(no subject)
Title: When We Were Young We Knew Everything
Fandom: Lost/Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Kate, Alex
Word Count: 979
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: For cerberusk. For anyone who doesn't yet realize this - factors these two have in common: both from Iowa, both around the same age (if the interns were 27 in their first year, which I think they were supposed to be). Catch my drift?
Summary: Kate counts the tiles of the ceiling, the cracks in old paint on the walls, and listens to the clock tick each minute by. He lasts approximately three minutes before, "I don't get you."
She doesn’t hate him. She just hates people like him.
The brainless jocks, complete with complementary chip on their shoulder and God complex. What would the world be without them?
As someone removed from that crowd, Kate knew a lot of people who would like to find out.
Her senior year it was the wrestling team that became the most obnoxious. They were looking for scholarships, looking to Iowa State for their chance to get in, looking for their skills to make up for their bad grades. Plus their school’s football team was 0-9 at the moment, and the only people winning shit lately were the wrestlers. Now they had bragging rights.
Personally she thought they all must have fell on their heads a little too hard.
They didn’t bother her. The bulk of them figured out pretty quickly that she may get straight A’s more often than not, but she also hung around the boys, not the girls, and thus she hit back. A look in the hallway would result in her narrowed eyes, a warning that no, she was not afraid, and that was usually the end of that.
Until the day of senior portrait make up day. Her mom had ‘fallen down the stairs’ again, hurt her arm, and Kate had gone to the hospital to see her, to take her home, missing the original day.
There were five of them, sat in alphabetical order (if A, K, N, P, and W can be considered order), and told to wait while they set up. Which meant that she would be sitting next to Alex Karev, a particularly aggravating member of the wrestling team, for about the next half hour.
She wasn’t going to talk to him. But he was going to talk anyways, just a matter of time.
Kate counts the tiles of the ceiling, the cracks in old paint on the walls, and listens to the clock tick each minute by. He lasts approximately three minutes before, “I don’t get you.”
She doesn’t look at him, keeps her eyes level on the wall, because really she doesn’t care to. “I wasn’t aware you spent any time thinking about me.” She does it to put him on the defensive but it doesn’t seem to quite work so instead she switches to insults. “You shouldn’t think too hard. Brain cells are few and far between with your type.”
He leans forward, in such a way where his face ends up in her line of sight, even if she’d been trying to avoid it. He is very close. A little too much, if you ask her. “So now you think I’m stupid. I thought you of all people would hate labels.”
“I don’t like labels.” His breath against her face unnerves her and so she moves, pressing her back firmly against her chair. “And I never said you’re stupid.”
“Implied. Same thing. Don’t try to lie your way out of it.”
It’s not what she expected. Stick to your guns is not what she expected. She expected ‘damn right’. That made sense in her head. That made sense with him. She crosses her arms and looks him right in the eye as she says, “I don’t get you either.”
“So you think about me too?” Alex is smug about this. He’s usually smug. She’s starting to think it comes naturally to him.
“Not of any desire to but yes.” She watches him do that once-over thing that’s never going to work on her like he thinks he could somehow get laid if he plays his cards right, and so she decides to share exactly what she’s thinking, if only to put him off. “You’re a jock in anatomy class. The jocks take Earth Sciences and Geosystems. They don’t take anatomy. So I don’t think you’re on the wrestling team because you want to be a wrestler.”
There’s the slightest change in his face to tell her she is dead on but he covers it up almost as quickly as she herself would’ve. Almost. “And what else would I be doing?”
It’s a jump, a Hail Mary pass, whatever, but it’s an educated guess and she has nothing to lose. In seven months she will never have to see this man again. “For one thing you’re looking for a scholarship.”
He smirks, something like relief, before she’s even done. “Caught me.”
“For another,” he doesn’t look so relieved now, “I think you’re looking for revenge.”
Now he isn’t looking at her. Now he’s ignoring her. Quite the change of hands.
She sighs. “I missed senior portraits the first time because my mom fell down the stairs and hurt her arm.”
If he was going to start denying things then this would be about where he’d jump in. She watches his face, at the emotions playing behind his eyes, begging to be brought to the surface by a boy - no, a man, almost - who is far too concerned with appearance and facade to let that happen.
“I understand what it’s like to want to stop it, believe me I do.” His fist taps out some quiet staccato rhythm against the leg of his jeans. “Maybe that’s why you don’t get me. Because you think you’re the only one who’s got this problem. You think you’re the only one who’s putting on act.”
