AN: Roughly this is hospital merger time (so season 6 episode 3).
"Hey so I think I found the apartment. Want to go tonight since you're off at six?" Mark asks walking up to Lexie in the cafeteria.
Ever since they'd taken the day off work Mark and Lexie had found themselves completely stalled when it came to finding the right apartment. Whereas before the couple stalled due to not finding a house they could see raising a family in, now with the hospital merger looming Mark had a hard time getting Lexie to even leave the hospital.
Shaking her head Lexie looks at the charts in her arms. "I can't. It's the merger, no one's going home and I can't be the first one to leave." Lexie explains.
Carefully, Mark tries to figure out how far he's going to push this. "Right but you've been here for well over 80 hours straight…" He points out trying to see if she'll talk herself into coming home or at least take a few hours and sleep.
Shrugging Lexie reads over the chart again, it's memorized. She has it memorized but she wants to nail it before she goes to her patient. "Power naps and coffee. I've gotta run there's a trauma. Love you." Lexie leans up and presses a kiss to his cheek leaving Mark standing there dazed and confused.
"This ought to end well." He mumbles before getting paged and ending up in an operating room with a pissed off Derek yelling about how the chief had lost his ability to lead.
Rapidly following Derek out of the operating room Mark knows that he needs to stop the neurosurgeon before he says something that gets him fired. While Mark didn't agree with any of the way the chief had handled this, he felt like staying uncharacteristically quiet and doing what he saw as his usual amazing job would help both him and Lexie make it through. In his mind he had no chance of getting fired, and the chief needed him for the revenue both he and his department brought in. With that Lexie had to be safe, Chief Webber had to know that if they fired Lexie it would take Mark a matter of hours to quit.
Mark felt safe in the merger. Chasing Derek down the hall he reaches him by the nurses station. "You're tired, you're angry, you're gonna say something you'll regret. Get out of here for a while, go to the driving range hit a bucket of balls." Mark suggests hoping that getting Derek to leave will make him calm down.
Even if Mark felt mostly comfortable about his position in the merger he didn't want to watch his best friend get fired over his temper. "I have a surgery in an hour." Derek interjects not stopping.
"So take a walk." Mark starts desperately putting himself in Derek's path. "Grab Meredith, take a walk." He suggests again.
Rolling his eyes he looks up at Mark "Meredith won't leave the hospital, none of them will." Derek points out. The residents and interns all but moved into the hospital over the last ten days, Mark could barely count the number of hours he spent with his wife and very few of them had taken place outside the hospital.
Ironically, since Lexie had badgered him to give up his hotel room, Mark had taken to also sleeping at Meredith's. With the merger it had basically grown to just Mark and Derek in the house, occasionally waking up to find a sleeping resident somewhere or hear a door slam as pages went off throughout the house.
"Everyone's waiting on word from up high, look don't tell me Lexie's not worried." Derek points as Mark turns to see his wife running down the hallway with bags of blood in her hands, only to trip and fall on the floor.
Sighing, Mark looks down at his wife and tries to figure out if she'll get mad if he tried to help her. In her refusal to leave the hospital she had also refused to work with him or do anything related to work over fear it would look like special treatment. He knew Lexie was freaked out over all of this. "No Lexie's worried." Mark agrees.
Later in the day he finds Lexie standing by the nurses station charting in a new lab coat and scrubs. It takes everything he has to not tease Lexie about it, and of course he fails miserably at it. "You missed a spot." He points out with a chuckle.
Instantly Lexie turns and begins gesturing. "You can't tease me about the blood thing." She starts fingers pointing at him. "It's not funny and if it gets back to the chief I may as well pack my things." She starts rambling and before it spirals Mark cuts her off.
For a brief moment he wonders how in all of this he became the sane and calm one, talking everyone he knows off the ledge. "You need to stop worrying about the chief, all this is in your head."
