(no subject)
Title: We Start Over Again (At The Edge Of The Ocean)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith, Lexie
Word Count: 1,059
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: #24 - Ocean for 100_situations
Summary: It's the first time she's been submerged under water since the ferry accident.
Call it a bonding experience.
“You can’t swim?” Lexie’s grasped a hold of something and she isn’t letting go anytime soon. “Is that it?”
“It’s not that I can’t swim. I can swim.” Meredith corrects, quickening her pace in some kind of subconscious effort to avoid this conversation. It isn’t going to work, she can tell.
“Then what?”
She can’t take much more of this line of questioning. “Can’t we just let this go?”
“Did you have a bad experience or something? Cause my friend Tori went scuba diving and almost had a run in with a shark and now she refuses to go anywhere near the ocean.” Lexie’s words come almost as fast as the sound of her shoes against the floor. A rush of air, words running into each other. Sometimes, oftentimes, Lexie reminds Meredith of herself.
It’s what forces Meredith to stop. Because she would push too and chances are Lexie really isn’t going to leave it alone until she gets her answer. It’s better to just get it over with. “I almost drowned. Last year. I fell into Elliot Bay and I died and they almost couldn’t bring me back. So I don’t swim.”
Meredith doesn’t wait for Lexie’s eyes to widen or her mouth to form a perfect ‘o’, she just keeps walking down the hall.
---
Weeks later Lexie’s knocking at the door sometime after ten, after an early shift.
“Do you own a swimsuit?”
Meredith’s stumbling over “what?” and noticing the way she can see the straps of what must be a red and white swimsuit top that ties around Lexie’s neck and it occurs to Meredith that Lexie means serious business.
Two minutes later she’s borrowed one from Izzie and Lexie’s gunning the car down the street.
---
“This is insane.” Meredith calls out, when they arrive at this sparkling body of water (she doesn’t know where she is - frankly everything is a bit blurry and she may have had a drink at Joe’s briefly before she went home, before she got here - not that she’s going to say anything), but Lexie is midway through slipping her pants off as she runs into the water like an overenthusiastic kid.
Lexie makes this little high pitched shriek when she gets there, something that sounds like ‘cold’, but then she turns her full attention on Meredith. “Come on, we didn’t drive all the way out here for nothing.”
And Meredith’s really just curious why Lexie wants to do this so bad. Why she wants to ingrain herself in Meredith’s life so much. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want the problems and complications that come from being a part of the life of Meredith Grey.
She follows her in anyways; she’s curious how far she’ll take this.
The water is freezing as it laps at her ankles and Meredith pauses right there, letting her body get used to the temperature change. “How can you stand this?”
Lexie smiles and shrugs, ducking under the water and coming back up in a matter of seconds, just enough to get her head wet and her hair hanging in stringy waves at her shoulders. “It’s refreshing. You know how surgery wakes you up? Same thing with less blood.”
With that encouragement Meredith lets herself wade in until the water hits her bare waist. It still chills but it’s tolerable now, and she’s trying so hard to keep her mind of the temperature that she lets her thoughts come out of her mouth instead of staying in her head. “Why are you so dead set on this?”
Surprise is probably the right way to describe the emotion on Lexie’s face. “What do you mean?”
She started this; she might as well just keep going. “Swimming at practically ten o’clock at night. That’s something you do in college. Drunk.”
“It’s fun, Meredith. We all need to have a little fun.” The smile, the child-like innocence on her face disappears all at once, and it makes Meredith regret saying anything just a little bit. “You know I care about you, okay, even though you don’t want me to. And that thing, about almost drowning? That’s one of the few things you told me about your life, of your own free will. So maybe I just wanted that to mean something.”
And Meredith is coming to understand, slowly but surely, that Lexie really is well-intentioned, that she just wants to know her, whether it’s good or bad, and it’s that thought that pulls her the rest of the way into the water, so that she’s bobbing next to Lexie. It’s the first time she’s been submerged since the ferry accident.
She lets herself sink a little, sucking in a breath as she ducks under, purposefully, just to prove she still can. She can make it back up on her own.
She can do this.
Even so she has that moment of panic, where she forgets how to move her arms and legs, and she opens her eyes to find Lexie underwater with her. Lexie’s hands slip around her arm, tugging her up just enough, and Meredith’s attempt to shrug her off gets her going again. She rises to the surface with a shaky breath.
“You okay?” Lexie asks, after a moment, her hand back on Meredith’s arm again, steadying.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was fine.” She tells her, firm both in her resolve and her denial.
“I know you were.” Lexie replies, which is surprising to say the least, because she expected her to say something along the lines of ‘didn’t look like it’. It isn’t what she needs to hear right now, which is probably why Lexie avoided it. “Just wanted to make sure you knew that.”
Maybe that’s what she’s been trying to do all along.
“Thanks.” Her words don’t sound as sincere as she means them to; she really is thankful, she’s just having a hard time with it. It’s swimming for god’s sake, she’s been doing it since she was a kid. But now it’s become something else.
The grin is back on Lexie’s face, like this is really all she wanted out of the night, and Meredith can let herself drift, no longer fearing what would happen if she didn’t force herself to remember to keep her head above water.
She’ll be fine. She is fine.