Hello once again beautiful people! How in the hell I've managed to successfully update not once but twice in a week is incredibly baffling, especially for me, so please don't get that used to it, but I really couldn't resist after all your kind reviews (and the giant wave of inspiration that hit me square in the face). I love seeing what you think, and I think you'll have quite a lot to say after this chapter, so remember that the box at the end of the page is your best friend as it is mine, and there's nothing I love more than us all being best friends. I own nothing, which is a damn tragedy within itself, and once again, all mistakes I make are my own. It's fanfiction, though. Not sure what you expected anyways. Alright, I'll shut up.

Chapter Three

Lexie prided herself on many things, a steady hand being one of them. Her patience, on the other hand, was anything but. Major Mark Sloan hadn't been an ideal patient by any means while she fixed him up, cleaning the wound and sewing the laceration shut, even being so kind as to not do a hack-job on it like she should have in order to jump in on Hunt's surgery, a ruptured spleen that had come out of nowhere, or to even team up with Kepner. But she hadn't. Instead, she sat there diligently finishing her job even despite his ridiculous commentary that grated down on her nerves more and more the longer they sat there.

She'd been entirely grateful when he was finished and she was able to dismiss herself from his company.

His whole unit had been swallowed whole by base, and she prayed that this wasn't going to be a new common thing even though the discomforting sinking feeling in her chest told her otherwise. From what she understood, the crudely-slapped together IED that had set off near their truck hadn't been made well enough to do the kind of damage it wanted to, but it certainly had taken plenty. The soldier that had come in with the broken femur had lost his leg entirely, Kepner was forced to amputate it in order to save his life, and he'd been discharged almost immediately after. She may have spent most of her days inside the med tent, doing medic work half the time and twiddling her thumbs waiting for something to fall in her lap the other half, but she knew it was taking its toll. It didn't take her being around any of them to tell her as much.

It meant Mark Sloan was out of sight, out of mind for a little while, anyways, so she wasn't going to dwell over it that much.

After dinner one night, she was sitting outside of the med tent watching the sky and taking advantage of the quiet. Out in the distance, a group of soldiers as well as Avery and another one of their surgeons were playing a game of soccer, their laughs echoing out in the empty desert. Lexie's hands were wrapped around her knees, hugging them towards her chest as her eyes danced over each little star in the sky. Back in Boston it was a little harder to see all of the stars, and even with all of the smoke and dust stirred up from the sand, she could see them clearly. She'd always been fascinated by the stars as a little girl; they were a source of quiet comfort, getting lost in the elements in space that burned brighter than the sun and were long gone now. They reminded her of her childhood, they reminded her of what she could be. What she was going to be. What she was already halfway on the verge of being.

"If it isn't Doctor Sunshine," the voice pierced her bubble of thought, frown immediately settling on her face as she glanced up. She knew exactly who it belonged to, and he was wearing a ridiculously overbearing smile on his face as he looked down at her.

"Major Sloan," she replied dryly, line of sight rectifying back to how it had been only a few moments earlier.

"What, I don't get a nickname?"

Lexie rolled her eyes at his teasing, pulling her legs a little closer to her chest. "I'm pretty sure my giving you a nickname is frowned upon."

"Correct, you are," he congratulated. Without warning, he sat down next to her, accidentally bumping her knees with his elbow as he made room for himself on the ground in order to get comfortable. Torn from her peace in watching the sky—or at least, as much peace as there could be with a soccer game transpiring a couple of feet in the distance—she turned her head to stare at him, bewildered.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm joining you, Sunshine." His answer was matter-of-fact, as if he were explaining to her how the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening. The immediate response that materialized in her mind was to ask him where, exactly, the sign over her head calling for company was and when the lights had turned on because she sure as hell couldn't recall, but she decided to let it dissipate. Judging by his semblance to the Cheshire cat, he really didn't care one way or another, and she wasn't looking to pick a fight.

