𝙓𝘾𝙑𝙄. THE STRANGER IN THE RAIN ALTERNATIVE TITLE:BETH AND MARK (PART ONE)
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i'm not even going to,,, no
this chapter destroyed me. have fun with it for me! x
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I - DENIAL AND DISBELIEF
IF YOU ASKED Mark when things had gone wrong in his relationship with Beth, he would've been able to remember it more clearly than when things had gone right.
Both were definitive moments, the sort that would belong in a supercut.
It'd flicker past his eyes like a film reel that was well-worn, a beginning to the end, snapshots in succession that would leave a lump at the back of his throat–– the end, ironically, began exactly where everything had started: a clinic opening's soirée and Mark standing on the threshold of the room holding a woman's hand and pretending he was happy.
For context, that was his first 'affair'.
If this whole thing were a movie, he was sure that would have been one of the most defining plot points.
The months that they'd taken between the resignation hitting the Chief of Surgery's desk at Manhattan West Hospital to the grand opening of a private clinic, those had been patterned by the sort of silence that would happen between war fronts.
A pause, everyone holding their breath, the two of them living around each other not knowing what would come next. Neither of them mentioned how Mark had given up his career for her, damning himself to a world of meetings that he could not have cared less for.
(Mark, solely out of the fear that he'd say something he'd regret, and Beth, out of the fear that he'd say it wasn't worth it at all.)
The tension lingered, words caught at the back of their throats and Mark began spending nights, more often than not, in his own apartment.
Beth continued her slow downward spiral into the worst era of her life and Mark could only watch, slack jawed as his whole body urged him to do something—
She'd asked him to give up his whole career for her, and for what?
For him to watch her get high every morning before she went to work, and risk everything she claimed to want to protect?
Fuck that. Mark had silently resented her for it. It became a moment that broke everything, a fever in his chest that he couldn't sweat out.
That didn't happen in movies, not in the movies that he watched.
