genograms and alcohol somehow let us know {ga - lexie; lexie/meredith, alex/lexie}
Title: Genograms And Alcohol Somehow Let Us Know
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie. Lexie/Meredith, with some destructive Alex/Lexie on the side.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,447
Summary: She thinks she read something somewhere about grief making people prone to odd behavior; the both of them must make for textbook cases. Excuses, excuses, and it's because of this that she lets the lines blur.
Lexie saw The Hotel New Hampshire in college. Specifically, Lexie saw the last half of it.
There had been a date, some well-to-do guy who was a year older than her, always buttoned the top button on his dress shirts, and held the door open like he expected to be thanked for it, some grand, dramatic gesture. Fifteen minutes into dinner and she’d already decided there would be no second date.
She didn’t stay for dessert. Instead she walked back to campus, got turned around only once in the dark, and let herself into the dorm that currently held two more people than it was designed for. There were two people sprawled in her roommate’s bed, the aforementioned roommate and her best friend Alyssa from two rooms down; a girl she didn’t know, but who nodded to her when she walked in like she did, was knees to chest on the floor.
The movie was playing on a crappy television towards the center of the room, casting bluish shadows on the walls, and the room smelled of her roommate’s favorite brand of lite beer.
Lexie studied a lot. In bed, with the lights low, textbook resting on her knees, and she did so that night with the occasional glance towards the television screen. It wasn’t until the chorus of gasps, of “oh god, gross” from Alyssa that she really paid attention and by then she was looking at Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster going at it and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.
She found out later they were playing siblings.
No other questions needed to be asked to qualify the reactions, and they were forever linked with the words ‘incest’ and ‘wrong’. One a descriptor of the other.
Trouble is, Lexie never had a brother.
Trouble is, when words like ‘half’ and ‘sister’ get thrown into the mix, the lines get a little blurrier, the associations weaken and break away altogether.
-
Meredith watches her like a hawk over breakfast.
She plays with her spoon more than she eats, shifts cereal from one side of the bowl to the other, and her fingers stain with newsprint from the paper that she’s only skimming. Meredith fumbles the coffeepot for half a second and Lexie notices.
It’s like that now that it’s just the two of them. It’s like that now that Meredith found her in tears on the floor on two separate occasions - once in the hospital, once in the hallway. Alex sleeps sound with the aid of vicodin and Derek hasn’t been released thanks to complications Meredith doesn’t want to talk about, so it’s just them and this awkward air in the mornings.
The consensus seems to be that she’s gone the way Izzie did once, except without bathroom floors and excessive baking and whatever other bits and pieces she’s heard about a time before her. The consensus seems to be that Alex either draws these kind of women or he creates them.
Lexie wishes people would stop assuming that this is all because her boyfriend got shot.
It’s so much more than just that.
Her tongue darts out, absentmindedly circles the edge of the spoon, half moon shape, and when she glances up Meredith looks torn between very concerned and very…intrigued. She closes her lips and Meredith, startled, looks down.
Lexie’s not the only one who’s a little off lately.
She thinks she read something somewhere about grief making people prone to odd behavior; the both of them must make for textbook cases.
-
The most outlandish thing Lexie ever did sexually also occurred in college.
That also involved Alyssa from down the hall, a bottle of vodka, and a chaste close-mouthed kiss that she had both initiated and ended. It wasn’t that she wasn’t into it, it was that she hadn’t realized what she was doing until the other girl’s mouth started moving against hers, her lips parting. That’s when shit got real and Lexie scrambled to the far end of the bed.
She couldn’t look her roommate in the eye for a week.
Alyssa always seemed to find something funny about that.
(If they were playing truth or dare, she wouldn’t tell people about this. She’d blush and tell the worst kept secret in the hospital, that it was her and that thing she did with her hips that broke Mark’s penis.)
-
Meredith’s mouth doesn’t taste like tequila.
That’s where she knows they have a problem.
She’s pretty sure every ‘making out with her sister’ scenario that’s ever crossed her mind (so, one) has involved alcohol of some kind. And Meredith being the one who starts it.
That part is true.
