattan? Was he still alive? 

Mark couldn't tell. 

All he knew was that he'd mentioned motherhood in a conversation with his girlfriend. 

He, the infamous commitment-phobe, had brought up a taboo subject without even hesitating.

He saw the shift at the back of her eyes.

(Beth was caught up in that moment too, at the most simple of sentences that had caused her heart to jump in her mouth.)

(For a moment, she thought she was going to cry–– she thought she was going to tell Mark that that was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her, simply because she was so convinced that she was doing everything wrong.)

(She wasn't capable of doing anything right. She didn't feel like her Mother's daughter. She didn't feel like a production of Bizzy Forbes' genetics. She didn't feel like she'd be a good mother at all––)

He watched Beth's throat bob with the weight of what he'd just said.

"I uh," She cleared her throat, "I think you'd be a good Dad."

If he thought that his words had been consuming, hers were shattering. 

Mark felt his mind halt. He collapsed into the light in her eyes, holding onto the very last syllable as it passed her lips.

He didn't agree with her.

But even so, he gave her a light smile.

She smiled back.

God, being a father, that wasn't something Mark thought about often. 

He tried to avoid it, just as he'd avoided the look on his high school girlfriend's face when she'd sat him down and tried to break the news so gently: You're going to be a Father. 

He hadn't been a good father then. He'd looked Samantha Riley in the eyes and told her that he wanted no part in it. He'd given her money for an abortion and he'd skipped town. He hadn't been a good father. He'd left and he'd never looked back, assumed that she'd taken the money and solved all of their problems all in one––

He glanced over at Beth, noticing how she'd fallen silent again.

If he had the chance again, he'd try. 

He was determined to try. 

He didn't want to be the sort of arrogant ass that skipped out on their kids. 

He'd been abandoned too many times as a kid, left alone to stare at walls and fear about his future. 

He'd take that chance, he'd try his damn best, treat his kids better than he'd been treated by his own parents.

"Patrick."

Mark just tiredly turned his head towards her.

She smiled again.

"Hmm?"

"The cat," Beth spoke with a very slow reluctance, as if she knew that he was going to ridicule her. Her face pulled with a grimace as Mark pulled a particularly nasty looking shard of glance out of her finger. "If I had a cat, I'd call it Patrick."

I love you, baby, And if it's quite alright I need you, baby...

"Really?"

To warm the lonely night, I love you, baby, Trust in me when I say...

"Mmhm."

"Was Johnny Castle taken?"

"Shut it."

Oh, pretty baby Don't bring me down, I pray...

"Why not... Why not Maverick?"

"I'm not naming my cat after Tom Cruise."

"Top Gun is easily the best movie of the century–"

"Yeah, for people without taste."

"Even so, the name Patrick? It's not very creative–"

Beth snorted, "Don't insult our son like that."

Oh, pretty baby, Now that I've found you, stay...

Mark's gaze found hers. 

She was grinning at him, her cheeks flushed from the wine and the alcohol and her eyes stuck on his lips as he seemed to fumble with his words. 

She'd said 'our son' as if they were just two words, the sort that could be thrown around–– Mark didn't take that word lightly and, for the tiniest moment, his future was full of it: of white picket fences, of kids, of things that had given him a heart palpitation fifteen minutes ago.

 His mouth dried and he found himself very, quietly, dropping his head back down to his makeshift triage, trying to get the thought of him and Beth having their own little family out of their head.

Fuck, he thought to himself, I'm screwed.

"We can have more than one cat," She said indifferently, as if she hadn't gotten caught up in the same words as he had. 

(It made him thinking about her family, about how one day Derek had been talking about football and then, the next he'd been talking about how he'd love to teach his metaphorical child how to throw a fastball one day.) 

   Beth shrugged, "We can have all of the cats in the world––"

Oh, pretty baby, Trust in me when I say...

"How much space are we going to have?"

"All the space we want." 

Her response came with a slight wince, as Mark tried his best to minimise the pain of it. He ran a soothing thumb over her wrist, feeling the goosebumps that rose on her skin at his delicate touch. 

