Previously: Mari and Meredith consider deathbed confessionals very differently. Meredith makes steps to bridge family divides. Hints of concern are made, from more people than Mari expected.
chapter five: bar story
Dr. Bones was on-call in the bar.
Or so one assumes, as he's holding the bell for last call taped in his bony hand.
Mari can guess where he came from, not that she expects many to realize that the skeleton is real. Someone must have absconded with him from across the street, thrown a lab coat over his shoulders, and fixed his jaw to look comical.
This is the dive bar for Seattle Grace. It makes sense that a token of death would follow, would be made to witness the libations of life.
Joe is behind the bar, hale for a man who was made a Frankenstein experiment, killed to later be revived, to save his life from an aneurysm, and save it further from medical debt.
He greets her, undeniably friendly, like she isn't still a stranger. He says 'welcome back to Oz', as part of an inside joke, and doesn't blink at her ordering water, doesn't push when her smile remains closed mouth, and disengaged, as she takes a seat with delicate care, with her eye on the door.
Maybe that's why everyone at Seattle Grace has Joe stories, times he helped them when the hospital got too much, when they hadn't yet made their mark, when they were adrift.
Meredith, Alex, George, Izzie, and Cristina liked to end a 14- and 16-hour shift at Joe's. Her roommates stumble in, in a haze of cheap beer and tequila. Laughing, and loud, and drunk, chattering in the kitchen as Izzie suddenly wants to bake something, and Meredith and George share the bowl of cookie dough or melted chocolate, too impatient and too easily distracted to wait for the oven.
After those nights, Joe's nights, there's always sugary confectionary left for the morning, and mountains of bowls, and spoons, and baking trays left to be tackled. Popcorn spilled in the living room, a blue television glowing where another Ellis Grey surgery was pulled from the past.
Mari didn't know what any of their 'Joe stories' were. But being here just reminds her of hers.
Six months ago, she was driving Meredith to the intern mixer. Smiling in amusement as she listened to her grumble through why do I have to do this? Complaining about the hair, and the makeup, and the dressing up. The sheer pointlessness of looking dolled up, before the reality of multi-day and night shifts, sleep deprivation, and grouchiness, scrubs, and harsh fluorescent lights. For Meredith, dress-up had nothing to do with their jobs.
Mari laughed but she didn't understand. Dress-up was part of every job.
If only they offered something like this to non-surgical residents, to the people who move laterally instead of straight up.
There was a stop light, next to a lane of brownstone businesses. Mari was looking at the hospital signage to familiarize herself with the layout, and Meredith's attention turned the right, looking up at the green neon glow of 'The Emerald City Bar' as she mused that at least at the mixer there was free booze.
Mari followed Meredith's eye line, and nearly missed the light change, looking at the sudden ease in Meredith's shoulders, like she has something, now, to look forward to.
The car moves forward, and Meredith doesn't notice that Mari's hands have slid down to the bottom of the steering wheel to hold tight.
"So, wish me luck."
Mari agreed, distractedly, telling herself not to read into it. "Luck."
Mari carefully peels peanuts along their seams, checking the glass above the back of the bar, to see the door.
After getting into a routine of shelling groupings, she looks over her shoulder and flinches to see Mark in her shadow, still in smooth black leather, with his hand outstretched like he was about to touch her shoulder.
"Hey," he says slowly, tilting his head at her. "I guess you didn't hear me..."
No, she didn't. This time he wasn't standing close enough to whisper near her ear. He seems distant. A more respectable distance, and a blankness over his features, instead of flirtatiousness.
"I'm sorry," she says slowly, blinking as she takes him in. "The music."
He narrows his cat like eyes, finding the music, and the chatter, particularly low, for this kind of place.
"Right. So, is this seat taken?"
She wordlessly shakes her head, carefully turning back in her seat.
She misses his order to Joe, but she catches Joe's subtle look at them both sitting together. He grabs a bottle of single malt Scotch, and Mari realizes what this must look like.
Same spot. Same drink. Same girl.
