This one's for PMC.  We'll miss you babe! 

Rocket Launcher – hey, you're back!  Yeah, college apps are a "piece of pie"… except, not :)

Britgirl2003 – Well, that depends on your definition of happily ever after :)  But there won't be any maudlin death scenes, I'm really trying to go easy on the tearjerking.

Sparky0151 – Here's the Cordano you ordered – would you like some Cherry Garcia with that? ;)

Chapter 11. Kodak Moments

Mark had just managed to stop worrying when he ran into Elizabeth, quite literally.  Getting on the subway, he'd sat down to try to stop the pounding headache when he felt a foot smash his toe and a voice say absently, "Excuse me."

He looked up, startled, when he heard the distinctive, accented tones.  "Elizabeth?"

She stopped threading her way through the crowd, and smiled tentatively.  "Oh, Mark!  I didn't even realize it was you – I'm sorry, did I hurt you?"

"No, no."

Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows in a question, and he nodded – "Go ahead, sit."

She took the seat next to him and leaned forward, clasping her hands on her knees.  "How are you feeling?"
"I can't say I slept that well last night."

She smiled and for once, he didn't feel like his mere presence got on her nerves.  But they didn't have anything more to say to each other; a comfortable, almost placid silence reigned as the train roared to their stop.

When he got to the ER, taking leave of Elizabeth with another mutual, only vaguely awkward smile, he joined Susan, who was also arriving.

"Ready for another wonderful day of vomit and blood?" she asked him.

He rubbed his hands together.  "Bring it on."

In fact, he was enjoying himself during every minute he worked; he knew it wouldn't be more than a few months at best until he couldn't work anymore.  But the stress took its toll on his eye muscles, and soon he found himself turning to Susan again.

"Hey," he said, joining her in a down moment at the desk.  "Like the effect?"

He blinked, to demonstrate, and his right eye stayed insistently open.

"Need some drops again?" she guessed, feigning annoyance.

Mark pouted.  "Please?"

"Oh, all right.  C'mere."

He sat in a chair, and Susan's hands were soft on his face, tilting his head back; her face concerned and gentle.  The bustle of the activity around the desk faded to a tiny, claustrophobic space of smiling friendship and buried, melancholy affection.

"So I woke up this morning and there was a cockroach in my bed," she remarked.  "Can I just say that it wasn't a pleasant start to my day?"

"What's wrong with cockroaches?" he said.  "I had a pet cockroach when I was little.  Kept it in a little glass cup with a top on it."

"Oh, Mark.  Gross."

He shrugged.  "I liked bugs."

"Bugs are one thing; cockroaches…"  Susan shook her head.  "You worry me."

Kerry passed by them and did a double take, coming back to stand quite near Mark and say quietly, "Mark, is your eye okay?"

He blinked, and Susan stepped away.  "I'm having Gamma treatment again," he explained in a low voice.  There was no point in keeping the secret, now that Elizabeth knew.  "This is what happens."

Behind her impassive face Kerry seemed slightly regretful, knowing what that meant.  "I'm sorry," she said in a clipped voice.  "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

"Not really," he murmured as she walked away.

~

"You paged me?" Elizabeth demanded as she entered the scrub room.

She encountered two faces – Anspaugh and Robert – but the latter was the one that caught her attention, since her arrival brought an instant's tumult to its features before they settled into Romano's usual suavity.

"We got swamped with a couple of GSW's," he said.  "I had a transplant scheduled in an hour, so I need you to take one of them."

"Fine," she said.

He cocked her a grin.  "I owe you a favor."

She fielded the grin with her own.  "I'll need an assist.  Edson's on?"

At Anspaugh's confirmation, she had a nearby nurse page Dale Edson and started scrubbing in.

"So, how are Lizzie's prospects at replacing me?" Romano asked Anspaugh casually.

"Well," Anspaugh said, directing his words to Elizabeth, "it's an interesting possibility.  And you know I have nothing but the highest respect for you."

