New chapter for you! These next couple of chapters are going to bring us back to Mark's side of the story. Please, please review and let me know if you like - otherwise I don't know if I'm doing a good job. Thanks. You're all wonderful. x

10.

It had been three hours since Lexie Grey had died in OR1.

As was the case more often than not at Seattle Grace Mercy West, the hospital was rife with rumour and speculation. It had been months since anyone had seen Lexie at the hospital and she had drifted away from her friends long before she stopped showing up for work so the initial shock many staff felt at losing one of their own didn't take long to dissipate enough for people to start a pool on what her last words had been. Currently the odds on favourite was a tie between;

'Mark, I love you'

And

'Callie, I blame you'

Highly creative suggestions…

The thing staff were discussing even more closely was what had happened so dramatically and so publically between Mark and Callie. Mark and Callie were well loved and known and so closely tied up with the rumour mill that they were the favourite doctors of staff who'd never even met them. Callie and Mark had both nearly died before – their close encounter with death and subsequent love story was full of the sort of angst and romance that made it seem almost fictional. The fact that this perfect couple might be disintegrating at the hands of a dead ex-girlfriend was all very exciting. Staff were taking bets on whether they would get back together, what injuries Callie had sustained, and whether or not the two could ever work together again. When a scrub nurse had witnessed Arizona dramatically bursting into the staff lounge and Bailey's subsequent departure, the rumour mill had almost gone into meltdown. Did this mean Callie and Arizona were getting back together?

Since Hunt had sternly, but not using excessive force, steered Mark up the stairs and away from prying eyes nobody had seen him and since Bailey, Callie and Arizona had disappeared into the staff lounge – and Bailey had re-emerged and disappeared seconds after Arizona's entrance – nobody had seen them either. Anybody would think that this would mean that the rumours would peter out into nothing but absence seemed to make the heart grow fonder, the tales grow taller and the betting pools grow larger.

Mark had been left in the chief's office for a bit to cool off and when the door had been left unsupervised he had slipped away. He felt drawn to the morgue and so he went down to the basement. The basement was a place where surgeons rarely found themselves. Surrounded by bodies, they were surrounded by physical reminders of their failures – of the lives they had not been able to save. A surgeon like Mark, who so frequently saw himself as a plastics God, never dwelt on failure and could not actually remember a time when he had been down in the morgue before.

It did not take him long to find Lexie. She had been laid out in a small, cool, dimly lit room so that Thatcher and Molly could come and see her when they arrived at the hospital. The dim blue lights made her skin look even paler. If Mark believed in ghosts he could almost believe Lexie was going to float up from the table and away. A white sheet covered her entire body and its edges hung down to the floor on each side on the table. Her eyes were closed and whilst she didn't look like she was sleeping there was an element of peace around her. Of course, Mark knew that this was because there was no expression at all to crease her features. Without expression, peace was the only thing her face could express but it seemed to life a tiny fragment of the weight Mark felt sitting on his heart to see her so completely pain free.

'Hello Little Grey,' Mark stood awkwardly next to the table. It was strange. He had seen people die. He had pronounced people and fought to save them but at no point had he spent any length of time just standing next to a dead body. He felt useless. It was a feeling he had ever since he'd broken down the door of the apartment. Callie had known what to do. Callie had sprung into action but he had just stood there. Even back at the hospital he had been useless. He blinked and realised that he was crying. Turning around he walked straight out of the room.