Title: Silence Is Golden
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Lexie, Cristina
Word Count: 820
Rating: PG-13
Summary: He came to get coffee and take a break, not to be someone's babysitter.
“Do you have a surgery in the next three hours?” Cristina slips through the door to the lounge, hand pulling the door closed behind her, just enough so Mark can’t see in.
“Never took you as having an interest in plastics Yang.” Mark says, trying to look around her and failing at that.
“I don’t.” She frowns, momentarily off track, veering back on a second later with, “Look are you doing anything or not?”
He raises an eyebrow, an idea finally coming into his head. “Finally decided you can’t resist my charms?”
There’s a look that comes over her face and he can’t quite decide if it’s confusion or disgust. He’d prefer to call it the former. “Whenever I need you to watch three for me because she’s sick so they won’t let her near the patients but she came in with Meredith so she has to wait until someone drives her home and I have a surgery I am supposed to assist on in like ten minutes so I can’t be stuck with her.”
“Wait, what?” He starts to ask but Cristina passes by him before he even gets the first syllable completely out. “Yang!”
“Thank you,” she says, not bothering to look at him as she does, before she turns the corner and disappears from sight.
Which leaves him with whoever’s behind that door, presumably one of Cristina’s interns and he hates interns. He cracks the door, looks inside, and forces himself not to smile when he sees who it is.
He hates interns, except for this one.
“Little Grey,” he says, by way of greeting. Lexie makes a sort of squeaky noise in the back of her throat and then nods, curling back up into the chair. He frowns at the odd response, pouring himself coffee, what he came for in the first place, and sitting down in the chair that had been moved as far against one wall as it could go, probably by Cristina to minimize contact. “So what’s so wrong with you that I’ve got babysitting duty?”
Lexie presses her lips tight together, looking down like she’s thinking of what to say, then puts a hand to her throat and moves her lips soundlessly. Interesting. Very interesting.
“Laryngitis?” he guesses, and she nods in confirmation. “Why the hell did you even show up with that?”
She shrugs, mouths something that might be ‘better earlier’ and sighs against her chair. Right now she looks like nothing more than a child.
He shifts and her eyes follow, in a sort of way that insists she hasn’t had much to pay attention to other than movement. Not like she could probably hold a conversation with Cristina even if she could talk. “Well at least there won’t be any babbling tirades today. And I can say whatever I want without retribution.”
Her eyes narrow. ‘Don’t’ her lips say, but it doesn’t do much to deter him. If he’s going to be stuck in here for awhile (and he could leave, technically, but he won’t, and it’s not like he’s all that busy today anyway) he might as well have some fun.
“You should move out of that apartment you and O’Malley are living in. Stick him with the rent. It’s like revenge.” Mark suggests, and she groans, like she was almost expecting this, right before she coughs, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. Miserable seems to need a new definition in this case. Still he continues, at her somewhat bewildered look. “Let me guess, you aren’t interested in revenge?” She shakes her head.
“Not his fault,” she gets out a hoarse whisper this time, one that cracks at the end. He can tell there’s more she wants to say - there’s always more she seems to want to say - but she can’t at the moment and so she grabs something off of the table next to her and starts tearing whatever it is with fierceness.
Taking the risk of getting himself sick too, he comes over to her, stooping in front of her, opening her hands to find tiny shreds of what appears to have been cotton balls and laughing when he does. “I think there are other things that would’ve been more effective,” he tells her and she glares at him, trying to close her hands but getting his fingers caught there. She sighs again, and he presses the back of his hand to her head, still with that grin on his face. She’s got a fever too, not surprisingly - she shouldn’t be here. “You want to go home?”
Lexie meets his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s serious. He is. She makes a noise that sounds like enough of a ‘yeah’ for him to tell her to get her coat as he goes to retrieve his keys. He doesn’t quite know where home is but he figures he’ll figure it out on the way.