She glances to her right, like she expects the scene to recreate itself, Derek smiling at her, but instead she finds Mark, large shoulders hunched forward, focused exclusively on his drink.
The mirage disappears.
Mark murmurs something into his glass that Mari doesn't catch. It's only when he glances over, like he's waiting for a response, that Mari guesses it was something she was meant to hear.
"Pardon?"
His grey-ish blue eyes search her face, his voice now slow and deliberate. "I said, you look sad."
She's not sure he's being genuine, given he sometimes exaggerates and stretches out his words like he's digging.
"You're not waiting for Derek, are you?" he continues.
She frowns. "No?"
"Oh." And he frowns too, like he's confused by her. "I thought we might have that in common."
"Waiting for Derek?"
He rolls his eyes. "No. You, waiting for Derek. Me, waiting for Addison."
She glances at the door, just turning her chin to glance over her shoulder.
She's waiting for Meredith.
And just like last time, she's hoping Meredith won't show. Or at least, part of her is.
She doesn't want the meeting with Meredith's father to end in the kind of disappointment Meredith likes to numb with alcohol, but if Meredith did show, Mari could explain herself, away from their roommates. Explain that she would have gone, if she thought her presence wouldn't make things worse.
"Why aren't you waiting for him?" he wonders.
She blinks.
Mark turns so he's sideways along the bar, glass loose in his hand as the remnants glow amber.
"Delayed response," he quotes her, eyes not letting her go. "You really don't think hitting me had anything to do with you?" he raises his brow. "It just happened to work that way, after seeing your almost striptease?"
She presses her tongue against the back of her teeth.
"You make that sound tawdrier than it was."
He shakes his head. "I'm talking about what it looked like. To him."
Mari isn't up for being back in the exam room, trying to probe at the wound that still bleeds.
"Why are you here?" Here on the other barstool and just…here, in Seattle. The day she was back in the hospital, and back in this bar.
His brow quirks at her expression.
"I get Addison." And she does. She gets giving someone space and realizing too late that you've given them too much. That people don't come back on their own. "She heard about me, and hopped on a plane to see if her marriage could be salvaged. Your actions make less sense."
"Can't I want the same thing?" he asks semi-rhetorically.
How is what he wants comparable to that?
"Which is what, exactly?" she asks, matching the semi-serious tone by turning to him too, brow raised like she's daring him to answer.
He pursues his lips. "You are so not what I pictured."
She makes a face. His mind is apt for a comparison, she's sure.
She's not Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd. She doesn't have old Hollywood charm of female fatale sensuality, neither the look of leading the Valkyrie. Mari wasn't anywhere near 5'10'' and spiked heels. When she was eleven, and the orthodontist told her she'd be 160 cm at most, she called him a liar and tried to negotiate. She won the negotiation, but failed the genetic lottery.
It gets her sometimes, that Addison looks more to be the 'other woman' that audiences would root for anyway.
His teeth flash in a grin, amused at her disgruntlement.
"So, what's your reason?" he shoots back.
She shoots him a look of feigned apathy, choosing to watch the bar mirror instead.
Mark waves his hand at her, to get her to look at him. "You're sitting here, shelling peanuts, with a glass of water. You know why I'm here, but why are you?"
"I don't know why you're here," she corrects.
"I told you."
"You lied."
"When?" he asks, baffled and offended.
She flicks the peanut debris towards him since he's the one who drew attention to them. He looks down at his sleeve, like he's trying to see if he needs to brush off the leather. "If you truly don't know, I'm afraid I'm going to have to charge you 400 dollars for my answer. I hear that's your going rate."
His brows shoot up.
"Extortion," he accuses, head tilted contemplatively.
Mari fixes the pile of shells, not expecting him to set his glass down, and reach in his jacket for his wallet. After flicking through the bills, he lays four hundred-dollar bills on the bar top between them.
Mari laughs, short and quiet. What her ribs will allow.
