(no subject)
Title: So This Is How It Goes (I Would Have Never Known)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith/Mark, Meredith/Alex
Word Count: 2,369
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: One of the lovelies over at Sweet Charity wanted an AU where Mark came to Seattle instead of Derek and Meredith slept with him instead. This is what I got.
Summary: AU (see above). She hits him with a pillow and, when that fails, nudges him with her foot, bathrobe pulled tight against her body. She can hear the clock tick in her head; she has to go now.
The night before her first day at Seattle Grace and the last place she should be is a bar. Meredith has never been one to care about these things. She’s nervous and alcohol helps her to not be that way, so that makes it okay in her book.
The man who sits down next to her sends a smirk and a “can I buy you a drink?” her way and she finds out he’s persistent by turning him down not once but twice. Third time’s the charm and she finally gives in.
“You know just because you’re hot doesn’t mean you can get whatever you want.” It’s the alcohol talking.
“No?” He phrases it as a question. “Can it get me you?”
She tells him no but by the end of the night they’re headed back to her place, and her best intentions have gone out the window.
---
She hits him with a pillow and, when that fails, nudges him with her foot, bathrobe pulled tight against her body. She can hear the clock tick in her head; knows she has to go now.
“Usually I’m the one kicking the girl out.” He pulls on his pants. “This is new.”
She blushes - she doesn’t know why she blushes - as she explains, “I just really need to get to work. But it was nice meeting you…” she trails off, just now realizing that she doesn’t remember his name. She might never have known it.
“Mark,” he supplies, easily, knowing exactly why she’d paused. “Don’t feel bad, I don’t remember yours either.”
“It’s Meredith.” She smiles. Somehow this gone from awkward to comical, and while she doesn’t know how she’s certainly not complaining.
“Alright, well, Meredith, you ever get lonely you know where to find me.” Another charming smirk and this one she nods to.
He walks out of her house and she knows the odds of him ever walking back in are slim to none.
---
She sees him through the door and freaks. She freaks and her feet stay rooted in one place and he sees her.
Mark catches up to her while she’s on her way down the hall and away from him. “That was fast.”
“Shut up.” She replies, face on fire once again. This is not what she needs on a first day.
“I should warn you I don’t do office romances.” He tells her, keeping pace with her. “Too corny.”
“Good.” Then why is he following her? “As long as we’re on the same page.”
“But I’ve heard the on call rooms here are quite nice.”
“I thought you just said you don’t do office romances?” She stops at the elevator, presses the button and prays it gets here fast.
He puts his hand over hers on the button, pining her between him and the wall but with enough space between them that passers-by might think nothing of it. “Fucking in on call rooms is not romance.”
“Depends on who you ask. Counts for some people.”
“Are you one of those people?”
The elevator dings and the door opens as she takes advantage of the momentary distraction to slip out of his grasp and make a break for it. She hits ‘door close’ as she tells him, “Guess you’ll have to find out.”
---
Bad things come in threes and sevens. So far for Meredith it’s three.
The man she slept with last night is her boss’s boss, her resident seems keen on making their lives hell at least for their first shift, and she was just called a nurse by one of the other interns because he’s a sexist pig.
Meredith tells him as much while slamming locker doors, in not so many words, and he lets her, maintaining that she’s just not worth fighting with.
“You’re just acting like an asshole because I knew what I was doing when you didn’t.” She says, not at all letting him get to her. “All you are is a sore loser.”
“That’ll never happen again.” Alex tells her, overconfidently.
“Wanna bet?”
And just like that it’s game on.
---
Mark catches up with her the next day, after she’s slept and showered and had time to process.
“So was that a yes or no on the on call rooms?”
She almost laughs to herself. He is nothing but determined. “It was a maybe.”
“Dependant upon?”
“You’re digging for answers you aren’t going to get.” She warns.
He shrugs. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
---
By the time she’s got Alex pushed up against the wall of the locker room, yelling right in his face to get the message across, Mark is in the doorway, watching them.
“Enjoying getting your ass beat by a girl Karev?” He taunts, making no effort to get her to back down other than raised eyebrows that seem to remind her that it’s her best interests not to do anything drastic.
She likes Mark a whole lot better after that night.
She still wouldn’t date him.
---
She will fuck him apparently. In the on call room.
He sends her dirty looks during surgery, the kind that make her body ache, and they can’t get each others clothes off fast enough once they are alone.
After, she pulls her clothes back on, and watches him do the same, reminding the both of them, “that was the last time.”
Even then she knows her resolve will break.