They’re like six inches apart on the couch and Lexie’s got her lip caught between her teeth, worrying it, while Meredith does the whole “are you okay?” big sister type conversation that Lexie had been determined for them to have up until a few months ago. Which is about when she realized that that dynamic and their dynamic were not exactly conducive to one another.
Some element was off. There was love there, now, and there was concern and protectiveness, but that was a part of all sorts of relationships, not just familial ones. There was something about them that went unnamed, and Lexie chalked it all up to the fact that they hadn’t grown up together and the initial reluctance and rejection that marked their first few months of knowing each other.
Meredith could play the big sister and Lexie could play the younger, impressionable one but the truth of the matter was that it always felt a little empty.
Her sister leans in, closes the space between them, and Lexie feels a variety of things. None of them can be called empty. She feels Meredith’s hand on her cheek, the way Meredith’s bent knee fits between Lexie’s thighs, sliding closer, and the way her tongue slips past Lexie’s lips.
Meredith’s mouth doesn’t taste like tequila. It tastes like spearmint gum, with the faintest hint of this afternoon’s coffee.
It tastes startlingly similar to how she imagines her own might.
-
The night before, there had been a hand on her shoulder and her name on repeat.
She’d learned to freeze when startled, blankets clenched in her fists, reminding her of where she was. There had been the jumping around period, where she’d be on her feet or batting at anything that touched her; it was pretty obvious why that wouldn’t work so well once Alex got home and it stopped being just her in the bed.
Still, a simple touch at the wrong moment can startle the breath right out of her.
“You talk in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
It was a nightmare - they both knew it, they both knew why, and so it didn’t bear discussing. Just as he hadn’t returned to normal since the shooting, his temper in full force and sarcasm flooding his voice above all else, neither had she. And maybe they wouldn’t.
She rolled onto the side facing him, let her hand fall along his bicep, where it would’ve fallen on his chest before, wary of white bandages and still healing wounds. When she shifted the rest of her body closer, curled her legs up, his hand fell low on the inside of her thigh. Part apology, part plea; both silent.
“You’re like Meredith,” he offered, after a too long stretch of silence.
It came out on a breathy laugh, surprise and confusion merged. “What?”
“She talks in her sleep.”
Lexie didn’t ask how he knew that. There was a time where beds in this house were communal and she preferred to think it had more to do with that than any other kind of intimacy on their part.
It still kept her awake.
-
Fourth of July is a fucking joke.
She can hear the fireworks from the parking lot once it gets dark enough and the televisions in the waiting room are on low volume showing much of the same but in Boston. If it keeps up, she has a feeling Dr. Wyatt will have a few new patients within the week; the loudest ones sound like gunshots and she knows it’s not only her.
It’s easy when the memory is so fresh.
It’s been almost two months.
She calls it a night in the on-call room around eleven. Alex doesn’t call her and, four floors up with no windows and sturdy walls, she can’t hear a thing other than faint possibility of her pager and, hopefully, the alarm on her cell phone, set for five-thirty. There is no chatter in the hallway beyond the door.
The door cracks open at one.
Arms and worn cotton fabric greet her, the body lying next to her on the small bed curving around hers, pulling her close. Lexie sighs, recognizes the scent and the gray material that covers the other woman’s thin body (Dartmouth appears on the back of closed eyelids, if nowhere else in her line of sight, and the hole on the cuff of the left sleeve is right where she remembers it).
The kiss from before has gone so far unmentioned. That doesn’t appear likely to change tonight and Lexie can feel the world blur pleasantly at the edges, with warm breath on the back of her neck.
“Sleep,” Meredith says, in what Lexie has decided is her sisterly tone - she’s heard it used enough, and not only towards her - and maybe that’s all this is.
Maybe it’s better that way.
She does what she’s told.
-
She supposes there’s bound to be irony here.
Meredith the healer with her hands on Lexie’s shaking shoulders, on her knees in the hallway sandwiched somewhere between the bathroom and Alex’s room. Notes of the same in the on-call room. Add to that the ease with which she plays the doting wife to Derek and still manages to work eight or ten hour shifts with her sanity intact, in a place that violently turned on them all one spring morning, and she becomes what they should all aim to be.