(The fact that he carries more than that in his wallet, makes her wonder what lifestyle Derek left in New York, if Seattle had been the complete reverse. A trailer in the woods, freshly caught fish for his breakfast, warm, soft red and blue flannel. She can't picture him in a leather jacket or waving down the bartender like he's used to being served.
How much of Seattle Derek was an experiment, a distraction? How much wasn't real?)
She shifts back, looking over the deserted bar. Nearly as private as the exam room had been, if she were to cut him open.
After Derek hit him, and the Chief yelled about decorum and liability, and Derek had stormed off, and Addison had followed at a skirted distance, Mari was standing there, with everyone running off, and Mark at her feet, touching the blood on his face, and looking at the stain on his fingers, as if to make sure it was really there. Something more relieved, and not at all defensive, when he had looked up at Derek.
She knew that look. Recognized it. In Alex. In House. In Meredith...In herself.
'Don't leave me, don't ignore me, ...I can take a hit'.
It came from a childhood where love was a tide, something to yearn for, never dependable, never steady. Normal people from happy childhoods, didn't anchor themselves in other people the way that they did. Didn't lean into the hits.
It's not a thing anyone wants to hear about themselves.
She plans to push his money back at him, and tell him she was kidding.
"Do you always censor yourself?" Mark shakes his head in disappointment. "Almost say what you want and think better of it?"
She bites the inside of her cheek. Yes.
Fine.
"Did you think if he got to hit you, he might be able to forgive you?"
Mark stares, pulled back slightly as his lips quirk up ruefully. He shakes his head, looking down at his glass as he tips it into the light. "I came for Addison."
She scrutinizes his face from the corner of her eye, searching for guile, or insincerity, and finds the absence of it a bit tragic.
"Or you came to earn forgiveness too."
Not for Addison, but to mimic Addison, first giving space, and then to see where he stands, see if things can return to how they used to be.
"From one, if you can't have both." It sounds pragmatic, not romantic.
Unless she's wrong. There's too much history she doesn't know, to get all of it right. Maybe he does love Addison. Maybe he's convinced himself he has to, to reconcile the betrayal to his best friend. Maybe he doesn't like being the bad guy, and he wants to throw Derek and Addison for a loop.
Mark swallows the double of whisky in one go.
"They're not fixing it," he declares. "Believe me, that's not Derek and Addie. They both need to wake up to reality."
'Addison is my family. That is 11 thanksgivings, 11 birthdays, and 11 Christmases. And the one day I'm supposed to sign a piece of paper and end my family? A person doesn't do that. Not without hesitation.'
"It's a lot to give up," she murmurs.
He gives her a look, like he expected her to be on the same page. "Not if it's already gone."
"You had one night with her. What is that compared to eleven years of marriage?"
Mark frowns.
"One night?"
Mari pauses, hand still stretched towards her water glass.
Why does he make it sound -
"No," she whispers, head shaking back and forth to deny it, to wish she didn't hear it.
He realizes then, that she didn't know.
Mari stares, unseeing, thinking back to what was said, and what she just inferred, because she didn't want to hear it at all.
She created the narrative all on her own. Pictured something drunk, and sad, and a woman left behind, thinking she deserved to be left behind. Didn't deserve to defend herself. Then finding out her husband was -
Addison asked her to understand.
Something jagged and sharp is digging in, spasming, strangling.
She can't breathe.
Mark lunges for her and she doesn't know why, because she doesn't even realize she's falling.
Mari presses against the hurt, nails digging in as if she could rip her ribs open. She hears the explosion, feels Dylan shielding her with his weight.
She blindly pushes against him, needing air, needing out.
Mark hoists her up, tucking her hair behind her ears, cradling her neck with both hands and pressing his thumbs under her chin to get her to lift her head up, up until she's gasping.
His eyes are no longer cat like, but blown, running over her face. He exaggerates each word, forcing her to hold eye contact.
"Hey, look. at. me. Breathe."
('Is she okay?'
'Should we call someone?'
'Does she-'
"I've got it handled. I'm a doctor," Mark barks back, trying to get Mari to focus.)