---
Exactly thirty-two hours later, in the upstairs bedroom of her house, now occupied also by roommates, as their hips find a rhythm and her lips find his, it does.
---
“You’re fucking Sloan.” Alex announces, out of the blue, one day when it’s just the two of them on that gurney in the abandoned hallway.
“No but you might want to try it if you want in on his surgeries that bad.” She retorts, picking on him to try and cover up the truth.
It doesn’t work. “Oh you so are.”
Briefly she contemplates whether or not she should bother denying it further. It ends up being not. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t broadcast that.”
“Why would I?” He asks, and for a moment she thinks she might have found a redeeming quality in him. Then he adds, “There’s nothing in it for me anyways.”
So much for that.
---
It stops being able to be called a one night stand, or a brief fling, at about the one month mark. They both know this. And yet they continue to pretend that this is nothing more than habit.
There are feelings there, at least for her; she just doesn’t know what they are yet.
---
“Why are you coming to me with this?” Alex barely looks at her, focused on the books in front of him. “I thought Cristina was your best friend or whatever.”
“You’re the only one that knows.”
“No.” He replies. “I’m just the only one who’s said anything.”
Her eyes get wide. “Who else? Did you tell anyone?”
“No. But people aren’t blind.” He shoots her a look. “Or deaf.”
She slumps back against the wall. “This is bad.”
“How long did you think you’d be able to keep it a secret anyways?”
“I don’t know. Forever.”
He laughs and she glares, and at the moment this feels a lot like the end of the world.
---
Turns out Izzie always knew and George has been kidding himself and Cristina just doesn’t care (later she’ll found out that she was too busy fucking Burke to notice any of this).
Izzie shakes her head, mutters something about people who wait too long and asks, in not so many words, just what exactly this relationship is, what it means.
“It’s sex.” Meredith tells her, oversimplification and all that, before Izzie raises an eyebrow and forces her to continue, “And I might like him but he’s just not the kind of guy you can successfully date.”
“You don’t know until you try.”
Meredith remembers his no office romances rule and knows that she can try all she wants but all she’ll end up getting is a fight.
---
Surprise, surprise, she doesn’t always get what was expects.
“You want to date?” He asks, a little too surprised for her tastes. He’s caught off guard though and that’s advantageous if nothing else.
“I want to do something other than sneaking around and having sex in on-call rooms.” Meredith doesn’t think she’s asking for a lot. She’s not asking for a ring or the key to his apartment. She just doesn’t want to feel used.
He scratches the side of his head, looks down at the ground, then at the wall, mulling over his options. “This wasn’t supposed to be - “
“Be anything other than sex, I know.” She finishes for him. “But it’s been a month and it’s not like people don’t already know.”
So she’s decided right here and now that if he doesn’t give her something more than this then she’s going to dump him. Dump him now before it gets too hard.
Meredith’s never been the one who pushed for more before.
“Alright. When are you free for dinner?”
This is their turning point. Just not necessarily the one she’d thought it would be.
---
Happiness is fleeting.
With the title of relationship also comes all the baggage of a relationship. And a relationship between two people who aren’t very good at relationships is even worse. The fights, and the formalities, and the everything else make her wish that she’d never said anything at all.
She realizes that the problem behind this is that she doesn’t know what she wants. But the only way to find out is to try everything, and she’s trying this.
It’s not working. At all.
They officially last two weeks and three days before she decides to throw in the towel. It’s another week before she says anything to him.
“It’s better this way.” She shrugs. There’s no heartbreak; this wasn’t love, she only thought it might be.
---
Sometimes, they still find each other in the on-call room.
They never talk about it afterwards.
---
“I thought you two were broken up?” Inquiring minds want to know, or at least Izzie’s does.
“We were - are.” It’s not a slip of the tongue, she just honestly doesn’t know. This isn’t your classic relationship with clear, defined boundaries. “Maybe we’re on a break.”
“Sounds very Ross and Rachel if you ask me.”
Meredith guesses there are worse things they could be compared to.
---
One of these so-called breaks results in moping over a shot of tequila and then there’s Alex and heavy sarcasm with that smirk of his. Sometimes he reminds her so much of Mark. Sometimes he reminds her of herself. She guesses there’s something to be said about that.
There’s also something to be said about the fact that she ends up on the couch with Alex on top of her, and in the morning doesn’t feel bad about it.
---
It’s kind of like a love triangle. Except she doesn’t love either of them, and they certainly don’t love each other. It’s a broken love triangle. Maybe it’s acute.