“Katherine Austen?” One of the men standing near the big backdrop, cameras pointed to a single stool in front of it, calls, searching out the female faces. She nods. “We’re ready for you.”
She rises, one hand brushing Alex’s knee, but she barely looks at him. This isn’t something you talk about. It’s something you say once and walk away from and that is precisely what she’s doing.
Walking away.
From him. From truth. From the little girl inside that screams for contact and somebody, anybody, who knows.
---
Title: Fake Power
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy/Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Characters/Pairings: Lexie, Xander
Word Count: 790
Rating: PG
Author's Note: Written for ladybeth.
Summary: There was a kick. A jolt. Her nerves on fire.
She doesn’t know why or how but she knows when, down to the minute on the clock.
May 20, 2003, 7:42am.
There was a kick. A jolt. Her nerves on fire.
That morning she breaks a glass. One minute she’s holding it steady on the counter as she pours orange juice and the next there’s glass embedded in her hand.
The stitches sting. The wound heals up, the pain disappears in a day and a half and Lexie, medical-student-soon-to-be-intern Lexie, understands that this shouldn't be possible. But it is and the fact that it’s cool is only slightly undermined by the fact that it’s a little scary.
A week later she’s walking home from class when she notices a car following her. She turns a corner and it turns with her and after the first minute or so, when she realizes that nobody in their right mind would be driving something like 5 miles an hour unless they were following her, she stops, disappearing into the thick bushes that edge someone’s yard, waiting until the car has driven ahead of her to come back out, this time behind the car. The element of surprise, she thinks, against her better judgment sidling up to the driver’s side and calling out, “Are you following me?”
The man behind the wheel startles, hitting the brake hard enough that the car would’ve squealed had he been going faster. She gets her first good look at him, this man with dark hair and...was that an eye patch? Should he be driving like that? After a moment, he asks, “What?”
“Are you following me?” Lexie repeats.
“Are you Alexandra Grey?” He asks, instead of answering, using her full name in such a manner that only confirmed that he was a complete stranger.
“That depends.” She’s never had someone following her, and all the after-school specials and stuff she learned in, like, kindergarten warn against this stuff. Don’t take the candy, and run away. But this guy? He kind of looks a little freaked out by her. Which kind of works to her advantage and keeps her from calling the police on his ass. “Why?”
“You haven’t noticed that you suddenly have super-strength or anything right?”
Yeah, clearly she needs more sleep. Because she is hallucinating this. And there is no way, hallucination or not, that she’s saying yes. What she is saying is, “Are you drunk?”
“Well that’s better than the answer I normally get.” Oddly he seems comforted by this. She can only stare at him. “Look I’m not crazy, or some stalker because I know you could probably take me out with one punch - even if it kind of looks that way - I’m just trying to help.”
Maybe - but she stops, her foot hovering the pavement, half a step forward, before she pulls it back. “What do you mean normally? You do this a lot?”
“Well you’re not exactly the only one. There’s like hundreds of you. Or maybe it was thousands.” She doesn’t know if she should be relieved or annoyed that he basically just called her anything but unique.
“Only what?”
“Slayer.”
Her eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
“Maybe you should sit down for this.” He reaches for the door handle on the passenger’s side.
“I don’t think so.”
“Alexandra, I’m not going to - “
“It’s Lexie.”
“Lexie - “
“Seriously, whatever you have to say, you have the wrong person. I’m just a girl. I’m nothing else. There’s nothing special about me. I’m a med student, I’m not a...slayer, or whatever it is you think I am.”
“They’re all just girls. But they’re all special.”
He won’t let up, and it almost makes her want to take that proffered seat. Almost. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because what have you got to lose?”
She gets in the car.
The man tells her about vampires and people called slayers and how there’s only supposed to be one but now there’s a bunch of them - hundreds or thousands or possibly hundred’s of thousand’s, he seems a little dyslexic with numbers - and she doesn’t believe him at first. But the story? It’s almost too detailed to be complete bullshit. There isn’t any part of it that’s believable and that might be what makes it believable.
But, turns out, they don’t really need her to do anything. She has the power, or whatever, but she doesn’t need to use it. They don’t really need her yet. And then he deposits her in front of her house with a hastily scribbled number on a small scrap of paper and drives off.
So, years later, when George is ranting about having all this power and not being able to use it, having fake power, boy does she ever understand.