"Ah, Elizabeth, you should be blushing by now," Romano said, his eyes on Elizabeth.

"I'm not that easy," she returned with a glimmer of a smile.

She knew that she was confusing him.   That his eyes every so often flicked down to the wedding ring pinned to her lapel: he knew nothing of the decision she'd reached last night.

Well – she corrected herself – she still wasn't sure what decision had been reached last night.  In the meantime perhaps it would be better to refrain from looking at him.

Definitely better.  He wasn't the only one feeling confused right now.

Anspaugh, meanwhile, was telling Elizabeth, "…But of course a committee will need to conduct a national search."

"Of course," she said.

"I am very supportive of this, though," he said with a direct look.

She smiled.  "Thank you."

"I hate to interrupt the Kodak moment," Robert said, "but where the hell is Edson?"

"I'll page him again," offered the nurse.

"Why don't you do that – oh, never mind!  Here comes our recalcitrant hero…" Romano said as Edson came in the door.

Elizabeth, impatiently, added, "Didn't you hear your pager?"

"I was tied up in a phone call," Edson said, annoyed.  "I got here as quickly as I could."

"Stop the excuses and scrub in," Elizabeth said.  "I need an assist on a GSW."

Edson sighed.  "All right."

"Hey Lizzie, you think the underlings are going to be this grumpy at Northwestern?" Romano asked.

"I think it all depends on how their boss behaves himself," Elizabeth said pointedly.

"Ah, I see how it is," he said, feigning hurt.  "And here I was thinking losing your beloved boss would break your heart."

Their eyes met from the opposite sinks, facing each other, and Elizabeth felt her stomach twist up again, as it had last night.

"Well."  He finished scrubbing, his gaze still steady, and walked across the room, passing close enough for her to feel a slight current of air against her arm.  His face, as he turned at the door for a couple of parting shots, had softened into something like affection.  "I have a feeling none of my colleagues at Northwestern will be quite as easy on the eyes as you, but maybe they'll be better at brown-nosing."

Elizabeth started to retort, but he had directed his attention back to the unfortunate Dale.  "In the future, if you're going to be a drama queen, can you figure out a way to make your dramatic entrance in a way that doesn't involve Dr. Corday waiting ten minutes for you?" he said as he went outside.

"Ugly little bastard," Edson muttered in the silent scrub room.

Elizabeth found herself jumping instinctively to Robert's defense.  "Yes, he's often mentioned his envy of your rugged good looks and sparkling charisma."

"The man is impossible, I don't know how you manage to work so closely with him without clobbering him."

"Firstly, he's incredibly punctual," Elizabeth said.

Anspaugh turned his head to mask a chuckle.  "You know, you two, Robert's left the room, so we can act like civilized human beings if we want to."

Edson shook his head.  "God, I'll be glad to see him go."

"That's one sentiment I'm sure Dr. Corday reciprocates," Anspaugh said.  Elizabeth didn't respond, so he continued, "Personally, though, I think the guy is the best surgeon we've got.  –Present company excepted, of course," he added with a nod that Elizabeth was pleased to see directed exclusively at her.

She acknowledged the nod and finished scrubbing up.  "Dr. Edson, I'm starting," she said curtly.  "I still need an assist, if it fits your leisurely schedule."

As she backed out of the room and into the nearby OR she heard him gripe to Anspaugh, "That one can be as bad as Romano sometimes."

Oh, Dale – Elizabeth wanted to say – thinking of herself and Robert over the years, and their finely honed, back-and-forth rhythm of challenge and parry, strike and counter – you have no idea.

~

Susan yawned slightly as she entered the suture room.  Her patient was young, twenty-six or so (god, she was calling twenty-six-year-olds young – how middle-aged) and be-spectacled and quite lawyerly.

"Hi, Blake," she said.   "I'm Dr. Lewis, I'm going to stitch up your leg."

