Fic - What Kind of Day Has it Been (Lexie, Mark/Lexie) R, 1/1
Title: What Kind of Day Has it Been
Summary: It's easier, you see, to move through the uncertainty. All we have are the mistakes of others guiding our ways, lessons passed through the grapevines. Take them or leave them -- it's always your choice.
Rating: R
Author's Notes: 2,712 words. Knee-jerk reaction to 5x23 and 5x24. Dedicated to all the girls who ranted and worried and argued with me last night. You know who you are. All mistakes are mine. These characters, however, are not. This is completely different than anything I've ever written for these two before so Con-Crit is both welcome and appreciated. (Oh, and a cookie to whoever can tell me where the title is from *g*)
“You didn’t come back last night.”
He finds her in the supply closet, back to the door, thumbnail between her teeth.
She waits a beat or two before turning around to face him, fingers dropping to her side, curling and uncurling before spreading against the fabric of her thigh, still. There is a moment, an eternity where they just stand there and stare at one another, breathing, being, waiting with bated breath for the other to go first. Something rises in her throat, familiar almost, and she’s been doing so well, been so good about keeping her emotions in check, that it startles her.
There’s a lump in her throat and she forces herself to swallow around it. She has to look away.
“I was working.”
It’s true. There had been an accident on the beltway just after everything and they needed doctors. Lexie had stepped up. The hospital doesn’t change. It’s consistent, a constant. People always need to be saved, always need attention, and that is what she does. She’s a doctor. She saves people. It’s her job. So she worked, and kept working because working meant an occupied mind and hands. Working meant prolonging the inevitable for just a few more short hours.
Breathing slowly, she reaches up, fingers reaching to pinch the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t know how to do this anymore - the whole grieving process thing. Mostly she remembers things in bits and pieces, odd little memories. It was all accidental really and she just found her way through those five steps by grabbing blindly at whatever was near and holding on the best she knew how. She muses quietly that it is something no one should ever have to actually learn.
After her mother died, after the call with her father’s voice in her ear saying she’s gone like that was that, she had worked then too. It’s easier, you see, to work through the uncertainty.
It’s what she does.
Mark moves a few steps towards her carefully, stopping a foot or two away. He’s testing the waters and it is a bitter moment when she remembers why. They’re fighting. She doesn’t want to fight with him. She’s too tired to fight with him. Mark sighs softly, air passing his lips in a short whoosh of air and she feels it. It takes something away from her. Her chest tightens. She doesn’t want to think about why.
“Lexie,” he starts softly and finally, finally he reaches for her, fingers on her elbow, soft and secure. She looks at him, really looks at him, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes, bottom lip between her teeth. She doesn’t want to cry - she forces herself not to cry.
Between them there is another moment that stretches on for too long before she finally allows herself to fold into him, arms at her sides as his wrap around her, her forehead solid against his chest. Her eyes close and he breathes and she does too, fingers unsteady as they fist into the cotton of his shirt.
Lexie doesn’t let go.
There is a mumble against her hair, something akin to It’s okay maybe, and she has to strain to hear it.
It is almost enough.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” she says in the car on the way back to the hotel.
The sun is too bright in the early morning sky and she winces, closing her eyes as she rests her forehead against the cool window. There are things she does after long days, after losing a patient that got too close, that hit too close to home. She calls her father and drinks a little - tequila, usually, because she quite likes the way it burns on the way down, the way it coils in the pit of her stomach - then puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving forward.
Today she does nothing.
Mark is staring at her. She can feel it even with her eyes closed, and he’s choosing his words carefully. She hurt him, she gets that, she even hates herself a little for it, but it’s about self-preservation. It’s about her, not them, not even him. She has these plans, you see, all these grand, brilliant plans that don’t take well to change. She doesn’t know how to tell him this, doesn’t know if there is a way to tell him this without hurting him more than she already has.
Her lips part to say something, but she pauses. It isn’t the right time. She wishes it were. She wishes he would yell at her. Wishes he would fight with her. Wishes he would do something other than sit here and wait for her to fall apart.
“Okay.”
It’s all he says.
Lexie’s eyes finally slide open. The light is green. It takes him a moment to shift the car into gear.
They move in circles around each other.