Surgeries are fun when they’re all on the same case. Mark’s flirting with her over someone’s skin graft and Alex is kind of half-glaring, half-watching and Meredith is thinking about how they both look kind of in their element and that for someone reason that makes them both equally hot.
And a threesome is out of the question, she tells herself before she, or anyone else for that matter, thinks of it.
She really needs to make a damn decision here.
---
“I thought we were over.”
“I thought you hated Karev.”
“I thought you didn’t do office romances or whatever you called them.”
“I thought you didn’t either.”
“Shut up.”
“You first.”
It always comes out as childish.
---
She gets why she likes Mark. But with Alex they started out on the wrong foot so she can’t really understand how she has any feelings for him what so ever.
He called her a nurse. And he’s an ass about sixty percent of the time. It’s just the other forty percent that keeps getting under her skin and under her sheets.
---
They sort of force her into making a decision in the most untraditional, most scene-making, dramatic way possible.
They get into it over a patient. In the hallway. Near the Chief, who looks more and more irritated as voices escalate and curses fly through the air. Very unprofessional, he’ll say later, when he’s yelling at all three of them (and she got dragged into this, so it’s not her fault, but it is at the same time).
She’s expected to take sides. They both expect her to take theirs. She’s only one person.
Therefore she has to choose.
She doesn’t see it as making the choice. At the time it’s just a choice; inconsequential.
Meredith takes Alex’s side and none of them really ever look back.
---
There isn’t anymore dirty on-call meetings.
Alex needs a place to stay and he moves in with her and Izzie - George has been gone for awhile (and by that she means since he realized that he’ll never have her to himself, and Meredith never knew, she never knew and she’s glad she didn’t because there’s no easy way to let someone down and she was already going to break his heart).
He finds his way into her bedroom every now and then, and she into his. Izzie doesn’t really figure it out, she’s got this heart patient of hers that she’s wrapped up in, so anything beyond the realm of the hospital is pretty much non-existent in her mind (a little birdie in her head tells her to watch that - she never listens). She doesn’t always sleep with him though. That’s what she likes. There doesn’t have to be sex. For someone who has a reputation for sleeping with all the nurses, you know the ones Mark hadn’t gotten too (and some he had), he’s surprisingly less pushy than she expected.
She didn’t see that coming that night at Joe’s.
She never does.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith/Mark, Meredith/Alex
Word Count: 2,369
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: One of the lovelies over at Sweet Charity wanted an AU where Mark came to Seattle instead of Derek and Meredith slept with him instead. This is what I got.
Summary: AU (see above). She hits him with a pillow and, when that fails, nudges him with her foot, bathrobe pulled tight against her body. She can hear the clock tick in her head; she has to go now.
The night before her first day at Seattle Grace and the last place she should be is a bar. Meredith has never been one to care about these things. She’s nervous and alcohol helps her to not be that way, so that makes it okay in her book.
The man who sits down next to her sends a smirk and a “can I buy you a drink?” her way and she finds out he’s persistent by turning him down not once but twice. Third time’s the charm and she finally gives in.
“You know just because you’re hot doesn’t mean you can get whatever you want.” It’s the alcohol talking.
“No?” He phrases it as a question. “Can it get me you?”
She tells him no but by the end of the night they’re headed back to her place, and her best intentions have gone out the window.
---
She hits him with a pillow and, when that fails, nudges him with her foot, bathrobe pulled tight against her body. She can hear the clock tick in her head; knows she has to go now.
“Usually I’m the one kicking the girl out.” He pulls on his pants. “This is new.”
She blushes - she doesn’t know why she blushes - as she explains, “I just really need to get to work. But it was nice meeting you…” she trails off, just now realizing that she doesn’t remember his name. She might never have known it.
“Mark,” he supplies, easily, knowing exactly why she’d paused. “Don’t feel bad, I don’t remember yours either.”
“It’s Meredith.” She smiles. Somehow this gone from awkward to comical, and while she doesn’t know how she’s certainly not complaining.
“Alright, well, Meredith, you ever get lonely you know where to find me.” Another charming smirk and this one she nods to.
He walks out of her house and she knows the odds of him ever walking back in are slim to none.
---
She sees him through the door and freaks. She freaks and her feet stay rooted in one place and he sees her.
Mark catches up to her while she’s on her way down the hall and away from him. “That was fast.”
“Shut up.” She replies, face on fire once again. This is not what she needs on a first day.
“I should warn you I don’t do office romances.” He tells her, keeping pace with her. “Too corny.”
