the lucky ones (1/2) {grey's - alex-centric)
Title: The Lucky Ones (1/2)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Lexie, Meredith, various others. Definite Alex/Lexie and Mark/Lexie, especially in pt. 2.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,321
Author's Note: This was going to be one big story, however the marathon race against the clock that this has turned into, in order to get it up before the new episode tonight, means that I'm posting in two separate parts in order to not rush through to finish it and sacrifice quality. Anyways, long story short, this is a tad bit experimental on my part and I'm not 100% sure about how it came out.
Spoilers: Up to 7.01.
Summary: AU-ish (in that it fills in gaps but I'm fairly sure most of this didn't happen). Four women and him and there is a word for this kind of symmetry.
you've been a hollowed-out apple
though you're standing up straight
(the universe is going to catch you; the antlers)
After the shooting, there is a solid two weeks where you can’t go through a single news cycle without hearing the words Seattle Grace and tragedy strung together. The adjectives in between change, of course. Horrible, terrible, dreadful, atrocious; all words that mean the same thing and yet somehow nothing at all.
There is a candlelight vigil held outside of the hospital, full of grieving friends and family members of those lost or injured and strangers who believe in higher powers and the hope. The cameras never fail to hold on the way the gaudy crime scene tape seems to tremble in the breeze or hold on a close-up of the face of some nameless child because it makes you think real hard on the implications of that scene. Here’s a child who lost her mother or her father - and who cares if that’s nothing more than a story your mind tells you because it happened to someone, some child out there, and that’s what they assume you’ll believe is important.
The ones left behind. The children and the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands. The ones who grieve over caskets lowered into the ground and hold smiles over fond memories with a microphone shoved three inches from their faces.
And as for the ones who were shot, who watched as their friends were gunned down in a hail of bullets or ten feet away from them as they rounded a corner, who walked through hallways painted in blood and god forbid brain matter in a place that was probably once thought of, to them at least, as safe?
Well, it’s simple. Their stories will come weeks and months from now, hidden at the tail end of the eleven o’clock news behind the latest round of reports about the recent earthquake or hurricane or maybe another shooting. When Seattle Grace no longer means anything but that hospital where that tragedy once occurred, though the details are quite fuzzy. When the focus of the masses has shifted, their attention span having run out some time ago.
But don’t fret. They survived. They’re the lucky ones.
Don’t you forget that.
-
Alex Karev woke up to a tube down his throat and a woman’s body curled in a chair, a forgotten book laying face-down on bent knees.
Her hand lay next to his on the bed, palm up, and his fingers tangled with hers to do what his voice couldn’t. She jolted, the book tumbling to the floor with a heavy thud, her legs drawing close to her chest and her hand yanking from his.
“Oh,” Lexie said, when her eyes had adjusted to the light and her body had finished shaking, even if her hands had not and that, that was a feeling she would get used to more and more over the coming weeks. “Oh, you’re awake.”
The note of dismay he thought was audible in her voice would be written off as drugged distortion and he won’t notice that her hands fell to fold in her lap instead of lingering on the bed, no part of her body touching his. He won’t notice that things begin to fray at the seams earlier than either of them really noticed.
He woke up and they started to fall apart.
(Except that’s not the truth at all, for so many reasons but most of all this one:
Alex Karev wakes up first to a tube down his throat and an empty room, second to the woman in the chair.
He woke up alone and he almost died alone, and for a moment there, when his eyes opened to a white ceiling and white walls and his mind hadn’t quite made sense of the beeps of all the machines proving him wrong, he really thought he was dead.)
-
His hospital room is lacking in visitors, but then they are spread thin and he is what some might call unwelcoming.
Even before.
He doesn’t see Meredith for a full two days after he wakes up. By then the tubes are gone, the vent is gone, and if anyone is united on anything it’s that he isn’t going anywhere any time soon - not from this hospital and not from this life. He’s supposed to find this reassuring.
