Slow Down, Gandhi (Alex/Addison, PG-13)
Title: Slow Down, Gandhi
Pairing: Alex/Addison
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,595
Summary: Two people, who are having remarkably awful weeks, find solace in each other.
Notes: This was supposed to be a rewrite of candy coated water drops for the Throwback Party (yes, I am late in posting). I had grand delusions of gutting the entire thing and starting over with the same concept and completely new plotline, but alas, this did not happen. What it is, however, is a variation on a theme.
It’s almost dawn when Alex fumbles for the door handle. He’s been inside for the past sixty hours straight - though he thinks that somewhere in there he must’ve walked past a window - but still he can feel the sunrise pressing against the back of his neck. His hand slips and he trips over his own feet and nearly tumbles into the on call room. He considers, for a split second, the merits of allowing himself to faceplant and fall asleep in a pile on the floor; while his brain considers, his hand reaches out on instinct and catches the metal frame of the bunk bed. He stays upright.
A distinctly-female groan from the bottom bunk alerts him to the presence of someone else in the room. He should’ve known better than to assume that he’d be able to catch some sleep without sharing breathing space with another human being, but he had hoped. He mumbles an apology for waking her and turns around to find another room. He may not be able to close his eyes in a room by himself tonight, but he certainly has personal rules about sharing on call rooms with women when it really is just about sleep. The daylight often brings with it awkward glances and variations on can you hand me my bra it’s right by your head where I tossed it when the underwire dug into my ribcage in the middle of my nap.
“The human brain starts to hallucinate when it’s deprived of sleep for seventy-two hours.”
The factoid is so out of left field and so appropriate that he stops with his hand reached halfway to the doorknob. He also recognizes the voice and wants not much more than to continue on in his journey of finding a female-free space to crash for a few hours. Things are strange enough between them.
Instead of apologizing for interrupting her sleep or even silently slipping out of the room and leaving her to it, he turns around and squints, trying to form the lump on the bottom bunk into a Dr. Montgomery-shaped outline. It doesn’t work. “What?” He remembers reading something about that in med school, but it may have been on hour seventy-four of a failed experiment in sleep deprivation. Regardless, his brain is awake enough now to want to know what the hell hallucination has to do with…anything.
The sheets rustle and the bed springs creak as she rearranges her legs and punches the lumpy pillow. “Derek could explain it better, but you start seeing things after staying awake for three days.”
“I got that, Doc,” Alex says. He’s still confused.
“Go to sleep,” she says, surrendering to the clock and her own exhaustion clouding her thought process: she isn’t sure where she had intended to take the hallucination comment anyway. She points at the bunk above her. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but the first hints of daylight are beginning to lighten the outside world and illuminate her shadowy form on the bed.
He takes a step toward the bunk bed and steps onto the bottom rung of the ladder. “You don’t mind?”
“Don’t care,” she mumbles. Her voice is muffled through the pillow that she’s pulled over her head, preempting the sun. “You don’t snore, do you?” Clearer, this time, as she lifts the pillow to make sure he’s heard her.
Alex chuckles. “Not that I know of.”
“I’ll kick you if you do.”
He pokes his head over the side of the mattress. “Do you?”
Addison pulls the pillow away from her again, turns over and glares at him in the half-dark. “Do I look like someone who snores?”
“No,” he says, because even if her eyeliner is smudged and her hair is tangled and he’s pretty sure that her cheek is imprinted with the creases of the sheet, she really doesn’t.
It’s been a remarkably shitty week.
That’s actually an understatement, but Alex gave up trying to find enough appropriate swear words in the English language to accurately capture the true lousiness of the past seven days. So he’s sticking with remarkably shitty. Good enough.
He tried to explain the remarkable shittiness in an email to a med school buddy who’s up to his elbows in fake boobs and nose jobs down in Miami, but couldn’t come up with the right phrasing. No matter what words he used, he sounded like he was whining and he knew that the response would be something like get the fuck back to plastics, dude; this gynie squad crap is so not for you so he again leaves it as remarkably shitty and compliments the guy on the attached photo: apparently they like their boobs big and buoyant in Miami and the larger the implant, the more skill needed.
