the lucky ones {part two; alex-centric}
muscle connects to the bone
and the bone to the ire and the marrow
i wish i had a gentle mind and a spine made up of iron
(marrow; st. vincent)
-
(They fuck after the wedding.
Maybe he preys on her sentimentality and so he walks through the wrong door on the wrong side of the hallway and makes his move. Maybe she’s still high off of her power trip downstairs, got a taste of what cruelty feels like on her tongue and craves more of the same.
All the same, he takes her up against the closed door, pushes up into her with his mouth on her neck and her arms around his. Her hair is a half un-pinned mess and the hem of her pretty little party dress catches on the doorknob, rips at the seam. Neither of them bothers to fully undress for the occasion, his pants pooled on the floor with her underwear, careless in such a way as to say nothing to see here, undermining the significance of the act.
More importantly, it’s careless on purpose, to maintain a carefully erected façade of indifference.
Except.
She comes and he follows right after, the whole thing over quickly, and as her body slip slides down until she’s on her feet again, weak knees and her hands curled around his biceps, he kisses her. Catches her lips with his, open-mouthed and exhaling hard through his nose, irregular breathing that matches an irregular heartbeat.
It’s not the act that’s significant as much as the order. It’s that he fucks her and then kisses her that bears repeating. There’s a difference if you learn to read between the lines but, then, that’s the way it always has to be with him.
Her dress isn’t the only thing damaged that night.)
-
“You’re not going to give me shit?”
Meredith’s chest deflates as she bends over the sink, pouring soap into the dispenser, slick fingers that fight to get a good grip on the pump and finally succeed in putting it all back together.
Soap bubbles over, seeps through in-between the cracks.
“You’ve got to pick your battles, Alex,” she wipes up the mess with a dishtowel, “and, besides, she didn’t tell me everything.”
He snorts a laugh; she doesn’t take kindly to it.
“Look, I have to come get Derek out of jail every other night, I’m hosting an impromptu wedding that I’m not even sure I support - not that I’m aloud to say that - and I have a job. And so do you. And so does she. You’ve got to pick your battles and I’m not throwing down for this. It wouldn’t even matter if I did.”
Alex doesn’t bother to tell her just how off base she is.
-
At times, when deprived of a fight, a challenge, anything to rally against, for too long, Alex has a tendency to go looking for just that.
This is veering dangerously close to being one of those times.
-
(The night of the wedding doesn’t end the way you might imagine, bodies that fall into bed and limbs intertwined.
Lexie presses a hand to his chest, still backed up against the door in her ruined dress, and when she feels the outline of the bullet underneath his skin, she gags. Plain and simple. Bile rises in her throat and her stomach turns sour.
She bolts, then, and water runs in the bathroom sink as she dry heaves over the toilet.)
-
They play games of chicken in hospital hallways, while passing nurses abstain from reminding them that they are far too old for this.
There’s always something needed in a supply closet, some sleep to catch up on in the on-call room, or a fellow doctor to consult with in the exam room. Someone can always turn left or right, swerve or sidestep out of the way, but no one walks through the same door at the same time and no one’s steps fall into sync and no one even thinks about making eye contact.
(It is, of course, Mark playing these games with him.
Mark Sloan who you couldn’t tear Alex away from when he first arrived, when all Alex could see was a future in plastics and the guy who could potentially help him get there, holding on to the last vestiges of a dream that he was less and less sure of.
The irony is unsettling.)
“Are you avoiding him because you think Lexie’s sleeping with him and you hate that you care or because he saved your life and you hate that you care?” Meredith asks, eyes straight ahead at the scene unfolding below the gallery, and their bodies close enough - shoulder to shoulder despite a half empty room - for him to feel the heat radiating off of her skin.
It’s suffocating. But, then, so is the question. There is no good answer. No easy but wrong one, a line for him to feed her even if she’ll shake her head in disbelief not a moment later. “Is there a third option?”
“Yeah.”
He stretches out his neck, tries not to look too relieved. Good thing too.
“It’s both.”
-
He doesn’t set foot on elevators.
He’s thinking of taking up running again.
(Trading enclosed spaces for wide open ones - greener pastures, if you’re so inclined - and while he doesn’t see blood on the grass he can still feel the burn in his lungs.)
-
The wedding happens and they all toast to love everlasting with varying degrees of believability to their smiles; he doesn’t even touch the champagne, instead pulling beers out of the fridge, one after the other, and staying mostly on the fringes of the event before he outright bails and keeps to the kitchen.
Jackson isn’t the first one to figure this out - Meredith grabbed shot glasses and tequila earlier and he knows there is wine, though its quality is probably questionable, because people filter in and out looking for it - but he is the first who tries to do anything about it.
“You usually this much of a wallflower?” Jackson asks, not unkindly.
“I don’t like weddings.”