Meredith wraps both of her hands around his, bone crushingly tight, when she finally does come. Collapses into the chair like a safe haven and takes his hand and his attention and almost all of his willpower to muster up something like a smirk and a smartass remark.
She comes more often after that, and so it’s her and Lexie and, once, Jackson popping his head in to say, “glad you’re okay, man” like he actually meant it.
He doesn’t see Cristina and he doesn’t hear about her either and, with his frame of reference for these things all shot to hell, days blending together - he doesn’t know how long he’s been here, hasn’t seen a calendar in days and won’t watch the news, keeps forgetting to ask - he eventually has no choice but to think there’s a reason for her absence.
“She’s fine.” By the time Meredith looks up, her lips are stretched in a tight smile, pained and fighting to turn down at the corners. “She’s just busy.”
Alex doesn’t ask for elaboration; she doesn’t offer it.
-
When he finds out about the engagement, he laughs and laughs and laughs until it’s become something hollow and awful and Meredith won’t look at him, won’t look at anything but the palm of her hand as it covers her eyes.
Cristina’s eyes are daggers, the most life anyone’s really seen in them for weeks, and someone’s retching in the upstairs bathroom - he knows and Meredith knows and still they sit downstairs, away -- but that isn’t for some time now. That isn’t for a few days or a few weeks.
(Two months and their world changed and they changed and time dragged on - )
-
In the early mornings, Lexie will come, smelling of the soap from Meredith’s bathroom, her hair still damp and pulled high into a ponytail. She comes with books and curls up in the chair by his bed and reads silently for hours.
There but not there and Alex starts to resent the way she feels like the babysitter he never had and never wanted.
He angles to get a good look at the cover of the book in her hands but her fingers obscure the title. He plays at guessing instead. “They haven’t cleared you for surgery yet?”
Lexie’s eyes lift from the page to stare at him for a long hard moment. She only almost smiles once she realizes he’s serious. “No one’s cleared for surgery. They’re not - ” she shakes her head, too much and too fervently, giving the appearance of a shoddily made bobble head. He can’t see the title any more than he can see the way her hands white knuckle around the edges of the hardcover. “No one’s cleared yet.”
She lets the conversation drop and Alex has always been skilled at a lot of things - taking a punch, giving an even better one, twisting that smirk into something that some women call charm and others call an invitation - but the art of honest conversation has never been very high on that list. So he says, “those case studies?” and tries to sound like he’s got better things to be thinking about, false as it may be.
Her shoulders tense. It isn’t abnormal. Her whole body is like that some days, wired and knotted and wary to touch. “Sort of.”
There is a pause.
She corrects, “yeah.”
(It’s worth noting here that, later, when she’s gone to get coffee from the vendor downstairs, he gets a good look at that book. They forget that the pain is no longer unbearable when he moves, that he can walk and manage himself just fine, even if, for a while there, his vitals weren’t where they’d like and that’s probably why he’s still here.
She’s got the book facedown, hidden under an old sweater that’s only suitable for early mornings this time of year, before the sun comes up and bears down on you, but Alex isn’t stupid and he isn’t particularly concerned with privacy either, so he looks.
There are no case studies, of the medical variety or otherwise, and it isn’t some textbook full of facts and procedures for her to memorize and recite at the most opportune moment. It’s a book about understanding serial and mass murders, hidden inside the pages of a hardcover copy of Moby Dick.
It’s worth noting that it’s here that the reality of just how messed up she is hits him. Not when they’re seated in a circle - to promote open lines of communication or some other line that the trauma therapist feeds them - during some bullshit group therapy discussion and she tries to teach them the difference between terrorist attacks and spree killings, serial killers and mass murderers, like putting a name on it, defining it, would put it in perspective. Would calm frayed nerves and make this somehow easier to process for her. Not when he finds out there’s been more books, internet searches too, a compulsive gathering of information.