He waves off Meredith and Izzie who try their best to drag him across the street to Joe’s, but he really just wants to go to bed. Now.
After attempting basic math and failing to multiply three by seven and come up with twenty-one, he decides to sleep at the hospital. If he can’t recite multiplication tables he’s had memorized since the age of eight, there’s no way he’s going to successfully drive a car for twenty minutes, parallel park it in front of his apartment building, climb three flights of stairs and get a key into a stubborn lock. It’s eight o’clock on a Friday night and an hour into a shift change and there is no good reason why he shouldn’t be able to find an empty on call room that will stay that way for at least three hours.
He’s woken up three and a half hours later by someone slamming the door shut. A sharply-worded scold about common courtesy dies on his tongue when he hears neither an apology nor a quiet shuffle toward the bed but a body slump, defeated, against the closed door. He recognizes the click of her heels when she finally steps away from the door. “Bad day?” As far as stupid questions go, it might be on top. Alex can’t claim responsibility for the remarkably shitty label: the curse had rolled off of Addison’s tongue as easily as neonatal terminology Alex can’t even hope to spell.
“Sorry,” she apologizes, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
Alex shrugs. “It’s cool. Go to sleep.”
Addison nods in the dark. She has a perfectly good car that she can drive to her perfectly good hotel room ten minutes away, but she can’t quite face the bright lights of the hotel lobby or the prospects of ripping apart the bed that the housekeeping staff insists on remaking every day despite at least six Post-Its asking them not to. She toes off her heels and kicks them out of the way of the door, hangs up her jacket and climbs onto the top bunk. “Why are you still here?” She knows she told him to go home hours ago.
“Couldn’t do math.” He doesn’t explain further. “What are you still doing here?”
“What else am I going to do?”
Alex knows that the polite thing to do is to ignore the quiet desperation in her voice, so he does. “G’night,” he offers.
“Good night, Alex.”
He’s gone when she wakes up at four in the morning. She stretches her stiff neck and decides that it might be worth braving the impeccably-made bed. After making certain that she won’t topple over in her heels, she slips her jacket over her shoulders and rummages around in the pocket for her car keys. Addison frowns when her fingers touch a piece of paper; she has a purse for receipts and stray Post-Its, a purse that happens to be securely inside her locker. Finding her keys in the other pocket, she unfolds the piece of paper and squints at it in the dim light. In case you need it - A precedes a neatly-written apartment address with instructions to find the spare key behind the dead cactus.
She flips the receipt over and is mildly impressed that it was for $45 worth of Bombay Sapphire and club soda. She reads the part about the cactus again and smiles as she neatly folds the receipt and its address and puts it back in her pocket.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Addison admits five days later, standing outside Alex’s apartment door. She jingles his spare key in her left hand, taken from the promised dead cactus, and offers it to him. She chooses not to comment on the purple stegosaurus keychain.
Alex takes the key from her and drops it back in its place and steps aside to let her in. “Have you eaten dinner?” He waits for her to shrug off her coat and then hangs it up on the sole bare hook on the rack behind the door, next to a collection of raincoats and sweatshirts he’s been too lazy to put in their proper home.
“It’s ten o’clock at night,” she says, bending over to untie her boots. She lines them up perfectly next to his sneakers.
“Legit question,” he defends himself, “I saw you eat lunch at five.”
“I could’ve skipped lunch and that could’ve been dinner.”
As if on cue, her stomach growls. Alex smirks and nods in the direction of the kitchen. He points out the living room as they walk through it and indicates that the bathroom is somewhere to the left. “I’d offer you beer,” he says, stirring a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove, “but all I have are two ancient cans of PBR. I think there’s a bottle of vodka somewhere.”
“I’m good, thanks. You cook?” Addison finds herself rewriting an entire page of assumptions on Alex Karev based on this fact alone.
“Limited repertoire.” He tastes the sauce and ponders it for a moment. “Taste this,” he extends the spoon to Addison.