"Come on, Mari. Breathe. You know how this works. Follow along." He starts counting.
She messes it up, falls off the count, grows dizzy as she tries to mimic his breathing until she's there. Not too deep, not too quick, and each one burning.
"What the hell happened to you, huh?" he asks, running his eyes over her face.
She squeezes her wet eyes shut, sinking with embarrassment, to know nearly everyone who frequents this bar works at the hospital.
"Remember what I said," she coughs, breathless and strangled, with every ache drawn to the surface "about bombs in patient's chest cavities?"
She did not expect, when she woke up for a mind-numbing therapy session, that she would end it with the guy Addison cheated on Derek with, helping her out of her shirt in Joe's bathroom.
He helps her out of the wrappings, looking over the livid bruising she couldn't even see because of the height of the mirror.
'And your hearing loss? Is that from the explosion too?'
She froze.
He rolled his eyes. 'I'm an ENT, on top of being a phenomenal plastic surgeon. I can tell when someone is compensating by reading lips.'
"You gonna tell Derek?" he asks after a long moment, helping her re-wrap while she pressed an ice compress to the worst of it. She's thinking about the stairsteps she'll have to take from the porch to her room. She'd almost prefer an on-call room across the street.
"He thinks my sister was the one in the explosion."
He pauses on a rotation. "That's not what I meant."
Oh.
She feels the press of memories, just being here, unable to keep blocking out Derek when she's trying to distract from the pain in her ribs.
'Do you always look at girls in bars that way?'
First Night at Joe's
"So, what's your story?" he asks.
"My story?" she echoes, bemused.
Who asks that, of a stranger? Really asks it. Meets it with undivided attention and genuine interest? In a bar, where even here people still look past each other, wait for any pauses they can fill with their own chatter, without hearing a word of what someone else has said. She looks at Joe, who's moved farther away, at the people passing behind them on their way in or out, and at him, who's still, strangely there, present in a way she isn't used to.
The story of Mari Grey, she muses.
So, why she's in this bar, not drinking. Why she's waiting for someone she doesn't want to show. Why she's in this city.
The job she's starting tomorrow, where Dr. Ellis Grey had made her start. The premier surgical hospital on the West Coast, and why that's a problem at all.
She's newly moved into a new house, an old house, ghosts and cobwebs and all, her mother's boxed life, and Meredith's secret one, and Mari having left most of hers behind as an insurance policy.
There were too many thorns to untangle from the roses. Too many wounds with bad stitching.
She can play a half dozen instruments markedly well, can speak even more languages, but she messes up hallmarks of American culture, and continues to own very little besides pictures and postcards, in the face of having left too much behind. She's too young to be taken seriously, and too out of sync to fit anywhere away from medicine. Her life is alien. Her mother made her strange. Dr. House made her, perhaps, a little stranger.
"It's still in the works," she decides, giving it perhaps too much thought. "New town, new chapter."
"Ah." He says like he agrees. She eyes his smile, cataloguing that he's in a dive bar, in an expensive red silk shirt, intentionally left untucked, peeked open at the chest. He doesn't look like he's taken off a suit jacket, or a tie that choked him after a hard day at work, but like he prefers a purposeful dishevelment. Something new, rebellious maybe, when his nails and his hair, show he is fastidious about personal hygiene, maybe even a little high maintenance, used to fine things. Drinking single malt in a sticky bar built on rounds of shots and pitchers of beer.
Like her, new to Seattle too.
She tilts her head, thinks of something the Seattle version of her could enjoy. The girl she doesn't know yet. "I might start running," and there's enough honesty in it, to maybe mean something less casual. "On the trails," she clarifies. Maybe take in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, not so different, and yet very different, from her life in New Jersey pines.
He hums, tilting his head slightly in concert, understanding. "I'm going to fish. I've always wanted to learn fly fishing."
The only thing she knows about fly fishing is from magazine covers in a waiting room.
"Is that what got you here," she lowers her voice with a teasing gasp "was there a brochure?"