  "We can have the biggest apartment in Manhattan," Beth said, "We can adopt all of the cats in the United States–– and even then, after everything, it'll be you and me."

Mark's smile warmed straight through him. He felt painfully bashful and transparent. His heart was, well and truly, on his sleeve.

"Me and you?"

"Mm," Beth hummed, her face was millimetres from his. 

She leant forwards in her chair, grinning upwards at him and almost taking the table cloth with her. 

  As if truly hearing it aloud for the first time, she laughed, "Fuck, doesn't that sound better than Church and State?"

"It does," He agreed. 

He was so tempted to kiss her. Her eyes flickered down to her lips and Mark was filled with the impulse to bottle this, trap this specific feeling in a tiny glass bottle like a model ship. He'd place it on the highest shelf in this apartment, out of the way so Beth couldn't knock it over in her drunken stupor. 

  "It sounds so much better––"

She kissed him. She pressed her lips to his in such a gentle but final way, that Mark knew it was futile to point out that she was injured. 

Beth smiled into it too, her lips curving as Mark was momentarily stupefied, his hand letting go of hers to gently hold the back of her head. 

She tasted of olives and bottom shelf Shiraz.

Oh, pretty baby...

"This is going to be so good for us," Beth murmured under her breath when the kiss finished. He wanted to kiss her again, but she moved backwards, lifting her chin so he could look her in the eye. "Mark, this practice is going to be good. No more Church and State. We can finally do our own things. We can finally just stop worrying about how things look and if anyone sees. Screw Cochran, Screw them all––"

The realisation was cold to the touch.

Slowly, Mark searched her eyes. 

His gaze bounced from one pupil to the other, a sudden iciness chilling his skin as he registered her words. 

Everything felt cold, everything felt sharp and gaunt, as if Mark had just swallowed a very bitter pill.

She was thinking of her career.

As Beth kissed him again, Mark couldn't stop thinking about it. 

About how Beth was so happy for him, of how she'd been so unconditionally supportive every step of the way. 

She'd hyped him up for that proposal meeting, she'd helped him prepare. 

She was so excited for him, so happy for this new chapter of their life together–

He wasn't sure why he was surprised, but he was. 

It was a sick surprise that made his mouth taste sour. 

Of course her support was not unconditional or just out of pure love. 

She was gaining from this too. Mark leaving the hospital meant whatever peace of mind that she'd been going on about ever since he'd started there. 

His further sick twist came at the expense of his train of thought of how, two hours ago, he'd actually made the silent decision to stay at the hospital, out of the pure love of his craft.

Mark saw it now, how Beth had balanced their whole future on this career change. 

It made him uneasy, about how easy it felt to lose it. 

Why did it feel conditional? 

Metaphorical cat sons and rooftop terraces seemed to come at the direct expense of Mark going into a career he didn't want. 

He didn't like that–– he didn't like that at all––

"Mark?"

She must've noticed how he stilled. 

For the first time that evening, through everything that Mark had hidden, it was the one thing that his body betrayed; that unsettled knowledge that Mark was being backed into a corner. 

The crushing feeling that all good things came to an end.

Mark looked over at her, at that familiar face that was still shining with so much pride. 

She was proud of him, he was doing something right, she was excited for him, he was travelling in the right direction––

"I mean it...I want this for us."

He felt as though he was in a time loop, staring at Beth as she said the same words from earlier. 

There was a slight dent in between her eyebrows, as if she could feel the momentary distance between. 

This, this was what happened every time they spoke instead of just fucking––

"I love you."

The way she whispered it with a blood-stained hand pressed against his jaw made his stomach wrench. 

Her fingers were still shaking slightly too and he had to fight the impulse to hold them. 

When he studied her face, she was looking at him just as she had before, with such love, such adoration. He didn't doubt that she did love him, they wouldn't have been here if not. 

They were too very similar people, both so frighteningly delicate––

He took her jaw in his hands. It felt kinder this way, to hold her while her fingers bled and trembled. She sat there, just gazing at him with those bottomless eyes and she waited for him to say it back.