She sheds her jacket and tosses it to the side, slips her shoes off her feet, and he watches her, arms dangling at his sides, his jaw set. He watches her and it unnerves her, puts her on edge. She turns her back to him, moves towards the couch, turns SportsCenter on low. It’s their morning routine - breakfast, coffee, SportsCenter. She needs this, needs something familiar and stable to hold onto. Still, she does not look at him. Mark’s jacket comes off easily, tossed somewhere near her own, and she’s watching Mike and Mike In The Morning when he slides onto the couch next to her, close, but far enough away to be cause for concern.
There is that lump in her throat again, itching for release and this thing in her chest, tightening and grabbing hold. All of a sudden the tears start pooling at the corners of her eyes and her eyelashes fall against her cheeks as she wills them not to fall and finally, finally she thinks of George. It’s tiny, the memory, seemingly insignificant in the whole scheme of things. It’s the day she moved out. It’s him, standing there, perplexed and the way he’d looked at her, lips pressed into a tight line, as he tried to find his footing in the midst of all the space suddenly between them. She knows now what she didn’t then - that she never really loved him, not in the way she thought she did, but that knowledge does not make this reality any easier.
“Are you okay?”
The kissing just sort of happens.
One second Mark is asking her if she’s alright and the next her fingers are curling around his face - fingers cold as they press into his cheeks - mouth and angle awkward as she presses against him. He’s unsure of what to do and it shows in the way his hands brace themselves at her sides, the way his mouth is soft and compliant, not demanding. Lexie presses her tongue against his, above and below and there’s a sound that passes his lips, somewhere between a growl and a moan, that gets stuck in her throat.
It is too much. It’s everything. It’s nothing. She pulls away, just for a mere moment, and looks at him through lidded eyes, breaths falling between them. She looks at him, lets her hand fall to his chest, somewhere near his heart and closes her eyes again, counts the thump thump thump of his heartbeat out with the tips of her fingers and kisses him again. Kisses him because he’s here and he’s breathing and he’s with her and he saw her when nobody else did.
Lexie kisses him, hard and bruising, and Mark kisses her back, with a hand tangled in her hair and the other resting on the small of her back. Mark kisses her back and it’s all languid and loving and wrong, fingers in her hair soft, lips on hers trying to coax her into something gentle. She fights him inch by inch, presses herself into him, over him, legs on either side of his thighs as she pushes him back into the couch hard.
“Lexie,” he breathes, like he did earlier in the supply closest, just her name, the two syllables falling nervously past his lips. She closes her eyes against it. It just seems wrong. “This is a bad idea.”
Lips against the stubble at his chin, against his cheek, the corner of his mouth. She’s looking him right in the eye when she pleads, please , all soft and broken and his face crumbles right along with her will. There is a moment that lasts too long before he kisses her, all jagged edges and blinding fire, all caution to the wind.
Mark kisses her like he needs this too.
It's fast and needy. Brutal. Lexie is a bitch in the way she takes, takes, takes with no questions asked. Her nails at the skin of his shoulders digging in deep.
There is no careful precision, no order in the way they do things. Just her pants next to his on the floor, shirt pressed up against her armpits, him between her legs. Mark pins her hands above her head, grasp so tight she feels the bruises forming. She needs this, needs the anger, needs the feverish, simple overtones of fucking to calm the mess inside her head.
She needs something to remind her that she is still half-alive.
He does not ask for permission and she does not care.
There is no adjustment, no tenderness, no are you okay? whispered against her mouth. He just moves and keeps moving like his life depends on it and they don’t talk, don’t banter, don’t tease. There is no curling of lips, no subtle sighs. It’s foreign, so not them, and there’s a bitterness on her lips she can’t seem to get him to kiss away no matter how hard she tries.
It is still him, though. It is still her.
Still something.
Mark fucks her like he knows her and his eyes are on her the entire time - watching, waiting.
She’s staring right back.
“My sister married the first guy that ever loved her back.”
It’s early afternoon. She hasn’t slept at all and neither has he. They haven’t really talked either - not about George or Izzie, or this stupid fight that is stretching them both a bit too thin. She’s in his Columbia sweatshirt and a pair of gym shorts, and he’s doing charts near the mini-bar. They both stay away from the couch, their own version of out of sight, out of mind. They haven’t done much of anything - ESPN is still on in the background though neither one of them are paying a bit of attention to it.
