fic: the sound of your sorrow comes... (April +Alex)
Title: The sound of your sorrow comes...
Characters/Pairing: April + Alex (Reed, Jackson, Meredith and Lexie)
Word Count: 5000
Rating: PG
Challenge: Big Bang for team_enfuego at shonda_land
Prompt: From summys_lj, the challenge was to use my recent April drabble as inspiration for a full fic where April and Alex become friends.
Summary: An attempt at an unravelling... April in the aftermath of the season six finale and how she develops reluctant friendships with both Alex and Meredith.
Author's Note: Title and cut text from “Paper Shoes” by Incubus.
She starts working on a speech as she sits by his bedside. Curled in a ball and pressed solidly into the curves of a plastic chair that she's beginning to think was specifically designed for maximum discomfort.
A machine breathes for him.
She's not sure if that fact makes it harder or easier for her to be here.
She dares herself to touch him, traces mindless patterns on the back of his hand with the lightest touch of her longest fingernail.
Launches back into her seat as his thumb twitches, an unconscious movement that she convinces herself to be a blatant back off.
The first draft of her monologue fizzles to a whimper on her lips and she backs out of the room with clumsy feet and held breath. Collides solidly with the chest of someone much taller than her, Dr. Sloan, stumbles momentarily, hands over head, defensive, automatic.
His eyes go wide, like maybe she's about to freak out and, if she's honest with herself, she probably is. He wraps fingers around the circumference of her left wrist, tugs gently 'til it's no longer covering her face and opens his mouth. Speaks words that she can't quite decipher.
She nods. Sends a silent prayer to whomever is listening that it's the correct response, lowers her mascara clumped lashes to the tangle of hastily tied laces at her feet and retreats cautiously. Overly aware of her every wobble and spin as she fights to regain some modicum of self control and dignity.
--
She heads for the benches that line the entrance of the third hospital she's come to know in the space of several months. Mercy West, Seattle Grace, Seattle Presbyterian. Wonders how long it will be 'til she manages to claim a full set. She huddles into her sweater despite the white, bright sunshine, tugs at sleeves that are too short and a waistband that is stretched to taught. It's not hers. It was never hers. But it's the closest thing to her best friend she has left and so she wears it nonetheless. Refuses to think about washing it lest the faint echo of perfume and laughter leach from the worn fabric.
Reed's mom has been in contact several times since the police knocked on her door and delivered news no mother should ever have to hear. The voicemail messages, for she always lets voicemail do her dirty work these days, are rambling and long. Wrought with tears and a seething kind of pleading for April to conjure magic she can't even comprehend let alone ever hope to achieve.
It's only been twenty seven hours.
It feels like a lifetime.
And she knows only too well that, for some, it is.
The rough path under the soles of her shoes is cracked and crumbling in patches. She scuffs her toe at a speck of green fighting its way to opportunistic life between shards of concrete that are shifting apart. Doesn't notice the tears until a blossom of damp, dark blue spreads across her bouncing knee.
--
She waits until three minutes before visiting hours are over before she lets herself venture back inside. Creeps along hallways that are slowly becoming intimately familiar with one hand pressed to the wall until she's inches from the end of his bed.
The ventilator has been removed. He's breathing on his own. She nods to herself, sharp and sure. It's a good sign thrown in amongst a day that's been full of bad ones.
Very bad ones.
The room is empty besides him and she's not sure what to make of it. Lets her mind wander to family and friends and girlfriends and colleagues and can't quite come up with a valid reason for why the beep of the monitors reverberates through a room that has no bodies in it to absorb the sound.
She knows Mark Sloan has been here because she almost broke her nose on his sternum but if he's had other visitors then there is no sign of them scattered throughout the room. The plastic chair is still where she pushed it, the pitcher of water that is clearly not for Alex remains full to almost overflowing on a side table. His hands are still palms down and stained by the smudge of his own blood. No one has touched them since he arrived. No one has held them long enough to notice.
Long enough to care.
She heads out to the nurses station and asks for a bowl of warm water and some gauze. Sets about scrubbing the evidence from under his nails, swallows the lump in her throat that tells her it wouldn't be there if she'd been functioning a little more fully when she found Reed.
If she hadn't failed to put all the pieces together in a way that fit she might have managed to find him, too.
The was blood. So much blood. More than too much for one person. Looking back a day and a half it's painfully obvious to her now... but then again, her hindsight always was twenty twenty.
--
She steers clear once he wakes up. A constant stream of questions and apologies and information that is achingly irrelevant now (Reed thought you were a good person underneath all the gruff you pretend to be) plays on an echoing loop in her periphery. She's not convinced she has enough control over them all to stop them spewing out and staining the bandages that cover the damage a chunk of metal did to his chest.
The speech is still writing itself. In the moments where the soundtrack goes silent she thinks slowly, softly, about what she'd say to him, how she'd roll the words off her tongue, the delicate phrasing she'd use if he let her speak.
Which she absolutely doesn't expect that he would.
Reed may have thought the gruff exterior was a ruse, but April? She's not so sure.