A muscle jumped in Mark's own jaw. His whole body ached with the turmoil of wanting to give someone the world but not knowing how. He loved moments like these ones, the ones where they were alone and the outside world was locked away. He loved this feeling. He loved the way she looked at him–– he loved her.

It was frighteningly easy for him to forget how much he'd panicked when she'd mentioned that word the first time, when he'd gotten wind of the direction this conversation was headed. It was so easy. 

Almost easier than saying the words itself. It was as if something had clicked over in his brain and said fuck it:

If I'm leaving the hospital, I'm leaving it and I'm marrying you.

He didn't know what the hell was doing. 

He didn't know what the hell he was feeling. But either way–– he knew he didn't want to do any of this without her. It'd occurred to him that this was the sort of evening that people got engaged on. People got engaged in restaurants and over meals all the time. 

Fuck it. Why not?

Mark cleared his throat.

"It sounds crazy," He began, "But what if we just said fuck it and just––"

He was cut short.

The softness of the evening dissipated in the turn of Beth's head as she looked over at the apartment door. It burst open with all of the usual fanfare of a drunken evening. 

Mark had been so caught up in the moment, in the second, that he had almost not even realised that they were no longer alone–– it was no longer just you and me and me and you––

Amelia blinked at the two of them, squinting through the harsh lighting of an apartment oversaturated. 

She seemed to be caught completely off-guard, her brow furrowed as she shielded her sensitive eyes. 

Beth's roommate stumbled in the doorway, a laugh halting in her throat as she realised that she'd truly intruded on something.

(Amy's eyes travelled from the washing up in the sink, to the candles still scattered all over the room. She noticed the proximity between the two of them, of how Beth was half melted into his hand like the wax of the wick beside them. And Mark–– how he had a belated response because he seemed so invested in memorising the details of her face––)

"Oh shit."

Mark looked over at her, feeling his adrenalin fizzle out in the bottom of stomach. 

She was staring at them like a deer caught in headlights, the gaunt shadows under her eyes exaggerated by the harsh lighting overhead. 

She swayed on her feet, grasping the door handle tightly for stability. 

Mark felt his eye twitch with the sound of Amy's awkward, misplaced laugh.

"Sorry."

In the corner of his eye, he watched Beth retract herself from his hold, turning her attention over to her very visibly drunk friend as she stumbled into the apartment, leaving the door wide open behind her. 

A tiny part of Mark fell into the emptiness that Beth left, her head turning away and smile being reserved to ask Amy if she was okay. 

Mark's molars interlocked and he felt the blood stop rushing around his body. 

His heart stopped beating with that excited, impulsive feeling that had made him think that it was a good idea––

(Nobody would know no what almost happened that evening but him. He'd carry it with him in a little ring box, hidden at the back of his underwear draw until it was finally uncovered by a flustered Lexie Grey just after Christmas, nine years later. Nobody would know. Not a soul, but him. How close it'd been. The future that Beth had lazily pitched like her own business proposal over Shiraz and drained Martini glasses.)

(It was left in pieces, just like the remainders of her crystal soap dish lying on the bathroom floor.)

"Did you have a good evening?"

Beth's attempt at polite conversation with Amy did not settle well with Mark. 

He got to his feet, wiping his clammy palms on his jeans and took the pieces of glass he'd recovered from Beth's hand, just to throw them into the trash. 

Then he scrubbed his hands clean of the fleeting moment, right in the cold dish water he'd left behind. 

He couldn't think about what Beth was saying, what Amy was saying back–– all he could think about was how close he'd been to saying something he'd never expected to say to anyone.

Fuck it. Let's get married.

There was something so deeply embarrassing about even going to say it, but Mark couldn't decide whether being robbed of it was worse. 

He didn't know what to do with the mortified, painfully vulnerable feeling in his bones; what was he supposed to do? Carry on with his evening as if that hadn't happened? 

As if he hadn't just looked into Beth's eyes and decided that yes, he would've given his whole career in surgery and fidelity to her–– just to call her his wife.