There is a sigh - his, hers, she doesn’t know, but it filters between them, palpable. He puts his pen down and shoves the chart in his hands off to the side. She turns away from the window. It’s been raining on and off all morning and the sun is starting to filter through the clouds, making her wince. She pulls the curtain shut before turning fully towards him.
“I have these plans,” she says, and she doesn’t even know what she’s saying until the words leave her mouth. “I’ve had these plans. College, medical school, internship, residency…” Lexie pauses for a long moment and takes in the way he’s looking at her, all earnest and loving; it hurts her heart.
She didn’t plan this.
She’s a planner, it’s in her nature. To-do lists and ten year plans have seeped into every crevice of her life and she’s grown accustomed to expecting the unexpected. It’s what makes her a good doctor. But she didn’t plan this. She didn’t plan on him.
Her whole life she has breathed for things akin to structure and stability. It is in her genes to need these things and her life has been this series of pre-decided steps, lined up in neat little rows, and she’s already had to adjust them once, after her mother. She doesn’t cope well with change. No Grey really does.
“Lexie,” he starts, and then stops. He’s always been better at these sorts of things than her - the thinking before you speak thing. She envies him for it.
“She didn’t have a plan, Mark. She didn’t have a plan and now she’s stuck with a husband who is at war and a child she’s practically raising on her own. She’s stuck in this place where you’re happy, but not as happy as you could be, as you should be,” she pauses and there’s a noise he makes in the back of his throat that makes her ears pop before he raises himself out of his chair and moves towards her. He reaches for her, fingers to her elbow again, and she breaks, just a little. A sob gets caught in her throat and she doesn’t have the will to swallow around it anymore. “I’m so, so scared of ending up in that place, Mark.”
“Lexie,” he tries again, fingers leaving her elbow to rub at the back of his neck. He sounds tired. He is tired. He looks older than she ever remembers him looking before and it worries her. “We don’t have to do this now.”
There are words that get caught in her throat and she doesn’t quite know how to explain this. Doesn’t know how to tell him that she needs to make this right before she can even begin to sort out the rest. The rest will still be there… an hour, a day, a week from now and the reality of this day is still going to be there. It is always going to be there. He might not be.
Lexie understands this in a way she never could before.
Mark reaches for her again and finds her hand easily, lets his fingers intertwine with her own.
There’s a bruise forming on her wrist and the way he trails his thumb over the tender skin, over the curve of her bone, says that maybe he understands too.
“Can we just, I don’t know,” she breathes and the tears are back prickling at the corners of her eyes, and these, too, she doesn’t have the will to stop. “Can we just put the whole moving in thing into a drawer for a little while? Just for a couple of days until we can talk about it, really talk about it? Do you think you could do that for me?”
It’s a lot to ask for and she knows it. She understands what it meant for him to ask for her. Understands things like roots and family and permanence and what it means for him to want those things, what it means for him to want those things with her.
Lexie just doesn’t know how to let him know she understands. Doesn’t know how to let him know that she is thankful for him and his presence in her life in more ways than she could ever really begin to express. So she squeezes his hand and leans into him, doesn’t let go. Watches the uncertainty cloud his features, and feels her heart beat for him and him alone for a short, fleeting moment.
She says a prayer, too - to a god she’s having a hard time believing in right now that they’ll make it through this.
“Yeah,” he says finally and all of a sudden the tears start to fall and she sighs, letting her shoulders slump, letting herself move fully into him. “I can do that,” he continues, like he’s trying to convince himself and Lexie chuckles mirthlessly at nothing in particular.
Grief is irrational like that.
“Good,” she exhales. “Good, because right now I’m going to start crying and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop and I need you to just hold me and tell me it’s going to be okay even if it’s not.” She takes in a shaky breath that gets caught in her throat. “I just really, really need you to do that for me.”
The pressure of his arms around her is immediate and right and Lexie just sort of falls into him, lets his left hand pressing between her shoulder blades provide her the stability and structure she so desperately needs.
Outside thunder crackles and retreats, the steady tap tap tap of rain filtering against the window.
