❛ 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄 . . . ❜
000. concerning beth

━━━━━━━━━━━

A YEAR PRIOR

Beth is so sure a single emotion could kill you.

She'd felt it.

Sadness like a tight fist around her throat, clenching tighter and tighter until her eyes water and her lungs seize. A gulp of air that's not going anywhere, a pinch in the back of her chest as everything withers within her.

Then happiness: a bitter pill on her tongue that never did anyone any good anyway. Blood rushing pupils dilating and then the world rushing out from underneath her. A high (higher and higher and higher) and then the fall.

Falling in love, with substance or person, that had never worked out quite in her favour. She'd always thought you needed rehabilitation just for a love (like that) gone wrong. When something's deep in your veins like that, it's not going to end well. No matter how good it feels, how safe you feel in the palm of someone's hand, something's going to give.

For Beth, it had been everything.

In the fallout, so she's found, there's anger.

Yeah, that'll be the one that gets her.

If something has to kill her, it'll be rage.

Whether it's like a knife in her back that she can't remove on her own, or just a second heartbeat, Beth knows it won't go away. It's not a friend, either, it's just a burning feeling that lies under skin. No matter how deeply she scratches it won't go away.

It burns, from the inside out.

It also contradicts her whole existence in a way that feels like a comedy; a deeply sadistic comedy of errors, worthy of applause or at least laughter across a crowd of spectators. ––

No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much it breaks and remoulds the thoughts and feelings within her, she can't communicate it. She's tried to explain it, to a therapist across a desk that was older than her––

I'm angry, she'd said, I'm really fucking angry, all the fucking time.

It tasted sweet on the tip of her tongue. Not in the nice way, but in the way she'd imagine it'd feel to bite into a cyanide capsule. The sweet before the poisoning. The relief before the death.

But they'd only asked –– Well, why?

Why?

Why not?

As far as she sees things, she had a right to be angry. She always has. After all, people tend to get pissed off by the unexpected. She never expected her life to go to shit, she never expected to be hooked on practically anything she get hands on, all before 30 years old. She definitely hadn't expected to have her surgical licence revoked due to malpractice ––

Oh, and she'd definitely never expected to receive a call from Derek Shepherd, her brother-in-law, one October evening, gravely telling her, in a rush of his own blistering anger, that her sister had just been found in bed with her boyfriend.

Her sister. Her boyfriend. Screwing each other's brains out on Derek's own linen sheets ––

Oh, the scandal of it all.

Within that scandal, however, Beth had been completely and utterly blindsided.

Yeah, that had felt like a situation that needed a lot more than just one session of therapy to figure out.

It'd called for a flight out of the city and complete radio silence. Just her and anger on a honeymoon, intertwined like lovers but incapable of divorcing. Hand in unlovable hand, the other holding a one way plane ticket, and she'd tried so hard to not look back.

That was a survival tactic, right? Everything she'd done, from that moment on, was all about survival. The affair had swept her up like a raging current and she'd had to paddle desperately to stay afloat. Drowning had been so easy, but her resolution to live, just out of spite, had made everything else so much more fun.

She'd rode into the sunset like every hero at the end of every movie, only she'd gone off alone. Faded off into the distance to leave them all to choke on the ashes as the city burned down behind her –– she'd tried to rebuild herself into a person again, string her emotions back together, fight for her sobriety and find her mind. And she had.

That was her survival.

But, even still, there was that question––

Do you think about New York?

––pitched by a different therapist, charging her stupid amounts by the hour. She'd paused and she'd stared at him and wondered whether the question was supposed to be easy to answer. (It was, wasn't it? It was Yes or No. It is a Yes or No.) She'd pushed her hair behind her ear.

Sometimes

Sometimes?

And just like always, Beth had felt it. Her anger, her rage, her resentment –– shaped into the image of her lover, of blue eyes and a sarcastic smirk, making her body heave like a gun just about to fire. Tension in her shoulders and then a lockjaw laugh as she tried her best to let it all go––

I try not to, She'd said coyly and she'd smiled, Leaving graves well enough alone and all that––

Why?

(Jesus fuck.)

A blink at the ceiling as she tried to clear her gaze.

Why?

Why do you want to leave it all alone?

And Beth had felt her mouth dry.

She'd held his gaze, held his nonchalant, expectant features until they downturned in a way that she recognised, herself, as a psychiatrist. She saw the way it flickered through his eyes and she knew, in that moment, that her trauma was a field day for a professional.

If I start thinking about it, Beth had began, I don't think I'll stop.

About the midnight smiles and the stoop-side kisses, and the wine glasses and the fine, little white lines that kept her up at night. About the man who had taken her heart in one hand and Addison Montgomery's marriage in the other ––

And all of the ways she would have loved to tear them both apart.

Call her bitter, call her bruised, but Beth would have done anything to ruin just a moment of their lives, just like they'd ruined hers.

And that, she was sure, was what would kill her one day.

──────

Her brother, however, was apparently far more easier to take out.

After all, Beth found out that Archer Montgomery was dying while half-way through a marriage proposal.

That's what she got in moments like these: moments where a man who loved her a lot more than he should have, was down on one knee with hope in eyes and nothing but good will and rainbows in his heart.

She got grief, and a whole lot of it, too.

It was a romantic proposal, candlelight, a classical tune on a beat-up radio and his hand holding hers so tightly blood had stopped circulating to her finger tips. A concerto had been cut in half by her cell phone, slicing through a nervous speech he'd practised a few too many times in the mirror.

In unison, their heads had turned to stare at it.

Beth had already been filled with so much tension, with so much discomfort and awkwardness. The words, I'm sorry, I can't, had been so close on the tip of her tongue –– and the phone had taken it straight out of her mouth. Her boyfriend of two years had tried his best to continue, squinting his way through the sound.

But, after a while, he just sighed.

Are you going to get that? He'd asked.

Uh, Beth had cleared her throat, eyes bouncing between the ring box and the phone on the other side of the room, I'm sure they'll leave a message.

For the record, she didn't like answering the phone, and for good reason too.

The truth was, Beth hadn't seen this coming –– the proposal or the voicemail left by a voice she'd really wanted to bury as deep as possible in the past. If her commitment issues hadn't killed the mood, the sound of Addison Montgomery's voice definitely had ––

Beth, hey... Hey, I uh... It's Addison.

(Yeah, Beth had thought to herself, No shit.)

I'm sorry to uh... to call but uh...

(An apology who would have thought––)

It's Archer, he's sick. He's really sick.

And Beth's stomach had dropped at that. Her eyes had found the wall in front of her, and, for the first time in years, she'd allowed herself to think of the past. It had played out to the sound of her sister sighing, caught in a moment that Beth had hoped would never come. Addison fumbling words in her mouth, wondering what to say... how to say it––

It's bad, Beth, Her sister had said, as if they hadn't tried to ignore the memory of each other for years, You, uh, you need to come to Seattle.

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hi lovelies ❤️

the new version of flatline will begin posting at the end of july 2022 with three chapters a week until chapter twenty five. i'll be posting chapter one tomorrow, just to get everyone warmed up!

you ready? bc i sure as hell am.
let me know if you're a first time reader or back to do this madness all over again, either way mwah, thank you for coming on this adventure with me.

soph x

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WORDS 1530
REWRITTEN ON THE 26TH OF JUNE 2022