Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟳𝟲 death by a thousand cuts

𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙑𝙄.
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

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AN AIRPORT, ADDISON concluded, was no place for a Montgomery.

She'd never taken flights as a kid as it had never crossed any of their minds to ever leave suburban Connecticut. 

They'd grown up thinking that the whole world was inside the aisles of clean-cut convenience stores and finger foods. Their brushes with the outside had been restrained to the odd commute out to boarding school, a glimpse of New Jersey or New York; the only one of the three of them that had even graced a plane had been Beth being sent out to Pennsylvania every September.

 She'd been packed on a plane to the trendiest school for girls all on her own and had come back at Christmas terrified of them, vowing to never wilfully get on a flight. 

(It had been too much for a kid to handle on their own at such a young age, and Addison wondered whether Beth would ever recover from it, or whether her sister would simply be stuck wherever she happened to land.)

Addison didn't mind planes. What she did mind, she supposed, was their tendency to drop out of the sky.

That's what she thought about as she stood in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, massaging hand cream into chipped and chapped fingers. 

What if, on the way back to California, her life just ground to a halt? What if the damn tin box fell out of the sky and that was it—things were left unfinished, conversations had been shirked and avoided and Beth was left wondering whether she'd made the right decision to chase her own flesh and blood out of the Emerald City on a time crunch.

Economy, Addison sniffed as she stooped and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. T

he word itself made her want to burst into flames right there. Her hand was slick against the plastic, making her shoulders raise very slightly in disgust. 

I'll die in last-minute economy.

It was almost physically painful for Addison to let Beth have the last word—and oh, there had been so many. She could still feel her veins throb from the force of it, the slight wind-lashed sting of her skin as it recovered. 

There were so many things that Addison wanted to say; she'd never been fond of being outsmarted, she was the one who said the final things and got the final say and the final laugh—and say final over and over again made her chest want to collapse from the weight of saying goodbye. 

(Final things hurt more than firsts.) 

She wanted to tell Beth that she wasn't leaving and that she wasn't going to let Beth give a happy life either—

It was only when she'd cleared security and stood in the terminal, eyes glazing over at a setting sun, that Addison realised that Archer was right. Running through an airport was the grand gesture that Beth had deserved. 

Sure, Addison wore heels all the time and she'd probably completely butcher her ankle, but wasn't that what it was all about? Selflessness?

For a woman who had spent so much time advocating for patients, fundraising and priding herself on her morals, Addison figured she was terribly selfish.

She balanced her cell phone in the palm of her hand, pacing a thin line down the centre of the passenger lounge, just as she had outside of that patient's room.