Lexie welcomes the familiarity.
Summary: It's easier, you see, to move through the uncertainty. All we have are the mistakes of others guiding our ways, lessons passed through the grapevines. Take them or leave them -- it's always your choice.
Rating: R
Author's Notes: 2,712 words. Knee-jerk reaction to 5x23 and 5x24. Dedicated to all the girls who ranted and worried and argued with me last night. You know who you are. All mistakes are mine. These characters, however, are not. This is completely different than anything I've ever written for these two before so Con-Crit is both welcome and appreciated. (Oh, and a cookie to whoever can tell me where the title is from *g*)
“You didn’t come back last night.”
He finds her in the supply closet, back to the door, thumbnail between her teeth.
She waits a beat or two before turning around to face him, fingers dropping to her side, curling and uncurling before spreading against the fabric of her thigh, still. There is a moment, an eternity where they just stand there and stare at one another, breathing, being, waiting with bated breath for the other to go first. Something rises in her throat, familiar almost, and she’s been doing so well, been so good about keeping her emotions in check, that it startles her.
There’s a lump in her throat and she forces herself to swallow around it. She has to look away.
“I was working.”
It’s true. There had been an accident on the beltway just after everything and they needed doctors. Lexie had stepped up. The hospital doesn’t change. It’s consistent, a constant. People always need to be saved, always need attention, and that is what she does. She’s a doctor. She saves people. It’s her job. So she worked, and kept working because working meant an occupied mind and hands. Working meant prolonging the inevitable for just a few more short hours.
Breathing slowly, she reaches up, fingers reaching to pinch the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t know how to do this anymore - the whole grieving process thing. Mostly she remembers things in bits and pieces, odd little memories. It was all accidental really and she just found her way through those five steps by grabbing blindly at whatever was near and holding on the best she knew how. She muses quietly that it is something no one should ever have to actually learn.
After her mother died, after the call with her father’s voice in her ear saying she’s gone like that was that, she had worked then too. It’s easier, you see, to work through the uncertainty.
It’s what she does.
Mark moves a few steps towards her carefully, stopping a foot or two away. He’s testing the waters and it is a bitter moment when she remembers why. They’re fighting. She doesn’t want to fight with him. She’s too tired to fight with him. Mark sighs softly, air passing his lips in a short whoosh of air and she feels it. It takes something away from her. Her chest tightens. She doesn’t want to think about why.
“Lexie,” he starts softly and finally, finally he reaches for her, fingers on her elbow, soft and secure. She looks at him, really looks at him, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes, bottom lip between her teeth. She doesn’t want to cry - she forces herself not to cry.
Between them there is another moment that stretches on for too long before she finally allows herself to fold into him, arms at her sides as his wrap around her, her forehead solid against his chest. Her eyes close and he breathes and she does too, fingers unsteady as they fist into the cotton of his shirt.
Lexie doesn’t let go.
There is a mumble against her hair, something akin to It’s okay maybe, and she has to strain to hear it.
It is almost enough.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” she says in the car on the way back to the hotel.
The sun is too bright in the early morning sky and she winces, closing her eyes as she rests her forehead against the cool window. There are things she does after long days, after losing a patient that got too close, that hit too close to home. She calls her father and drinks a little - tequila, usually, because she quite likes the way it burns on the way down, the way it coils in the pit of her stomach - then puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving forward.
Today she does nothing.
Mark is staring at her. She can feel it even with her eyes closed, and he’s choosing his words carefully. She hurt him, she gets that, she even hates herself a little for it, but it’s about self-preservation. It’s about her, not them, not even him. She has these plans, you see, all these grand, brilliant plans that don’t take well to change. She doesn’t know how to tell him this, doesn’t know if there is a way to tell him this without hurting him more than she already has.
Her lips part to say something, but she pauses. It isn’t the right time. She wishes it were. She wishes he would yell at her. Wishes he would fight with her. Wishes he would do something other than sit here and wait for her to fall apart.
“Okay.”
It’s all he says.
Lexie’s eyes finally slide open. The light is green. It takes him a moment to shift the car into gear.
They move in circles around each other.