It’s some cruel twist that messes with Lexie’s equilibrium until she learns to squint.
There’s these little things. Like how Alex refuses to do anything but withdraw, hide behind wit and sarcasm and bitterness, the layer upon layer of defense mechanisms that he’s built up once more ever present, unless Meredith’s involved. He tones it down when she’s there; he lets himself be a little more human.
Above anyone else, Meredith’s the only one he’ll break down the barriers for; it’s a death sentence for his and Lexie’s relationship, but she figures that was a foregone conclusion anyways and they’re all just clinging to the debris until even that doesn’t work anymore.
He won’t tell her why. Lexie’s learned to call him on things, that he respects the efforts of those who stand up to him and usually rewards them. He won’t budge on this.
It lets her know that Derek getting shot is only part of the equation here.
“What don’t I know?”
Alex ignores her from the far side of the couch, pushes the ‘channel up’ button of the remote three times before it works; the batteries are dying but the news springs eternal. The word ‘shooting’ crops up and he’s pushing it again.
“She’s my sister, Alex. I deserve to know.”
He flicks his eyes towards her, holds for a count of five, then returns them to the screen. His grip on the remote is tight and there’s a pained feel to his expression. You don’t deserve anything of the sort is what he isn’t saying and Lexie curls her body further from his.
Alex would choose Meredith over her. In a heartbeat.
It’s okay, though, it really is.
Lexie would choose her too, over him.
(This is the moment she knows it’s over.
Not in three months when she’s yelling through tears, and he’s hitting all her wrong nerves and sore spots like it’s a fucking sport for him, in the hospital of all places - her humiliation for all to hear through the heavy wooden door and thin walls. His hands will be shaking and so will her voice.
The night before he will have run himself ragged, miles on pavement, and the sounds of him retching in the bathroom will have woken her up -- are you trying to finish the job screamed in a voice that both sounds and feels alien, and Meredith pulls her out of the bathroom while he rests his head on the cold porcelain toilet seat.
But that won’t be their end. That will be the final explosion, the culmination of all that failed potential and all the feelings that have been harbored since they both started to overstay their welcome.
It’s this.
This is their swan song.)
-
There’s some giant meeting with mandatory attendance.
Richard Webber stands on a stage and addresses the entire room with the kind of confidence and warm reassurance that should calm her frayed nerves.
She keeps thinking that the room is too dark. Too expansive. She’s in the middle of the seventh row, no clear exit.
Her nails tap against the arm rest, sandwiched between Alex and Meredith, and she catches every fifth word, the general sentiment fairly routine by now. Cristina provides running commentary directly to Meredith’s right, cutting and probably louder than she knows, but not so loud that it’s reaching the ears of anyone who’d find offense. Alex throws in a comment every now and then and when he glances at her, at her hand and the frantic movement of her fingers, she notes he looks tired.
“Lexie,” Meredith says it in a harsh whisper, nodding her head in the general direction of that armrest.
“Oh, is that what that noise is?” Cristina leans forward, presumably to get a look. “Seriously.”
She balls her hand into a tight fist, nails digging into her palm, and her fingers start to feel like they’re cramping, nervous energy circulating throughout her. Lexie does things with her hands when she’s nervous or upset or pretty much every negative emotion one could think of. She rips things up or she taps excessively or she cleans and organizes things. Her hands have to busy.
They don’t stay in her lap very long. The tapping resumes.
Meredith sighs next to her, after a minute, and then covers Lexie’s hand with hers, twining their fingers together so she has no other choice but to stop. Lexie exhales a shaky breath and her sister doesn’t look at her.
She squeezes her hand. And Lexie squeezes back.
Because she has to do something and this can be her something.
-
This time it isn’t The Hotel New Hampshire.
This time it’s some indie film, French subtitles interspersed, and a woman is curled, nearly naked, around her brother.
“Dude, what the fuck?”
Meredith swirls tequila in her glass, casual drinking instead of the old drowning of the sorrows, and, you know, Lexie just walked in the door. Alex is slumped on the couch next to her sister, and Cristina has claimed the chair.
“Wait, I think there’s a threesome in this one.”
“Wasn’t she a Bond girl?”