He knows here. Right here with the book in his hands, and the sweater she wore this morning, when she showed up at five with circles under her eyes and hands that wouldn’t stay still - perpetually sleepless in Seattle, a pun that never becomes funny -- thrown over the back of the chair.
He knows because there’s something else Alex is skilled at - not always, mind you, but these things come with unfortunate experience - and that’s being able to tell the difference between crazy and actual mental illness. Off beat and disturbed. Okay and decidedly not.
So he pushes the book back beneath the sweater and doesn’t say a word when Lexie walks back in, bearing her coffee and a magazine tucked under her arm. He keeps his mouth shut because he knows this will bring his tally to four and he’s running out of excuses and ways to make a case that this is all merely coincidence.
Four women and him.
There’s a word for that kind of symmetry. Several, in fact.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Alex can count on one hand the number of times he’s set foot in a church and religion is all but lost on him, but that much is already obvious. Because if he was? Now would be a really good time to start praying.)
-
It rains the day they discharge him. He hasn’t seen the sun through anything but the window for far too long, so it figures that it’s pouring by the time they get out to the parking lot. Putting on a jacket is just more complicated than it’s worth so he skips it altogether and by the time he gets in the car, he’s soaked and dripping all over the leather.
“And this is why I didn’t bother with my hair this morning,” Meredith says, running a careless hand through damp strands. She came to get him and he doesn’t ask about Lexie. He doesn’t try to deconstruct the reasons why it’s not his girlfriend but his friend - maybe best friend and, once, best man - who puts a hand on his arm but doesn’t offer help or pity or anything resembling kindness in the face of his latest attempts at bravado. “You okay?”
He performs some approximation of a shrug and waits until she isn’t looking anymore to wince.
“She’s just busy,” she says, once they’ve made it out onto the street, “you know how it is.”
(Here’s how this almost goes:
“I’ve been cooped up in a fucking hospital bed for how long? I can’t even remember how it is,” there is the slightest change in Meredith’s body language, the way she angles away from him and braces for impact, “and neither can she. She’s not even cleared for surgery yet.”
“The clinic,” she offers, useless protest, and he glares and she parries. “They’re still a little short-staffed.”
“It’s still a load of bullshit.”
“Alex.”
“I know,” and it isn’t him backing down. Two simple words, enunciated in such a way as to say stop trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
“You don’t know anything. You’ve been cooped up in a fucking hospital bed, remember?”
But that’s not the conversation they have and she remains unaware of the knowledge he has and isn’t supposed to, that she isn’t supposed to tell him and he isn’t supposed to let on. And that’s okay. It’s okay because there is that old saying, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and it’s true. It’s true and no one will be dying tonight or a week from now or six months from now and, one can assume, that means these things are bound to come out.
The dying portion of this story is over.
Now here comes the hard part.)
Instead, he sets his jaw and works any and all traces of emotion out of his voice as he says, “I don’t care.”
“Alex.”
(This will always be the same. Alex, Alex, Alex, the sound of his name on her tongue and the power it holds over him, this small woman who pushed him up against those lockers all those years ago and he thinks that may not be where she got his friendship or his kindness, what little he has to spare, but that is where she got his respect.)
“I don’t care,” he repeats, and the wind whistles as rain splatters against the windshield.
-
Meredith’s house is an update on a frat house, an adult sequel of sorts. Don’t open closed doors unless you know what’s going to be behind them.
It’s not just him and Lexie, her and Derek. There’s Cristina, sometimes, curled up in Meredith’s bed when Derek is still in the hospital, or on the couch when he isn’t. Jackson gets wasted during some mass ‘drinking instead of dealing’ fest that he’s invited to and Alex isn’t privy to and somehow goes from the armchair he passed out in to the floor sometime during the night. He heard, once, that there was April.
He figures Owen’s been here, to see Cristina. He knows Mark has, after Derek gets home, and those are times that Alex has something else to do or somewhere else to be or, failing that, takes a fucking nap.
