it's a green christmas in this town (2/?) {ensemble}
Title: It's A Green Christmas In This Town (2/?)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Sadie, Cristina, George, Callie. Other implied relationships (eventually Cristina/Owen in further parts, per request)
Word Count: 2,842
Author's Note: This is turning into something far longer than I'd intended, but just to let people know I'm still working here's more of this. It is, since I split this chapter, now more than four parts. Hope ya'll are gonna stick aroung though. Happy holidays to everyone!
Summary: There's this feeling, in the pit of his stomach, like something is about to go very wrong and he needs to get out of there right now.
(part 1)
There’s this feeling, like something is about to go wrong and he needs to get out of here now, that rouses him and forces his eyes to open. He hasn’t had that feeling in a long time - not since Addison, late nights spent slipping out of that Manhattan brownstone before Derek could get home. Except for once. The one time he ignored it was the same time that had Derek not speaking to him for months.
Safe to say that never happens again.
Mark’s out of bed, with his jeans pulled on and his shirt half pulled over his head, barely five seconds later, moving like this is life or death. He doesn’t wake Lexie, doesn’t say goodbye. He’s not running away from her, he just simply isn’t taking anymore risks. She’ll know that. She’s quick on the uptake.
His footsteps on the floor, the stairs, don’t make a single sound, practiced from a life of running out on too many of his one night stands. He makes it to the door with no interruptions, digs his keys out of his pocket and then opens the door.
It takes him a few seconds to process that he’s just been greeted by something in the area of two to three feet of snow outside the door. A long, long few seconds.
Dammit.
---
Derek hears the knob of the bathroom door turn, the soft click when the door closes once more, and he has time for a solitary moment of confusion, before his morning visitor speaks.
“Derek?” Meredith asks, probably in the reverse order that she should’ve done things. Ask first, and then walk in.
“Do you do this often?” There’s a faint smile on his lips that she can’t see, as he rinses the shampoo from his hair. “Walk in on unsuspecting people. Because I don’t imagine your roommates like that.”
“Are you kidding me?” He can hear the sound of fabric falling to the tile floor. “Alex would invite me in.”
Great. Comforting. “Remind me again why he has to live here?”
The shower curtain slides open and, even standing there completely naked, she looks kind of intimidating when she says, “Because my friends are dark and twisty and occasionally kinky just like me.” She steps inside with him, no invitation needed. “You like that about me, remember?”
She says it as she kisses him, her arms wrapping around the back of his neck, pulling him closer, as the water beats down her bare back. He murmurs his agreement against her lips, all hope of getting out of the shower in a timely manner lost until he thinks to ask, “”Not that I’m complaining, but aren’t you supposed to be still asleep?”
“The clocks are off.” Meredith replies, putting an inch or two between them so that she can get the actual conversation out of the way as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the good part. “I think the power went out last night.”
“Then aren’t we going to be late?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she reminds him, and he nods, and then she’s got her hands and lips back on him, slipping a bit in the suds at the bottom of the shower. They find balance up against the cool tile wall and he’s just getting to the part where he sees just how many ways he can make her moan against him when there’s a crash, followed by a yelp. He can barely hear it but it’s enough to catch his attention and distract him, which in turn makes her whine as she lets her head rest against his chest, already giving up, knowing that one of them is going to have to go downstairs and figure out what that was because it’s five in the morning and they sort of need to know.
“I’ll - “ he starts, and she sighs, heavily, disappointedly.
“Yeah.”
---
Izzie had just been doing her normal morning thing. Get out of bed at a semi-reasonably early hour, make coffee, find a nice quiet room without people in it and pace and think and try to breathe. Try to ignore Denny (he’s there, but he’s quiet, lately, and she likes it better that way).
Except usually she didn’t run headlong into Mark Sloane, causing her to lose her grip on her coffee cup, and both scald him with the steaming liquid and drop the mug on his foot. He makes a sound that’s a cross between a yell and a very unmanly yelp, as the mug bounces off of him and shatters against the floor. She squeaks, loudly.
