Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟬𝟱 solar power

𝙑.
SOLAR POWER

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SPOILER ALERT: Four years wasn't long enough.

Not by a fucking long shot.

I couldn't quite explain the suddenness of seeing Mark's face after all this time, hearing his voice, catching the scent of his stupid cologne. Whatever it was, it wasn't far from the feeling you go when you're staring into the sky. A cloudy sky, one where the clouds are thick and full and you can't see anything but the grey and white smog. But then suddenly there's a shift: the wind blows, the earth rotates and then you're staring directly into the sun--

Mark was a pretty shit sun to be blinded by.

Four years wasn't long enough for me to forget that. He wasn't worth my time, he wasn't worth my energy or my breath. In fact, four years seemed to only place a magnifying glass underneath his shitty light; seeing him sat alongside me at Joe's Bar was enough for my chest to deflate and my arms to ache and my mind to think about how devastatingly strong my love had been for him--

I'd blinked the sunspots from my vision and moved on with my evening, pretending that he wasn't there. He became a black hole in the corner of my vision, one that sucked out all of my energy and my patience. I conversed with my old friends, stirred my lemonade and thought about how desperately I didn't want to be in this city. In my head, I pledged to get on the first flight I could get once Archer was conscious and stable; it hurt my heart, but I knew he'd understand.

I was going to flee. I'd never liked the sun much anyway. I'd flown too close and gotten burned and I'd caught some of its heat in the process-- in all honesty, I was scared that I was going to feel the familiar anger, the negative emotion that had driven me to the edge back in New York. It was what had moulded me into the person that we'd both (referring to myself and Mark) had hated so feverishly.

Anger wasn't good for a Montgomery kid. It did shitty things to us, seemed to unlock a hidden gene in our DNA that triggered self-sabotaging behaviours like a proclivity for addiction. Addison's anger had unlocked the 'stealing your sister's boyfriend' DLC. Archer had spent half of his life determined to stay calm.

So I sat there, in that bar, listening to them reminisce over things that just seemed sour to me, thinking about how orbiting around the sun had been a shit deal to begin with. I'd never really even liked astronomy anyway. I felt their eyes on me, I felt the spin of the earth and wondered whether any of them knew how hard I'd had to fight to get my feet back onto earth.

***

─── Archer was on the road to recovery three days later.

Thanks to my ex-brother-in-law, he was worm-free (something he didn't really like to repeat out of the fear that someone would mistake him for some sort of veterinary case). Derek was very happy to tell me that it looked as though Archer was completely out of the woods; he was going to be fine, he was going to make a full recovery and, so long as he didn't go off to South America and eat any more questionable fruits, there wasn't going to be any more worm infested cysts in his future.

The news had both delighted me and troubled me.

I liked being with Archer. Over the past few days, it'd been what I'd looked forwards to the most: the hospital visits, sitting in the corner of his room and flipping through the trashy magazines that Archer seemed to accumulate (despite claiming to never read them, he was obviously way too mature to read about Britney Spears' love life) and making witty conversation whenever Archer breezed into a talkative news. Naomi appeared at his bedside for most of the time, offering me a wide, welcoming smile that felt far more sisterly than anything Addison could offer to me. They were dating now, an unlikely couple that I'd never envisioned... but they seemed happy. We'd talk about LA, talk about the last four years of my life and how I'd managed to make myself a solid career in Psychiatry... Archer wanted to know it all. I even told him about Charlie, leaving out the fact that I'd left the poor man hanging on a very important question--