didn't necessarily consider herself a pessimist, but she found the concept of Valentine's Day seriously idiotic.

Love was an extremely overused word. Daisy found it truly bizarre how people were willing to throw the term around as if it were a weightless thing.

Love is heavy, a feeling you only hold for the people who know the deepest and ugliest parts of who you are and still care about you.

Daisy only ever loved three people, and two-thirds of that list happened to be deceased. Calypso was the only person on the entire planet that Daisy loved with every ounce of her.

And yet flowers and chocolate seemed like the most excessive way to express that. Why couldn't the expression itself just be enough?

Daisy was in a bad mood. She didn't think it was fair that Mom and Dad weren't around to love her anymore. She didn't think it was fair that the only person capable of loving her was a first grader. Valentine's Day made Daisy all sorts of grumpy. Valentine's Day was stupid, with its sickeningly awful Hallmark cards and oversized teddy bears.

February 13th was no doubt a day of preparation all over as people prepared gifts for the following day to give to their loved ones. Perhaps the 13th was a night that people were scrambling to buy last minute candies and gifts.

On the night of the 13th, the Sloan household was filled to the brim with tiny Valentine cards. Calypso was having a party at school the following day, and she found great joy in taking the time to write out a valentine for each classmate of hers.

"Abby." Calypso announced loudly at the dinner table as she finished writing the girl's name on a valentine. She scanned through the sticker pads laid out in front of her. "Abby gets, um...Abby gets a princess sticker!"

Daisy looked down at the messy handwriting, Calypso pressing the sticker down on the valentine. It wasn't centered on the card at all, and it drove Daisy insane.

Calypso also seemed so proud of herself that Daisy didn't have the heart to tell her she had gotten her b's and d's mixed up again. Calypso's classmate Abby would be getting a valentine tomorrow addressed to Addy.

Calypso picked the black-ink pen up again, pressing hard as she wrote. Her hands were shaky. Writing always made her nervous, and Calypso knew she was bound to mess something up. Her shakiness made the ink smear as she glided her hand along, but she tried not to pay attention to the splotches.

Calypso didn't mind the splotches anyway, because at least she was writing her letters. She had filled out so many cards already! The girl felt smart, for the first time in a long time, and she hoped that feeling never ever went away.

"Will." Calypso spoke loudly, turning to her sticker pack. "Will gets an alligator sticker."

This had been a recurring process all night. Calypso fills out her little cards and proceeds to announce every single name.

Aly gets a sticker and Calvin gets a sticker and Lilly gets a sticker and dear God Daisy wanted to claw her own eardrums out so as to not have to hear the never-ending cycle anymore.

Daisy was trying to get her own homework done, but that was immensely difficult with the six-year-old being as loud as ever. Not to mention she had all of her glitter pens and cards and sticker packs sprawled all over on what was supposed to be a shared table space.

Calypso picked up her pen, ready to write another valentine out when she frowned. She couldn't read the next name on her list. "What's this one?"

Calypso turned to her big sister for help, and Daisy looked down at the list of names Calypso's teacher had printed off for Valentine's Day cards.

"Elizabeth."

"Elizabeth." Calypso repeated as she annunciated the name, turning to Mark who was still in the kitchen. "I need help writing Elizabeth."

Calypso could write the shorter names, like Abby and Will. Ava had been an absolute piece of cake.

But if it was any longer than four or five letters, Calypso needed Mark's help writing. His writing was usually neater anywhere.

Er...kind of neater. He did have the notorious doctor hand-writing, and some of his words that he wrote tended to just look like squiggles.

"Daisy can help you, I'm in the middle of dinner."

Daisy frowned at that. "I can't, I'm doing homework."

"And I can't either, I'm making dinner." Mark shrugged as he reiterated his point. "Unless you want to switch places?"

Daisy sighed, pushing her English notebook aside for the moment being. "Start with an E."

"E." Calypso repeated quietly. Her tongue stuck out slightly as she concentrated hard on writing the letter. She made one long stick, with three little sticks hanging off the end. "E."