“Good.” Then why is he following her? “As long as we’re on the same page.”
“But I’ve heard the on call rooms here are quite nice.”
“I thought you just said you don’t do office romances?” She stops at the elevator, presses the button and prays it gets here fast.
He puts his hand over hers on the button, pining her between him and the wall but with enough space between them that passers-by might think nothing of it. “Fucking in on call rooms is not romance.”
“Depends on who you ask. Counts for some people.”
“Are you one of those people?”
The elevator dings and the door opens as she takes advantage of the momentary distraction to slip out of his grasp and make a break for it. She hits ‘door close’ as she tells him, “Guess you’ll have to find out.”
---
Bad things come in threes and sevens. So far for Meredith it’s three.
The man she slept with last night is her boss’s boss, her resident seems keen on making their lives hell at least for their first shift, and she was just called a nurse by one of the other interns because he’s a sexist pig.
Meredith tells him as much while slamming locker doors, in not so many words, and he lets her, maintaining that she’s just not worth fighting with.
“You’re just acting like an asshole because I knew what I was doing when you didn’t.” She says, not at all letting him get to her. “All you are is a sore loser.”
“That’ll never happen again.” Alex tells her, overconfidently.
“Wanna bet?”
And just like that it’s game on.
---
Mark catches up with her the next day, after she’s slept and showered and had time to process.
“So was that a yes or no on the on call rooms?”
She almost laughs to herself. He is nothing but determined. “It was a maybe.”
“Dependant upon?”
“You’re digging for answers you aren’t going to get.” She warns.
He shrugs. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
---
By the time she’s got Alex pushed up against the wall of the locker room, yelling right in his face to get the message across, Mark is in the doorway, watching them.
“Enjoying getting your ass beat by a girl Karev?” He taunts, making no effort to get her to back down other than raised eyebrows that seem to remind her that it’s her best interests not to do anything drastic.
She likes Mark a whole lot better after that night.
She still wouldn’t date him.
---
She will fuck him apparently. In the on call room.
He sends her dirty looks during surgery, the kind that make her body ache, and they can’t get each others clothes off fast enough once they are alone.
After, she pulls her clothes back on, and watches him do the same, reminding the both of them, “that was the last time.”
Even then she knows her resolve will break.
---
Exactly thirty-two hours later, in the upstairs bedroom of her house, now occupied also by roommates, as their hips find a rhythm and her lips find his, it does.
---
“You’re fucking Sloan.” Alex announces, out of the blue, one day when it’s just the two of them on that gurney in the abandoned hallway.
“No but you might want to try it if you want in on his surgeries that bad.” She retorts, picking on him to try and cover up the truth.
It doesn’t work. “Oh you so are.”
Briefly she contemplates whether or not she should bother denying it further. It ends up being not. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t broadcast that.”
“Why would I?” He asks, and for a moment she thinks she might have found a redeeming quality in him. Then he adds, “There’s nothing in it for me anyways.”
So much for that.
---
It stops being able to be called a one night stand, or a brief fling, at about the one month mark. They both know this. And yet they continue to pretend that this is nothing more than habit.
There are feelings there, at least for her; she just doesn’t know what they are yet.
---
“Why are you coming to me with this?” Alex barely looks at her, focused on the books in front of him. “I thought Cristina was your best friend or whatever.”
“You’re the only one that knows.”
“No.” He replies. “I’m just the only one who’s said anything.”
Her eyes get wide. “Who else? Did you tell anyone?”
“No. But people aren’t blind.” He shoots her a look. “Or deaf.”
She slumps back against the wall. “This is bad.”
“How long did you think you’d be able to keep it a secret anyways?”
“I don’t know. Forever.”
He laughs and she glares, and at the moment this feels a lot like the end of the world.
---
Turns out Izzie always knew and George has been kidding himself and Cristina just doesn’t care (later she’ll found out that she was too busy fucking Burke to notice any of this).
Izzie shakes her head, mutters something about people who wait too long and asks, in not so many words, just what exactly this relationship is, what it means.
“It’s sex.” Meredith tells her, oversimplification and all that, before Izzie raises an eyebrow and forces her to continue, “And I might like him but he’s just not the kind of guy you can successfully date.”
“You don’t know until you try.”
Meredith remembers his no office romances rule and knows that she can try all she wants but all she’ll end up getting is a fight.
---
Surprise, surprise, she doesn’t always get what was expects.
“You want to date?” He asks, a little too surprised for her tastes. He’s caught off guard though and that’s advantageous if nothing else.
