Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟳𝟬 twenty-minute christmas

𝙇𝙓𝙓.
TWENTY-MINUTE CHRISTMAS

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✧ ah yes, nothing says the holidays

like a christmas chapter that's twoweeks late. ✧

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NEW YORK

IF THERE WAS one thing that Mark didn't anticipate when it came to relationships, it was the holiday season.

It crept up fast on Manhattan, coating the streets with thick sheets of snow and tinting the air with that fresh, winter bite, all before he could even wrap his head around it. 

Suddenly, he was opening the door to the sound of choirs carolling, cabs straining through the sleet-strewn streets and the same droning holiday song that played over and over at the back of all department stores (I, don't want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need--) There were people donning red jackets and hats, pot-bellies and the constant lingering smell of roasting chestnuts on every corner-- festivity, as always, had hit New York City hard.

He found it different in every corner of the city. 

Christmas over in Bloomingdale, around Beth's apartment, was so different from what he usually experienced on the Upper East. The streets were filled tighter to the brim, lights hung from every spare crevice in every building and there seemed to be a star on the top of every tree from Columbia to Lincoln Square. 

The festive cheer and the goodwill, very slowly, seemed to leak in through the door, beginning in the light treads of stray snow across Beth's apartment floor. It seemed to appear very gradually, as if scared that it would rouse the inhabitants. 

Slowly but surely, it bloomed into a stray piece of tinsel and a greetings card from a work colleague, a WHAM! Tune tumbling in through a open window, a Macauley Culkin movie accidentally taping over an episode of ER on the DVR--

Mark fucking loved Christmas.

It was, by all means, his favourite holiday of the year. 

Usually, when people discovered that assertion, it perplexed them. (How was it that he, Mark Sloan, didn't favour Valentine's Day or maybe even International Women's Day, or whatever other days of the year that he could use to his advantage for an extra squeeze?) 

Mark, meanwhile, didn't really understand what the big deal was-- all he knew was that Christmas seemed to make the world seem a little bit brighter.

He loved it all. He loved the snow, he loved the songs, he loved the high spirits and the way that the whole world seemed to twinkle in unison. 

He loved the way that he'd managed to find his own annual tradition, hauling ass into Carolyn Shepherd's brownstone for their yearly Christmas Eve celebration. He loved the way that it was something that he looked forward to each year, some semblance of the Christmas that he'd never quite managed to get in his childhood. 

He loved how it brought people together and made him feel a little bit further from that little kid in that dark, empty apartment on the Upper East Side--

His girlfriend, however, didn't seem to share the sentiment.

If anything, Beth was caught off-guard by it too. She'd taken his excitement with a raised brow, blinking at him as he seemed to burst into December with high hopes; well, to be specific, she'd stared at him and said, very seriously, holy shit who are you? after watching him smile for longer than five minutes.