“I swear I was just going to turn on the news.”
Once again, Lexie finds herself wondering why it’s always the brother and sister. If sister and sister or brother and brother is too daring, crossing too many lines, or people just don’t think of it.
They don’t see it coming.
She eyes Meredith, laughing at something she missed, and goes upstairs.
-
“You need sleep,” she says, that tone again (it should set off warning bells, by now), pushes Lexie’s hair behind her ear, and her hand stays there, curls around the back of her neck.
She says “you need sleep” and then she leans in to kiss her.
It isn’t an action that’s generally conducive to sleep.
Do as I do, not as I say, in some screwed up universe where that’s actually the saying.
Lexie still lets herself fall back against the couch when Meredith moves to straddle her hips.
-
Someone suggests they take this somewhere more private.
Someone remembers to lock the door when they do.
It cements the fact that this is fucked up, and not just because of things like blood and genetic blueprints in the form of a double helix, but because of things like the men down the hall, asleep in their respective beds.
This is not just about them.
This is not just about them as Meredith presses her into the bed, the bed that used to belong to Izzie and used to contain remnants of her life before Meredith boxed it all up and put it in the attic less than a month after the shooting. Forget the past, forget the future; now is more important.
Meredith moves over top of her and Lexie bucks her hips against the other woman’s, hands on her waist and slipping down to her jean-clad thighs. When she presses her fingers between Meredith’s thighs, the lips against her neck turn to teeth.
She doesn’t leave a mark.
She doesn’t leave a mark and Lexie twists to cover her mouth with her own, Meredith’s moan getting lost where they’re joined.
-
Alex is willfully ignorant and Derek believes far too much in a woman that only exists a good three-fourths of the time.
They slip through the cracks.
So Derek works late hours to compensate for his absence and Alex runs progressively longer distances to compensate for vulnerabilities and Lexie licks a line down Meredith’s throat and tastes salt (she thinks tequila), and who knows what they’re compensating for.
(Missing limbs on a family tree and, maybe, if they’d grown up together, this would be different. Maybe they missed their chance at that kind of a relationship, and now all they can manage at is this bastardization.)
She still looks over her shoulder when she’s in a hallway alone, in that hospital. She still flinches when the elevator doors open, expecting the improbable (but not impossible).
“I’m thinking of transferring,” she muses, skinny legs drawn to her chest and the sheets wrapped around her form.
Meredith catches her eye for only a second, breaks her gaze as she pulls her sweater over her head.
It’s December already, early, and this has gotten harder and harder to explain away under the heading of grief and loss.
They slip through the cracks and the falling snow covers them, packed down and suffocating.
-
She looks into a lot of places. Bookmarks websites, sifts through flyers, makes lists in the form of pros vs. cons.
Meredith fits somewhere in the middle, better suited for a Venn diagram.
Alex and her blow up at each other, just as promised. They stay in rooms that face each other and, in the mornings, they often find themselves on different sides of the hallway, unwittingly engaging in the glare-off from hell.
He looks at her like he can’t quite comprehend that now, of all times, is when she leaves him.
She looks at him like she can’t quite comprehend how he didn’t notice that they both left a long time ago.
It’ll wear off, she knows; he’ll either become more distant or return to status quo.
But this was never just about him.
-
She takes a five-day sabbatical, packs her bags, and drives.
Ends up in Oregon. Never California; it’s too trite, too cliché.
When she comes back, Alex has moved back into the trailer until he finds a new place to live, and Meredith is on the front porch looking more torn open and raw than Lexie’s seen her in recent memory.
Meredith hugs her, somehow both crushing and a comfort, and that’s new too - both the need for it, and the sensation that Lexie might be the one holding her up this time.
It’s a one-eighty from months ago.
Equilibrium returns, bit by bit.
-
The lines blur.
They blur at night when Meredith’s fingers curl inside of her.
They blur in the harsh light of day when she finds herself saying my sister and feels Meredith pat her shoulder at the lunch table as she walks off, watches her kiss Derek on the cheek, the lips, in the mornings and outside of nurses’ stations.
The lines blur and Lexie stays despite it all, because it turns out she’s just as afraid of what will happen if she leaves as she is of what will happen if she stays.