It’s why he can’t get back to work fast enough.
-
“Did you know,” his spoon clinks against the bowl in his hand, suddenly still at the tone in her voice. Lexie isn’t looking at him but instead at the newspaper or, possibly, whatever she has hidden in the newspaper. He’s wary of her too now. She’s gotten better at deception.
He cranes his neck until he can see over her shoulder, watch the way her fingers trace the lines of tiny print, damp from her glass and smudging ink. She keeps doing it anyway, keeps rendering the thing unreadable.
“Did you know,” she starts again, “that they say we’re the lucky ones.”
A laugh chokes out, rips from her throat.
“I mean, how insane is that?”
He thinks of Reed, a bullet between the eyes, execution style. He thinks of pools of blood and elevators he won’t set foot in, and a conference room that he avoids like the plague. He thinks of all the things he probably didn’t see.
They are the lucky ones. They’re not dead. It’s just their friends.
His cereal turns to mush in his throat.
It’s enough to turn his stomach. He dumps out the remains of his breakfast, sets the bowl in the sink, and makes his escape up the stairs.
Her laugh follows him, an awful ghost biting at his heels and digging footholds into his skin.
-
He goes back.
They throw him in group therapy sessions to tell him things he already knows (Lexie’s there, practically vibrating in her seat and talking too fast, and proving a point that he didn’t have the guts or the strength to make -- we were a mass murder, because it happened at one place, by one person, and more than five people were killed, she says, and it all he sees are flashing red lights reflected back in the eyes of everyone else in the room) and drag their heels on clearing him for surgery, make him sing the same tune over and over until he starts wanting to tell them the opposite, make up some especially disturbed and particularly inspired stories just to see what happens then. At least it would look like progress, in one direction or another.
He goes back and, a week later, Lexie loses her shit in front of him and Mark and half a dozen patients and he walks away because, finally, finally, he’s hit his limit.
-
(For a good long while, he walked away will be repeated as an excuse to all manner of reactive behavior, without ever really analyzing the behavior - the action - itself.
He walked away.
This is fact.
His feet moved across linoleum and he cleared the room and then another and a few hallways to boot before he found an unoccupied on-call room and locked himself in there.
It’s fact. Unchangeable and unarguable.
Without context, fact can be biased. It can also be irrelevant. And people miss a great deal of context when it suits them.
Alex walked away, yes, but there was a reason, maybe reasons plural, but it all boils down to one thing: he is no good to her when busted up himself, and just like he can see the difference between okay and not okay with her, the same can be said for himself.
He knows it’s a game face. He knows it’s an act. He knows its all bullshit and the defense mechanisms that save him.
Honesty always was his strong suit.)
-
She’s gone for three days.
He sleeps in on-call rooms for the first two nights, away from empty beds and reminders, comes back home on the third to find she’s beat him to it. Lexie’s a bundle of limbs on the edge of his bed, eyes wide but free of dark circles, her coloring better than it’s been in weeks. The old gray shirt she wears, Dartmouth printed on the front in fading letters, is recognizable as being Meredith’s and it’s this, the reminder of who she is to someone else, that keeps several feet of distance between them and his hands stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie.
“I slept for fifty hours,” she says, faint smile aimed more at the tangle of her arms wrapped around her knees than at him, “at least that’s what they said. That’s like two days. Over two days. Who does that? Who can sleep for two days straight?”
“They sedated you,” he says, not a question but a statement.
She nods anyways. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Her silence on the matter and the way she looks at him through thick lashes, earnest in her innocence, means she’s looking for an invitation. The clock flips past eleven, closer to a quarter of, and he’s been thinking of all the ways that this could go. Specifically, all the ways that it can end, because Lexie may be better, she may be on her way there, but he isn’t even close. And that makes him, in his own estimations, the last thing she needs right now.