“Weren’t you married? In like a huge church wedding?”
“Like I said,” he replies with gritted teeth, fighting off misdirected anger and settling for a mask of annoyance.
Jackson leans back against the counter at that, like someone generally unafraid but doing their level best to stay just out of reach of teeth and claws (he is an anomaly, after all - his bite is just as bad as his bark). “You guys are messed up.”
“Dude, I almost tripped over you in the middle of the night three weeks ago because you were passed out on the living room floor. You might want to remember to include yourself in that.”
“Fair enough,” Jackson laughs. “Now where’s the beer?”
When he presses one into the other man’s hands, it’s something of an overdue olive branch.
-
(They fuck.
She runs - not walks - away.
What happens before, what happens between his form in the doorway, his eyes tracing the arc of her arm as she pulls the pins out of her hair, and her body pinned against the same door, his leg between both of hers, leaving her balance shot to hell and his hands greedy underneath her dress - none of it matters.
It still led to the same result, as drunken and messy and brimming with a Molotov cocktail of anger and hurt as it was.
The aftermath?
Never mind that.
It’s just the rest of their lives.)
-
They dance around each other for a handful of days but the steps aren’t very creative and eventually they run out of floor space.
He stops spending nights in the hospital, on-call rooms and the 24-hour coffee vendor in the lobby - by the elevators he won’t take - and starts spending them in the bar. The air is staler than he remembers and Joe keeps a closer eye on him than he wants, but sometimes Meredith will meet him shot for shot and others Jackson will settle two seats down from him at the bar, within striking distance but still keeping a careful distance.
Jackson reminds him of friends he used to have in high school and it only succeeds in reminding him that, messed up as he was then, this is a completely new level of fucked up.
But there’s no one there the night some blonde chick he’s fairly sure he stitched up in the pit months ago sidles up to him and turns the charm on to eleven. He just sees the way her eyes don’t focus and her lips curl in a way he doesn’t particularly care for when she glances towards the bathrooms in a way that insinuates exactly what she wants from this evening.
He tells her he would but his girlfriend might give him hell (he doesn’t know why he says it, why he doesn’t just tell her he just got off a twelve hour shift and he’s tired and be done with it) and she chokes on her martini, maroon nails digging and threatening to crack glass.
Alex pulls into the driveway, pushes straight on through to his room, even with Meredith and Cristina in the living room, turned heads and inquiries that meet him at the door.
Lexie’s on the bed again.
-
“The door was closed for a reason,” he starts, a far cry from last time - same time, same place, same players - but he figures that goes for the outcome as well. She is not wide-eyed and fresh faced nor is she on the verge of anything close to a breakdown, shaking hands and a constant, unstoppable flow of words; free of reminders, he’s less edgy, and at an immediate disadvantage.
She’s got her footing, not fine but closer and all the better for having come out the other side. He’s still learning to distinguish from the light and the train, his head full of new problems for him to file away with the old ones in a cabinet that was too full six years ago.
“So was mine,” she replies, quiet but not timid, the heel of her palms pressing into the bedspread as she leans ever so slightly back. It’s not a defensive position; it’s not knees drawn in and arms wrapped around.
He doesn’t know what to do with that or her.
“Look, if you’re here to give me shit - ”
“And I should be, right?” She picks up before he’s left off. “Because you acted like the world’s biggest ass and you had to know that I wasn’t okay, you of all people - ”
With her having set the precedent, he just jumps right on in. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be giving this speech to Sloan? Since he’s the one you’re fucking.”
Lexie recoils visibly, hunched shoulders and harsh intake of breath - like someone who’s been punched, curling in on themselves in a protective maneuver; it doesn’t remind him of the fights he’s been in, numerous as they may be, but instead of a ten year old’s perspective through a cracked bedroom door as fist connects with jaw - and the instant of pleasure he draws from cutting deep gets pushed aside in exchange for disgust that churns low in his stomach.
He still doesn’t have the decency to look at the floor.
“At least I’m not calling out for the woman who left me.”
Alex takes a few more steps into the room than he probably should. “That joke’s getting old.”
“So’s the act,” she says, upturned chin, defiance if he ever saw it. It doesn’t deter him, instead makes him push back that much harder. She can take it now, in the way that she couldn’t before, when he tried to end it in one clean blow (then get out, he’d told her, and her eyes had been vacant).
He thinks he can drive her away again; he thinks he can make this one stick.
He thinks he can undo all the repairs made when he let his mind get away from him, the ones that have her sitting here in the first place.
“You don’t know me.”
She stands now, closing in on him in the least graceful way possible. The backs of her knees bump against the bed and her foot tangles in the shirt he wore last night - thrown off at two in the morning when he was still blaming the heat for his inability to sleep - but she still manages it, angry all the way. “Well you don’t know me either. No one does. Everyone just thinks I’m the crazy chick because I got shipped off to psych, never mind the fact that we all had to see a therapist, for weeks. We’re all crazy. We’re all messed up. I’m just everybody’s favorite example.”