“What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.” She starts, immediately, no apologies, because this is (partly) her house and he is definitely the intruder here. Somehow. She doesn’t even know how he got in; then it dawns on her. “Who are you sleeping with?”
“No one.” He answers, far too quickly, on gut reaction, then, “And how is that an appropriate question to ask your boss?”
“I’m not the one sleeping with my intern.” It’s not a shot in the dark. She isn’t sleeping with him (it’s hard enough when it’s just two people, and you’re questioning whether or not one is even there, much less three), and Meredith better not be sleeping with him, which leaves Sadie or Lexie. Probably Sadie. She would sleep with Mark.
He glares, no room for argument. It’s a Mexican standoff, dripping with too-hot coffee and confidence.
---
This time Lexie wakes up to the sound of something crashing, probably downstairs. It is, most definitely, not anywhere near as fun as the last time she woke up. However, Mark is already gone and that means their secret is safe, so she can’t call it a total loss.
She pulls on clothes, the pajamas she wore to bed the night before, and, bleary-eyed, walks out into the hall. It’s empty, and she takes a second to get her bearings before she heads down the stairs. Bad idea. Derek practically runs into her back (it’s her fault for standing in front of the bathroom anyway), and she jumps, sort of off to the side. He mumbles a “sorry” and, mostly dressed, hair wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower, he takes off down the stairs, apparently having heard the noise too.
Alex is the next to poke his head out of his bedroom. He’s only half-dressed and doesn’t look like he’s slept for shit all night, squinting at her like it takes him a minute to figure out who she is. “What’s going on?”
Maybe she looks around to see if she’s the only one still in the hallway and thus who he’s talking to. She can’t help it. “I don’t…I have no clue. Derek just went downstairs…” she points, like she needs to, and she would be so much more coherent if she was actually fully awake.
He stares at her. Like she’s crazy. And then Meredith walks out of the bathroom in a towel (well, now she knows what was going on in the bathroom at least, not that she wants to considering), looking between the two of them, then down the hall. “What’s going on?”
Lexie declines to answer this time.
---
It’s when Mark starts hearing people moving about upstairs that he realizes, without a single doubt, just how screwed he is.
Derek is going to find out. And there is absolutely nowhere he can run, unless he wants to do so in the snow and there is just no way his car is going to drive out of there. No way.
Some door upstairs opens and closes and he hears a soft thud and a surprised noise from someone, followed by footsteps on the stairs, and he knows it’ll be Derek who appears in a few seconds. Because it’s his luck today.
No surprise there, he’s right, and he locks eyes with Derek. Anger he expects. Instead he gets disapproval mixed with disappointment because, obviously, he knows (it might be because Mark’s pretty sure he looks a bit like a deer in headlights right now), and that hurts worse than the anger would have. He let him down. Again. He tried so hard not to.
His brain starts working overtime trying to come up with a suitable response for this, for why he’s here, one that will get him out of trouble and keep that look off of Derek’s face. His mouth, however, is not working on the same wavelength because all he manages to do is point to the still cracked open door and say, to the apparent surprise of both Izzie and Derek, “snow”.
At the very least it manages to turn their attention elsewhere.
---
Cristina’s late for work. It’s probably the first time since she became a resident.
She’d been up at four, seen the snow half an hour later, and left five minutes after that. The ten minutes between her apartment and the hospital took triple that but she found a way and, judging by the number of doctors actually there when she arrived, she was one of the early ones.
By the time she runs into George it’s six thirty and he’s looking particularly perplexed that it seems to be only them out of their little group that showed up.
“Where is everyone?”
She raises an eyebrow at him, giving a chance to correct himself, and when he doesn’t replying, “Don’t know if you noticed but it’s snowing outside.”