“Needs salt. That’s really good.”
Alex smiles and throws a pinch of salt into the sauce pot. “Thank you.”
“I can do omelets. Pancakes. French toast. Basically breakfast.”
Glaring at the pot full of water that seems intent on doing nothing but simmering, Alex reaches for the pasta. “I can make spaghetti. Toast. I can grill things.”
“I thought I saw a grill outside.” She stands up and begins opening cabinets in search of glasses for water. “Speaking of. What’s with the dead cactus?”
Alex points at the correct cabinet for her and drops the pasta into the now-boiling pot. “Turns out, cacti don’t like Seattle. Too wet.”
“Maybe you take it inside,” she suggests with a smile.
Alex returns her smile with one of his own. “Tripped over a shoe at half-past-too-damn-early. Landed right on the cactus.”
“One of my roommates,” Addison says, apropos of nothing as she stirs the last bits of now-cold spaghetti around on her plate in absent patterns, “had this theory. Anytime you were having a bad run of things and couldn’t shake it, all you had to do was curl up in bed with someone. Didn’t have to be sex, just sleep. The morning would be a little brighter.”
Alex leans back in his chair and stretches his legs out under the table, crossing his ankles. He swirls his glass and watches the almost-melted ice clink around. “Was she right?”
Addison shrugs. “I met Derek later that semester. It was kind of a moot point, then. Seemed to work for her, though.” She stops playing with her food and mimics Alex’s posture, clasping her fingers over her stomach. “Thanks for dinner.”
He nods in acknowledgement and ponders her words. “Let me know if I’m out of line, here,” he waits for her nod before continuing, “but it seems to me you’ve had a pretty bad run of things ever since you and Shepherd split for good. Especially since you kicked Sloan to the curb.”
“What are you saying,” she asks, a smirk taking over her face and cutting some of the harshness of the question, “that I need to spoon with someone for a night and my problems will all go away?”
Alex waves off her teasing, though it is exactly what he’s recommending. Maybe for both of them. “Just analyzing the facts. You’ve had a bad few months, haven’t shared a bed in a while, maybe you oughtta give your roommate’s theory a test.”
Her eyes narrow. “Are you offering?”
He shrugs. “If you’re asking.”
Addison frowns and returns to her spaghetti for a few moments. Seemingly finding an answer in the tomato sauce, she looks up and focuses on Alex across the table. “Yeah,” she says quietly, “I am.”
There’s a slight catch to her voice that makes Alex wonder if things are even worse than he knows. He won’t ask, though; it’s not his place to inquire about the inner workings of her mind. They’ve come a long way in the past year, but they aren’t quite there. Not yet. “I have an extra toothbrush,” he says with a smile. That they both have the morning off is a topic already covered, long before the garlic bread disappeared.
Alex sits on the edge of his bed, patiently waiting for Addison to arrange the pillows and comforter to her liking. She looks different without the makeup she’d scrubbed off with a bar of soap while he loaded up the dishwasher and made sure that the front door was locked. He doesn’t want to think that she looks more real, but she does, somehow. He turns out the light and slides underneath the covers.
Addison instantly curls into him, pressing her back against his chest. He slides one arm under her neck and drapes the other across her stomach, holding her close. She sighs, and Alex feels some of the tension leave her shoulders. Nuzzling the nape of her neck, Alex flutters a kiss across her skin. “Go to sleep, Addison,” he whispers as she laces her fingers through his.
She nods, barely, as if she needed that last bit of encouragement. After a final wiggle, getting her leg situated just right, she closes her eyes and allows sleep to wash over her.
Alex stays awake, watching the shadows of tree branches waving in the wind dance on the floor and walls. He thinks that one of them should stand guard, because it’s only been five minutes and he hasn’t even slept yet and he’s already starting to feel better and there’s no way in hell he’s letting the universe pull any tricks and screw this up for them. But he knows that he has no weight with the universe, no words he could scream and no punches he could throw that would make things go their way if the universe decided to act up in the middle of the night.
Sleep pulls at the edges of his conscious mind and his last thought before tugging Addison a little closer and joining her in slumber is at least we have an antidote, now.