She stared ahead, lips pressed together as she tried to turn her focus to the soccer game. It wasn't interesting by any means; they were all playing on a one-man team and it had quickly evolved from soccer to a game of keep-away. Earlier, she'd sworn she saw Avery pick up the ball and start running. However, it was better entertainment than having to acknowledge she'd now found herself plagued with the company of none other Mark Sloan, the last person she wanted to be around at the moment. "Haven't seen you around base," Sloan commented, his way of trying to elicit a conversation out of her.

"I spend most of my time in the med tent."

"Doing what? You haven't had anything to do since...the incident." His voice went about as stiff as the air around him, had Lexie reached out she could have felt it bristling. The numbness was still seeping through the after math; from what she'd overheard, it was a lot harder when you didn't get sent home in a body bag. Turning her head slightly, she could see him straighten up a little and square his shoulders back, as though he was physically trying to shake the awkwardness from his body.

"We have to practice," she pointed out, trying to steer the conversation from a plummet into painful silence. That was worse than him accompanying her via his own invitation to do so, in her book, and Lexie had always been the kind of girl who didn't mind talking emotions with other people. "Surgery's only muscle memory to an extent."

"Every time I come by to get this thing changed," he replied, lifting up his arm to display the giant cut that ran along the distance of his forearm. "You are never there, so the way I see it, that's not much of an excuse."

"And again, I'm a surgeon, not a medic." It wasn't entirely a lie; changing dressings and removing stitches was basic field-medic work, and by her doing it would have been an entire waste of time. Whether or not she mentioned to him that she'd ducked out every single time he'd come around looking for her wouldn't hurt him.

"So you patching me up was just something you did out of the kindness of your heart?" He rested a hand over his chest mockingly. "Dr. Grey, I'm touched."

Lexie rolled her eyes, but she kept quiet. Her answer was already armed on the edge of her tongue, but she knew the repercussions it would surely bring. The second she'd mention the only reason she'd patched him up was to save his arm from infection and ultimately amputation, the awkward silence would return with all its spikes, or worse, he'd lash out. As much as it aggravated her, she'd take the taunting that came along with his company, rather than an excruciating silence that allowed her her quiet.

"How come you aren't out there running around with your surgeon buddies?" he asked, gesturing out towards the group off in the distance that had now entirely abandoned the soccer ball and were running around chasing one another like a group of elementary-school children.

"Those are some of your guys out there, too, you know," Lexie told him. She didn't want to give him the real answer, which was that she didn't really have anything to do with the other surgeons on the base other than Hunt who was always much too busy for any sort of outside bonding, that she was much more content and having twenty times more fun sitting and observing the stars than trying to keep up somewhere she wasn't necessarily invited. "I could ask you the same thing."

One of his eyebrows kinked in question, mostly out of surprise she was even willing to go back and forth. "Are you?"

Lexie's line of sight was far off in the clearance, her mind raveling her back inside faster and faster as she started slipping from the conversation. "No, I'm not."

"And why is that?" he prompted teasingly.

"Because I already know the answer: for some reason, you just can't seem to resist me." He'd walked himself right into that one. She would have never put it out on display, but she was damn proud of it, too, even if he had made it easy for her.

Sloan scoffed, making it harder for Lexie to keep her grin suppressed. "Whatever you say, doc." She shook her head at his denial, trying not to laugh as she tore her eyes from him and went back to watching the sky.

Each little star burned, brighter than some and others fading well into the blackness of the sky, and Lexie couldn't help herself but to think of home, who she was before she'd slapped on the olive drab and khaki; when she'd lay in the backyard with Molly and make shapes from the clouds and identify the Big and Little Dippers over and over again since it was the only constellation either of them had bothered to memorize. She'd been just Lexie, with the photographic memory and one foot inside Harvard who smiled and rambled too much and apologized often and resented apples. She'd been one of those stars that did well with a black backdrop, stealing the eye's attention, and now she felt in the likes of those who had dimmed out, the ones who had known their place for so long that it resulted in them losing themselves and burned all the way out trying to rediscover. Drawing her knees in a little closer, she rested her chin down on her folded arms. "I'm not a soccer girl, anyways. I played softball all the way through college," she admitted to him, kick-starting him and the conversation up all over again.