“But the streets are plowed. I mean we’re here.” George says, looking out the doors of the lobby. Outside tiny white flakes fall onto salted ground. It’s a hospital; they’re one of the first to see the snow plows come through.
“They’re farther out,” she tells him, with a shrug. He still looks worried, but they both wander off on their own separate ways (it’s not like they really spend that much alone time together - a little snow won’t make them bond).
When she hasn’t heard anything an hour later, she palms her phone, finds Meredith’s cell on speed dial and listens to the phone ring ten times before going to voicemail. Once. Twice. Three times.
It must say something about how far gone their relationship is that she gives up after that.
---
They kind of all just filed down like they were assembling for a meeting. After all the crashing and the shrieking and the standoff in the hall, Izzie had wandered off into the kitchen to refill her coffee, Derek had taken up residence in the chair in the living room, Mark standing up against the opposite wall. Sadie, for her part, completely confused by most of this, took a seat on the arm of the couch with her own coffee, simply because there was nowhere else to go.
Sitting there, more or less directly between Derek and Mark who were looking at each other but not saying a whole hell of a lot, felt a lot like she was interrupting a particularly nasty lovers’ spat. It was unnerving enough that she was almost happy when Alex and Lexie both came down, Lexie sitting on the floor, somewhere between herself and Derek, like a child who knew she’d done a bad thing and was just waiting to get yelled at for it, and Alex taking a seat on the couch, the side opposite of where she sat.
Still, there was silence. More waiting.
Izzie settles in a minute or two after that, at first sitting down somewhere in the middle of the couch, equally distant from both Alex and Sadie but, after a few really tense moments between her and Alex, ones mostly in which she was looking at him and he was trying very hard not to look at her, she grabs the throw that lies over the couch and pulls it down with her as she lies down, head resting against his leg, absolutely on purpose. His entire body relaxes, slowly, measured so that you won’t notice unless you’re looking. A lot of what Sadie does is observe anyways.
When Meredith comes in eventually, coming down the stairs and straight into the living room, sitting half on the arm of the chair, half on Derek’s lap, the entire mood of the room shifts. And the silence breaks.
“So, we’re stuck here.” She says, with a sigh that seems to move through the entire room. “The Chief says not to even try to leave.”
After that, people just start talking, not to any specific individual so much as the entire group, each somehow waiting their own turn to speak.
“Aren’t they going to be short staffed?”
“They’ll probably send some patients to Mercy West.”
“Oh, yeah, Richard will love that.”
“Wait, stuck here for how long?” Izzie asks, the question that stands out amid all the others, the one everyone clearly wants an answer to. Because as much as these people seem to get along, for the most part anyway, there’s nothing like a few days stuck in the same house with the same people to make fights break out.
It’s not like there’s not enough tension in this room. This is just fuel to the fire.
Meredith suddenly looks a lot more interested in the fabric of the chair she’s sitting in than meeting anyone’s eyes, as she mumbles, “You know, until the snow stops. And melts.”
That catches Sadie’s attention, seeing as she was the only one who’d actually bothered to check the weather this morning, while everyone was freaking out. “That won’t be until Christmas Eve.”
“That’s…wait, Christmas Eve is tomorrow.”
“It’s tomorrow? Seriously?”
“We’re stuck here for how long?”
“At least we don’t have to work.” Meredith sighs out, then, off the look’s of a bunch of workaholics, or possibly just people who don’t want to be stuck in a house for that long, she adds, “I mean, come on, it could be nice. Isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be - being trapped in a house with…family and friends and people you…can’t wait to get away from, okay, point taken.”
Derek’s got his eyes glued to Mark, once again, when she says that, and Sadie gets the distinctive feeling that if it wasn’t for everyone else in the room they’d be at each other’s throats. Granted, this is partly her fault, but Sadie can’t help but look at this as full of interesting possibilities. After all, the only way to resolve tension is to fight it out. Or…other ways.
