Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟵𝟭 you were mine to lose

𝙓𝘾𝙄
YOU WERE MINE TO LOSE

──────

NEW YORK

FAITH WAS RIGHT.

When she'd told Beth that the whole hospital was talking about the rumors concerning Doctor Sloan's sexual perversions, she hadn't been lying. If anything, she'd underplayed it.

For weeks, it was all Beth could hear. 

It was one of the only interesting whispers that carried on the wind as went about her work. By interesting, she meant that the professional body of Manhattan West Hospital had taken to it like kindling to a lit match. 

Those words followed her as she kept her head down, slipping under her skin and catch her foot on uneven floor. 

It was chipped, hushed, between the lips of nurses as they congregated at their stations, between radiologists as they chuckled over their scans. An exchanged hitched eyebrow between a group of colleagues desperate for something to relieve them from their work––

Didn't you hear? Sloan's taking payments now.

Beth didn't mention it to Mark. Not once. 

She was terrified of revisiting the same old arguments filled with the same old rhetoric. She didn't want to be this person who seemed to be managing a relationship rather than partaking in it. She wanted soft kisses in between surgeries and hazy smiles as they passed in the corridors–– but instead, as if Mark could sense the urgency, they avoided each other completely.

 Fleeting glances were curbed, exchanges were brief and Beth felt her heart shudder every time the distance between them seemed to grow.

For a few nights, she found herself lying awake, staring at the ceiling gripped by it. It wasn't ideal, seeing as she barely got any sleep anyway, but this thought pattern kept her awake all hours. Whether it was beside Mark, a sleeping mountain, or alone in an on-call room, it was all Beth could think about: how she was forcing this man to be a stranger to her.

She was reminded of her parents, of how everyone in her household had known that their marriage had been one big facade. 

They'd put on such a performance in the outside world; they'd smiled, they'd held their events and they'd boasted about their perfect marriage to anyone who would listen. But behind closed doors, Beth had seen it with her very eyes: the disinterest they had for each other. They hadn't been in love, she was sure of it, they hadn't cared for each other like parents should've. The Captain's affairs (of which Beth again, was sure there had been so many) had only fractured things further–– a loveless home filled with loveless people, and loveless children who didn't particularly know where to fit.

Did the kids go in the cupboards with the cereal and the estranged emptiness? 

Did they go under the sink with the cleaning supplies and the dread of hearing the car on the driveway? 

Maybe they could fit under the bed with the shoes and the childhood memories that were heartbreaking in retrospect?

They'd picked their way across a kitchen with a disinterested mother and an angry father and they'd figured out how to love from there. Beth couldn't remember how it happened, but it had.

Addison had controlled every relationship she'd ever had, she'd ruled over the relationships in her life with the same love that a king had for their country.