The moment it came out of her mouth, she found herself wishing there were some way to retract all the words. The smile on Sloan's face returned, bright and brilliant and creases forming next to his eyes. His elation was burning through her side as she winced, a small laugh escaping her throat the more ridiculous the look on his face got. "What?" Lexie asked, tearing fully away from her other surroundings to give him a look, hair sweeping down across her shoulders.

"Oh nothing," he mused nonchalantly. "Just thinking about how next time we find ourselves like this, I'm so kicking your ass in a game of baseball."

"I lost someone overseas," are Lexie's first words to Dr. Wyatt.

Four sessions and she'd successfully made it through without talking, up until the last twenty minutes of session number five. Hell, she'd been proud of herself for keeping silent that long. By nature, she was one who would ramble just to fill empty air whether she had something to say of importance or not. Not talking in therapy was her way of resisting more of Meredith and Derek's attempts to cure her of her grief, not talking was a way of getting a second of silence where she could be in her mind with no one berating her for it, not talking in therapy was keeping the waterfall of bricks her memories and emotions had taken the form of at bay where she could essentially forget about them.

Her fight with Meredith a few days ago had started gnawing away at her, like she was supposed to regret it or something. She didn't by any means: the words had to come out one way or another, and her sister wasn't going to hear anything than brutal hostility since that was the language Meredith spoke. The nightmares had come swinging in full-force, much worse than they usually were, and the same face haunted them in ways she'd tried to entirely black out of her mind.

Dr. Wyatt's face was expressionless, of course, although Lexie knew somewhere behind the mask she was a thousand shades colored in surprise that Lexie had actually said something that wasn't a reminder time was up. "Were they a friend?"

"Everyone's a friend over there," Lexie answered after a moment of contemplation. "But yeah, I...I guess you could say that."

"Were they more than a friend?" She was the shrink, after all. Everything Lexie said was a puzzle that Dr. Wyatt seemed to have all the answers in solving. The silence was overwhelming to the point of suffocating. She knew the answer, Dr. Wyatt knew the answer too, but she wanted to hear her physically say it even at the risk of it killing her to squeeze it from her lungs. Lexie exhaled from her nose, bangs falling in her eyes as she cast her head downwards so she could focus more closely on the carpet and avoid eye contact altogether.

"Yes," she finally admitted, her voice small.

"Tell me about them," Dr. Wyatt gestured for her to continue, and Lexie felt her insides freeze. She hadn't talked about him in ages, mostly because it was an unspoken rule that no one brought him up, no one asked him about her, and no one ever acknowledged his existence verbally when she was within hearing range. Meredith and Derek had been strict enforcers of that, especially when she'd first gotten home, still reeling and any sign of him would set her off into hysterics. Out of sight, out of mind worked when she was in the company of others, not so much when she was on her own and fully trapped inside her head, but she could handle it when his face appeared in the dreams turned to nightmares, when it was out of her control entirely.

Her mouth suddenly dry, she gripped her hands tighter together in an attempt to get a tangible hold on something she could control. In this case, it was just how fiercely she could cut off the circulation in her palms. Dr. Wyatt had asked her to talk, and all the words blended together in a fit of nothing inside her mind. There was a reason she never talked about it, and that was because the slightest little thing would break the very fragile dam holding it all back. In the corners of her eyes, Lexie could feel the burning start, thorns pressing further and further down at the thought of him. His laugh. His smile. His eyes. His heart. The way he'd faded right there in her fingers.

"I loved him." The only thing that was willing to jump from the back of her throat did so in a way that she could feel all of her insides start to shift at the weight. Dr. Wyatt was scribbling fiercely in her notebook—finally, Lexie was giving her something to go on and god was she taking advantage of the few little things she could squeeze out—while Lexie stared at her hands, studied the shape of her fingers and the length of the nails. It was growing harder and harder for her to hold firm to the reality that her hands were clean and not covered with blood and dirt and ash. "I...I loved him. We were going to get married."