He presses his lips to contain his smile, lowering his voice too. "It was very persuasive."
She hums, "so, I know you're new to Seattle too, and you can't fly fish…"
He laughs. "Yet. And I have…. other, qualities," he grins, eyes crinkling in his self-conscious flirtation.
"Can you sing? Dance?"
He coughs, "uh, no. Badly."
"Play an instrument?" she asks, a little too interested to compare to her usual type.
He ruffles the back of his hair, an indecisive breath escaping him. "Well, I played sax, in high school."
"Jazz?" she perks up, interested.
"Uh, no. More...marching band."
"Marching band..." she echoes.
"With the uniforms. The hat." He laughs at himself.
She didn't go to high school. She didn't tire of the travel the way Meredith did, when she chose boarding school. She should have watched American high school movies, so she'd have something to draw from. What was the famous one, about detention club?
"I've never heard a marching band," she realizes, wondering if she's missed out. She's certain they had it in college, but she didn't go to the American football games. "So, favorite band, outside of your marching days?"
"You like music," he realizes, eyes dancing at the discovery.
She flushes, feeling that heady thrum that comes from meeting someone who looks and listens and finds it worthy of note.
"So, this answer is important," he guesses. "It's going to tell you something about me."
She hums. "Yes. Answers do tend to do that."
"I should wait then. For the second date."
She bites the corner of her lip, trying, and failing to not let her smile give her away.
Second date. As if they're guaranteed to have a first. Or, that this chance encounter is their first. "Not the third?" She parries, as an allusion to the date typically associated with intimacy.
"No. Third date is when I show off my impressive, newly acquired, fly fishing skills."
She laughs. He laughs too, like he can't help it.
"You still have a few questions left, if you're going for a full twenty," he encourages. That wasn't quite her intention, but she enjoys making it a challenge.
What do people ask on first dates?
"Okay, can you finish a crossword?"
"If I cheat."
She tsks. "Do you smoke?"
"Occasionally. With a very good cigar."
With the rising stance to ban smoking indoors, most casual smokers are reluctant to admit to the habit. Would think no was honest enough.
Lies, hedging, omissions, are interesting, but she's a moth to a flame, when it comes to honesty.
"Favorite color?"
He takes more time to commit to this answer. For a split second she wonders if he'll choose the flirtatious answer, about her eyes or what she's wearing. Her eyes are hazel grey and she's wearing a black spaghetti strap that shows off the golden tan doomed to fade under Seattle skies. "Blue. But not light blue. Indigo."
"Favorite book?"
"Sun Also Rises."
Unfortunately, she doesn't know it. "Was it a sad or happy ending?"
He pauses, the moment carrying more weight than she expected. "Sad," he says, slightly subdued, touching his scotch for the first time since he's sat next to her.
If he's learned that she especially likes music, she's learned that something in the ending of this book she hasn't read, mirrors a sadness in him.
"That is so not what the Monty Python boys say," she exaggerates.
He tilts his head, like he's running movie quotes though his head, trying to figure out which she means.
Mari's hand idly twists the Queen of Hearts she was still gripping, turning it like a spun blade, as she looks over her masterpiece.
Casually she strikes, watching the house tumble. The cards falling in front of her.
"So," she regards the wreckage with potential, asking a question Ellis Grey would approve of "how steady are your hands?"
Meredith comes in, in her slinky black dress, and strappy heels, and moves to the bar like she's done it a hundred times. She orders tequila, straight. The bartender looks over her head, towards Mari who's moved away from the bar to a table, as he pours. There isn't much in terms of family resemblance, no matter that both are often compared to their mother.
She supposes Joe remembers her warning. Dirty blonde and shots of tequila.
She doesn't have to pull out her phone to know that Meredith hasn't called her. Might have never intended to, or did, but only after.
"Everything okay?" Derek asks.
She looks at him blankly, not sure what to think yet.
"Do you have any siblings?"
His brows raise. "Four sisters."