It’s a concentrated effort, to make sure to put space between her and himself, and himself and the wall. Surrounded by escape routes in his own territory (walk away, that’s what you’re good at) and it almost reminds him of Meredith, except she would’ve slapped him already. They’d be done with this by now.
“And, for the record,” her eyes narrow, “I’m not sleeping with Mark. Not that it’s any of your business.”
He tries to look bored by the admission, succeeds if the look on her face, irritation intensified and a flicker of something else, is any indication. “I don’t care.”
“You won’t even look him in the eye.”
“He won’t look me in the eye,” and he yells it, makes the mistake of backing it with too much fire, because she opens her mouth to spit something back at him and then closes it a second later, a slow nod as she steps forward.
“You’re so screwed up.”
“Shut up.”
“No. You say we’re a thing and then you call out for her. You ask me if I’m okay like you care and then you tell me to get out. It’s like you can’t make up your mind. And I can. So maybe you should shut up.”
He laughs then, and maybe he intends for it to be a bitter, mocking laugh, or maybe he doesn’t intend it at all (it’s probably the latter) but it happens. A slow chuckle that strengthens in the face of her suddenly bewildered expression.
(She kisses him anyways, on tiptoe in the middle of the room, nothing for leverage and nothing for balance. Just closes her eyes, hopes for the best, and dives right into the deep end. Pretends it’s only about shutting him up.
When he throws her back onto the bed, relying on the give of her knees and the element of surprise, it’s a promise but not of the sort she’d probably like.
This will all end in pain, sure as the skies will open up and pour down on this miserable city.)
-
This time, no one bolts.
“Alex.”
He feigns sleep, hands folded over his stomach, eyes closed. His breathing isn’t convincing, too sharp, muscles too tense, and he knows she can tell by the way she continues to prod.
“Alex.”
Her body shifts next to him, her hand falling to rest on his shoulder.
“About what I said,” she starts, when he twitches underneath her fingertips.
“Lexie,” he says, gives himself away in a voice heavy with sleep that won’t come any time soon, “go to sleep.”
She pulls her hand back reluctantly, lingering a few moments longer than necessary, and then she settles into the space allotted to her, close but not too close, a thin line of mattress separating them - the physical manifestation of all the places where he won’t let her in and she won’t try hard enough to break on through.
And that will always be the problem.
-
(Nothing changes.
He keeps her at arms length straight until he forgets to put forth the effort.
She never learns the material no one ever bothered to teach her, where to stand up and where to back down. How to pick her battles.
No one ever teaches her that this is how you deal with him, this is how you push past barriers and get inside, resistance be damned. This is how the others did, how Izzie turned him into a man who loved her so much that he couldn’t take the risk of staying with her any longer, or how Meredith turned him into the brother she never had despite a sister that she did.
No one ever tells her why either. A mother, a girlfriend, a wife, you. An abusive father and the siblings he left behind. The reasons he fears a connection more than he fears being alone; he doesn’t want to be the thing to break her but instead the thing that only comes close, sets her straight.
He’s saving her, in his own misguided way.
Except he’ll never understand that she never needed saving at all.)
-
Mark is an eventuality.
Alex can say he doesn’t care, he can do it until he’s blue in the face and sick of lying to himself, but there are facts and he can only ignore the way his stomach twists and words stick in his throat, coming out three times harsher when they pass, when faced with reality.
She will slip away from him and he won’t have the will or the way to stop it from happening.
(Another wedding and another year later, he kisses her on the cheek, softer than he ever had on the mouth, and his fingers rest against her elbow.
The words he whispers in her ear make her shiver underneath his touch.)
-
They don’t really break up, since they were never officially back together.
One day she’s naked in his bed and the next they’re two friends in a bar, with nothing between them at all.
“I just…this isn’t what I want,” she says, bare feet on carpet and crossed arms that she hugs tight to her body.
“Fine by me,” he replies and that’s that with nothing more than the closing of his bedroom door, leaving her standing in the hallway. Alone.
Two weeks later, she’s back with Mark.
-
“Are you okay?” Meredith asks, when she has exhausted her reserves of new and inventive ways to beat around the bush.
“Don’t ask me; ask her,” he says, forgoing eye contact in favor of leaning back against the wall of the tunnels, looking straight ahead. It’s just the two of them down here, just them and a seemingly endless hallway, silence save for their breathing and the flipping of pages, the creaking of gurneys as they shift. “She’s the one who gets too involved.”
“She’s the one who ended it.”
“I thought you weren’t throwing down for this,” he points out, because Lexie’s not the only one with a good memory. The years have been unkind to him, made him colder and harder, but the occasional effectiveness of twisting people’s words is knowledge gained.