"He'd proposed?"

Lexie shook her head, blinking her eyes rapidly to hold the tears at bay for just a little while longer. "He'd um...we'd talked about it," she explained quietly, voice threatening to break in half under the weight of the sobs fighting their way out. "It was going to happen, we knew that, we just, kinda wanted to wait? At least until the tour was finished and he could retire and we were at home for good. Like real people do, anyways."

"Just because you have an unconventional relationship doesn't mean it makes you any less of a real person, Lexie," Dr. Wyatt pointed out, and Lexie had to bite back the laugh. She knew all about unconventional; her sister's definition of marriage was a framed Post-It note, the frame only coming about when the adhesive on the back started failing. "So the two of you were going to come home and get married."

"That was the plan," she muttered.

"And then he—"

"You don't have to say it," Lexie cut in, head snapping up to meet Dr. Wyatt in an icy glare and voice raising the second she realized where this was derailing. "I...I know what happened. Please, just...don't say it."

"Lexie," Dr. Wyatt coaxed. "Not hearing the words, not letting someone say them in front of you only buries you further down into denial. Even if it's not what you want to hear."

"I've heard it enough over the last five months," Lexie pointed out. "I've heard it enough to last me a lifetime."

Her eyes weren't glued to the clock, nor was her brain focused on keeping the time, so she was a little startled at the small, erratic knock on the door that couldn't have belonged to anyone but Meredith. Almost on cue, Lexie fell silent as her sister pushed the door open, her eyes falling back down into her lap. "Lex, you ready?" Meredith asked, just like usual, looking over at Dr. Wyatt for something, anything. The session was over, and Meredith's added intrusion was the swift hit to the shut-down button.

"Yeah, I'm ready." She released the breaks on her wheelchair and started off towards Meredith, as Dr. Wyatt closed the notebook and capped her pen. It was only now that Lexie noticed the color of the notebook, her notebook most likely, a shade of plum purple.

"See you next week," Lexie heard Meredith say quietly to Dr. Wyatt. She wondered if her sister could tell that something was different with this session, that perhaps she'd done something other than stare at the walls.

The car ride was filled with a lack of conversation, as per usual, but this time it wasn't from Lexie trying to prove a point to Meredith that talking wouldn't solve all of her problems. This time, it was because Lexie had dipped her toe back in an ocean she'd swore never to go swimming in, at least not any time soon. She was sitting in the seat, thumb encircling the surface over her palm over and over because this time, she'd really gone and done it and now there was no taking it back. Cracks had already begun to snake their way up through the walls, and any time now they were going to come crashing back down. And all she wanted now, just like she had back then, was her older sister.

"I talked today," she whispered after a rampant surge of courage to talk to Meredith that wasn't in the name of picking a fight flooded right through her, and if Meredith had ever been a person who believed in using her car radio, she never would have heard Lexie.

"You did?" The way Meredith spoke, it was like she was discovering Lexie had indeed been the one to hang all the stars in the sky by her pinky. Lexie knew she'd been told roughly a million times, most of them coming from herself, not to get her hopes up on seeing significant bursts of progress especially in processes designated to help. Meredith was biting her tongue, trying to keep her joy from flooding over as she glanced over at Lexie. "What'd you talk about?"

Lexie didn't even realize she had been holding her breath until the words fell from her mouth in a rushing exhale. "Mark."

...I'm sorry. Please don't kill me, guys. Come on though, you had to know it was coming, like...you HAD TO, okay? I tried to drop as many hints as I could without really dropping hints, although now if you go back and reread the last few updates things certainly make a hell of a lot more sense. Either way, I couldn't keep dragging it out much farther because the suspense was killing me. Besides, even though he is no longer physically with us Mark has a lot of tie-in to everything in Lexie's present, and in case you can't tell, flashbacks are going to be a major part of the story anyways, so rest assured, you won't be that deprived of him! I love him too much to do that to myself. And to think, Elisa, you voted for this. Wink. Anyways, lemme know what you thought, remember I love you, and someone tell Chyler Leigh I love her. xo