Pairing: Alex/Addison
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,595
Summary: Two people, who are having remarkably awful weeks, find solace in each other.
Notes: This was supposed to be a rewrite of candy coated water drops for the Throwback Party (yes, I am late in posting). I had grand delusions of gutting the entire thing and starting over with the same concept and completely new plotline, but alas, this did not happen. What it is, however, is a variation on a theme.
It’s almost dawn when Alex fumbles for the door handle. He’s been inside for the past sixty hours straight - though he thinks that somewhere in there he must’ve walked past a window - but still he can feel the sunrise pressing against the back of his neck. His hand slips and he trips over his own feet and nearly tumbles into the on call room. He considers, for a split second, the merits of allowing himself to faceplant and fall asleep in a pile on the floor; while his brain considers, his hand reaches out on instinct and catches the metal frame of the bunk bed. He stays upright.
A distinctly-female groan from the bottom bunk alerts him to the presence of someone else in the room. He should’ve known better than to assume that he’d be able to catch some sleep without sharing breathing space with another human being, but he had hoped. He mumbles an apology for waking her and turns around to find another room. He may not be able to close his eyes in a room by himself tonight, but he certainly has personal rules about sharing on call rooms with women when it really is just about sleep. The daylight often brings with it awkward glances and variations on can you hand me my bra it’s right by your head where I tossed it when the underwire dug into my ribcage in the middle of my nap.
“The human brain starts to hallucinate when it’s deprived of sleep for seventy-two hours.”
The factoid is so out of left field and so appropriate that he stops with his hand reached halfway to the doorknob. He also recognizes the voice and wants not much more than to continue on in his journey of finding a female-free space to crash for a few hours. Things are strange enough between them.
Instead of apologizing for interrupting her sleep or even silently slipping out of the room and leaving her to it, he turns around and squints, trying to form the lump on the bottom bunk into a Dr. Montgomery-shaped outline. It doesn’t work. “What?” He remembers reading something about that in med school, but it may have been on hour seventy-four of a failed experiment in sleep deprivation. Regardless, his brain is awake enough now to want to know what the hell hallucination has to do with…anything.
The sheets rustle and the bed springs creak as she rearranges her legs and punches the lumpy pillow. “Derek could explain it better, but you start seeing things after staying awake for three days.”
“I got that, Doc,” Alex says. He’s still confused.
“Go to sleep,” she says, surrendering to the clock and her own exhaustion clouding her thought process: she isn’t sure where she had intended to take the hallucination comment anyway. She points at the bunk above her. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but the first hints of daylight are beginning to lighten the outside world and illuminate her shadowy form on the bed.
He takes a step toward the bunk bed and steps onto the bottom rung of the ladder. “You don’t mind?”
“Don’t care,” she mumbles. Her voice is muffled through the pillow that she’s pulled over her head, preempting the sun. “You don’t snore, do you?” Clearer, this time, as she lifts the pillow to make sure he’s heard her.
Alex chuckles. “Not that I know of.”
“I’ll kick you if you do.”
He pokes his head over the side of the mattress. “Do you?”
Addison pulls the pillow away from her again, turns over and glares at him in the half-dark. “Do I look like someone who snores?”
“No,” he says, because even if her eyeliner is smudged and her hair is tangled and he’s pretty sure that her cheek is imprinted with the creases of the sheet, she really doesn’t.
It’s been a remarkably shitty week.
That’s actually an understatement, but Alex gave up trying to find enough appropriate swear words in the English language to accurately capture the true lousiness of the past seven days. So he’s sticking with remarkably shitty. Good enough.
He tried to explain the remarkable shittiness in an email to a med school buddy who’s up to his elbows in fake boobs and nose jobs down in Miami, but couldn’t come up with the right phrasing. No matter what words he used, he sounded like he was whining and he knew that the response would be something like get the fuck back to plastics, dude; this gynie squad crap is so not for you so he again leaves it as remarkably shitty and compliments the guy on the attached photo: apparently they like their boobs big and buoyant in Miami and the larger the implant, the more skill needed.