Her eyes burn into his skin, somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder. “I thought I wouldn’t have to.”
“I’m fine,” he says, with a degree of finality, and it fills him with relief when she lets the matter drop.
She still leaves Dr. Wyatt’s number taped to the cereal box the next morning, to show just how fine she thinks he is.
-
Most times, he runs at night because that’s the only free time he’s got and he can’t quite drag himself out of bed any earlier than he already has to for work.
It’s only ever truly dark out if he gets too far away from the streetlights, which practically never happens, and Alex may have a newfound fear of elevators but his confidence in his own abilities to deal with anything else he runs into is pretty far off the charts.
He got shot. He lived. He focuses on those things, on the facts, and powers on through the rest.
-
He isn’t there the day that Lexie moves out, bags packed and lined up downstairs the morning that he leaves.
They greet him by the door, that old gray sweater of hers draped over one of the hooks by the closet for the last time, and as he brushes past it to grab his own coat from the closet, he can still feel the weight of that book in his hands, Moby Dick and the things that it concealed. He has suspicions that her dress from the wedding is hidden in one of those bags, ripped seam and all. He hopes Mark asks; he doesn’t think she’ll have an answer for him.
He spends the better part of three days in Centralia with Arizona, a sick little girl, and her neurotic, overbearing parents who have seem to have a problem with the way they do their jobs. Twice he almost says things that would require apologies and early returns. He bites the inside of his cheek until sore becomes an understatement and always keeps things in his hands lest they curl into fists, but he makes it and Arizona looks almost proud of him when the little girl makes it out of surgery without complications and they’re getting ready to leave.
“You did good,” she says, warm smile that stretches to reveal perfect white teeth.
“I’m ready to go home,” he replies, and doesn’t even try for the same.
The words ring nothing but true, however. Centralia is practically the next town over from Chehalis and he’s spent his time here looking over his shoulder in anticipation of something other than a brandished gun.
He’d be happy to put as many miles as possible between himself and a trailer park and the woman who once lived there and might still.
-
Cristina goes to Joe’s with them for the first time in a long while after a particularly late shift that strips them all of the majority of their good judgment. Meredith plies her with tequila for a while, meeting her shot for shot, and when Cristina finally decides to be in charge of her own intake Meredith kind of forgets to watch her.
Or tell her to stop.
It’s Meredith and Alex up with her that night and even if it’s Meredith holding her hair back while she pukes, it’s still Alex who thinks to throw the blanket over her when she’s finally passed out on the couch, her head in Meredith’s lap.
He wakes up at four-thirty sprawled across the arm chair with a crick in his neck.
-
“She’s not happy,” Meredith says, at lunch, just the two of them and the chattering of three hundred of their closest friends.
“Who the fuck is?”
She grimaces; he makes no apologies. He never does.
-
Some guy in the pit develops a case of projectile vomiting and by the time that’s over him and Lexie are both covered in it. The smell isn’t something they can towel off and Bailey makes a face for all of two minutes before she’s finally had it and sends them both to the showers.
Of course he’s going to look.
“Alex,” she says, a too weak warning, and her chest flushes along with her cheeks. She struggles with the towel and even when it’s tied as tight as she can get it he can still see the tops of her breasts when she bends to grab her discarded scrubs.
“What?”
“I’m with Mark.”
“Are there cameras in here now?”
“There’s not…it’s just,” she stammers, “…just don’t do that.”
Alex shrugs, and if his eyes leave her carefully concealed body it’s due to the fact that rooting through his locker requires him to actually look. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“I know but still.” She slumps against her own locker rather than digging into it, her shoulders against cold metal and jutting locks. It strikes him as odd given her words until he gets that they have a little less to do with her own personal interests and more to do with those of others.
“So Sloan has jealousy issues.” He drops his towel as he talks, getting a kick out of the way she immediately averts her eyes and sends them everywhere but in his general vicinity. There’s a poster with the words be safe, use a condom that should fall right into her sightline when she finally settles on the wall and he has to bite back a laugh. “That’s what this is about.”
“No,” she protests, but they both know better than to believe her words. “He’s just - okay, yes, he wouldn’t like you looking. He would hate it. Happy?”
His smirk is firmly in place by the time she looks at him to check. By then he’s got his pants on; the rest is immaterial. He wonders what the hell she’s waiting for.
“Seriously, you can stop.”
“I’m not even looking.”
“I mean with the all-knowing smirk.”
“You’re right, I could.” The slam of his locker door is impressive and it causes her to flinch at the unexpected force. He’s not angry just restless, eagerly seeking a way to get under her skin for the sake of it. Because he doesn’t want to give her the time of day half of the time but he still does, and usually not in a tone that suggest she’s wasting his time like he does with ninety percent of the people he crosses paths with on a daily basis. Maybe she’s under his skin, just a little. Maybe reciprocity is only fair.