The Seattle Presbyterian doctors have been very accommodating. Perhaps thanking their lucky stars that Allison Clark wasn't admitted to their wards for surgery. A toss of the coin.
Heads you win.
Tails you lose.
Whatever their motivations, they barely look up as the rubber soles of her sneakers echo the steps she takes along night dim hallways to the window of his room. Stands on the outside, looking in.
A familiar place she's fought so hard to escape.
And now, without Reed and Charles, exactly where she's destined to remain.
--
Reed's forty minute funeral service is the hardest thing she's ever sat through. She penned a eulogy onto the back of a napkin as she sat, numb from the waist down, on the floor outside Alex's room. The monotonous beep of machinery that provided the constant evidence of his continued survival the only background noise, as tears slid from her chin, smudged the messy ink to illegible and raw.
It didn't matter. The words forever etched into her soul.
She managed to get half way through without her voice tripping over the lump that had taken up residence in the back of her throat. She felt fingers that she couldn't see curl around her wrist, and a voice she longed desperately to hear whisper at her to get it over with so the drinking could start, and as a laugh she'd only ever hear again in her dreams faded out she managed to stumble through the rest.
The procession music has also been her job, because Mrs. Adamson couldn't bring herself to go through CDs searching for a song she wouldn't even know was the right one anyway.
She catches Jackson's watery gaze as they stand to leave and he nods, just once. His version of yes, you chose good.
She bites off the bitter laugh that catches in the back of her throat and tries to squash the memories of herself from the night before, bottle of red wine in one hand, remote control for the sound system in the other. She'd started with a glass, but on the seventh pathetic, tear-stained run through of Adam Duritz belting out the achingly perfect words to “Round Here”, she'd abandoned all pretense of normalcy and gone for long, noisy gulps straight from the bottle.
After all, she was soundtracking the end of her best friend's existence. Drinking cheap, red wine straight from the bottle seemed like a fairly minor concession to the occasion in the grand scheme of things.
--
( “...it's the song of the century, the entire century, April... don't you completely agree?” Bottle of cheap champagne in one hand, hairbrush clenched into a classic microphone pose in the other, pajama bottoms and tank top and short, spiky hair that she never could get under complete control without at least ten minutes and a straightening iron.)
--
Her apartment is empty. And cold. And too expensive for her to live in alone. Reed's ghost hangs in the corners, tied tight to curtains and dusted across picture frames, follows her into the bathroom and sits on the side of the tub as she scrubs away make-up and brushes her teeth 'til her gums bleed, stares back when she opens the fridge in search of food she knows won't be in there.
And when the suffocating silences get to be too much, she twists her key in the lock and lets herself out. Drives clear across the city to where even more ghosts roam and watches Alex sleep through horizontal gaps in the blinds that are meant to shield his room from prying eyes.
Probably even her eyes.
But she tries not to think too much about that.
--
Her own mother calls in a high pitched fit of outrage three days later.
And it wasn't that she was hiding anything from them, her parents, her sisters.
She just didn't quite know how she'd ever get it all into the right words. It's the same fear that is stopping her from crossing the imaginary line that means she'd have to talk to Alex.
Because a man that shot and killed so many people pointed a gun at her chest and told her to run. And if someone could give her the answer for how to tell that to her mother, she'd be more than grateful.
So when her mother calls in a fit of outrage, she apologises quickly and offers hollow platitudes and reassures her that everything is fine now. Ends the conversation with shaky fingers and even shakier sanity.
Doesn't even hear the voice the first however many times it echoes to her from beyond the horizontal blinds. Momentarily forgets where she is and what she was doing and that her presence here is probably all levels of what the hell? to him.
She steps up to the doorway, slowly but surely. Like she's walking a line between assured and terrified.
Which, in reality, isn't all that far from the truth.
--
“Everything okay?”
His voice is rough. She doesn't expect it even though every medical text book she's ever read can tell her why. She nods quickly, hopes it doesn't look as mad as it feels as her hair tumbles around her shoulders and her vision swims to something thick and watery that she prays isn't tears.
Because now is so not the time for tears.
He shifts, lifts his chin by a few degrees. The vague colouring he's managed to regain fades in an instant as his face contorts into a fleeting grimace that tells her he's crossed some invisible pain threshold he's devised for himself and is probably in screaming agony right now.
She can imagine he'd be the sort of patient that would ignore the pethidine pump until until he passed out lest someone think he might be in pain.
She watches as he smooths his features out, a practiced movement that relaxes the muscles in his forehead and returns a shade of pale pink to his cheeks.
That it doesn't quite melt the terror in his eyes is telling.
“You sure?”
And the concern in his voice is all kinds of incongruous.
It's also her un-doing.
She backpedals. Stumbles over an apology that mostly trips over itself on the way out and does the only thing her brain has the capacity to come up with right now.
She flees.
--
It's days, maybe even weeks, before she sees him again, mostly because she can't quite bring herself to go back after that. Conjures images of him laughing about her, telling the others how odd she is, mimicking her manic head bob intended to portray how fine she was and absolutely failing on a number of levels.