“Then get out,” he tells her, and it’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to her.
-
Part Two
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Lexie, Meredith, various others. Definite Alex/Lexie and Mark/Lexie, especially in pt. 2.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,321
Author's Note: This was going to be one big story, however the marathon race against the clock that this has turned into, in order to get it up before the new episode tonight, means that I'm posting in two separate parts in order to not rush through to finish it and sacrifice quality. Anyways, long story short, this is a tad bit experimental on my part and I'm not 100% sure about how it came out.
Spoilers: Up to 7.01.
Summary: AU-ish (in that it fills in gaps but I'm fairly sure most of this didn't happen). Four women and him and there is a word for this kind of symmetry.
you've been a hollowed-out apple
though you're standing up straight
(the universe is going to catch you; the antlers)
After the shooting, there is a solid two weeks where you can’t go through a single news cycle without hearing the words Seattle Grace and tragedy strung together. The adjectives in between change, of course. Horrible, terrible, dreadful, atrocious; all words that mean the same thing and yet somehow nothing at all.
There is a candlelight vigil held outside of the hospital, full of grieving friends and family members of those lost or injured and strangers who believe in higher powers and the hope. The cameras never fail to hold on the way the gaudy crime scene tape seems to tremble in the breeze or hold on a close-up of the face of some nameless child because it makes you think real hard on the implications of that scene. Here’s a child who lost her mother or her father - and who cares if that’s nothing more than a story your mind tells you because it happened to someone, some child out there, and that’s what they assume you’ll believe is important.
The ones left behind. The children and the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands. The ones who grieve over caskets lowered into the ground and hold smiles over fond memories with a microphone shoved three inches from their faces.
And as for the ones who were shot, who watched as their friends were gunned down in a hail of bullets or ten feet away from them as they rounded a corner, who walked through hallways painted in blood and god forbid brain matter in a place that was probably once thought of, to them at least, as safe?
Well, it’s simple. Their stories will come weeks and months from now, hidden at the tail end of the eleven o’clock news behind the latest round of reports about the recent earthquake or hurricane or maybe another shooting. When Seattle Grace no longer means anything but that hospital where that tragedy once occurred, though the details are quite fuzzy. When the focus of the masses has shifted, their attention span having run out some time ago.
But don’t fret. They survived. They’re the lucky ones.
Don’t you forget that.
-
Alex Karev woke up to a tube down his throat and a woman’s body curled in a chair, a forgotten book laying face-down on bent knees.
Her hand lay next to his on the bed, palm up, and his fingers tangled with hers to do what his voice couldn’t. She jolted, the book tumbling to the floor with a heavy thud, her legs drawing close to her chest and her hand yanking from his.
“Oh,” Lexie said, when her eyes had adjusted to the light and her body had finished shaking, even if her hands had not and that, that was a feeling she would get used to more and more over the coming weeks. “Oh, you’re awake.”
The note of dismay he thought was audible in her voice would be written off as drugged distortion and he won’t notice that her hands fell to fold in her lap instead of lingering on the bed, no part of her body touching his. He won’t notice that things begin to fray at the seams earlier than either of them really noticed.
He woke up and they started to fall apart.
(Except that’s not the truth at all, for so many reasons but most of all this one:
Alex Karev wakes up first to a tube down his throat and an empty room, second to the woman in the chair.
He woke up alone and he almost died alone, and for a moment there, when his eyes opened to a white ceiling and white walls and his mind hadn’t quite made sense of the beeps of all the machines proving him wrong, he really thought he was dead.)
-
His hospital room is lacking in visitors, but then they are spread thin and he is what some might call unwelcoming.
Even before.
He doesn’t see Meredith for a full two days after he wakes up. By then the tubes are gone, the vent is gone, and if anyone is united on anything it’s that he isn’t going anywhere any time soon - not from this hospital and not from this life. He’s supposed to find this reassuring.