He waves off Meredith and Izzie who try their best to drag him across the street to Joe’s, but he really just wants to go to bed. Now.
After attempting basic math and failing to multiply three by seven and come up with twenty-one, he decides to sleep at the hospital. If he can’t recite multiplication tables he’s had memorized since the age of eight, there’s no way he’s going to successfully drive a car for twenty minutes, parallel park it in front of his apartment building, climb three flights of stairs and get a key into a stubborn lock. It’s eight o’clock on a Friday night and an hour into a shift change and there is no good reason why he shouldn’t be able to find an empty on call room that will stay that way for at least three hours.
He’s woken up three and a half hours later by someone slamming the door shut. A sharply-worded scold about common courtesy dies on his tongue when he hears neither an apology nor a quiet shuffle toward the bed but a body slump, defeated, against the closed door. He recognizes the click of her heels when she finally steps away from the door. “Bad day?” As far as stupid questions go, it might be on top. Alex can’t claim responsibility for the remarkably shitty label: the curse had rolled off of Addison’s tongue as easily as neonatal terminology Alex can’t even hope to spell.
“Sorry,” she apologizes, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
Alex shrugs. “It’s cool. Go to sleep.”
Addison nods in the dark. She has a perfectly good car that she can drive to her perfectly good hotel room ten minutes away, but she can’t quite face the bright lights of the hotel lobby or the prospects of ripping apart the bed that the housekeeping staff insists on remaking every day despite at least six Post-Its asking them not to. She toes off her heels and kicks them out of the way of the door, hangs up her jacket and climbs onto the top bunk. “Why are you still here?” She knows she told him to go home hours ago.
“Couldn’t do math.” He doesn’t explain further. “What are you still doing here?”
“What else am I going to do?”
Alex knows that the polite thing to do is to ignore the quiet desperation in her voice, so he does. “G’night,” he offers.
“Good night, Alex.”
He’s gone when she wakes up at four in the morning. She stretches her stiff neck and decides that it might be worth braving the impeccably-made bed. After making certain that she won’t topple over in her heels, she slips her jacket over her shoulders and rummages around in the pocket for her car keys. Addison frowns when her fingers touch a piece of paper; she has a purse for receipts and stray Post-Its, a purse that happens to be securely inside her locker. Finding her keys in the other pocket, she unfolds the piece of paper and squints at it in the dim light. In case you need it - A precedes a neatly-written apartment address with instructions to find the spare key behind the dead cactus.
She flips the receipt over and is mildly impressed that it was for $45 worth of Bombay Sapphire and club soda. She reads the part about the cactus again and smiles as she neatly folds the receipt and its address and puts it back in her pocket.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Addison admits five days later, standing outside Alex’s apartment door. She jingles his spare key in her left hand, taken from the promised dead cactus, and offers it to him. She chooses not to comment on the purple stegosaurus keychain.
Alex takes the key from her and drops it back in its place and steps aside to let her in. “Have you eaten dinner?” He waits for her to shrug off her coat and then hangs it up on the sole bare hook on the rack behind the door, next to a collection of raincoats and sweatshirts he’s been too lazy to put in their proper home.
“It’s ten o’clock at night,” she says, bending over to untie her boots. She lines them up perfectly next to his sneakers.
“Legit question,” he defends himself, “I saw you eat lunch at five.”
“I could’ve skipped lunch and that could’ve been dinner.”
As if on cue, her stomach growls. Alex smirks and nods in the direction of the kitchen. He points out the living room as they walk through it and indicates that the bathroom is somewhere to the left. “I’d offer you beer,” he says, stirring a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove, “but all I have are two ancient cans of PBR. I think there’s a bottle of vodka somewhere.”
“I’m good, thanks. You cook?” Addison finds herself rewriting an entire page of assumptions on Alex Karev based on this fact alone.
“Limited repertoire.” He tastes the sauce and ponders it for a moment. “Taste this,” he extends the spoon to Addison.
“Needs salt. That’s really good.”