“I want to do something other than sneaking around and having sex in on-call rooms.” Meredith doesn’t think she’s asking for a lot. She’s not asking for a ring or the key to his apartment. She just doesn’t want to feel used.
He scratches the side of his head, looks down at the ground, then at the wall, mulling over his options. “This wasn’t supposed to be - “
“Be anything other than sex, I know.” She finishes for him. “But it’s been a month and it’s not like people don’t already know.”
So she’s decided right here and now that if he doesn’t give her something more than this then she’s going to dump him. Dump him now before it gets too hard.
Meredith’s never been the one who pushed for more before.
“Alright. When are you free for dinner?”
This is their turning point. Just not necessarily the one she’d thought it would be.
---
Happiness is fleeting.
With the title of relationship also comes all the baggage of a relationship. And a relationship between two people who aren’t very good at relationships is even worse. The fights, and the formalities, and the everything else make her wish that she’d never said anything at all.
She realizes that the problem behind this is that she doesn’t know what she wants. But the only way to find out is to try everything, and she’s trying this.
It’s not working. At all.
They officially last two weeks and three days before she decides to throw in the towel. It’s another week before she says anything to him.
“It’s better this way.” She shrugs. There’s no heartbreak; this wasn’t love, she only thought it might be.
---
Sometimes, they still find each other in the on-call room.
They never talk about it afterwards.
---
“I thought you two were broken up?” Inquiring minds want to know, or at least Izzie’s does.
“We were - are.” It’s not a slip of the tongue, she just honestly doesn’t know. This isn’t your classic relationship with clear, defined boundaries. “Maybe we’re on a break.”
“Sounds very Ross and Rachel if you ask me.”
Meredith guesses there are worse things they could be compared to.
---
One of these so-called breaks results in moping over a shot of tequila and then there’s Alex and heavy sarcasm with that smirk of his. Sometimes he reminds her so much of Mark. Sometimes he reminds her of herself. She guesses there’s something to be said about that.
There’s also something to be said about the fact that she ends up on the couch with Alex on top of her, and in the morning doesn’t feel bad about it.
---
It’s kind of like a love triangle. Except she doesn’t love either of them, and they certainly don’t love each other. It’s a broken love triangle. Maybe it’s acute.
Surgeries are fun when they’re all on the same case. Mark’s flirting with her over someone’s skin graft and Alex is kind of half-glaring, half-watching and Meredith is thinking about how they both look kind of in their element and that for someone reason that makes them both equally hot.
And a threesome is out of the question, she tells herself before she, or anyone else for that matter, thinks of it.
She really needs to make a damn decision here.
---
“I thought we were over.”
“I thought you hated Karev.”
“I thought you didn’t do office romances or whatever you called them.”
“I thought you didn’t either.”
“Shut up.”
“You first.”
It always comes out as childish.
---
She gets why she likes Mark. But with Alex they started out on the wrong foot so she can’t really understand how she has any feelings for him what so ever.
He called her a nurse. And he’s an ass about sixty percent of the time. It’s just the other forty percent that keeps getting under her skin and under her sheets.
---
They sort of force her into making a decision in the most untraditional, most scene-making, dramatic way possible.
They get into it over a patient. In the hallway. Near the Chief, who looks more and more irritated as voices escalate and curses fly through the air. Very unprofessional, he’ll say later, when he’s yelling at all three of them (and she got dragged into this, so it’s not her fault, but it is at the same time).
She’s expected to take sides. They both expect her to take theirs. She’s only one person.
Therefore she has to choose.
She doesn’t see it as making the choice. At the time it’s just a choice; inconsequential.
Meredith takes Alex’s side and none of them really ever look back.
---
There isn’t anymore dirty on-call meetings.
Alex needs a place to stay and he moves in with her and Izzie - George has been gone for awhile (and by that she means since he realized that he’ll never have her to himself, and Meredith never knew, she never knew and she’s glad she didn’t because there’s no easy way to let someone down and she was already going to break his heart).
He finds his way into her bedroom every now and then, and she into his. Izzie doesn’t really figure it out, she’s got this heart patient of hers that she’s wrapped up in, so anything beyond the realm of the hospital is pretty much non-existent in her mind (a little birdie in her head tells her to watch that - she never listens). She doesn’t always sleep with him though. That’s what she likes. There doesn’t have to be sex. For someone who has a reputation for sleeping with all the nurses, you know the ones Mark hadn’t gotten too (and some he had), he’s surprisingly less pushy than she expected.
She didn’t see that coming that night at Joe’s.
She never does.