He didn't do marriage, but in all fairness, Mark hadn't done relationships either.

So he lingered, clearing the remnants of the evening as Amy told Beth all the things she'd missed. 

He washed what was left and made sure there was no trace of it. 

He buried all of the traitorous ideals and wishes and dreams and tried to remind himself that he was just too impulsive, that he got caught up in moments and touches and that they were fine just as they were––

But then Beth caught his hand as he leant over and reached for her empty wine glass.

"You were saying something before..." 

Her eyes traced every inch of his face, of his posture. He stilled under her touch. Her brow was bunched again, as if she could tell that this evening had soured slightly, but couldn't guess where it had gone wrong. 

  "What was it? It seemed important––?"

Mark gazed at her for a few passing beats.

Oh, you have no idea.

Then, very slowly, he shook his head.

"No, it was nothing," He said, "Don't worry about it."

***

─── Later that evening, as Beth stood in the kitchen, staring at broken fractures of her soap dish in the bottom of the trash, she thought about her mother.

Her mother had been married fairly early on. Her mother had, Beth supposed, once been human too. She'd spent most of a childhood wondering whether marriage was just as it appeared: like some sort of prison that left you shackled in the kitchen of your upper-middle-class suburban home.

Beth had never had the energy to feel sorry for Bizzy. She'd never done herself any favours, never loved the people she was supposed to love, never invested her time where it needed to be–– oddly enough, Beth thought that her mother was one of the worst people in the whole world, ranking very closely with her own father. She didn't even want to capitalise the word. She hated Beatrice Forbes––

But why was she so desperate to be her?

"I knew it."

Amy's voice was an invasion in the quiet. 

Mark had long returned to their bedroom and was probably waiting on Beth to go to sleep. 

Amy had changed the music to her own now so Beth had to strain ever so slightly over the sound of some nondescript indie band that she'd never heard of–– the eyes that raised to meet a very drunk and bleary Amelia Shepherd, did not feel like her own.

She ended the evening as she always did, feeling more like a corpse than a squeaky clean housewife. 

Every breath Beth took felt closer and closer to a death rattle with every passing moment. 

The tap water she'd gone to retrieve herself just sat, forgotten beside the faucet.

Amy, however, came alive with night. Beth bet that she couldn't even count all of the things in her system on one hand. She crackled with the sort of energy that told Beth she was too far gone to make good or sensible decisions. The energy in her eyes was so terrifying–– but so, bewilderingly addictive.

And as for the rest of Amy, well, Amy looked like hell just like she did.

"What are you on?"

Beth's skin burned with the heat of Amy seeing straight through her. 

The surgical resident's head twisted to the side, looking her head to toe as if she could sniff the pills leaving Beth's system like a sniffer dog. 

Beth just stayed silent, too exhausted and too decimated to try put up a fight.

Mark had wanted to say something important. Beth had been able to tell.

"Let me guess?" Amy's drawl echoed between Beth's ears. "You're on Addys?"

Again, the irony didn't surpass Beth at all.

When Beth continued her silence, half out of tiredness and half because she didn't know what else to say, Amy seemed to to take it as a yes. 

(Was she supposed to say yes? Was she supposed to say that yeah, she'd been snorting medication that wasn't supposed to prescribed to her?) 

A long chuckle fell through Amy's lips and she shook her head, placing her elbows down on the table and resting her chin on her knuckles.

Beth watched, feeling the ghost of Mark's fingers hugging her jaw.

"That doesn't do shit," was what Amy said next.

Her slightly bloodshot eyes, blown from the things she'd seen and done, bore into Beth's hesitant soul. 

Her mascara and eyeliner had ran, probably from whatever hot club or bar she'd spent her evening in, and her lips looked cracked. 

Beth could tell from the way that Amy had to almost hold herself upright, that the woman had not slept for days.

Amy languished her pause and smiled, the grin both a warning and an invitation.

Her nose scrunched as if she was talking about cats or something other that was undeniably cute.

"You ever tried coke?"