“But you won’t,” she finishes for him, her head lolling back against the doors, eyes closing for the briefest of seconds and she’s still standing there in that towel that doesn’t cover as much as she probably thinks. The sight makes his palms itch to slide along damp skin.
“But I won’t.”
And then he does, but only because he’s dipping his head to kiss her, hands avoiding arms and hips and skin all together, instead bracing against the lockers and trapping her body between them.
(She opens her mouth to him, lets a hand curl around to the nape of his neck and the press of his body against hers be the only thing holding that towel in place, because, momentarily, she forgets not to.
They’re both the same in that way; always forgetting to push the other away.)
-
They don’t talk about it.
(He kissed her, she reacted, and that was that. That was as far as it went, and a kiss is just a kiss between two former lovers when you consider all the places that it could’ve gone.
A kiss is a kiss and he’s a cheater - has a record and a reputation that he can’t quite shed - and perhaps she is too. In the eyes of those who matter in the scheme of things, she is. This is far from their worst.
“Maybe I would’ve hated it too,” he had said, and then he’d left with that stupid smirk on his face.)
Nothing changes.
He’s starting to believe that, between them, nothing ever will.
It’s almost comforting.
-
He almost gets run down crossing the street some time after ten-thirty at night as fall moves closer to winter.
Alex stops jogging long enough to yell “watch where you’re going” and goes on his merry way down the sidewalk until he hears a car door open.
“Dude, are you insane?” Jackson’s voice rings out loud and clear. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“No, it’s ten and you have headlights,” he shoots back but doesn’t go anywhere as the other man comes closer. It would be a pointless endeavor, not to mention an unnecessary one.
“What are you - are you running?” The street light illuminates Jackson’s face now and Alex can see quite clearly the face of one confused, slightly ticked off man. “Who runs this late at night?”
He gives the obvious answer, since Jackson seems set on asking stupid questions. “Me.”
“You want a ride back?”
“No.”
“You should really invest in reflective clothing.”
“You should really watch where you’re going. And learn to tell time.”
Jackson shakes his head.
“Nice swerve, by the way,” he adds, and then he’s off again without another word before Jackson can have second thoughts and try to get him to take him up on the offer of a ride home.
-
Lexie gets engaged and it’s three days before he finds out, from April of all people. Meredith spends the rest of that lunch break alternating between worried glances at Alex and sending disbelieving glares at April, like he can’t fucking see what she’s doing. He’d rather be told than coddled and he says as much when pressed - her hand on his arm and April’s nervous, too-wide eyes.
His exit strategy leads him to the tunnels. Leads him to Lexie, sitting Indian-style on a gurney with her palms upturned in her lap. Save for the open eyes, it looks like she could be meditating.
“Hey,” she says, and the sound echoes off of the walls.
Alex doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t stalk off down the hall in the face of the harsh reality everyone is trying to hide him from.
He doesn’t need to. He isn’t blinded by jealousy and he doesn’t wish it was him. His feelings towards her are of the sort that refuse to attach themselves to definitive emotions - not love but not exactly like, though certainly tethered to her by shared history and shared friends. He is losing nothing to that ring on her finger, except the possibility of something that never seemed to come together and refused to amount to anything other than sex and cutting words.
So he sits.
He occupies the exact same space on the exact same gurney that he always has, breathing in some of the only air in this hospital that doesn’t sting of disinfectant, and he just sits there with her, like it’s the easiest thing in the world - and it might be.
-
Once, he gets as far as the doorway of Dr. Wyatt’s office on a whim.
“Dr. Karev,” she says, his name at the ready, like she’s been expecting him. Her pen stops scribbling. “Can I help you?”
There’s something in the phrasing that makes his stomach twist, makes him suddenly eager to put distance himself and this office.
Help.
He doesn’t like the word; he likes less what it implies.
“No,” he says, after a moment, “I just…took a wrong turn.”
-
“Derek’s mother isn’t doing so well.”
He’s careful not to look up for more than a few seconds; her eyes fix on her hands, flat on the table in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
“They don’t know,” she says, and, “He said they’re doing some tests. He said he’s thinking of going to New York to see her.”
“Like a few days?”
“I don’t know.” Her appetite seems to have left her some time ago, her breakfast relatively untouched on her plate; it’s making him lose his own. “It depends on the results, I guess.”
“You going with him?”
“I don’t know.”
-
It’s a short engagement. Winter turns into spring and then there are invitations in the mail, gold lettering on ivory paper, and Alex rolls his eyes hard at how disgustingly traditional the whole thing feels.
“You know you’re invited too.”
“I don’t like weddings.”
“I got married on a post-it,” Meredith reminds him, “so it’s not like I do either. And they went to theirs.”
He laughs. It’s not particularly funny.