She 'huh's, but her attention is elsewhere. It feels like she's in a tunnel, or like they were walking together, but she took a different turn, looked up to a different landscape.
"I'm sorry, Really - it's just…" She wants to stay, but –
She needs to know what her life is going to be like, here with Meredith. If she's going to go back to living with an alcoholic, a frequent, or 'just sometimes' drunk. Cleaning up messes, flinching at mood swings. Getting her in the shower and sleeping with the door open so she can hear her snore and know she's still breathing, that she's still on her side and won't asphyxiate. Caring for someone, who resents that she's a witness to it.
He sees something in her face, some tie that's pulling her away. "You have to leave," he realizes.
She wishes she didn't.
She spreads the cards back on the table, tries to find the battered Queen of Hearts, and finds the Wild instead.
She writes her name and number in the available space, swallowing her nerves because he hasn't asked, and she isn't leaving with any poise here.
"So you don't take me running, the wrong way."
Meredith says, "you had to get away too?" like they've stumbled on common ground, like it wasn't strange that Mari would suddenly be here.
"What do you think I'm getting away from?" She asks slowly, confused.
"You know," she gestures absently with her wrist, her speech more relaxed than she was before the mixer. "The house. The boxes. My boxes, and your boxes, and Mom's boxes."
...Maybe she was, a little.
"No, I was just…waiting for you," she decides, playing coincidence.
Meredith wrinkles her nose. "I stayed as long as I could. I smiled. I smooched. I hated it."
Mari blinks, because Meredith didn't tend to use sentences that started with 'I'.
"Was it weird being there?" She wonders, pushing to see how deep Meredith's unease runs beneath the still surface.
The question causes a grimace. "I don't know," she downs a shot, making a gesture to Joe for another one. "Yeah, sort of. I mean, not yet, because nobody knows yet, but..." she shrugs at the inevitable.
Derek comes up to the bar, on her other side, to settle his bill. She hopes he doesn't ask for an introduction. She wants this - him - that feeling - separate and over there, and not ruined.
"We could have gone together," Meredith muses aloud. "If you hadn't been such an overachiever. Or, if I hadn't of been an underachiever? We'd be doing this together. Or I would be ahead of you, and you could actually come to me for advice, ya know?"
Too much of that sounds like a precursor to resentment. Tracking who's ahead.
She smoothes her face to prevent from grimacing.
"There's no wrong time to start something?"
Does it actually bother her, that Mari is further in her career? Did it matter, when Meredith was going for surgery, and Mari didn't?
She thought they were doing this together. Wasn't that the point of Seattle, of sharing the house?
Meredith keeps her eyes on her empty shot glass. Her voice gaining a new, sardonic edge. "Very inspirational. You should put that on a poster. With a cat."
Derek has his head tilted on her other side, but instead of interjecting, he leans in to whisper good luck near Mari's ear, close enough his nose brushes one of her curls.
In the reflection behind the bar, she can see his pause, see her own rigidly like a tense wire. Mari watches him walk behind her and disappear in the silver glass, and wonders what he's thinking of her now.
"If you rather get laid then stand at your sister's elbow, ruining her buzz, it looks like you're missing your window of opportunity," Meredith waves her hand, whether to emphasis her point, or get Joe's attention, is unclear. Her delivery is perfectly flat, and a little slurred.
Mari watches the shot glass refill. The fourth. The bar is louder than it was with Derek, music, and conversation, and laughter, sudden cheers, and the shot glass clinking against the bar top after Meredith drinks it straight. Mari tries to tuck herself against the bar as people keep brush against her back.
She could take the barstool next to Meredith. Drop her unease and adapt a mimicry of the people around her, make her smile light, commiserate about what they're going to face tomorrow. Maybe, if she could get Meredith to see it as them against Mom's legacy, Meredith won't make it Mari's career vs. hers.
But to do that, she'll have to hope Meredith's guard lowers with libations. Hide her worry about what that means. Pretend she isn't offering too much of her own insecurities in the hopes of getting something back.