At least it won’t be a boring holiday.
---
When Mark decides he can’t take the looks, or the way no one seems to really know what to do with him, he escapes back upstairs and into - well he isn’t quite sure whose room it is. Either Lexie or Izzie’s. Regardless, it’s got his stuff, more specifically his cell phone in it, his sole connection to the outside world and therefore people who don’t either want to kill him or choose to ignore him.
“Help me,” he says into the phone, as soon as his call rings through.
“Help you?” Callie asks, sounding rushed and tired, the background chatter a definite sign that she was actually at work. “Where the hell are you?”
“Snowed in.” He groans as he adds, “At Meredith Grey’s house.”
It’s quite possible that she isn’t even trying to contain her laughter, judging by the way she practically howls with it. “You’re kidding me?” His silence gives every indication that he is, in fact, not, no matter how much he wishes he was. “How did you end up there?”
“Long story.”
“Well, I don’t actually have a lot of time on my hands, seeing as half the staff is unaccounted for or snowed in, so make it fast.” The beginning of that sentence gave him hope that maybe she would be letting him off the hook - alas, no such luck.
“I --,” he starts, stops. Might as well get it out, she’s going to figure it out eventually. “I’m sleeping with Lexie Grey.”
There’s a pause and he can hear her stop short in the hallway. He winces as her voice rises in volume, “You slept with an intern. You give me your whole ‘no hot interns’ speech and then you go and sleep with one.”
“Shh, keep it down.” He tells her, reflexively.
“It’s Seattle Grace.” Callie reminds him. “Everyone is going to know before the year is even over, blizzard or not.” There’s another pause, but at least the silence is comfortable, instead of downstairs. “Derek’s not happy with you is he?”
Mark nods his head to an empty room. “Not at all.”
“Are you - “ she stops mid-question, and he can hear someone talking to her on the other end. She says something back to them, before speaking directly into the phone again. “I have to go. Keep me posted.”
He’s talking to dead air and a dial tone as he exhales a, “yeah”.
---
Part 3
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Sadie, Cristina, George, Callie. Other implied relationships (eventually Cristina/Owen in further parts, per request)
Word Count: 2,842
Author's Note: This is turning into something far longer than I'd intended, but just to let people know I'm still working here's more of this. It is, since I split this chapter, now more than four parts. Hope ya'll are gonna stick aroung though. Happy holidays to everyone!
Summary: There's this feeling, in the pit of his stomach, like something is about to go very wrong and he needs to get out of there right now.
(part 1)
There’s this feeling, like something is about to go wrong and he needs to get out of here now, that rouses him and forces his eyes to open. He hasn’t had that feeling in a long time - not since Addison, late nights spent slipping out of that Manhattan brownstone before Derek could get home. Except for once. The one time he ignored it was the same time that had Derek not speaking to him for months.
Safe to say that never happens again.
Mark’s out of bed, with his jeans pulled on and his shirt half pulled over his head, barely five seconds later, moving like this is life or death. He doesn’t wake Lexie, doesn’t say goodbye. He’s not running away from her, he just simply isn’t taking anymore risks. She’ll know that. She’s quick on the uptake.
His footsteps on the floor, the stairs, don’t make a single sound, practiced from a life of running out on too many of his one night stands. He makes it to the door with no interruptions, digs his keys out of his pocket and then opens the door.
It takes him a few seconds to process that he’s just been greeted by something in the area of two to three feet of snow outside the door. A long, long few seconds.
Dammit.
---
Derek hears the knob of the bathroom door turn, the soft click when the door closes once more, and he has time for a solitary moment of confusion, before his morning visitor speaks.
“Derek?” Meredith asks, probably in the reverse order that she should’ve done things. Ask first, and then walk in.
“Do you do this often?” There’s a faint smile on his lips that she can’t see, as he rinses the shampoo from his hair. “Walk in on unsuspecting people. Because I don’t imagine your roommates like that.”