She sheds her jacket and tosses it to the side, slips her shoes off her feet, and he watches her, arms dangling at his sides, his jaw set. He watches her and it unnerves her, puts her on edge. She turns her back to him, moves towards the couch, turns SportsCenter on low. It’s their morning routine - breakfast, coffee, SportsCenter. She needs this, needs something familiar and stable to hold onto. Still, she does not look at him. Mark’s jacket comes off easily, tossed somewhere near her own, and she’s watching Mike and Mike In The Morning when he slides onto the couch next to her, close, but far enough away to be cause for concern.
There is that lump in her throat again, itching for release and this thing in her chest, tightening and grabbing hold. All of a sudden the tears start pooling at the corners of her eyes and her eyelashes fall against her cheeks as she wills them not to fall and finally, finally she thinks of George. It’s tiny, the memory, seemingly insignificant in the whole scheme of things. It’s the day she moved out. It’s him, standing there, perplexed and the way he’d looked at her, lips pressed into a tight line, as he tried to find his footing in the midst of all the space suddenly between them. She knows now what she didn’t then - that she never really loved him, not in the way she thought she did, but that knowledge does not make this reality any easier.
“Are you okay?”
The kissing just sort of happens.
One second Mark is asking her if she’s alright and the next her fingers are curling around his face - fingers cold as they press into his cheeks - mouth and angle awkward as she presses against him. He’s unsure of what to do and it shows in the way his hands brace themselves at her sides, the way his mouth is soft and compliant, not demanding. Lexie presses her tongue against his, above and below and there’s a sound that passes his lips, somewhere between a growl and a moan, that gets stuck in her throat.
It is too much. It’s everything. It’s nothing. She pulls away, just for a mere moment, and looks at him through lidded eyes, breaths falling between them. She looks at him, lets her hand fall to his chest, somewhere near his heart and closes her eyes again, counts the thump thump thump of his heartbeat out with the tips of her fingers and kisses him again. Kisses him because he’s here and he’s breathing and he’s with her and he saw her when nobody else did.
Lexie kisses him, hard and bruising, and Mark kisses her back, with a hand tangled in her hair and the other resting on the small of her back. Mark kisses her back and it’s all languid and loving and wrong, fingers in her hair soft, lips on hers trying to coax her into something gentle. She fights him inch by inch, presses herself into him, over him, legs on either side of his thighs as she pushes him back into the couch hard.
“Lexie,” he breathes, like he did earlier in the supply closest, just her name, the two syllables falling nervously past his lips. She closes her eyes against it. It just seems wrong. “This is a bad idea.”
Lips against the stubble at his chin, against his cheek, the corner of his mouth. She’s looking him right in the eye when she pleads, please , all soft and broken and his face crumbles right along with her will. There is a moment that lasts too long before he kisses her, all jagged edges and blinding fire, all caution to the wind.
Mark kisses her like he needs this too.
It's fast and needy. Brutal. Lexie is a bitch in the way she takes, takes, takes with no questions asked. Her nails at the skin of his shoulders digging in deep.
There is no careful precision, no order in the way they do things. Just her pants next to his on the floor, shirt pressed up against her armpits, him between her legs. Mark pins her hands above her head, grasp so tight she feels the bruises forming. She needs this, needs the anger, needs the feverish, simple overtones of fucking to calm the mess inside her head.
She needs something to remind her that she is still half-alive.
He does not ask for permission and she does not care.
There is no adjustment, no tenderness, no are you okay? whispered against her mouth. He just moves and keeps moving like his life depends on it and they don’t talk, don’t banter, don’t tease. There is no curling of lips, no subtle sighs. It’s foreign, so not them, and there’s a bitterness on her lips she can’t seem to get him to kiss away no matter how hard she tries.
It is still him, though. It is still her.
Still something.
Mark fucks her like he knows her and his eyes are on her the entire time - watching, waiting.
She’s staring right back.
“My sister married the first guy that ever loved her back.”
It’s early afternoon. She hasn’t slept at all and neither has he. They haven’t really talked either - not about George or Izzie, or this stupid fight that is stretching them both a bit too thin. She’s in his Columbia sweatshirt and a pair of gym shorts, and he’s doing charts near the mini-bar. They both stay away from the couch, their own version of out of sight, out of mind. They haven’t done much of anything - ESPN is still on in the background though neither one of them are paying a bit of attention to it.