She'd volunteered for this one because the day was slow and she didn't have the heart to wake up Gallant, who had fallen asleep at the admit desk, or Mark, who had crawled into an empty room to sleep several hours ago.  Besides, maybe this way she could avoid being sucked into another major case during her last fifteen minutes.

Blake was silent and unfriendly, and Susan, who normally welcomed the chance to chat with her patients, rather appreciated the silence.  Concentrating on stitching up the tattered skin on his leg, she found her thoughts drifting back to Mark.

There had been few times when she'd allowed herself to take these newfound – or newly rekindled – feelings for Mark seriously.  After all, he was her friend, and married, and dying.  But last night, even today while she helped him with his eye, she had realized just how far she'd let herself go.

She knew he was going downhill fast.  It wasn't just the frailty she could feel every time she touched his skin, but his mind wasn't working as well as it used to.  And she couldn't stand that, knowing that what had mattered to Mark more than anything was being able to take care of people; knowing things were drawing to a close and she was running out of time even to talk to him, to be near him.

"That hurt?" she asked Blake absently when he drew in a tiny breath.

"No," he said.  "It's fine."

She slipped back into concentration, into the present.  Once she'd finished, time was up, and she left Blake with a hint of relief.

The note on the door opposite her said, "Sleeping… don't wake."  Then, smushed like an afterthought in the small space at the bottom, "Please."

Oh, Mark.  She laughed and opened the door, wanting to tell him he could go home now.  Their shift was over.

He was on his back in his usual sleeping position, long legs spread slightly so that his feet didn't hit the end of the bed.  Susan sat down on the bed and called softly, "Mark… wake up…"

Mark's eyes opened and he looked up at her in innocent sleepiness.  "Susan," he mumbled.  "I dreamed about you."

"Yeah?" she asked.  "What about me?"

He woke up more fully and his expression was wondering, as if he were seeing her anew.  "You were a mother," he said.  "You had a little baby.  A boy."

She looked away.  This wasn't a pleasant topic for her – he knew that.  She'd been a mother once, and that wasn't real, didn't last.  "Did you conjure me up a husband?" she said.  "A handsome one, I hope."

"No," he said slowly, with his voice catching as if there were something more he wanted to say.  "I don't think so."

Let's stop this – she thought – before I find myself thinking of all the children I've never had, the chances I relinquished at that train station five years ago.  "Our shift's over," she said.  "You're free to go home and sleep."

"Already?" he said.  "I thought I went to sleep just ten minutes ago."

"No, you slept through half our shift," she said.

"Dammit."

"It's okay.  You're sick."

He looked up at her.  "People are just going to let me slack off now.  They're just waiting for me to drop off."

"No, they're going to try to make it better for you," she said.  "They're going to let you judge for yourself when working here gets too hard."

"Do you think I should give up now?" he said.  His tones were innocent, like a child: like she had only to say the word and he would obey.

She met his eyes through a blur.  "I'm never going to want you to give up, Mark."

Mark's face changed when he heard that.  With a visible effort not to wince in pain, he sat up laboriously and looked her intensely in the eye.  She recognized that expression, the mixture of plaintive nervousness and determination on his face.  It almost frightened her, wondering what he might say next.

Suddenly Mark caught a good look at her eyes, which she knew were gleaming.  His eyebrows drew together, and he reached out to touch her face, a thumb gently wiping away one tear.

She couldn't look away.  "Mark—"

"Dr. Lewis?"

Shit.  "Yeah?" she said, turning to see Lydia opening the door as Mark leaned backwards, away from her.  And she couldn't decide who to be angry with, Lydia for interrupting or herself for the wildly confused confession that had been on the verge of spilling from her mouth. 

"There's three coming in from an MVA.  Can you do it?"

"Of course," she said, standing decisively.  "Just my cup of tea."

Mark began, "I'll help—"

She interrupted him and said with a pointed grin, "Go home."

He smiled.  "Bye, Susan."

"Later," she said.

Looking back just before she closed the door behind her, she saw his smile fade into pensivity.

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