-
(Know this:
Mark Sloan loves Lexie Grey, wholeheartedly, and quite probably will continue to do so for the rest of his life. His love for her is the kind of material that fairytales are made of.
But fairytales fade to black after the first kiss wakes the sleeping princess and the moral of the story - true love conquers all - is discovered. Life doesn’t, so it’s also important to add this: Mark doesn’t understand Lexie.
He doesn’t understand yet that she’s different from most of the women before her who have tried to change him. The ones who wanted him to settle down, who wanted weddings and kids and promises of forever. He didn’t want any of that until now, now when it was a good time and there was a good woman who he could want all these things with. He hadn’t wanted them and now he did, and that was supposed to make him perfect. That was supposed to be the last puzzle piece sliding into place, making everything run smoothly where it hadn’t before.
Except Lexie is twenty-five and doesn’t want any of those things right now. She wants a career. She wants to be loved, sure, but she also wants a life and friends and that moment in her career where she stops just being ‘the other Grey’ and starts being Lexie Grey, kickass surgeon, and she knows she can have that, given time and that little extra effort that she’s willing to put forth to be the best. But he doesn’t understand that because he has all of those things. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be just starting. He doesn’t understand that she needs herself more than she needs anyone else, that she needs to figure out herself before she can handle a relationship that involves paperwork and planning, and the sort of upkeep and maintenance that things like that require.
She’s halfway to thirty and she doesn’t know who she’ll be in six months let alone five years - the shooting proved that, if nothing else, that everything can change in a twelve hour span of time and that it’s possible to go to bed and no longer be the same person you were when you woke up that morning - and he just doesn’t get that the old cliché really can ring true: it’s not him, it’s her.
She says her vows anyways and hopes for the best. They call this settling, in the absence of brighter prospects.)
-
“He was always the better guy,” he whispers, at the wedding, her skin cold underneath his fingertips, that little shiver she gives running straight into his body.
Alex kisses her cheek.
(She forgets to believe him.)
-
Meredith leaves a month later.
He doesn’t know the details and neither does she, but where Derek goes so does she when he’s talking a few weeks instead of a few days. The other man looks tired, worse than he has since the shooting, and Alex lives with him so he has to express at least a modicum of concern. Not that he vocalizes it but it’s there.
“Okay, the bills are paid up. I have keys, Derek has keys, Cristina has keys - don’t be surprised if she drops by, even though it’s just you here because there’s…there’s things going on, I think, even if she says everything’s fine - and you have keys. Are you going to be all right by yourself?”
He raises an eyebrow. “You’re aware I’m not your kid brother right? You don’t have to tell me to keep all the doors locked and don’t talk to strangers.”
A smile stretches thin but her eyes light up at least. “Don’t burn down the house.”
At the door, she throws her arms around his neck, her body colliding with his and knocking him a step back. Slowly, his arms wrap around her, the movement foreign. They’ve known each other for longer than he likes to think about but they’ve never been the hugging type.
“I’ll be back soon,” she says, her warm breath against his neck, but from the way she holds on he can tell otherwise. He nods.
-
He isn’t alone for very long.
Meredith’s only been gone for three days before Jackson’s inquiring about the availability of the other bedroom.
“Why?”
“I think the better question is why not.”
He’s been through three different hallways and has yet to lose the other man, through small talk and fucking bullshit about the damn weather that’s only just now, as he approaches the nurse’s station to grab the chart he needs, led to this. “It’s not my house.”
“I sort of talked to Meredith about it.”
“Then why are you talking to me?” Chart in hand, he bypasses the elevator bay and starts towards the stairs. Jackson doesn’t anticipate this and it throws him off for exactly two seconds before their steps are back in sync. “I pay rent just like,” he stops himself, mentally, to think on that one, “nobody else.”
“She said there was a spare room and it was fine with her if it was fine with you.” He keeps pace with him on the stairs too. “So?”
“So don’t touch my cereal and buy your own beer and we’ll be fine.”
-
There are stretches of two or three days where he doesn’t see Lexie at all. Lunch breaks don’t sync up, the group aspect of their relationship falling to the wayside in Meredith’s absence, and so it’s hospital gossip that keeps him informed more often than not.
He’s heard they’re fighting. Spring transitions into summer and the temperatures rise ten degrees higher than average. Heat makes people more volatile. So go the conversations of the random doctor or nurse in the cafeteria, or outside the lounge.
Meredith calls every few days to tell him nothing of note and hear nothing of note other than i’m still here, which he’s long since figured out is the entire reason she calls. He tells her about Jackson and she laughs. He tells her Cristina’s been quiet and there is silence on the other end, but she knows this already.
“I’m glad you’re not alone,” she says, over the sound of running water in the background.
“Cut the sentimental crap, will you. What are they doing to you over there?” His tone is light, disguises the fact that it’s honest.
