[grey's] fic | Don't Lie Shaking In The Early Morning Frost (Alex/Addison/Meredith)
Title: Don’t Lie Shaking In The Early Morning Frost (2/2)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Addison/Meredith
Word Count: 2300 (5200 total)
Rating: R (TRIGGER WARNING: brief but graphic mention of past miscarriage)
♥: for flipflop_diva
Summary: A smutty, angsty post season 6 AU. Ask them later, how it happened, and Meredith will give you some half-empty answer about too-expensive tequila and rusted blood stains.
(Part 1) |
Meredith looks at him sideways and barely swallows her incredulous disbelief when he first hints at it. He shrugs and smirks and tells her not to pretend she’s never wanted to fuck a surfer boy.
She retaliates fiercely. Spits past triumphs into the air between them, a challenge of sorts.
He thinks she’s probably lying but history tells him that’s not necessarily the case.
He doesn’t bother to ask for clarification. Figures, the less he knows the better these days.
Addison offers to put blonde tips in his hair, laughs breathlessly and wonders out loud whether he even owns a pair of board shorts.
He stares back at her blankly and realises this may not have been his most cleverly thought through plan.
Meredith helpfully suggests he go naked, and he takes her words as an invite to lay her across the kitchen counter and make her scream his name into her own balled fists while Addison watches on, piece of toast hanging lazily from two fingers as she forgets, momentarily, how to chew.
The boys in the band are more helpful. Offer him suggestions that are only half tongue in cheek and appear genuinely concerned for his safety.
You do, like, know how to swim, right?
They know which side their bread is buttered on.
He tells them to fuck off nonetheless.
Plucks idly at the strings of his guitar and refuses to speak for the remainder of the rehearsal time they’ve been allocated.
Mark Sloan arrives on their doorstep early one afternoon. Which is about seventeen different levels of fucked up. He watches Addison as she moves through the house and he can’t help but feel kind of sorry for the guy.
After all, he did save his life. Once upon a time.
But they don’t talk about those days. Figments of imaginations that try so very hard to forget. He thinks, absently, that it’s quite possible Mark lost even more than he did that day… Dried blood that settles into patterns he can’t quite bring himself to look at.
It’s well past midnight when he decides sixteen is definitely too many tangled limbs to keep track of. Stronger hands than he’s used to tugging insistently at his hips and the panic riddled ghost of familiar fingers, feather light over faded scar tissue.
He stiffens under the touch. Both literally and figuratively, until Meredith erases all the tension in the only way she knows how. Her tongue across his teeth and the length of her curved spine arched high above him.
Addison apologises later. He shrugs and feigns a nonchalance he hasn’t felt in decades.
Feels something shift in their dynamic that sends him reeling. Out of control.
And in free fall.
The surf is stronger than he expected. Froths at his calves and drags him forward insistently before shoving him backwards towards the shore again.
The push and pull feels achingly familiar.
He forgoes lessons, and simply watches instead. How to duck under the on-coming waves in time to avoid having your face smashed with acrid salt water. How to lay across the board and paddle. How to stand up.
How to stay up.
How not to get swallowed whole by the pounding blue-black ocean.
The swirls of heavy cumulonimbus clouds overhead are ominous. A dare of sorts.
The dislocated shoulder says he loses in the end.
Can’t even bring himself to be surprised.
He’s on the deck sulking when they come home. Right arm strapped to his chest in a make-shift sling. Humming along roughly on a combination of pain killers and beer.
They fail to note his presence at first. Wind whips sand against the side of his face, stinging, as they press one another up against the glass of the French doors. He smirks his lips into a knowing grin; already more than familiar with what it is that comes next.
Uses the cover of early darkness to hide the silhouette of him playing along to their well-rehearsed show. Comes into his fist at the same moment Addison’s eyes blink open. Her teeth fiddling expertly at the skin below Meredith’s left ear.
She grins. Cocks her head a little to the side.
He shrugs. As though the whole tableau is nothing more than a typical Tuesday night.
His shoulder takes longer to heal than it probably should. Meredith bullies him into having scans that only serve to tell him what he already knows.
She teases him incessantly about his attempts at sporting glory but the tone of her words is less patronising than it once might have been.
Age has mellowed them both, no matter how vehemently they may try to deny it.
