and Calypso being gone made Mark think.

Really think, for the first time in a while.

The apartment was so quiet without the girls. Mark hadn't expected to miss it, but he sort of yearned for the headaches he used to receive as a result of the girls bickering over the silly things.

Mark felt guilty for ever having debated getting rid of the girls. The quiet he had been craving was so eerie, and Mark hated it.

Presently, the man was trying to get through his shift at the hospital. Work usually didn't feel that long to Mark, but he found that minutes dragged on at the speed of molasses. He was ready to be done with work and go home.

Er...maybe not go home. Maybe work was a good distraction from the eerie silence of the apartment he so strongly abhorred.

Mark frowned as he looked down at his patient's chart, knocking on the already opened wooden door. "Mr. Walter?"

The man sitting in the hospital bed was a patient of Mark's—one that had been discharged days ago. Mark wasn't sure why the man was back.

"What are you doing here? I thought-"

"Something's wrong with my face." The man groaned, white gauze covering a solid half of his head. "You said it'd be better by now."

Mark frowned, pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves as he tried to coax more information out of his patient. "How long has the pain been this bad?"

Mr. Walter looked desperately over to his wife for help, the woman's brows knitting as she tried to recall. "Um...since last night, maybe?"

"A lot of this is just swelling from the surgery, it'll go down if you give it some time." Mark reassured as he looked at the man's puffy cheeks and semi-swollen nose. He looked as though he had gotten beaten up as opposed to just having undergone a face lift.

Mark peeled back the white gauze, grimacing at the oozing stitched incision that sat right along the man's jawline, adjacent to his ear. "You haven't been dressing the incision site?"

Mr. Walter looked almost dopey as he gaped up at the doctor. "Was I supposed to?"

"Well that might be your answer." Mark let out a quiet laugh, crossing the room to gather the supplies he would need to fully clean and re-dress Mr. Walter's incision.

Usually, Mark would leave such tedious things to the interns. But seeing as Mr. Walter happened to be one of Mark's favorites, the doctor didn't mind taking the time to give his patient a little extra comfort.

Mr. Walter was charming and sociable, and he had the same dry sense of humor that Mark had. Mark liked that.

Mr. Walter looked immensely overwhelmed at all the supplies that Mark had pulled out. "Do we really need all of that? Can't you just load me up with that stuff you gave me last time?"

"If you're referring to the hardcore doses of drugs, no I cannot." Mark spoke bluntly, Mr. Walter letting out a short laugh immediately followed by a string of groaning out in a combination of annoyance and pain. "This is gonna help, I promise. Your wound is infected, it just needs to be cleaned out and I'll get you some antibiotics."

To say that Mr. Walter cried out like a baby while Mark cleaned his wound was a major understatement.

Working in the medical field, Mark held no judgment for any of his patients or the things that they felt. Everybody had different pain tolerances, everybody was feeling different things that Mark couldn't possibly understand.

Mark held no judgment for any of his patients, yet he couldn't help but slightly judge the way that Mr. Walter was reacting to the mild antiseptic on his wound as if Mark was sawing off his leg right there.

"Done. You're good." Mark assured as he placed the brand new gauze on the entirely cleaned wound.

"You did good, honey." Mrs. Walter attempted to reassure her husband.

The man only huffed, looking to still be in pain. "Don't humor me, Violet."

That name took Mark's brain elsewhere.

Mark wondered where his own Violet was. Her and her sister were probably in some cold facility at the moment. Maybe they were happy to be gone, maybe they were sad to be gone. Selfishly, Mark hoped it was the latter.

The name Violet suited the little girl just as much as Calypso. Mark wondered what had prompted the girl to switch her name. He had meant to ask, his curiosity always having been raging, but he never got the chance to hear the story. He wouldn't ever get to hear the story either.

"Is something wrong, Dr. Sloan?" Mr. Walter asked, Mark coming back after having completely zoned out. His face was blank.

"No, no, nothing's, uh...everything's good." Mark let a forced smile take on his face. "I'll send up an order to the pharmacy for those antibiotics."

The husband and wife thanked the man, Mark's smile immediately dropping as soon as he exited the room.

He made his way over to the nurses' station, filling in the chart as best as he could until he was interrupted.

"I'm feeling great today." Callie announced in such a cheery tone that Mark wanted to roll his eyes. "Are you feeling great today? Did you miss me?"

"I missed you so much." Mark spoke absently in a flat tone, purely to appease the woman beside him as he stared down at his chart.

Callie frowned as she faced the man. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong with me, Callie, I just have things to do." Mark mumbled as he looked over at his friend. "Don't you have something you need to do?"

