Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟴𝟴 mother's daughter

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.