"L."

Calypso wrote her L, writing an I immediately after when her sister told her to.

Except Daisy noticed that Calypso had switched between uppercase and lowercase, writing a lowercase L and an uppercase I. What should have spelled Eli so far spelled out Ell

"You did it wrong." Daisy frowned. "You can't switch back and forth between upper and lowercase, that's not how it works. You messed it up."

"Daisy." Mark frowned from the kitchen, noticing how harsh the girl was being with her words.

Daisy did realize maybe she was being a little mean. She was so irritable though, and she didn't know why she felt like snapping at everything in her path.

Daisy took a deep breath, trying to make Calypso feel not so targeted. "But...it still looks good. After the I is a Z."

Z's were hard for Calypso. She frowned down at her paper, trying her best. She didn't know which way the letter faced, but she knew it was a zig-zag of a whole bunch of lines.

Naturally, of course, Calypso wrote the letter backwards, and Daisy groaned.

"It's facing the wrong way." Daisy spoke, mumbling the next part quietly under her breath. "God, teaching you is like teaching a brick."

Not quietly enough, apparently, because Mark was not impressed.

"What did you just say?"

"I said I love my sister so much." Daisy spoke loudly as she tried to play off the major insult she had given her sister. "Write an A next."

Mark didn't know what Daisy's problem was, but it was incredibly frustrating.

Elizabeth naturally took what felt like decades for Calypso to write out.

But soon enough she did get it, despite the tangle of backwards letters. Calypso decided that Elizabeth would get a penguin sticker.

"Ben." Calypso drawled out as she finished writing the three-lettered name. Calypso smiled so widely that her dimples poked out. "Ben gets three stickers."

"Three stickers?" Mark grinned, placing the salad he had finished preparing in the middle of the table. "You've got a crush on Ben or something?"

"Of course not." Calypso spoke in a dismissive tone, as if Mark were stupid for suggesting such things. "Ben is my husband."

Mark's grin immediately faded as his eyes grew wide. "I'm sorry?"

But Calypso paid no mind to him, swinging her legs happily as she moved on to the next name. "Jess."

Mark had so many questions that he would bookmark for later as he retreated back to the kitchen to take the chicken out of the oven. A husband?

Also...how the hell had the six-year-old managed to get married before him?

Calypso had finished all of her valentines for each of her classmate before she knew it, but she still had a few cards leftover. She spoke quietly to her sister as she leaned forward. "How do you spell Mark's name? I wanna make him a card."

Daisy wrinkled her nose. "Why? He doesn't need one."

"Of course he does." Calypso argued. "He's probably so sad and lonely because no one loves him."

"Okay, ow." Mark frowned as he placed the dish on the kitchen table. "So much hostility tonight."

Dinner was nearly ready, and as Mark retreated back to the kitchen to clean everything up, Calypso looked expectantly at Daisy.

"I need help."

"M-A-R-K." Daisy hastily spelled out the man's name for Calypso, not taking her eyes off of her English notebook as she wrote.

Daisy was speaking too fast for Calypso's brain to process the letters, and Calypso sat confused with her pen in hand. "Um...can you say it slower?"

Daisy didn't have time for this, and she was growing wildly impatient.

She took Calypso's list of names, using her mechanical pencil to scribble Mark's name at the bottom of the paper.

"Use this, okay? Okay." Daisy huffed, not giving Calypso the chance to actually speak.

Calypso didn't mind though. She didn't pick up on the social cues that Daisy was annoyed with her. Rather she noticed that Daisy was doing something nice for her by writing Mark's name down as a guide, and Calypso smiled at how kind her big sister was.

Slowly and steadily, Calypso let her shaky hands glide along the small valentine card as she wrote Mark's name down.

She was incredibly proud of herself for how well she had written her letters, and she was more than excited to show off her work when Mark came back over to the table for dinner.

"Wow." Mark spoke in an enthusiastic tone that made the six-year-old happy. "I love it, it looks great. Thank you."