Addison busies herself scouting out orthopaedic surgeons while he protests the need to be sliced open at all. It is a fight he can’t possibly win and she kisses him softly, trails her lips across his chin and over the offending joint.
Whispered I’m sorrys skim the surface of his skin. Like maybe she thinks it’s all her fault. His stupidity. His pathetic need to prove himself, even when he’s the only one who gives a damn.
He longs to tell her that it doesn’t matter. That he’s the one that is sorry. But the words thicken and then die on his tongue.
Lost forever in a single exhale.
They come to him together, but it is Addison who speaks.
He swallows her words, thick and choking, and wonders how fast he can run from whatever it is that comes next.
Meredith’s fingers twist into the hem of his t-shirt. He watches them work insistently at the fabric so that he doesn’t have to watch her.
Again, it is Addison who speaks. And later he’ll wonder whether the whole thing had been choreographed from the start.
She spills words, whole sentences, paragraphs and entire novels, about babies and futures and a thousand other fantasies he’d long ago forbidden himself from imagining.
Meredith’s fingers stop their fiddling. There’s polish on her nails that he doesn’t think he’s ever noticed before and it seems almost counterintuitive for a surgeon to lacquer the parts of herself that she plunges into body cavities. Even if the shade is the palest pink he’s ever seen.
Addison keeps speaking. At least, he figures that she does. A sound vibrates through his rib-cage.
Hollow.
He thinks about Amber and how her tiny, tiny fingers used to curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it had any right to be. Like maybe she’d already figured out how hard she’d have to hold on to keep him around.
He thinks about all the myriad ways in which he failed her.
They wait until Addison floats out of the house on her too high heels before they so much as even glance at each other.
Meredith shrugs. The fear etched, spider web-like, across her face, a complete mirror image of his own.
He’s fairly certain Addison doesn’t know about attempt number one for Meredith to have a child. One more broken down story that never quite made it to vocalised. After all:
Oh, and by the way…
She blinks and he thumbs away the tear that forms. Kisses her as gently as he’s ever managed to kiss anyone because the only words he can come up with right now are not words she needs to hear.
“Alex.”
His name. There’s no question this time. No plea. Just his name on her lips. A statement of fact.
The sweetest sound of all.
He pulls her towards him, wraps his body around hers as she folds into him completely. He buries his face in the soft curls that scatter across the pillow beneath them and sings a lullaby, the only one he’s ever know, into the nape of her neck.
Addison says she understands. His apprehension. Their apprehension.
He doesn’t think she does. Not really.
How can she possibly, after all?
But that is no more her fault than his dislocated shoulder was. Different scars to represent the same thing. He takes her out for breakfast and tries his best to explain. Figures it is the absolute least that she deserves.
Stutters over words like Izzie and Oh and I can’t begin to fathom how I’ll ever make a decent parent…
She smiles and locks her ankles with his under the table. Waits until he’s finished, breathless, before she speaks. Accuses him gently, impossibly careful and right up on the points of her tip toes, of not getting it.
Any of it.
And he thinks that maybe it is her who doesn’t understand him then, because no, he probably doesn’t.
He very rarely does.
But she explains it, cotton soft. Runs her finger around the base of his thumb, lazy, looping circles he might just drown in. Gifts him words that he clings to, that it’s not just him. That it’s not just Meredith.
That they are not alone.
That it is them. Us. We.
We are in this together…
He nods dumbly. Let’s her promises lay loose on the table top between them.
They go to OB appointments as a group. The three of them. And it’s LA so no one so much as bats an eyelid at the implied arrangement.
Meredith makes jokes about her hostile uterus and how it must have made an exception for his no doubt equally hostile sperm, as the doctor nods and smiles and pretends like she might just understand all the words between them that remain unspoken.
Addison buzzes incessantly. A high frequency hum that sets his teeth on edge.
He drags her into cold shower after cold shower after cold shower. Sucks a nipple between his teeth as he hoists her hips high above his. A desperate attempt to keep her at a level that prevents Meredith from screeching for her to leave.
Or that it’s not her baby.
Or other unspeakable horrors he knows reach the tip of her tongue every now and then.
She is scared. Terrified. And he gets that.
Addison, he remains convinced, does not. She has far from crappy genes, after all.