This is the lesser effort.
-
fin.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie. Lexie/Meredith, with some destructive Alex/Lexie on the side.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,447
Summary: She thinks she read something somewhere about grief making people prone to odd behavior; the both of them must make for textbook cases. Excuses, excuses, and it's because of this that she lets the lines blur.
Lexie saw The Hotel New Hampshire in college. Specifically, Lexie saw the last half of it.
There had been a date, some well-to-do guy who was a year older than her, always buttoned the top button on his dress shirts, and held the door open like he expected to be thanked for it, some grand, dramatic gesture. Fifteen minutes into dinner and she’d already decided there would be no second date.
She didn’t stay for dessert. Instead she walked back to campus, got turned around only once in the dark, and let herself into the dorm that currently held two more people than it was designed for. There were two people sprawled in her roommate’s bed, the aforementioned roommate and her best friend Alyssa from two rooms down; a girl she didn’t know, but who nodded to her when she walked in like she did, was knees to chest on the floor.
The movie was playing on a crappy television towards the center of the room, casting bluish shadows on the walls, and the room smelled of her roommate’s favorite brand of lite beer.
Lexie studied a lot. In bed, with the lights low, textbook resting on her knees, and she did so that night with the occasional glance towards the television screen. It wasn’t until the chorus of gasps, of “oh god, gross” from Alyssa that she really paid attention and by then she was looking at Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster going at it and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.
She found out later they were playing siblings.
No other questions needed to be asked to qualify the reactions, and they were forever linked with the words ‘incest’ and ‘wrong’. One a descriptor of the other.
Trouble is, Lexie never had a brother.
Trouble is, when words like ‘half’ and ‘sister’ get thrown into the mix, the lines get a little blurrier, the associations weaken and break away altogether.
-
Meredith watches her like a hawk over breakfast.
She plays with her spoon more than she eats, shifts cereal from one side of the bowl to the other, and her fingers stain with newsprint from the paper that she’s only skimming. Meredith fumbles the coffeepot for half a second and Lexie notices.
It’s like that now that it’s just the two of them. It’s like that now that Meredith found her in tears on the floor on two separate occasions - once in the hospital, once in the hallway. Alex sleeps sound with the aid of vicodin and Derek hasn’t been released thanks to complications Meredith doesn’t want to talk about, so it’s just them and this awkward air in the mornings.
The consensus seems to be that she’s gone the way Izzie did once, except without bathroom floors and excessive baking and whatever other bits and pieces she’s heard about a time before her. The consensus seems to be that Alex either draws these kind of women or he creates them.
Lexie wishes people would stop assuming that this is all because her boyfriend got shot.
It’s so much more than just that.
Her tongue darts out, absentmindedly circles the edge of the spoon, half moon shape, and when she glances up Meredith looks torn between very concerned and very…intrigued. She closes her lips and Meredith, startled, looks down.
Lexie’s not the only one who’s a little off lately.
She thinks she read something somewhere about grief making people prone to odd behavior; the both of them must make for textbook cases.
-
The most outlandish thing Lexie ever did sexually also occurred in college.
That also involved Alyssa from down the hall, a bottle of vodka, and a chaste close-mouthed kiss that she had both initiated and ended. It wasn’t that she wasn’t into it, it was that she hadn’t realized what she was doing until the other girl’s mouth started moving against hers, her lips parting. That’s when shit got real and Lexie scrambled to the far end of the bed.
She couldn’t look her roommate in the eye for a week.
Alyssa always seemed to find something funny about that.
(If they were playing truth or dare, she wouldn’t tell people about this. She’d blush and tell the worst kept secret in the hospital, that it was her and that thing she did with her hips that broke Mark’s penis.)
-
Meredith’s mouth doesn’t taste like tequila.
That’s where she knows they have a problem.
She’s pretty sure every ‘making out with her sister’ scenario that’s ever crossed her mind (so, one) has involved alcohol of some kind. And Meredith being the one who starts it.
That part is true.