Calypso was confident her valentine would score a place smack on the most prestigious art gallery in Seattle: the refrigerator door. She felt good inside. Reading and writing were both so difficult, and she had managed to fill out all those cards with minimal error and no meltdown.

Daisy did not feel good inside. A sort of rage and annoyance burned inside of her as she watched Calypso give Mark his valentine. Perhaps Daisy was just a tad bit jealous that Calypso had taken the time to write Mark a valentine instead of her big sister.

"You wrote a W, and your R is backwards." Daisy pointed out the glaringly obvious errors on the card that Mark had chosen to ignore. "I mean...Wark? That sounds so stupid, you wrote his name all wrong."

"Daisy." Mark frowned, not wanting Calypso to get upset. "I think it's perfect-"

"But it's not perfect, because if it was perfect, there wouldn't be any errors. And there are errors, there are so many errors, each of these cards have an error on them." Daisy rambled on at such a fast pace. Mark looked mad, and Daisy didn't understand why he was mad. "What? You're lying to her face just to make her feel better. How is she supposed to ever learn if you don't correct her?"

Learning was crucial, of course, Mark understood that. But positive and constructive feedback was also crucial. Pointing out every single error wouldn't help Calypso learn, it would just make her feel bad.

"I think that's enough." Mark spoke firmly.

Daisy didn't think it was anywhere near enough. All of Calypso's cards were completely wrong, and Daisy would have no problem going through each card and explaining to Calypso where she had made a mistake.

She wouldn't do that, of course, because now it was time for dinner.

Daisy wasn't hungry anymore though. She was mad, and she thought Mark's chicken was even stupider than Valentine's Day.

While Daisy retreated to her bedroom grumbling about how awful she thought the upcoming holiday was, she hadn't realized she had left a very upset Calypso behind at the dinner table.

The girl hadn't even realized her mistakes, but now that Daisy pointed it out, she had made so many errors.

Calypso looked at the overwhelming amounts of n's and u's that had gotten mixed up. The w's and the m's, all the letters she had written backwards. They all floated around and tormented her.

The card addressed to a boy named Uriah caught her attention. The U in his name looked like the upturned mouth of a big smiley face. A big smiley face that was laughing at Calypso, laughing as if it couldn't possibly fathom the girl's stupidity.

Daisy was the nicest person Calypso had ever met, as well as the smartest person Calypso had ever met. If Daisy thought that Calypso was stupid, then the girl undoubtedly had to be stupid, her sister wouldn't lie.

The chicken Mark had made didn't look so yummy anymore, and Calypso decided she wasn't really hungry. She had so many cards to fix anyway, she wouldn't even have the time to eat.

Mark watched as Calypso picked up Abby's card, the one she had addressed to Addy. He frowned as Calypso used her ink pen to completely scribble out what she had written.

Calypso tried her hardest to correct herself. She hated that she couldn't read or write, she hated that she felt like an idiot.

Calypso pushed the card aside as she finished her re-try, her hands even shakier than before. The girl reached for a new card to correct, and Mark didn't have the heart to tell Calypso she had written Addy again.

• • • •

Arizona, Mark, and Caroline were crowded around a two-year-old patient whose head was entirely opened.

Mark's job in this instance wasn't too bad. He had helped make the initial zig-zag cut to help later hide the scar within the hair as well as helped Dr. Fanning expose the fused sutures in the skull, but Caroline really was doing the heavy lifting in regards to cutting the actual fused bone itself.

Arizona was on standby at the chest, ready to crack it open should the little one on the table go into distress. Arizona also hadn't directly witnessed this sort of pediatric neurosurgery in ages, and she was eager to watch.

Caroline was at the toddler's head, the pediatric neurosurgeon working her magic.

Mark wondered if Derek and Caroline did the same things, just on different sized brains. Mark noted that they both wore those same surgical loupes as they peered into gross brain matter.

But he also noted that Dr. Fanning looked exceptionally pretty with the silly glasses on. Mark thought Derek just looked stupid, with or without the loupes.