Despite his good intentions, Mark's so-called advice ends up with Lexie reciting statistics at him about all of the hospitals who had merged. Even though he knew that he should try and stop her and get her to take a nap or go eat something, he can't help but to smile at the way her memory worked. Mark finally jumps in to stop her. "Okay. Alright. Woah. You have to stop. You deserve to be here, act like it." He reassures her hoping that she really does understand she belongs her. Leaning up, Lexie kisses him, calmed for a moment before taking off down the hallway. "You know, later, after you went home and got some sleep." He calls as she turns down the hallway.
From the blood on her coat, Lexie's day doesn't go up. Her paranoid schizophrenic patient freaks out on her over the lack of her nametag on her substitute lab coat and slams her to the ground. For a moment, Lexie stays put, trying to figure out if getting shoved had hurt her in anyway, she processes that nothing's broken or more than bruised before getting up. Storming off she tries to figure out what had happened that made it so her patient could storm out of the ER.
Paging everyone up the psych chain again, and warning Dr. Bailey the son had taken off Lexie begins searching everywhere she can. Having finished up with his patient, Mark steps into the hallway to see Lexie frantically looking behind bins and other beds.
"You look crazy," He calls hoping to get enough of a rise out of her to calm her down.
What Mark doesn't expect is his petite wife to get in his face and begin yelling at him. "This is your fault!" She starts yelling as loud as she can without being disruptive. "You the one who told me to act like I deserve to be here! And I did! And now I lost a schizophrenic and I am going to be lost unless I find the schizophrenic!" She raises up on her toes to yell at him before turning back down the hallway to keep yelling.
Rather than let her go, Mark continues hoping that he'll calm her down as he watches her crawl behind a bed that clearly would not fit a grown man. "You're not going to find him back there." He says less than helpfully.
Whipping back around Lexie closes the distance again on her husband "You do not get to be charmed by this because this is not charming," she threatens exasperated. In this moment he can finally tell just how little sleep his wife has had and how much this merger had pushed her to the breaking point. "This is me getting cut from the program, this is me having to transfer. You're already amazing. I'm just starting out! What if I can't get another spot in another program? Are we really going to work at different hospitals? No we're not. So I'm going to never get to become a surgeon. I have never stapled a bowl and I have never resected an esophagus. I am not amazing yet." Lexie yells the end and Mark quickly closes the distance.
Placing his hands on her shoulders as she pants, Mark tries to calm her down. "Alright, let's just breathe okay?" He coaches taking dramatized breaths and trying to get her to calm down. Once he's noticed her breathing return to normal he careful speaks again hoping to reason with her. "Look at me. Security is on this. You have become a crazy person I do not recognize, I would like my wife back. Can I get Lexie back?" He says and watches her start to melt in his arms.
The relief lasts only a moment before Lexie hears the schizophrenic and takes off at a dead sprint. They make it just in time to see the man fall down the stairs.
"Dammit." Lexie curses before springing into action.
At the end of his shift Mark listens as Derek talks. "Wait someone slammed Lexie onto the ground?" Mark asks getting a recap from Derek. An hour ago Mark had gotten out of surgery and Derek offered up the details of the surgery currently finishing up in OR 3.
Nodding, Derek continues to explain the parts of the story Bailey told him in a rage before she scrubbed in. "I know that Lexie came up with the plan to get both patients on the table in a way that saved the day, but I know the patient slammed her to the ground." Derek explains and Mark spots his wife sitting downstairs sobbing in her chair.
Mumbling some sort of excuse Mark takes off at a sprint. Watching Lexie try to calm herself before launching into another fit his heart drops in a panic. Webber had cut his wife from the program. "No, are you serious?" Mark starts in disbelief. Even with his biased opinion he knew that Lexie had skills that most of her class didn't. "I'm going to go to the chief…"
Shaking her head, she interrupts him. "I'm safe, I didn't get cut Mark, I'm safe." Lexie explains before launching into another fit of sobs. Wrapping his arms around her, he kisses the top of her head.
"I love you." Mark comforts pulling her closer.
AN: I hope close to 1800 words makes up for my slow posting time! It's the weekend so I'm trying to post a few more chapters! Drop a review and let me know what you thought!