They’re like six inches apart on the couch and Lexie’s got her lip caught between her teeth, worrying it, while Meredith does the whole “are you okay?” big sister type conversation that Lexie had been determined for them to have up until a few months ago. Which is about when she realized that that dynamic and their dynamic were not exactly conducive to one another.
Some element was off. There was love there, now, and there was concern and protectiveness, but that was a part of all sorts of relationships, not just familial ones. There was something about them that went unnamed, and Lexie chalked it all up to the fact that they hadn’t grown up together and the initial reluctance and rejection that marked their first few months of knowing each other.
Meredith could play the big sister and Lexie could play the younger, impressionable one but the truth of the matter was that it always felt a little empty.
Her sister leans in, closes the space between them, and Lexie feels a variety of things. None of them can be called empty. She feels Meredith’s hand on her cheek, the way Meredith’s bent knee fits between Lexie’s thighs, sliding closer, and the way her tongue slips past Lexie’s lips.
Meredith’s mouth doesn’t taste like tequila. It tastes like spearmint gum, with the faintest hint of this afternoon’s coffee.
It tastes startlingly similar to how she imagines her own might.
-
The night before, there had been a hand on her shoulder and her name on repeat.
She’d learned to freeze when startled, blankets clenched in her fists, reminding her of where she was. There had been the jumping around period, where she’d be on her feet or batting at anything that touched her; it was pretty obvious why that wouldn’t work so well once Alex got home and it stopped being just her in the bed.
Still, a simple touch at the wrong moment can startle the breath right out of her.
“You talk in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
It was a nightmare - they both knew it, they both knew why, and so it didn’t bear discussing. Just as he hadn’t returned to normal since the shooting, his temper in full force and sarcasm flooding his voice above all else, neither had she. And maybe they wouldn’t.
She rolled onto the side facing him, let her hand fall along his bicep, where it would’ve fallen on his chest before, wary of white bandages and still healing wounds. When she shifted the rest of her body closer, curled her legs up, his hand fell low on the inside of her thigh. Part apology, part plea; both silent.
“You’re like Meredith,” he offered, after a too long stretch of silence.
It came out on a breathy laugh, surprise and confusion merged. “What?”
“She talks in her sleep.”
Lexie didn’t ask how he knew that. There was a time where beds in this house were communal and she preferred to think it had more to do with that than any other kind of intimacy on their part.
It still kept her awake.
-
Fourth of July is a fucking joke.
She can hear the fireworks from the parking lot once it gets dark enough and the televisions in the waiting room are on low volume showing much of the same but in Boston. If it keeps up, she has a feeling Dr. Wyatt will have a few new patients within the week; the loudest ones sound like gunshots and she knows it’s not only her.
It’s easy when the memory is so fresh.
It’s been almost two months.
She calls it a night in the on-call room around eleven. Alex doesn’t call her and, four floors up with no windows and sturdy walls, she can’t hear a thing other than faint possibility of her pager and, hopefully, the alarm on her cell phone, set for five-thirty. There is no chatter in the hallway beyond the door.
The door cracks open at one.
Arms and worn cotton fabric greet her, the body lying next to her on the small bed curving around hers, pulling her close. Lexie sighs, recognizes the scent and the gray material that covers the other woman’s thin body (Dartmouth appears on the back of closed eyelids, if nowhere else in her line of sight, and the hole on the cuff of the left sleeve is right where she remembers it).
The kiss from before has gone so far unmentioned. That doesn’t appear likely to change tonight and Lexie can feel the world blur pleasantly at the edges, with warm breath on the back of her neck.
“Sleep,” Meredith says, in what Lexie has decided is her sisterly tone - she’s heard it used enough, and not only towards her - and maybe that’s all this is.
Maybe it’s better that way.
She does what she’s told.
-
She supposes there’s bound to be irony here.
Meredith the healer with her hands on Lexie’s shaking shoulders, on her knees in the hallway sandwiched somewhere between the bathroom and Alex’s room. Notes of the same in the on-call room. Add to that the ease with which she plays the doting wife to Derek and still manages to work eight or ten hour shifts with her sanity intact, in a place that violently turned on them all one spring morning, and she becomes what they should all aim to be.
It’s some cruel twist that messes with Lexie’s equilibrium until she learns to squint.