Meredith wraps both of her hands around his, bone crushingly tight, when she finally does come. Collapses into the chair like a safe haven and takes his hand and his attention and almost all of his willpower to muster up something like a smirk and a smartass remark.
She comes more often after that, and so it’s her and Lexie and, once, Jackson popping his head in to say, “glad you’re okay, man” like he actually meant it.
He doesn’t see Cristina and he doesn’t hear about her either and, with his frame of reference for these things all shot to hell, days blending together - he doesn’t know how long he’s been here, hasn’t seen a calendar in days and won’t watch the news, keeps forgetting to ask - he eventually has no choice but to think there’s a reason for her absence.
“She’s fine.” By the time Meredith looks up, her lips are stretched in a tight smile, pained and fighting to turn down at the corners. “She’s just busy.”
Alex doesn’t ask for elaboration; she doesn’t offer it.
-
When he finds out about the engagement, he laughs and laughs and laughs until it’s become something hollow and awful and Meredith won’t look at him, won’t look at anything but the palm of her hand as it covers her eyes.
Cristina’s eyes are daggers, the most life anyone’s really seen in them for weeks, and someone’s retching in the upstairs bathroom - he knows and Meredith knows and still they sit downstairs, away -- but that isn’t for some time now. That isn’t for a few days or a few weeks.
(Two months and their world changed and they changed and time dragged on - )
-
In the early mornings, Lexie will come, smelling of the soap from Meredith’s bathroom, her hair still damp and pulled high into a ponytail. She comes with books and curls up in the chair by his bed and reads silently for hours.
There but not there and Alex starts to resent the way she feels like the babysitter he never had and never wanted.
He angles to get a good look at the cover of the book in her hands but her fingers obscure the title. He plays at guessing instead. “They haven’t cleared you for surgery yet?”
Lexie’s eyes lift from the page to stare at him for a long hard moment. She only almost smiles once she realizes he’s serious. “No one’s cleared for surgery. They’re not - ” she shakes her head, too much and too fervently, giving the appearance of a shoddily made bobble head. He can’t see the title any more than he can see the way her hands white knuckle around the edges of the hardcover. “No one’s cleared yet.”
She lets the conversation drop and Alex has always been skilled at a lot of things - taking a punch, giving an even better one, twisting that smirk into something that some women call charm and others call an invitation - but the art of honest conversation has never been very high on that list. So he says, “those case studies?” and tries to sound like he’s got better things to be thinking about, false as it may be.
Her shoulders tense. It isn’t abnormal. Her whole body is like that some days, wired and knotted and wary to touch. “Sort of.”
There is a pause.
She corrects, “yeah.”
(It’s worth noting here that, later, when she’s gone to get coffee from the vendor downstairs, he gets a good look at that book. They forget that the pain is no longer unbearable when he moves, that he can walk and manage himself just fine, even if, for a while there, his vitals weren’t where they’d like and that’s probably why he’s still here.
She’s got the book facedown, hidden under an old sweater that’s only suitable for early mornings this time of year, before the sun comes up and bears down on you, but Alex isn’t stupid and he isn’t particularly concerned with privacy either, so he looks.
There are no case studies, of the medical variety or otherwise, and it isn’t some textbook full of facts and procedures for her to memorize and recite at the most opportune moment. It’s a book about understanding serial and mass murders, hidden inside the pages of a hardcover copy of Moby Dick.
It’s worth noting that it’s here that the reality of just how messed up she is hits him. Not when they’re seated in a circle - to promote open lines of communication or some other line that the trauma therapist feeds them - during some bullshit group therapy discussion and she tries to teach them the difference between terrorist attacks and spree killings, serial killers and mass murderers, like putting a name on it, defining it, would put it in perspective. Would calm frayed nerves and make this somehow easier to process for her. Not when he finds out there’s been more books, internet searches too, a compulsive gathering of information.