Is there any chance that Meredith won't see Mari's empty glass, and see another divide between them that will make her shut down even more?
She sighs quietly, indecisive.
"You have my number," she tells this version of her sister. "Call me when you're done." And she slides into the crowd, brushing against one of the guys who looks about her age, in a suit with a loosened tie. He says hey, in the preamble of a look or a come on, in a deep voice with a rural, Midwestern inflection. She doesn't look up, certain that by the time she passes, his eyes will have found a better target.
She gets out on the street and breathes in blessedly cool air, the smell that comes with fresh rain.
"Hey!"
Derek turns his head, key in the door of a tan station wagon.
(Not exactly the car she envisioned him having, but she only takes note of it because she's not often surprised.)
She's certain another moment would have made her miss him. Another fleeting, fleeing things.
"Hey," she swallows. There's a crinkle between his brows, as he blinks the rain out of his eyes, off his lashes. The rain shows his coifed hair is being contained by product and mouse, with curls starting at his temples. She hasn't seen a side she doesn't like, but this?
She kisses him.
It's a soft press, as she hasn't anchored herself against him, is precariously tilted on her toes.
He presses back, sliding his hand right above her braid, cradling, as he kisses her, the other looping around her waist. The relief of getting it right, feeling that spark, melts her. Electricity buzzes under her skin, pushing her to arch into him, pressing her hands into his sides, at his waist, cold dew on their face, as his tongue slides against her.
Her whole body shivers. She's so close she can feel his heart beating into hers.
She pulls back for air, his lips and his warm panting breaths, sliding to the corner of her mouth, her cheek.
"I needed to do that," she pants, heady and dizzy, and grinning.
His mouth is still parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as his hand plays through her curls, massages the back of her skull.
"The Clash," he says, in a daze.
"Hmm?"
"Favorite band," he clarifies.
She slides her hands around his back, using his leverage to tilt her chest away so she can breathe, their hips slotting together. "I thought that was second date conversation," she murmurs.
"Couldn't wait," he teases, lightly brushing his nose against hers, sharing her grin.
When Joe was in surgery to remove his aneurysm, Derek Shepherd looked up from the operating microscope, and asked Burke, "what's your 'Joe story'? Seems like everybody around here has one."
"You first."
"Okay," Derek agrees gamely, not wanting to think about Addison being somewhere in this hospital, or Mari finding out about his marriage in nearly the worst way he could have imagined. "I went to Joe's place the night before I started working here. I'd only been in town, you know, a few days. I saw this woman." He remembers the warm light hitting her blonde hair, the expanse of golden tan skin, the black spaghetti strap that looked like silk, cut in a v to show the planes of her upper back.
"She was constructing a house of cards very seriously, like it was surgery." He chuckles. "And when she placed one just right, she'd smile."
He blinks to the present, to the room with twenty-odd people listening in. "So, Joe put another stack next to her, and he gave me this look, like here's your opportunity to go over and talk to her. So, I did. I like to look at it as my initiation into Seattle."
Initiation. Beginning.
"What about you?"
Burke looks at him completely straight. "Oh, I don't have one. I just wanted to hear yours."
Notes: I did it. I finished the four parter. Originally I planned to show Mark's day, and the day after meeting Mari at the bar, and what he'd say to Derek about it, but I'll save that for later as I liked keeping to the chapter's theme. This is the last flashback I plan for, as the story will start at the first day at Seattle Grace and go straight from there. No more jumping around.
Hopefully Mari and Derek's relationship is coming across as different from MerDer, hinting how Mari doesn't process things the same as Meredith, and so the relationship and fallout unfolded differently.
I always thought it was a shame Mark and Meredith didn't develop much of a friendship. I like the Ex-Dirty Mistresses Club.
There's a Sliding Door reference, since I take my username from that movie.
'You know what the Monty Python boys say, always look on the bright side of life.'
Oh, also! I changed up the first four chapters before this one, to get myself back in the groove. Nothing major was changed, but the difference was like...4,000 words, so.