Fandom: Lost/Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Kate, Alex
Word Count: 979
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: For cerberusk. For anyone who doesn't yet realize this - factors these two have in common: both from Iowa, both around the same age (if the interns were 27 in their first year, which I think they were supposed to be). Catch my drift?
Summary: Kate counts the tiles of the ceiling, the cracks in old paint on the walls, and listens to the clock tick each minute by. He lasts approximately three minutes before, "I don't get you."
She doesn’t hate him. She just hates people like him.
The brainless jocks, complete with complementary chip on their shoulder and God complex. What would the world be without them?
As someone removed from that crowd, Kate knew a lot of people who would like to find out.
Her senior year it was the wrestling team that became the most obnoxious. They were looking for scholarships, looking to Iowa State for their chance to get in, looking for their skills to make up for their bad grades. Plus their school’s football team was 0-9 at the moment, and the only people winning shit lately were the wrestlers. Now they had bragging rights.
Personally she thought they all must have fell on their heads a little too hard.
They didn’t bother her. The bulk of them figured out pretty quickly that she may get straight A’s more often than not, but she also hung around the boys, not the girls, and thus she hit back. A look in the hallway would result in her narrowed eyes, a warning that no, she was not afraid, and that was usually the end of that.
Until the day of senior portrait make up day. Her mom had ‘fallen down the stairs’ again, hurt her arm, and Kate had gone to the hospital to see her, to take her home, missing the original day.
There were five of them, sat in alphabetical order (if A, K, N, P, and W can be considered order), and told to wait while they set up. Which meant that she would be sitting next to Alex Karev, a particularly aggravating member of the wrestling team, for about the next half hour.
She wasn’t going to talk to him. But he was going to talk anyways, just a matter of time.
Kate counts the tiles of the ceiling, the cracks in old paint on the walls, and listens to the clock tick each minute by. He lasts approximately three minutes before, “I don’t get you.”
She doesn’t look at him, keeps her eyes level on the wall, because really she doesn’t care to. “I wasn’t aware you spent any time thinking about me.” She does it to put him on the defensive but it doesn’t seem to quite work so instead she switches to insults. “You shouldn’t think too hard. Brain cells are few and far between with your type.”
He leans forward, in such a way where his face ends up in her line of sight, even if she’d been trying to avoid it. He is very close. A little too much, if you ask her. “So now you think I’m stupid. I thought you of all people would hate labels.”
“I don’t like labels.” His breath against her face unnerves her and so she moves, pressing her back firmly against her chair. “And I never said you’re stupid.”
“Implied. Same thing. Don’t try to lie your way out of it.”
It’s not what she expected. Stick to your guns is not what she expected. She expected ‘damn right’. That made sense in her head. That made sense with him. She crosses her arms and looks him right in the eye as she says, “I don’t get you either.”
“So you think about me too?” Alex is smug about this. He’s usually smug. She’s starting to think it comes naturally to him.
“Not of any desire to but yes.” She watches him do that once-over thing that’s never going to work on her like he thinks he could somehow get laid if he plays his cards right, and so she decides to share exactly what she’s thinking, if only to put him off. “You’re a jock in anatomy class. The jocks take Earth Sciences and Geosystems. They don’t take anatomy. So I don’t think you’re on the wrestling team because you want to be a wrestler.”
There’s the slightest change in his face to tell her she is dead on but he covers it up almost as quickly as she herself would’ve. Almost. “And what else would I be doing?”
It’s a jump, a Hail Mary pass, whatever, but it’s an educated guess and she has nothing to lose. In seven months she will never have to see this man again. “For one thing you’re looking for a scholarship.”
He smirks, something like relief, before she’s even done. “Caught me.”
“For another,” he doesn’t look so relieved now, “I think you’re looking for revenge.”
Now he isn’t looking at her. Now he’s ignoring her. Quite the change of hands.
She sighs. “I missed senior portraits the first time because my mom fell down the stairs and hurt her arm.”
If he was going to start denying things then this would be about where he’d jump in. She watches his face, at the emotions playing behind his eyes, begging to be brought to the surface by a boy - no, a man, almost - who is far too concerned with appearance and facade to let that happen.
“I understand what it’s like to want to stop it, believe me I do.” His fist taps out some quiet staccato rhythm against the leg of his jeans. “Maybe that’s why you don’t get me. Because you think you’re the only one who’s got this problem. You think you’re the only one who’s putting on act.”
