Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟵𝟲 the stranger in the rain

He couldn't imagine Maverick from Top Gun sitting here, in Seattle, and trying to unpack things in a silent room, jaw clenched and eyes unmoving from a poster on lung cancer. He couldn't imagine Tom Cruise with a dry mouth, trying to find that anger in him, that hatred that he'd once had–– anything, any negative emotion, anything better than––

Oh fuck.

The attending lounge was quiet, everyone doing their job as they were supposed to, but Mark found himself on his break, staring into the far corner with half a sandwich beside him and a medical journal he hadn't even bothered opening. 

He'd set his interns with all of his post ops and was aiming to have a peaceful day–– his brain was scattered as it was, he didn't need his job to help drag him down too. 

So, he sat in silence, listening to the thunderstorm as it pounded against the windows behind him and tried to find something rotten inside him. 

Maybe it was a single thought diseased by Manhattan or a just... God, he didn't really know.

Or he did... Well, all Mark knew was that he didn't exactly hate Beth anymore.

He didn't hate her at all, actually.

Instead, he understood her. He understood why she'd done everything she had–– He understood why she'd needed him to leave the hospital and he didn't hate her for it. He understood that the drugs and the spiral and the poor mental health wasn't something that she'd done just to smite him. He understood–– He just... he understood everything.

Okay, scratch everything.

If Mark's life was a movie, maybe it wasn't an action blockbuster, the sort with exploding cars and villains and heroes and everything working well out in the end–– maybe it was a Rom Com that gone horrendously bad.

(Or, alternatively, a slow burn comedy where everyone in the whole world was just waiting for the punchline.)

Growing up, that's how he'd learnt things. 

His whole understanding of life had been through the consumption of movies, of pop culture, of watching episodes of Kojak and the whole of The Spy Who Loved Me over and over, until his eyes were sore. He spent hours trying to find the real within it. 

How was it that a man like him had found his socialisation on a television screen? 

Easy: find absent parents who don't want to teach it themselves.

A year ago, Lexie had asked him how he'd learnt to smooth talk and he'd just laughed and shrugged, saying that experience really paid off. 

The honest response, however, would have been that he'd learnt through observation, specifically, James Bond movies. He'd watched one of the most iconic movie characters of all times and figured that it was an example to follow–– he'd learnt how to charm and be an asshole, all at once. 

He learnt how to treat women in a haze that Beth had had to knock him out of. She'd tried to remind him that movies weren't real life at all. His deprogramming had started from the moment she'd taken his hand with such delicacy and told him that there was love in the world for him, he just had to take it.

Oh Jesus, thinking about that hurt like a bitch.

Okay, yeah, he definitely knew that this was real life. 

He knew that this feeling in his bones was so, frighteningly real–– He knew that when he closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, he played it over and over: standing in the doorway of the party for his own clinic two hours late, avoiding Beth's eye and pulling some revenge out of nowhere that he'd thought that she deserved.