“Nothing,” she says, and means the exact opposite. “I’ll be back soon.”
And then it’s been a month and it’s still just him and Jackson in a too-big house.
-
He gets home later than usual, has to stop to buy groceries when he gets off at nine - it’s the bane of his existence but he doesn’t trust Jackson to do certain things yet - and doesn’t even get all the way up the stairs before Jackson’s opening the door and closing it behind him, a strange amount of worry in his expression.
“She’s in there,” he says, and then looks at Alex like he can take it from there.
“Which she?”
“Cristina.”
Alex stops screwing with the bags in his arms at that. “Why?”
“I don’t know. She’s not really…she’s not talking and I figured you’ve known her for longer so - ”
“You’d rather dump her off on me?” He asks, nails it in one, like he knew he would, and adds, “What the fuck makes you think I’m good at dealing with other people’s problems?”
“I don’t think she’s really other people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You and her are kind of alike.” Jackson fumbles in his pocket for something and ends up producing car keys. “Anyways, we’re out of beer.”
“Of course we are.”
-
Cristina is on the couch, confined to one side of it with her feet flat on the floor and her head bowed. She doesn’t look up when he walks in, nor when he sits down on the armchair, mirroring her position.
Neither of them says a word for the longest time. He doesn’t know how to ask what’s wrong, doesn’t know the protocol for these things, he just knows that there is something wrong that has her here and, through sheer lack of options, it sort of falls on his shoulders to deal with it. Not for the first time he wishes Meredith was here.
“I left him,” she tells him, finally. The sound is harsh against his ears, cutting through the silence. She turns her hands over, bare ring finger, and stares. He doesn’t reach out to grab hold of them, instead presses his palms against his own denim-covered thighs, firm pressure as he contemplates just what he is going to do. Other than possibly change the locks.
“Good riddance,” he says, because he imagines that’s what one is supposed to say. Commiseration.
“Yeah,” she replies, hollowly, folds and unfolds her hands.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.” He hasn’t seen her all day either, so for all he knows she’s been here for hours. Who knows when Jackson got home and found her.
“You want me to call Mer?”
“No.”
So he does the one thing he knows she would do. He grabs the bottle of tequila, a few glasses, and just pours.
-
Jackson’s back in an hour and if there is beer, he doesn’t see it come into the house. He does slink into the kitchen and then back out again but that probably has something to do with the mix of shock and concern that furrows his brow and lets his mouth hang open, just subtle enough not to be comical.
Cristina regained the ability to string more than three words together a few drinks ago, her personality returning shortly thereafter. If anything, Alex had felt relief. If tequila didn’t work, his next step was to convince Meredith to fly back home immediately - which wasn’t likely.
“Everything okay?”
“Where’s the beer, asshole?” She asks, not missing a beat, and Alex has to hide a laugh of his own behind the rim of his glass.
“Wow,” Jackson replies. “What have you guys been drinking?”
“A lot,” he says, watching as Cristina holds the bottle up for effect. It’s mostly a lie; he’s had about half as much as she has, on purpose, because he remembers last time and, somehow, he has to be the adult here.
Jackson moves for the bottle; Cristina moves it away, setting it on the coffee table between her and Alex. “No alcohol for you.”
If the other man thought he was going to get any help from Alex, he was wrong. “You bailed, dude.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Do we look like we’re laughing?” Which, of course, is when Cristina does start to laugh, apparently amused by the look of disbelief on Jackson’s face. He levels her with a glare. “Helpful.” Then, to Jackson. “Do I look like I’m laughing?”
“You going to fight me over it?”
“I’ll win.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I was a wrestler.”
“Past tense.”
“Fuck you.”
He lets him drink anyway. And that’s how Cristina moves in, unofficially.
-
Meredith’s voice is shrill, coming through loud and clear at five o’clock in the morning local time when he calls her. He’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes, trying to master the complicated task of making coffee while juggling the phone and trying to hold a coherent conversation, all the while still only half-awake. Jackson’s in the shower and Cristina, as far as he knows, is still passed out in Meredith and Derek’s bed, since it wasn’t like that varied from her usual routine.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“It was like midnight for you,” he defends, before he realizes that’s what he’s doing. “And why the hell are you mad at me? I’m not the one she left.”
“I’m her best friend, Alex.”
“And you were going to hop on a plane as soon as you heard?”
She’s silent for a moment, proving the point that he’d already established the night before. Not likely. “No. Still.”
“She’s fine. Right now, she’s fine.” He pauses, to fumble with the buttons until he hears the machine gurgle to life. Feeling just about as productive as he can at five in the morning, he leans back against the counter. “Are you?”
“I’m coming back in a week.”
“Yeah, you say that and - ”
“Alex.”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I know.”
-
Two days later, he digs up the number Meredith left and makes an appointment with Dr. Wyatt.
And keeps it.