There’s these little things. Like how Alex refuses to do anything but withdraw, hide behind wit and sarcasm and bitterness, the layer upon layer of defense mechanisms that he’s built up once more ever present, unless Meredith’s involved. He tones it down when she’s there; he lets himself be a little more human.
Above anyone else, Meredith’s the only one he’ll break down the barriers for; it’s a death sentence for his and Lexie’s relationship, but she figures that was a foregone conclusion anyways and they’re all just clinging to the debris until even that doesn’t work anymore.
He won’t tell her why. Lexie’s learned to call him on things, that he respects the efforts of those who stand up to him and usually rewards them. He won’t budge on this.
It lets her know that Derek getting shot is only part of the equation here.
“What don’t I know?”
Alex ignores her from the far side of the couch, pushes the ‘channel up’ button of the remote three times before it works; the batteries are dying but the news springs eternal. The word ‘shooting’ crops up and he’s pushing it again.
“She’s my sister, Alex. I deserve to know.”
He flicks his eyes towards her, holds for a count of five, then returns them to the screen. His grip on the remote is tight and there’s a pained feel to his expression. You don’t deserve anything of the sort is what he isn’t saying and Lexie curls her body further from his.
Alex would choose Meredith over her. In a heartbeat.
It’s okay, though, it really is.
Lexie would choose her too, over him.
(This is the moment she knows it’s over.
Not in three months when she’s yelling through tears, and he’s hitting all her wrong nerves and sore spots like it’s a fucking sport for him, in the hospital of all places - her humiliation for all to hear through the heavy wooden door and thin walls. His hands will be shaking and so will her voice.
The night before he will have run himself ragged, miles on pavement, and the sounds of him retching in the bathroom will have woken her up -- are you trying to finish the job screamed in a voice that both sounds and feels alien, and Meredith pulls her out of the bathroom while he rests his head on the cold porcelain toilet seat.
But that won’t be their end. That will be the final explosion, the culmination of all that failed potential and all the feelings that have been harbored since they both started to overstay their welcome.
It’s this.
This is their swan song.)
-
There’s some giant meeting with mandatory attendance.
Richard Webber stands on a stage and addresses the entire room with the kind of confidence and warm reassurance that should calm her frayed nerves.
She keeps thinking that the room is too dark. Too expansive. She’s in the middle of the seventh row, no clear exit.
Her nails tap against the arm rest, sandwiched between Alex and Meredith, and she catches every fifth word, the general sentiment fairly routine by now. Cristina provides running commentary directly to Meredith’s right, cutting and probably louder than she knows, but not so loud that it’s reaching the ears of anyone who’d find offense. Alex throws in a comment every now and then and when he glances at her, at her hand and the frantic movement of her fingers, she notes he looks tired.
“Lexie,” Meredith says it in a harsh whisper, nodding her head in the general direction of that armrest.
“Oh, is that what that noise is?” Cristina leans forward, presumably to get a look. “Seriously.”
She balls her hand into a tight fist, nails digging into her palm, and her fingers start to feel like they’re cramping, nervous energy circulating throughout her. Lexie does things with her hands when she’s nervous or upset or pretty much every negative emotion one could think of. She rips things up or she taps excessively or she cleans and organizes things. Her hands have to busy.
They don’t stay in her lap very long. The tapping resumes.
Meredith sighs next to her, after a minute, and then covers Lexie’s hand with hers, twining their fingers together so she has no other choice but to stop. Lexie exhales a shaky breath and her sister doesn’t look at her.
She squeezes her hand. And Lexie squeezes back.
Because she has to do something and this can be her something.
-
This time it isn’t The Hotel New Hampshire.
This time it’s some indie film, French subtitles interspersed, and a woman is curled, nearly naked, around her brother.
“Dude, what the fuck?”
Meredith swirls tequila in her glass, casual drinking instead of the old drowning of the sorrows, and, you know, Lexie just walked in the door. Alex is slumped on the couch next to her sister, and Cristina has claimed the chair.
“Wait, I think there’s a threesome in this one.”
“Wasn’t she a Bond girl?”
“I swear I was just going to turn on the news.”