There is a sigh - his, hers, she doesn’t know, but it filters between them, palpable. He puts his pen down and shoves the chart in his hands off to the side. She turns away from the window. It’s been raining on and off all morning and the sun is starting to filter through the clouds, making her wince. She pulls the curtain shut before turning fully towards him.
“I have these plans,” she says, and she doesn’t even know what she’s saying until the words leave her mouth. “I’ve had these plans. College, medical school, internship, residency…” Lexie pauses for a long moment and takes in the way he’s looking at her, all earnest and loving; it hurts her heart.
She didn’t plan this.
She’s a planner, it’s in her nature. To-do lists and ten year plans have seeped into every crevice of her life and she’s grown accustomed to expecting the unexpected. It’s what makes her a good doctor. But she didn’t plan this. She didn’t plan on him.
Her whole life she has breathed for things akin to structure and stability. It is in her genes to need these things and her life has been this series of pre-decided steps, lined up in neat little rows, and she’s already had to adjust them once, after her mother. She doesn’t cope well with change. No Grey really does.
“Lexie,” he starts, and then stops. He’s always been better at these sorts of things than her - the thinking before you speak thing. She envies him for it.
“She didn’t have a plan, Mark. She didn’t have a plan and now she’s stuck with a husband who is at war and a child she’s practically raising on her own. She’s stuck in this place where you’re happy, but not as happy as you could be, as you should be,” she pauses and there’s a noise he makes in the back of his throat that makes her ears pop before he raises himself out of his chair and moves towards her. He reaches for her, fingers to her elbow again, and she breaks, just a little. A sob gets caught in her throat and she doesn’t have the will to swallow around it anymore. “I’m so, so scared of ending up in that place, Mark.”
“Lexie,” he tries again, fingers leaving her elbow to rub at the back of his neck. He sounds tired. He is tired. He looks older than she ever remembers him looking before and it worries her. “We don’t have to do this now.”
There are words that get caught in her throat and she doesn’t quite know how to explain this. Doesn’t know how to tell him that she needs to make this right before she can even begin to sort out the rest. The rest will still be there… an hour, a day, a week from now and the reality of this day is still going to be there. It is always going to be there. He might not be.
Lexie understands this in a way she never could before.
Mark reaches for her again and finds her hand easily, lets his fingers intertwine with her own.
There’s a bruise forming on her wrist and the way he trails his thumb over the tender skin, over the curve of her bone, says that maybe he understands too.
“Can we just, I don’t know,” she breathes and the tears are back prickling at the corners of her eyes, and these, too, she doesn’t have the will to stop. “Can we just put the whole moving in thing into a drawer for a little while? Just for a couple of days until we can talk about it, really talk about it? Do you think you could do that for me?”
It’s a lot to ask for and she knows it. She understands what it meant for him to ask for her. Understands things like roots and family and permanence and what it means for him to want those things, what it means for him to want those things with her.
Lexie just doesn’t know how to let him know she understands. Doesn’t know how to let him know that she is thankful for him and his presence in her life in more ways than she could ever really begin to express. So she squeezes his hand and leans into him, doesn’t let go. Watches the uncertainty cloud his features, and feels her heart beat for him and him alone for a short, fleeting moment.
She says a prayer, too - to a god she’s having a hard time believing in right now that they’ll make it through this.
“Yeah,” he says finally and all of a sudden the tears start to fall and she sighs, letting her shoulders slump, letting herself move fully into him. “I can do that,” he continues, like he’s trying to convince himself and Lexie chuckles mirthlessly at nothing in particular.
Grief is irrational like that.
“Good,” she exhales. “Good, because right now I’m going to start crying and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop and I need you to just hold me and tell me it’s going to be okay even if it’s not.” She takes in a shaky breath that gets caught in her throat. “I just really, really need you to do that for me.”
The pressure of his arms around her is immediate and right and Lexie just sort of falls into him, lets his left hand pressing between her shoulder blades provide her the stability and structure she so desperately needs.
Outside thunder crackles and retreats, the steady tap tap tap of rain filtering against the window.
Lexie welcomes the familiarity.