“Katherine Austen?” One of the men standing near the big backdrop, cameras pointed to a single stool in front of it, calls, searching out the female faces. She nods. “We’re ready for you.”
She rises, one hand brushing Alex’s knee, but she barely looks at him. This isn’t something you talk about. It’s something you say once and walk away from and that is precisely what she’s doing.
Walking away.
From him. From truth. From the little girl inside that screams for contact and somebody, anybody, who knows.
---
Title: Fake Power
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy/Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Characters/Pairings: Lexie, Xander
Word Count: 790
Rating: PG
Author's Note: Written for ladybeth.
Summary: There was a kick. A jolt. Her nerves on fire.
She doesn’t know why or how but she knows when, down to the minute on the clock.
May 20, 2003, 7:42am.
There was a kick. A jolt. Her nerves on fire.
That morning she breaks a glass. One minute she’s holding it steady on the counter as she pours orange juice and the next there’s glass embedded in her hand.
The stitches sting. The wound heals up, the pain disappears in a day and a half and Lexie, medical-student-soon-to-be-intern Lexie, understands that this shouldn't be possible. But it is and the fact that it’s cool is only slightly undermined by the fact that it’s a little scary.
A week later she’s walking home from class when she notices a car following her. She turns a corner and it turns with her and after the first minute or so, when she realizes that nobody in their right mind would be driving something like 5 miles an hour unless they were following her, she stops, disappearing into the thick bushes that edge someone’s yard, waiting until the car has driven ahead of her to come back out, this time behind the car. The element of surprise, she thinks, against her better judgment sidling up to the driver’s side and calling out, “Are you following me?”
The man behind the wheel startles, hitting the brake hard enough that the car would’ve squealed had he been going faster. She gets her first good look at him, this man with dark hair and...was that an eye patch? Should he be driving like that? After a moment, he asks, “What?”
“Are you following me?” Lexie repeats.
“Are you Alexandra Grey?” He asks, instead of answering, using her full name in such a manner that only confirmed that he was a complete stranger.
“That depends.” She’s never had someone following her, and all the after-school specials and stuff she learned in, like, kindergarten warn against this stuff. Don’t take the candy, and run away. But this guy? He kind of looks a little freaked out by her. Which kind of works to her advantage and keeps her from calling the police on his ass. “Why?”
“You haven’t noticed that you suddenly have super-strength or anything right?”
Yeah, clearly she needs more sleep. Because she is hallucinating this. And there is no way, hallucination or not, that she’s saying yes. What she is saying is, “Are you drunk?”
“Well that’s better than the answer I normally get.” Oddly he seems comforted by this. She can only stare at him. “Look I’m not crazy, or some stalker because I know you could probably take me out with one punch - even if it kind of looks that way - I’m just trying to help.”
Maybe - but she stops, her foot hovering the pavement, half a step forward, before she pulls it back. “What do you mean normally? You do this a lot?”
“Well you’re not exactly the only one. There’s like hundreds of you. Or maybe it was thousands.” She doesn’t know if she should be relieved or annoyed that he basically just called her anything but unique.
“Only what?”
“Slayer.”
Her eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
“Maybe you should sit down for this.” He reaches for the door handle on the passenger’s side.
“I don’t think so.”
“Alexandra, I’m not going to - “
“It’s Lexie.”
“Lexie - “
“Seriously, whatever you have to say, you have the wrong person. I’m just a girl. I’m nothing else. There’s nothing special about me. I’m a med student, I’m not a...slayer, or whatever it is you think I am.”
“They’re all just girls. But they’re all special.”
He won’t let up, and it almost makes her want to take that proffered seat. Almost. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because what have you got to lose?”
She gets in the car.
The man tells her about vampires and people called slayers and how there’s only supposed to be one but now there’s a bunch of them - hundreds or thousands or possibly hundred’s of thousand’s, he seems a little dyslexic with numbers - and she doesn’t believe him at first. But the story? It’s almost too detailed to be complete bullshit. There isn’t any part of it that’s believable and that might be what makes it believable.
But, turns out, they don’t really need her to do anything. She has the power, or whatever, but she doesn’t need to use it. They don’t really need her yet. And then he deposits her in front of her house with a hastily scribbled number on a small scrap of paper and drives off.
So, years later, when George is ranting about having all this power and not being able to use it, having fake power, boy does she ever understand.