-
(When asked, some time later, why?, he’ll shrug carelessly, say, “It was either that or the pit.” It’s a sentiment easily understood and, as such, hard to dispute.
In truth, it was because it was mid-May, a full year after hot lead was shot into his body, Cristina had broken down in tears in the kitchen that morning, he hadn’t seen Meredith in well over a month, Jackson was driving him crazy, and he pushed Lexie out of sight in an attempt to keep her out of mind as well - there was no one to prop him up anymore. There was no one to look to for a sign that it would all work itself out.
“I can’t say I’m not surprised to see you here.” Dr. Wyatt observes, thick file laying open across her lap that must be Perkins’ leftovers. He’s proved right when she adds, “You weren’t a very receptive patient last year.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he says, clarifies, “they told me where to go. Didn’t mean I wanted to be there.”
She crosses her legs, looks at him dead-on. “You like control, Alex?”
“Do I seem like a control freak?”
“You don’t seem like anything. It’s a simple question.”
“No,” he replies, the simple answer, and it’s true, he must not.
He hasn’t felt like he has control of anything in some time. It’s only now that he’s making use of all of his options.)
-
Derek’s mother dies.
He knows because Mark flies out for the funeral and the Chief wants to know how long they’re going to be short two attendings, much less two department heads. He knows because Meredith doesn’t answer her phone and he leaves three voicemails over the span of a few breaks.
Lexie’s the only one who finds him at lunch that day.
“Mark and I are taking a break,” she says, in between bites of salad.
He’s careful to keep his expression devoid of emotion, not to let his eyes linger on her too long. “Sorry,” he offers.
She sighs. “No, you’re not. But thanks.”
Maybe she’s right, maybe he isn’t all that sorry that they didn’t work out but he’s not exactly dancing through the halls about it either. It doesn’t mean anything to him one way or another. She’s there or she’s not, married or divorced, but he tries not to miss her, as a rule, because he can’t afford to.
She keeps him company at the bar that night, while he delays going home for as long as he can.
-
A few reporters swarm the premises of the hospital for a day or two, getting material for some one year retrospective on the ‘tragedy at Seattle Grace’, as they’re once again billing it. Once someone pins him down as one of the injured survivors, he’s got microphones stuck in his face every time he thinks about going outside for some fresh air.
It’s a shame; the sun is high in the sky. There’s no rain in the forecast for the next week, not the meteorologists really know shit.
They never do get anything out of him, after he almost growls at the lady who has just a few questions, if you’re not busy. Like his job is something cushy that keeps him behind a desk from nine to five. Cristina gets cornered too, only he gets to watch her fend for herself, spouting off about actually having to go save someone’s life, you know, something that actually matters, if they don’t have a problem with that. He smirks. Jackson catches him doing so; the smirk turns into a glare and the other man just laughs it off.
-
Lexie catches him in the hallway that night, nearly eleven o’clock with the reporters gone and her bag slung over one shoulder. Against his better judgment, when she asks him to wait up, he does, holding still just long enough for her to catch up and then fall into sync with him.
“I’m moving out,” she says, like they’re old friends and they always walk out like this. And maybe that’s what they are, old friends who couldn’t ever get it together and won’t now that so much time has passed and all that damage has been done. “In a week.”
“Thought it was just a break.”
“Well, it is but we’re not - we’re not trying to fix it.” She runs a nervous hand through her hair, grown out some in the past few months. “We don’t want the same things.”
He could’ve told her that. Then again, from the confident way that she says it, from the apprehension that seemed settled into her bones when he watched her walk down that aisle, he figures she probably did too. “Well, there’s always the attic. You slept up there before. Or you could just fight Jackson for the room - in fact, I encourage that.”
She laughs. “Isn’t that going to be a little crowded? When Meredith and Derek get back?”
“We don’t have people sleeping on the living room floor.”
“Yet,” she corrects.
“Right. So, no.”
“Alright. You headed there right now?”
“Yeah.” He chances a glance at her, finds her lip caught between her teeth. “Why?”
“Do you mind if I move some of my stuff up there tonight? Not all of it, it’s just there’s a lot and I kind of want to be out of there when Mark gets back, which - well, I’m not sure when he’s going to be back.”
Alex shrugs. “Whatever. It’s fine.”
His phone beeps at him then, one new voicemail, a missed call he hadn’t even heard come up, and he pauses long enough to scroll through and take note of the caller ID. Meredith. He looks up and Lexie’s holding the door of the elevator open for him. “You coming?”
For the longest moment he doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to get in that metal box, isn’t sure he wants to do it with that particular woman either. But she’s looking at him like everything’s fine and people don’t really look at him like that anymore. Like they’re okay. Like he’s okay.
He pockets the phone and steps on, unsteady on his feet as the doors close and it begins its descent.
But he’s on his feet.
-
fin.