“Are you kidding me?” He can hear the sound of fabric falling to the tile floor. “Alex would invite me in.”
Great. Comforting. “Remind me again why he has to live here?”
The shower curtain slides open and, even standing there completely naked, she looks kind of intimidating when she says, “Because my friends are dark and twisty and occasionally kinky just like me.” She steps inside with him, no invitation needed. “You like that about me, remember?”
She says it as she kisses him, her arms wrapping around the back of his neck, pulling him closer, as the water beats down her bare back. He murmurs his agreement against her lips, all hope of getting out of the shower in a timely manner lost until he thinks to ask, “”Not that I’m complaining, but aren’t you supposed to be still asleep?”
“The clocks are off.” Meredith replies, putting an inch or two between them so that she can get the actual conversation out of the way as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the good part. “I think the power went out last night.”
“Then aren’t we going to be late?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she reminds him, and he nods, and then she’s got her hands and lips back on him, slipping a bit in the suds at the bottom of the shower. They find balance up against the cool tile wall and he’s just getting to the part where he sees just how many ways he can make her moan against him when there’s a crash, followed by a yelp. He can barely hear it but it’s enough to catch his attention and distract him, which in turn makes her whine as she lets her head rest against his chest, already giving up, knowing that one of them is going to have to go downstairs and figure out what that was because it’s five in the morning and they sort of need to know.
“I’ll - “ he starts, and she sighs, heavily, disappointedly.
“Yeah.”
---
Izzie had just been doing her normal morning thing. Get out of bed at a semi-reasonably early hour, make coffee, find a nice quiet room without people in it and pace and think and try to breathe. Try to ignore Denny (he’s there, but he’s quiet, lately, and she likes it better that way).
Except usually she didn’t run headlong into Mark Sloane, causing her to lose her grip on her coffee cup, and both scald him with the steaming liquid and drop the mug on his foot. He makes a sound that’s a cross between a yell and a very unmanly yelp, as the mug bounces off of him and shatters against the floor. She squeaks, loudly.
“What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.” She starts, immediately, no apologies, because this is (partly) her house and he is definitely the intruder here. Somehow. She doesn’t even know how he got in; then it dawns on her. “Who are you sleeping with?”
“No one.” He answers, far too quickly, on gut reaction, then, “And how is that an appropriate question to ask your boss?”
“I’m not the one sleeping with my intern.” It’s not a shot in the dark. She isn’t sleeping with him (it’s hard enough when it’s just two people, and you’re questioning whether or not one is even there, much less three), and Meredith better not be sleeping with him, which leaves Sadie or Lexie. Probably Sadie. She would sleep with Mark.
He glares, no room for argument. It’s a Mexican standoff, dripping with too-hot coffee and confidence.
---
This time Lexie wakes up to the sound of something crashing, probably downstairs. It is, most definitely, not anywhere near as fun as the last time she woke up. However, Mark is already gone and that means their secret is safe, so she can’t call it a total loss.
She pulls on clothes, the pajamas she wore to bed the night before, and, bleary-eyed, walks out into the hall. It’s empty, and she takes a second to get her bearings before she heads down the stairs. Bad idea. Derek practically runs into her back (it’s her fault for standing in front of the bathroom anyway), and she jumps, sort of off to the side. He mumbles a “sorry” and, mostly dressed, hair wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower, he takes off down the stairs, apparently having heard the noise too.
Alex is the next to poke his head out of his bedroom. He’s only half-dressed and doesn’t look like he’s slept for shit all night, squinting at her like it takes him a minute to figure out who she is. “What’s going on?”
Maybe she looks around to see if she’s the only one still in the hallway and thus who he’s talking to. She can’t help it. “I don’t…I have no clue. Derek just went downstairs…” she points, like she needs to, and she would be so much more coherent if she was actually fully awake.