He catches Meredith with her keys in her hand more than once. Freezes to stone every damn time. Holds her wrist with one hand while he dials Addison’s cell with the other.
Utterly convinced she’ll up and leave if he lets her go.
He feels like he’s the only thing keeping the three of them together. And the three of them together is the only thing he knows these days.
She cries. Screams. Rakes her fingernails down his chest like a brand and vows she’ll never speak to him again if he doesn’t let her go.
He refuses to listen because he knows her well enough to know that she doesn’t mean it.
That she might even mean the polar opposite. And so he holds her tight, too tight.
And gives her an out.
Stay for me? Please?
On the days when the hormones aren’t raging their not so silent war, they walk along the beach with their toes in the winter chilled Pacific Ocean. Tucked tight into coats better suited to the Seattle snow as they bemoan the passing of summer.
The aching cold reminds him of Iowa and elevators. Of dead babies that leak down thighs and gun shots that echo through emptied out skulls.
Eyes that don’t blink and wives that smile and laugh and promise you the world, right before they die in your arms.
And even though they do come back, sometimes, it is only to tear you to shreds all over again.
He vows to never be that cold again.
He plays gigs in packed out bars full of people that come more for the booze than for him and the boys. He is not stupid enough to believe anything else could be the truth.
But they cheer and whistle and stamp their feet, while girls younger than Amber grind against each other on the dance floor. Their eyes on him the whole time.
He borrows lyrics and makes them is own; made it fourteen city blocks without breathing… and it’s silent as I sink into the sea… and sifting through the rubble for the wrong things…
Does his level best not to lost his shit right there on the stage. Bright lights and the phantom smell of cigarette smoke that never really leached out of the walls all those months and years ago.
He’s going to be a dad.
The revelation is blinding.
There are too many ghosts that hang in the empty spaces.
He refuses to let them name their son after any one of them.
Figures he might not be able to give the kid much, that the least he can offer is the chance to live his own life free from the shadow of someone he’s never met.
That he never will meet.
In the end he arrives a week early and almost ridiculously healthy. As though set to spite them from the start.
Tiny, tiny fingers curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it has any right to be. Like maybe his son’s already figured out how hard he’ll have to hold on to keep him around.
Pleads with a vehemence that is shocking, for things to be different this time ‘round.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Addison/Meredith
Word Count: 2300 (5200 total)
Rating: R (TRIGGER WARNING: brief but graphic mention of past miscarriage)
♥: for flipflop_diva
Summary: A smutty, angsty post season 6 AU. Ask them later, how it happened, and Meredith will give you some half-empty answer about too-expensive tequila and rusted blood stains.
(Part 1) |
Meredith looks at him sideways and barely swallows her incredulous disbelief when he first hints at it. He shrugs and smirks and tells her not to pretend she’s never wanted to fuck a surfer boy.
She retaliates fiercely. Spits past triumphs into the air between them, a challenge of sorts.
He thinks she’s probably lying but history tells him that’s not necessarily the case.
He doesn’t bother to ask for clarification. Figures, the less he knows the better these days.
Addison offers to put blonde tips in his hair, laughs breathlessly and wonders out loud whether he even owns a pair of board shorts.
He stares back at her blankly and realises this may not have been his most cleverly thought through plan.
Meredith helpfully suggests he go naked, and he takes her words as an invite to lay her across the kitchen counter and make her scream his name into her own balled fists while Addison watches on, piece of toast hanging lazily from two fingers as she forgets, momentarily, how to chew.
The boys in the band are more helpful. Offer him suggestions that are only half tongue in cheek and appear genuinely concerned for his safety.
You do, like, know how to swim, right?
They know which side their bread is buttered on.
He tells them to fuck off nonetheless.
Plucks idly at the strings of his guitar and refuses to speak for the remainder of the rehearsal time they’ve been allocated.
Mark Sloan arrives on their doorstep early one afternoon. Which is about seventeen different levels of fucked up. He watches Addison as she moves through the house and he can’t help but feel kind of sorry for the guy.
After all, he did save his life. Once upon a time.
But they don’t talk about those days. Figments of imaginations that try so very hard to forget. He thinks, absently, that it’s quite possible Mark lost even more than he did that day… Dried blood that settles into patterns he can’t quite bring himself to look at.