"Forceps." Caroline called as she held her hand out, an OR nurse carefully supplying her with the instrument almost as quickly as she had requested it.

This was by far the worst case of craniosynostosis that any of the three surgeons had ever seen. The toddler's head was swollen to the size of a basketball, and it was both alarming and amazing to see.

"How do you let it get this bad." Arizona mumbled as she watched Caroline legitimately try to cut back and pry a bone out of the toddler's skull. "I mean seriously, as a parent, how do you let it get this bad?"

"Healthcare is shit." Caroline frowned as she tried to writhe the pliable bone out. "Not everyone can afford this kind of stuff."

"Yeah, but...I don't know. I mean, you see your kid suffering, wouldn't you do something? Some sort of extreme measure?"

Mark raised his eyebrow at Arizona's words. "What do you mean? Like...go into an alley and let some unqualified creep dig into your kid's brain?"

"I'm not saying that, I just..." Arizona let out a quiet sigh as she looked down at the infant on the table. "I don't know. Wouldn't it have been so much safer if the kid had come in ages ago?"

"It's...usually significantly easier to handle the sooner the problem is addressed." Caroline silently agreed with Arizona. "And in this case the success rate jumps down from ninety-nine to...maybe thirty percent?"

"Thirty percent." Arizona repeated solemnly.

"Thirty percent isn't bad. I can work with thirty percent." Caroline spoke in an optimistic tone. "We're almost done anyway."

But a thirty percent success rate most definitely wasn't good, no matter how far along in the surgery they were.

"The fused suture has been released." Caroline stated for the record, emptying the tiny misshapen portion of the skull. "Absorbable plate is being inserted, and a drain will be placed."

Mark watched as the woman worked efficiently. Caroline appeared to be relatively young, and yet she acted as if she had done this millions and millions of times before. As if she could do this with her eyes closed.

Mark had to admit he had a tiny crush on the woman in front of him currently cutting a skull to bits.

But that was the problem, because Arizona also had a bit of a crush on the same woman. Things just seemed that much more competitive around the hospital between the two friends.

Mark looked over at the large clock on the adjacent OR wall, grinning beneath his face mask at the sight that it was a few minutes past midnight. "It's Valentine's Day."

"And kiddo happens to be getting a brand new skull. That's got to be the greatest present ever." Caroline spoke tenderly as she smiled, fully adjusting the new absorbable plates.

Mark cleared his throat, looking over at the chestnut-haired woman. "Do you have any Valentine's Day plans, Dr. Fanning?"

"None that involve you, Dr. Sloan."

Mark frowned, slightly offended, and Arizona loved nothing more than watching Mark get rejected.

"So you really are only into chicks." Mark mumbled, unable to grasp that Arizona probably had a better chance to win the woman over.

Caroline was highly unimpressed though, not taking her eyes off of her patient as she spoke. "Is your ego that big that you think I have to be gay to not find you attractive?"

"So...you are into men?" Mark asked, not seeming to have heard a word from the woman's mouth.

Caroline was into men, yes, and women too. It didn't matter, honestly. Caroline thought it was stupid to base who you fell in love with off of certain genitals, or lack thereof.

But the two surgeons before her didn't need to know that. Dr. Robbins and Dr. Sloan had both flirted with her enough in the past week to last a lifetime. She legitimately wasn't attracted to either of them, and she wondered why these people couldn't maintain a strictly professional workplace.

"Not everybody you encounter is going to find you attractive."

"Why not?" Mark frowned, as if that was a huge problem.

Caroline was more amused than she was annoyed, grinning as she took her loupes off. "I'm done here. You can have the honors of closing up."

That was Mark's job, of course, to ensure there was hardly any scarring. But he found himself wanting to leave too.

Caroline began to exit the operating room, walking right past Mark as she started to take off her bloodied gloves.

"Happy Valentine's Day, pal."

Arizona let out a mean laugh. "Pal."

Mark didn't find it funny, and he decided right then and there that being called pal on Valentine's Day felt just as awful as his six-year-old claiming he was sad, lonely, and unlovable.