He stares at her. Like she’s crazy. And then Meredith walks out of the bathroom in a towel (well, now she knows what was going on in the bathroom at least, not that she wants to considering), looking between the two of them, then down the hall. “What’s going on?”
Lexie declines to answer this time.
---
It’s when Mark starts hearing people moving about upstairs that he realizes, without a single doubt, just how screwed he is.
Derek is going to find out. And there is absolutely nowhere he can run, unless he wants to do so in the snow and there is just no way his car is going to drive out of there. No way.
Some door upstairs opens and closes and he hears a soft thud and a surprised noise from someone, followed by footsteps on the stairs, and he knows it’ll be Derek who appears in a few seconds. Because it’s his luck today.
No surprise there, he’s right, and he locks eyes with Derek. Anger he expects. Instead he gets disapproval mixed with disappointment because, obviously, he knows (it might be because Mark’s pretty sure he looks a bit like a deer in headlights right now), and that hurts worse than the anger would have. He let him down. Again. He tried so hard not to.
His brain starts working overtime trying to come up with a suitable response for this, for why he’s here, one that will get him out of trouble and keep that look off of Derek’s face. His mouth, however, is not working on the same wavelength because all he manages to do is point to the still cracked open door and say, to the apparent surprise of both Izzie and Derek, “snow”.
At the very least it manages to turn their attention elsewhere.
---
Cristina’s late for work. It’s probably the first time since she became a resident.
She’d been up at four, seen the snow half an hour later, and left five minutes after that. The ten minutes between her apartment and the hospital took triple that but she found a way and, judging by the number of doctors actually there when she arrived, she was one of the early ones.
By the time she runs into George it’s six thirty and he’s looking particularly perplexed that it seems to be only them out of their little group that showed up.
“Where is everyone?”
She raises an eyebrow at him, giving a chance to correct himself, and when he doesn’t replying, “Don’t know if you noticed but it’s snowing outside.”
“But the streets are plowed. I mean we’re here.” George says, looking out the doors of the lobby. Outside tiny white flakes fall onto salted ground. It’s a hospital; they’re one of the first to see the snow plows come through.
“They’re farther out,” she tells him, with a shrug. He still looks worried, but they both wander off on their own separate ways (it’s not like they really spend that much alone time together - a little snow won’t make them bond).
When she hasn’t heard anything an hour later, she palms her phone, finds Meredith’s cell on speed dial and listens to the phone ring ten times before going to voicemail. Once. Twice. Three times.
It must say something about how far gone their relationship is that she gives up after that.
---
They kind of all just filed down like they were assembling for a meeting. After all the crashing and the shrieking and the standoff in the hall, Izzie had wandered off into the kitchen to refill her coffee, Derek had taken up residence in the chair in the living room, Mark standing up against the opposite wall. Sadie, for her part, completely confused by most of this, took a seat on the arm of the couch with her own coffee, simply because there was nowhere else to go.
Sitting there, more or less directly between Derek and Mark who were looking at each other but not saying a whole hell of a lot, felt a lot like she was interrupting a particularly nasty lovers’ spat. It was unnerving enough that she was almost happy when Alex and Lexie both came down, Lexie sitting on the floor, somewhere between herself and Derek, like a child who knew she’d done a bad thing and was just waiting to get yelled at for it, and Alex taking a seat on the couch, the side opposite of where she sat.
Still, there was silence. More waiting.
Izzie settles in a minute or two after that, at first sitting down somewhere in the middle of the couch, equally distant from both Alex and Sadie but, after a few really tense moments between her and Alex, ones mostly in which she was looking at him and he was trying very hard not to look at her, she grabs the throw that lies over the couch and pulls it down with her as she lies down, head resting against his leg, absolutely on purpose. His entire body relaxes, slowly, measured so that you won’t notice unless you’re looking. A lot of what Sadie does is observe anyways.
When Meredith comes in eventually, coming down the stairs and straight into the living room, sitting half on the arm of the chair, half on Derek’s lap, the entire mood of the room shifts. And the silence breaks.