It’s well past midnight when he decides sixteen is definitely too many tangled limbs to keep track of. Stronger hands than he’s used to tugging insistently at his hips and the panic riddled ghost of familiar fingers, feather light over faded scar tissue.
He stiffens under the touch. Both literally and figuratively, until Meredith erases all the tension in the only way she knows how. Her tongue across his teeth and the length of her curved spine arched high above him.
Addison apologises later. He shrugs and feigns a nonchalance he hasn’t felt in decades.
Feels something shift in their dynamic that sends him reeling. Out of control.
And in free fall.
The surf is stronger than he expected. Froths at his calves and drags him forward insistently before shoving him backwards towards the shore again.
The push and pull feels achingly familiar.
He forgoes lessons, and simply watches instead. How to duck under the on-coming waves in time to avoid having your face smashed with acrid salt water. How to lay across the board and paddle. How to stand up.
How to stay up.
How not to get swallowed whole by the pounding blue-black ocean.
The swirls of heavy cumulonimbus clouds overhead are ominous. A dare of sorts.
The dislocated shoulder says he loses in the end.
Can’t even bring himself to be surprised.
He’s on the deck sulking when they come home. Right arm strapped to his chest in a make-shift sling. Humming along roughly on a combination of pain killers and beer.
They fail to note his presence at first. Wind whips sand against the side of his face, stinging, as they press one another up against the glass of the French doors. He smirks his lips into a knowing grin; already more than familiar with what it is that comes next.
Uses the cover of early darkness to hide the silhouette of him playing along to their well-rehearsed show. Comes into his fist at the same moment Addison’s eyes blink open. Her teeth fiddling expertly at the skin below Meredith’s left ear.
She grins. Cocks her head a little to the side.
He shrugs. As though the whole tableau is nothing more than a typical Tuesday night.
His shoulder takes longer to heal than it probably should. Meredith bullies him into having scans that only serve to tell him what he already knows.
She teases him incessantly about his attempts at sporting glory but the tone of her words is less patronising than it once might have been.
Age has mellowed them both, no matter how vehemently they may try to deny it.
Addison busies herself scouting out orthopaedic surgeons while he protests the need to be sliced open at all. It is a fight he can’t possibly win and she kisses him softly, trails her lips across his chin and over the offending joint.
Whispered I’m sorrys skim the surface of his skin. Like maybe she thinks it’s all her fault. His stupidity. His pathetic need to prove himself, even when he’s the only one who gives a damn.
He longs to tell her that it doesn’t matter. That he’s the one that is sorry. But the words thicken and then die on his tongue.
Lost forever in a single exhale.
They come to him together, but it is Addison who speaks.
He swallows her words, thick and choking, and wonders how fast he can run from whatever it is that comes next.
Meredith’s fingers twist into the hem of his t-shirt. He watches them work insistently at the fabric so that he doesn’t have to watch her.
Again, it is Addison who speaks. And later he’ll wonder whether the whole thing had been choreographed from the start.
She spills words, whole sentences, paragraphs and entire novels, about babies and futures and a thousand other fantasies he’d long ago forbidden himself from imagining.
Meredith’s fingers stop their fiddling. There’s polish on her nails that he doesn’t think he’s ever noticed before and it seems almost counterintuitive for a surgeon to lacquer the parts of herself that she plunges into body cavities. Even if the shade is the palest pink he’s ever seen.
Addison keeps speaking. At least, he figures that she does. A sound vibrates through his rib-cage.
Hollow.
He thinks about Amber and how her tiny, tiny fingers used to curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it had any right to be. Like maybe she’d already figured out how hard she’d have to hold on to keep him around.
He thinks about all the myriad ways in which he failed her.
They wait until Addison floats out of the house on her too high heels before they so much as even glance at each other.
Meredith shrugs. The fear etched, spider web-like, across her face, a complete mirror image of his own.
He’s fairly certain Addison doesn’t know about attempt number one for Meredith to have a child. One more broken down story that never quite made it to vocalised. After all:
Oh, and by the way…
She blinks and he thumbs away the tear that forms. Kisses her as gently as he’s ever managed to kiss anyone because the only words he can come up with right now are not words she needs to hear.
“Alex.”
His name. There’s no question this time. No plea. Just his name on her lips. A statement of fact.
The sweetest sound of all.
