I honestly do love this pairing. Yea I love Lexie and Hunt but this will always be an indulgence for me. I've decided that whatever this is won't be a full story more like a bunch of stories put together and they'll probably contradict each other but I just don't feel like I can make these full stories so enjoy and review please.

Disclaimer: I don't own.

Mark Sloan falls in love too fast and too hard and has ever since he was five and pulled Jessie Calahan's braids on the playground. So, he does sex with random women from random bars and tried to pick the ones with tan lines on a finger on their left hand because he had less of a chance falling for them.

And then he makes a mistake, picks the wrong married women in the wrong place and gets his heart smashed on concrete in the pouring rain.

(When did he become such a freaking cliché.)

He picked the pieces up and dusted them off and moved to Seattle, where he falls in love all over again with a woman who has no problem ripping it out of his chest again and making sure to hide the pieces in places he'll never find them.

Her name's Cristina Yang. It's whispered in hallways of the hospital when he first moves here. Talk of Burke and hand problems and bitch are uttered behind her back and he almost feels bad for her. Then he meets her and well, he doesn't feel bad.

She's hardcore to a fault, simply put. She holds her own in and out of surgery and she may be Cardio all the way but he still enjoys having her in his O.R.

Burke leaves and things don't change, not for them, really. He's her attending, she's a resident and that's it.

But he's a masochist and so he sleeps with her. There's no ring on her finger but there was supposed to be and that makes her just as unavailable. They don't pretend it's anything more than sex for comfort. And it works just fine for awhile. (But he's a masochist so it doesn't stay just fine.)

The relationship shifts subtly until there are more of her clothes in his closet then in hers. She moves around his new apartment like it's hers and he buys the crappy cereal she eats by the box. She doesn't expect special treatment at work because she hates plastics and he doesn't know if he should be offended or relieved.

He'll marry her one day. Of that he's certain.

But before that, there are broken dishes and yelling and more rain. Before that she'll break his heart and he'll break hers and love shouldn't hurt this much he thinks.

There's no big event, Burke doesn't come back, and Addison doesn't call professing her love. Their relationship just shifts again and suddenly they spend most of their time fighting and she walks out because it's what she knows how to do, and it's what she's good at.

(He doesn't go after her because that's what he knows how to do, what he's good at. He tried with Addison and everyone knows how that ended.)

He doesn't make some big proclamation, but there are two lines on a stick that she whips at him on the middle of an empty hallway and he goes out and buys a calendar.

He calls it emotional progression.