“So, we’re stuck here.” She says, with a sigh that seems to move through the entire room. “The Chief says not to even try to leave.”
After that, people just start talking, not to any specific individual so much as the entire group, each somehow waiting their own turn to speak.
“Aren’t they going to be short staffed?”
“They’ll probably send some patients to Mercy West.”
“Oh, yeah, Richard will love that.”
“Wait, stuck here for how long?” Izzie asks, the question that stands out amid all the others, the one everyone clearly wants an answer to. Because as much as these people seem to get along, for the most part anyway, there’s nothing like a few days stuck in the same house with the same people to make fights break out.
It’s not like there’s not enough tension in this room. This is just fuel to the fire.
Meredith suddenly looks a lot more interested in the fabric of the chair she’s sitting in than meeting anyone’s eyes, as she mumbles, “You know, until the snow stops. And melts.”
That catches Sadie’s attention, seeing as she was the only one who’d actually bothered to check the weather this morning, while everyone was freaking out. “That won’t be until Christmas Eve.”
“That’s…wait, Christmas Eve is tomorrow.”
“It’s tomorrow? Seriously?”
“We’re stuck here for how long?”
“At least we don’t have to work.” Meredith sighs out, then, off the look’s of a bunch of workaholics, or possibly just people who don’t want to be stuck in a house for that long, she adds, “I mean, come on, it could be nice. Isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be - being trapped in a house with…family and friends and people you…can’t wait to get away from, okay, point taken.”
Derek’s got his eyes glued to Mark, once again, when she says that, and Sadie gets the distinctive feeling that if it wasn’t for everyone else in the room they’d be at each other’s throats. Granted, this is partly her fault, but Sadie can’t help but look at this as full of interesting possibilities. After all, the only way to resolve tension is to fight it out. Or…other ways.
At least it won’t be a boring holiday.
---
When Mark decides he can’t take the looks, or the way no one seems to really know what to do with him, he escapes back upstairs and into - well he isn’t quite sure whose room it is. Either Lexie or Izzie’s. Regardless, it’s got his stuff, more specifically his cell phone in it, his sole connection to the outside world and therefore people who don’t either want to kill him or choose to ignore him.
“Help me,” he says into the phone, as soon as his call rings through.
“Help you?” Callie asks, sounding rushed and tired, the background chatter a definite sign that she was actually at work. “Where the hell are you?”
“Snowed in.” He groans as he adds, “At Meredith Grey’s house.”
It’s quite possible that she isn’t even trying to contain her laughter, judging by the way she practically howls with it. “You’re kidding me?” His silence gives every indication that he is, in fact, not, no matter how much he wishes he was. “How did you end up there?”
“Long story.”
“Well, I don’t actually have a lot of time on my hands, seeing as half the staff is unaccounted for or snowed in, so make it fast.” The beginning of that sentence gave him hope that maybe she would be letting him off the hook - alas, no such luck.
“I --,” he starts, stops. Might as well get it out, she’s going to figure it out eventually. “I’m sleeping with Lexie Grey.”
There’s a pause and he can hear her stop short in the hallway. He winces as her voice rises in volume, “You slept with an intern. You give me your whole ‘no hot interns’ speech and then you go and sleep with one.”
“Shh, keep it down.” He tells her, reflexively.
“It’s Seattle Grace.” Callie reminds him. “Everyone is going to know before the year is even over, blizzard or not.” There’s another pause, but at least the silence is comfortable, instead of downstairs. “Derek’s not happy with you is he?”
Mark nods his head to an empty room. “Not at all.”
“Are you - “ she stops mid-question, and he can hear someone talking to her on the other end. She says something back to them, before speaking directly into the phone again. “I have to go. Keep me posted.”
He’s talking to dead air and a dial tone as he exhales a, “yeah”.
---
Part 3