He knows here. Right here with the book in his hands, and the sweater she wore this morning, when she showed up at five with circles under her eyes and hands that wouldn’t stay still - perpetually sleepless in Seattle, a pun that never becomes funny -- thrown over the back of the chair.
He knows because there’s something else Alex is skilled at - not always, mind you, but these things come with unfortunate experience - and that’s being able to tell the difference between crazy and actual mental illness. Off beat and disturbed. Okay and decidedly not.
So he pushes the book back beneath the sweater and doesn’t say a word when Lexie walks back in, bearing her coffee and a magazine tucked under her arm. He keeps his mouth shut because he knows this will bring his tally to four and he’s running out of excuses and ways to make a case that this is all merely coincidence.
Four women and him.
There’s a word for that kind of symmetry. Several, in fact.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Alex can count on one hand the number of times he’s set foot in a church and religion is all but lost on him, but that much is already obvious. Because if he was? Now would be a really good time to start praying.)
-
It rains the day they discharge him. He hasn’t seen the sun through anything but the window for far too long, so it figures that it’s pouring by the time they get out to the parking lot. Putting on a jacket is just more complicated than it’s worth so he skips it altogether and by the time he gets in the car, he’s soaked and dripping all over the leather.
“And this is why I didn’t bother with my hair this morning,” Meredith says, running a careless hand through damp strands. She came to get him and he doesn’t ask about Lexie. He doesn’t try to deconstruct the reasons why it’s not his girlfriend but his friend - maybe best friend and, once, best man - who puts a hand on his arm but doesn’t offer help or pity or anything resembling kindness in the face of his latest attempts at bravado. “You okay?”
He performs some approximation of a shrug and waits until she isn’t looking anymore to wince.
“She’s just busy,” she says, once they’ve made it out onto the street, “you know how it is.”
(Here’s how this almost goes:
“I’ve been cooped up in a fucking hospital bed for how long? I can’t even remember how it is,” there is the slightest change in Meredith’s body language, the way she angles away from him and braces for impact, “and neither can she. She’s not even cleared for surgery yet.”
“The clinic,” she offers, useless protest, and he glares and she parries. “They’re still a little short-staffed.”
“It’s still a load of bullshit.”
“Alex.”
“I know,” and it isn’t him backing down. Two simple words, enunciated in such a way as to say stop trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
“You don’t know anything. You’ve been cooped up in a fucking hospital bed, remember?”
But that’s not the conversation they have and she remains unaware of the knowledge he has and isn’t supposed to, that she isn’t supposed to tell him and he isn’t supposed to let on. And that’s okay. It’s okay because there is that old saying, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and it’s true. It’s true and no one will be dying tonight or a week from now or six months from now and, one can assume, that means these things are bound to come out.
The dying portion of this story is over.
Now here comes the hard part.)
Instead, he sets his jaw and works any and all traces of emotion out of his voice as he says, “I don’t care.”
“Alex.”
(This will always be the same. Alex, Alex, Alex, the sound of his name on her tongue and the power it holds over him, this small woman who pushed him up against those lockers all those years ago and he thinks that may not be where she got his friendship or his kindness, what little he has to spare, but that is where she got his respect.)
“I don’t care,” he repeats, and the wind whistles as rain splatters against the windshield.
-
Meredith’s house is an update on a frat house, an adult sequel of sorts. Don’t open closed doors unless you know what’s going to be behind them.
It’s not just him and Lexie, her and Derek. There’s Cristina, sometimes, curled up in Meredith’s bed when Derek is still in the hospital, or on the couch when he isn’t. Jackson gets wasted during some mass ‘drinking instead of dealing’ fest that he’s invited to and Alex isn’t privy to and somehow goes from the armchair he passed out in to the floor sometime during the night. He heard, once, that there was April.
He figures Owen’s been here, to see Cristina. He knows Mark has, after Derek gets home, and those are times that Alex has something else to do or somewhere else to be or, failing that, takes a fucking nap.