He pulls her towards him, wraps his body around hers as she folds into him completely. He buries his face in the soft curls that scatter across the pillow beneath them and sings a lullaby, the only one he’s ever know, into the nape of her neck.
Addison says she understands. His apprehension. Their apprehension.
He doesn’t think she does. Not really.
How can she possibly, after all?
But that is no more her fault than his dislocated shoulder was. Different scars to represent the same thing. He takes her out for breakfast and tries his best to explain. Figures it is the absolute least that she deserves.
Stutters over words like Izzie and Oh and I can’t begin to fathom how I’ll ever make a decent parent…
She smiles and locks her ankles with his under the table. Waits until he’s finished, breathless, before she speaks. Accuses him gently, impossibly careful and right up on the points of her tip toes, of not getting it.
Any of it.
And he thinks that maybe it is her who doesn’t understand him then, because no, he probably doesn’t.
He very rarely does.
But she explains it, cotton soft. Runs her finger around the base of his thumb, lazy, looping circles he might just drown in. Gifts him words that he clings to, that it’s not just him. That it’s not just Meredith.
That they are not alone.
That it is them. Us. We.
We are in this together…
He nods dumbly. Let’s her promises lay loose on the table top between them.
They go to OB appointments as a group. The three of them. And it’s LA so no one so much as bats an eyelid at the implied arrangement.
Meredith makes jokes about her hostile uterus and how it must have made an exception for his no doubt equally hostile sperm, as the doctor nods and smiles and pretends like she might just understand all the words between them that remain unspoken.
Addison buzzes incessantly. A high frequency hum that sets his teeth on edge.
He drags her into cold shower after cold shower after cold shower. Sucks a nipple between his teeth as he hoists her hips high above his. A desperate attempt to keep her at a level that prevents Meredith from screeching for her to leave.
Or that it’s not her baby.
Or other unspeakable horrors he knows reach the tip of her tongue every now and then.
She is scared. Terrified. And he gets that.
Addison, he remains convinced, does not. She has far from crappy genes, after all.
He catches Meredith with her keys in her hand more than once. Freezes to stone every damn time. Holds her wrist with one hand while he dials Addison’s cell with the other.
Utterly convinced she’ll up and leave if he lets her go.
He feels like he’s the only thing keeping the three of them together. And the three of them together is the only thing he knows these days.
She cries. Screams. Rakes her fingernails down his chest like a brand and vows she’ll never speak to him again if he doesn’t let her go.
He refuses to listen because he knows her well enough to know that she doesn’t mean it.
That she might even mean the polar opposite. And so he holds her tight, too tight.
And gives her an out.
Stay for me? Please?
On the days when the hormones aren’t raging their not so silent war, they walk along the beach with their toes in the winter chilled Pacific Ocean. Tucked tight into coats better suited to the Seattle snow as they bemoan the passing of summer.
The aching cold reminds him of Iowa and elevators. Of dead babies that leak down thighs and gun shots that echo through emptied out skulls.
Eyes that don’t blink and wives that smile and laugh and promise you the world, right before they die in your arms.
And even though they do come back, sometimes, it is only to tear you to shreds all over again.
He vows to never be that cold again.
He plays gigs in packed out bars full of people that come more for the booze than for him and the boys. He is not stupid enough to believe anything else could be the truth.
But they cheer and whistle and stamp their feet, while girls younger than Amber grind against each other on the dance floor. Their eyes on him the whole time.
He borrows lyrics and makes them is own; made it fourteen city blocks without breathing… and it’s silent as I sink into the sea… and sifting through the rubble for the wrong things…
Does his level best not to lost his shit right there on the stage. Bright lights and the phantom smell of cigarette smoke that never really leached out of the walls all those months and years ago.
He’s going to be a dad.
The revelation is blinding.
There are too many ghosts that hang in the empty spaces.
He refuses to let them name their son after any one of them.
Figures he might not be able to give the kid much, that the least he can offer is the chance to live his own life free from the shadow of someone he’s never met.
That he never will meet.
In the end he arrives a week early and almost ridiculously healthy. As though set to spite them from the start.
Tiny, tiny fingers curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it has any right to be. Like maybe his son’s already figured out how hard he’ll have to hold on to keep him around.
Pleads with a vehemence that is shocking, for things to be different this time ‘round.