"Everybody is so pissy around here today, what happened while I was gone?" Callie mumbled. "I mean...Kepner yelled at me today. Kepner. She yelled at me."

"It's January, Torres. We're all tired and cold. Not everyone gets to magically disappear for a beach vacation to recharge." Mark only shrugged. "Did your marriage-salvaging plan work?"

"It did not." Callie reported, a big smile on her face that sent quite the mixed message. "Yeah, no, we're separating."

"You're what?" Mark asked, not really comprehending what Callie was telling him. "What do you mean you're separating?"

"We're separating. We're just taking some time apart, we're not getting a divorce or anything right now." Callie shrugged. The woman let out a sigh, as if the gravity of her situation was finally pulling her down. "We're just...separating."

Mark frowned, noticing the drastic shift in Callie's mood as her happiness was pulled way down. Mark thought it would help if he himself showed up to Callie's pity party. "If it makes you feel better, the girls are gone."

Callie narrowed her eyes at Mark's statement, not quite sure what he was saying. "Gone" was such an umbrella term. Did he mean to say that the girls had left? Had they died? Did something happen in which they disappeared? Had Mark taken the means to contact their social worker to get the children off of his hands?

"What do you mean they're gone?"

Mark only shrugged. "They're gone. Supposedly Mark Sloan was deemed an unfit parent by the state of Washington."

"What? What the hell did you do?"

"I didn't do anything." Mark defended himself. "They're just...gone, I don't know. It's done, I guess. It doesn't matter now."

Callie frowned as she took in Mark's nonchalant attitude. "You're taking this alarmingly well."

Mark could only manage a laugh, because the tragic reality was that he was taking the situation very badly.

He felt like he was going clinically insane. The silent apartment was destroying him, the emptiness suffocating. Mark hated being so alone. He hated cooking dinner for one person, he hated having so many coloring books skewed around the house with nobody to fill the pages with vibrant colors.

He could donate the toys, probably. They were a nuisance as well as skewn everywhere. Calypso had always been horrific about cleaning up after herself, and Mark could hardly walk anywhere in the apartment without the agonizingly hellish pain of stepping on a Lego.

But Mark couldn't find it in himself to get rid of all the toys. All those toys that had once been played with filled up the dreary emptiness in his apartment. Without them, the apartment would be even more dreary and bleak, painfully empty to a degree that Mark wouldn't be able to stand.

The blaring beeping of Callie's pager interrupted Mark's dreary thoughts, Callie mumbling shit over and over again. Probably not a great sign for the woman.

Mark was tired, and he still had a solid few hours left before his shift was over, and he would go home only to be met with silence.

It was a depressing cycle, one that Mark was eager to break, he just wasn't quite sure how to.

Maybe counseling would help. Maybe seeing a shrink or something would help him get over this weird, lonely stage of his life.

Mark's thoughts materialized into actions as he was paged to the psychiatric wing, something that made Mark furrow his brows.

He put his chart away, making his way down to psych. He hadn't ever really been down here other than with Daisy. The girl being gone made the hallway feel foreign.

A knock on Dr. Sen's door made the psychiatrist look up from his desktop computer.

"I hope you know I'm a plastic surgeon. I can give advice if needed, but it's not great." Mark joked, Dr. Sen not even cracking a smile as he jumped right into his point.

"You have a Chris Walter admitted?" Dr. Sen asked. "I need his file."

Mark raised an eyebrow at that. "Well he's...my patient. Unless he's seeking you for psychiatric help, I don't see why you would need his-"

"It's urgent." Dr. Sen interrupted. "Mr. Walter is a direct threat to one of my patients. He needs to be reported immediately."

Mark had trouble believing that the sociable man he'd had as a patient for the past couple days would hurt a fly, much less a human being.

"Why? What'd he do?"

"That's confidential, Dr. Sloan."

"Did he take a lollipop from a kid or something?" Mark mused, a grin written wide on his lips.

Dr. Sen had a grim look on his face, as if he knew something that Mark didn't, and Mark felt that he should probably shut up.

"I just need that file as soon as you can get it to me." Dr. Sen requested, Mark nodding.

"Yeah, I'll, uh...I'll go work on that."

Dr. Sen nodded, continuing to type on his computer, which told Mark that the psychiatrist was done speaking to him.

"Oh, also, uh...Daisy's done with psychiatry, so...you can go ahead and cancel her Saturday sessions."

Dr. Sen frowned at the information he was being given. "Any particular reason why she's decided to cancel?"

"Things are just...hard right now. She just needs a break." Mark told a slight lie. Lying was, after all, easier than having to explain that Daisy was no longer in his care.

Dr. Sen nodded. "I'm sorry to hear that. I hope things get better."

And for Mark's personal sanity, he really hoped that things got better too.