It’s why he can’t get back to work fast enough.
-
“Did you know,” his spoon clinks against the bowl in his hand, suddenly still at the tone in her voice. Lexie isn’t looking at him but instead at the newspaper or, possibly, whatever she has hidden in the newspaper. He’s wary of her too now. She’s gotten better at deception.
He cranes his neck until he can see over her shoulder, watch the way her fingers trace the lines of tiny print, damp from her glass and smudging ink. She keeps doing it anyway, keeps rendering the thing unreadable.
“Did you know,” she starts again, “that they say we’re the lucky ones.”
A laugh chokes out, rips from her throat.
“I mean, how insane is that?”
He thinks of Reed, a bullet between the eyes, execution style. He thinks of pools of blood and elevators he won’t set foot in, and a conference room that he avoids like the plague. He thinks of all the things he probably didn’t see.
They are the lucky ones. They’re not dead. It’s just their friends.
His cereal turns to mush in his throat.
It’s enough to turn his stomach. He dumps out the remains of his breakfast, sets the bowl in the sink, and makes his escape up the stairs.
Her laugh follows him, an awful ghost biting at his heels and digging footholds into his skin.
-
He goes back.
They throw him in group therapy sessions to tell him things he already knows (Lexie’s there, practically vibrating in her seat and talking too fast, and proving a point that he didn’t have the guts or the strength to make -- we were a mass murder, because it happened at one place, by one person, and more than five people were killed, she says, and it all he sees are flashing red lights reflected back in the eyes of everyone else in the room) and drag their heels on clearing him for surgery, make him sing the same tune over and over until he starts wanting to tell them the opposite, make up some especially disturbed and particularly inspired stories just to see what happens then. At least it would look like progress, in one direction or another.
He goes back and, a week later, Lexie loses her shit in front of him and Mark and half a dozen patients and he walks away because, finally, finally, he’s hit his limit.
-
(For a good long while, he walked away will be repeated as an excuse to all manner of reactive behavior, without ever really analyzing the behavior - the action - itself.
He walked away.
This is fact.
His feet moved across linoleum and he cleared the room and then another and a few hallways to boot before he found an unoccupied on-call room and locked himself in there.
It’s fact. Unchangeable and unarguable.
Without context, fact can be biased. It can also be irrelevant. And people miss a great deal of context when it suits them.
Alex walked away, yes, but there was a reason, maybe reasons plural, but it all boils down to one thing: he is no good to her when busted up himself, and just like he can see the difference between okay and not okay with her, the same can be said for himself.
He knows it’s a game face. He knows it’s an act. He knows its all bullshit and the defense mechanisms that save him.
Honesty always was his strong suit.)
-
She’s gone for three days.
He sleeps in on-call rooms for the first two nights, away from empty beds and reminders, comes back home on the third to find she’s beat him to it. Lexie’s a bundle of limbs on the edge of his bed, eyes wide but free of dark circles, her coloring better than it’s been in weeks. The old gray shirt she wears, Dartmouth printed on the front in fading letters, is recognizable as being Meredith’s and it’s this, the reminder of who she is to someone else, that keeps several feet of distance between them and his hands stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie.
“I slept for fifty hours,” she says, faint smile aimed more at the tangle of her arms wrapped around her knees than at him, “at least that’s what they said. That’s like two days. Over two days. Who does that? Who can sleep for two days straight?”
“They sedated you,” he says, not a question but a statement.
She nods anyways. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Her silence on the matter and the way she looks at him through thick lashes, earnest in her innocence, means she’s looking for an invitation. The clock flips past eleven, closer to a quarter of, and he’s been thinking of all the ways that this could go. Specifically, all the ways that it can end, because Lexie may be better, she may be on her way there, but he isn’t even close. And that makes him, in his own estimations, the last thing she needs right now.
“Then get out,” he tells her, and it’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to her.
-
Part Two