Once again, Lexie finds herself wondering why it’s always the brother and sister. If sister and sister or brother and brother is too daring, crossing too many lines, or people just don’t think of it.
They don’t see it coming.
She eyes Meredith, laughing at something she missed, and goes upstairs.
-
“You need sleep,” she says, that tone again (it should set off warning bells, by now), pushes Lexie’s hair behind her ear, and her hand stays there, curls around the back of her neck.
She says “you need sleep” and then she leans in to kiss her.
It isn’t an action that’s generally conducive to sleep.
Do as I do, not as I say, in some screwed up universe where that’s actually the saying.
Lexie still lets herself fall back against the couch when Meredith moves to straddle her hips.
-
Someone suggests they take this somewhere more private.
Someone remembers to lock the door when they do.
It cements the fact that this is fucked up, and not just because of things like blood and genetic blueprints in the form of a double helix, but because of things like the men down the hall, asleep in their respective beds.
This is not just about them.
This is not just about them as Meredith presses her into the bed, the bed that used to belong to Izzie and used to contain remnants of her life before Meredith boxed it all up and put it in the attic less than a month after the shooting. Forget the past, forget the future; now is more important.
Meredith moves over top of her and Lexie bucks her hips against the other woman’s, hands on her waist and slipping down to her jean-clad thighs. When she presses her fingers between Meredith’s thighs, the lips against her neck turn to teeth.
She doesn’t leave a mark.
She doesn’t leave a mark and Lexie twists to cover her mouth with her own, Meredith’s moan getting lost where they’re joined.
-
Alex is willfully ignorant and Derek believes far too much in a woman that only exists a good three-fourths of the time.
They slip through the cracks.
So Derek works late hours to compensate for his absence and Alex runs progressively longer distances to compensate for vulnerabilities and Lexie licks a line down Meredith’s throat and tastes salt (she thinks tequila), and who knows what they’re compensating for.
(Missing limbs on a family tree and, maybe, if they’d grown up together, this would be different. Maybe they missed their chance at that kind of a relationship, and now all they can manage at is this bastardization.)
She still looks over her shoulder when she’s in a hallway alone, in that hospital. She still flinches when the elevator doors open, expecting the improbable (but not impossible).
“I’m thinking of transferring,” she muses, skinny legs drawn to her chest and the sheets wrapped around her form.
Meredith catches her eye for only a second, breaks her gaze as she pulls her sweater over her head.
It’s December already, early, and this has gotten harder and harder to explain away under the heading of grief and loss.
They slip through the cracks and the falling snow covers them, packed down and suffocating.
-
She looks into a lot of places. Bookmarks websites, sifts through flyers, makes lists in the form of pros vs. cons.
Meredith fits somewhere in the middle, better suited for a Venn diagram.
Alex and her blow up at each other, just as promised. They stay in rooms that face each other and, in the mornings, they often find themselves on different sides of the hallway, unwittingly engaging in the glare-off from hell.
He looks at her like he can’t quite comprehend that now, of all times, is when she leaves him.
She looks at him like she can’t quite comprehend how he didn’t notice that they both left a long time ago.
It’ll wear off, she knows; he’ll either become more distant or return to status quo.
But this was never just about him.
-
She takes a five-day sabbatical, packs her bags, and drives.
Ends up in Oregon. Never California; it’s too trite, too cliché.
When she comes back, Alex has moved back into the trailer until he finds a new place to live, and Meredith is on the front porch looking more torn open and raw than Lexie’s seen her in recent memory.
Meredith hugs her, somehow both crushing and a comfort, and that’s new too - both the need for it, and the sensation that Lexie might be the one holding her up this time.
It’s a one-eighty from months ago.
Equilibrium returns, bit by bit.
-
The lines blur.
They blur at night when Meredith’s fingers curl inside of her.
They blur in the harsh light of day when she finds herself saying my sister and feels Meredith pat her shoulder at the lunch table as she walks off, watches her kiss Derek on the cheek, the lips, in the mornings and outside of nurses’ stations.
The lines blur and Lexie stays despite it all, because it turns out she’s just as afraid of what will happen if she leaves as she is of what will happen if she stays.
This is the lesser effort.
-
fin.