Alex smiles and throws a pinch of salt into the sauce pot. “Thank you.”
“I can do omelets. Pancakes. French toast. Basically breakfast.”
Glaring at the pot full of water that seems intent on doing nothing but simmering, Alex reaches for the pasta. “I can make spaghetti. Toast. I can grill things.”
“I thought I saw a grill outside.” She stands up and begins opening cabinets in search of glasses for water. “Speaking of. What’s with the dead cactus?”
Alex points at the correct cabinet for her and drops the pasta into the now-boiling pot. “Turns out, cacti don’t like Seattle. Too wet.”
“Maybe you take it inside,” she suggests with a smile.
Alex returns her smile with one of his own. “Tripped over a shoe at half-past-too-damn-early. Landed right on the cactus.”
“One of my roommates,” Addison says, apropos of nothing as she stirs the last bits of now-cold spaghetti around on her plate in absent patterns, “had this theory. Anytime you were having a bad run of things and couldn’t shake it, all you had to do was curl up in bed with someone. Didn’t have to be sex, just sleep. The morning would be a little brighter.”
Alex leans back in his chair and stretches his legs out under the table, crossing his ankles. He swirls his glass and watches the almost-melted ice clink around. “Was she right?”
Addison shrugs. “I met Derek later that semester. It was kind of a moot point, then. Seemed to work for her, though.” She stops playing with her food and mimics Alex’s posture, clasping her fingers over her stomach. “Thanks for dinner.”
He nods in acknowledgement and ponders her words. “Let me know if I’m out of line, here,” he waits for her nod before continuing, “but it seems to me you’ve had a pretty bad run of things ever since you and Shepherd split for good. Especially since you kicked Sloan to the curb.”
“What are you saying,” she asks, a smirk taking over her face and cutting some of the harshness of the question, “that I need to spoon with someone for a night and my problems will all go away?”
Alex waves off her teasing, though it is exactly what he’s recommending. Maybe for both of them. “Just analyzing the facts. You’ve had a bad few months, haven’t shared a bed in a while, maybe you oughtta give your roommate’s theory a test.”
Her eyes narrow. “Are you offering?”
He shrugs. “If you’re asking.”
Addison frowns and returns to her spaghetti for a few moments. Seemingly finding an answer in the tomato sauce, she looks up and focuses on Alex across the table. “Yeah,” she says quietly, “I am.”
There’s a slight catch to her voice that makes Alex wonder if things are even worse than he knows. He won’t ask, though; it’s not his place to inquire about the inner workings of her mind. They’ve come a long way in the past year, but they aren’t quite there. Not yet. “I have an extra toothbrush,” he says with a smile. That they both have the morning off is a topic already covered, long before the garlic bread disappeared.
Alex sits on the edge of his bed, patiently waiting for Addison to arrange the pillows and comforter to her liking. She looks different without the makeup she’d scrubbed off with a bar of soap while he loaded up the dishwasher and made sure that the front door was locked. He doesn’t want to think that she looks more real, but she does, somehow. He turns out the light and slides underneath the covers.
Addison instantly curls into him, pressing her back against his chest. He slides one arm under her neck and drapes the other across her stomach, holding her close. She sighs, and Alex feels some of the tension leave her shoulders. Nuzzling the nape of her neck, Alex flutters a kiss across her skin. “Go to sleep, Addison,” he whispers as she laces her fingers through his.
She nods, barely, as if she needed that last bit of encouragement. After a final wiggle, getting her leg situated just right, she closes her eyes and allows sleep to wash over her.
Alex stays awake, watching the shadows of tree branches waving in the wind dance on the floor and walls. He thinks that one of them should stand guard, because it’s only been five minutes and he hasn’t even slept yet and he’s already starting to feel better and there’s no way in hell he’s letting the universe pull any tricks and screw this up for them. But he knows that he has no weight with the universe, no words he could scream and no punches he could throw that would make things go their way if the universe decided to act up in the middle of the night.
Sleep pulls at the edges of his conscious mind and his last thought before tugging Addison a little closer and joining her in slumber is at least we have an antidote, now.