Knows without having to think too long or too hard that the reality is probably much worse. He's not thinking about her at all.
Which is how it should be, really.
But she's watched his chest rise and fall for the past god knows how many nights and the thought that he's not the least bit curious as to why leaves her deflated in a way she's never really experienced before.
Jackson drags her from the apartment formerly known as hers and Reed's and buys her a drink at a Starbucks halfway between home and the hospital.
She sips cautiously at a chai latte that tastes a little too much like scalded milk, burns the roof of her mouth and the tip of her tongue before rushing out a confession of sorts.
“I'm thinking of going back to Ohio.”
To his credit, Jackson's perfect eyebrows rise from perfect arches into perfect arcs of surprise but he doesn't say anything.
Yet.
She continues at her usual stumble. Trips over words and phrases and uses the length of time a chai latte takes to turn stone cold to admit that she can't pay rent and the thought of operating at Seattle Grace again makes her stomach lurch and Reed's ghost is haunting the shadows of everything she does here so... it just makes sense.
He shrugs his shoulders, like maybe he also thinks it makes sense. And the way his hands shake, ever so slightly, as he reaches for his coffee tells her he just might be craving an escape, too.
--
She gets as far as packed. Toothbrush tucked into toiletries bag and boxes sealed with wide packing tape, labelled neatly in thick, black marker.
Ohio suddenly seems a world away.
She gives in. Does the one thing she's forbidden herself to do since the whole sky seemed to cave in on top of her. She calls her sister. Barely gets a hello out before the tears come and the rest of what she's planned to say drowns in a sea of saltwater at her toes.
Kimmy threatens to jump on the next plane to Seattle and knock some sense into her if she so much as even thinks about quitting now. She fails to mention that her stuff is already packed in cardboard boxes and she's done more than think about it, she's purchased a red eye flight for the very next night.
They're chalk and cheese, or however that saying goes. Kimmy is blonde and beautiful and had given April two nieces before she even managed to turn nineteen. She'll never leave Ohio despite her convoluted dreams of fame and fortune.
And despite their glaring differences, there's still something about Kimmy that April clings to with a desperate sense of familiarity and warmth. She's pretty sure it's that that finally forces her down off the ledge she'd been balancing on.
Knows only too well that Kimmy means every inarticulate word that tumbles out of her mouth.
Isn't entirely convinced that Reed's ghost is ready for the arrival of her larger than life sister and the two out of control nieces that come along with her as a package deal.
--
Her red-eye departs. She's sitting at the bar, sitting at Joe's, as she imagines the jet taxi-ing down the runway at Seattle-Tacoma International and disappearing into the night sky.
She's not sure if the vodka is making the image clearer or more cloudy. Just knows that it's vivid enough that the never-ending dark seems to leach into her skin and bones.
A weight settles next to her, the stool rocking slightly as a body slumps and an arm waves out a familiar hello to Joe. Tequila arrives. The whole bottle. Shot glass upturned on the runner next to it. She looks up then, tilts her head by degrees and takes in the woman on her left.
Meredith.
She nods a greeting that April can't begin to categorise. Tangles of dark blonde hair escape from behind her ears, cloak her face in a shadow that barely manages to hide the bone numbing exhaustion painted there.
“Everything okay?” She borrows Alex Karev's words because she's so far beyond thinking up her own at this point and his were surprisingly effective in a way.
The harsh belch of laughter that is Meredith's response provides all the answer April needs. She nods her head in silent agreement, taps the rim of her icy tumbler to the side of the tequila bottle in a mock salute, and tilts her head back. Drains her glass in a way that she hopes looks seasoned and calm and only just manages not to choke on the acrid fuel as it lights a path through her insides.
She'd never really been a drinker, not before.
Now it feels like it's all she's managed to do since the back of her best friend's skull was blown into oblivion.
That and semi-creepily watch a guy she barely knows sleep.
--
She crashes on Meredith's couch that night. Can't remember the cab ride over there, wakes up to sun bouncing off dust motes in front of her eyes and has no idea what suburb she's even in. Just notes, with a degree of relief that makes her bones ache, that Reed's ghost hasn't managed to find her.
Not yet anyway.
A cough, a throat clearing, a noise of some sort. Behind her. In the doorway. She startles to upright and only just manages to hold onto the liquid contents in her stomach. Twists her head frantically searching for the source, finds him propped cautiously against the frame of the door.
She didn't even know he'd been released. Though, if she'd thought about it, the progression was obvious. Nineteen days have passed.
She groans, a low murmur that bubbles out of her before she can gather enough control to reign it back in.
What a perfect start.
His eyes widen a little. Arms cross awkwardly over his chest.
“Tequila?”
She frowns, creases her brow and tilts her head in an attempt to make sense of the word.
He holds up a bottle, swings it in front of him like it's the answer to any questions she might have. It's only now that she notices the slight sway he's developed.
“Ahh, tequila? Now?”
She squints a glance at her wristwatch, notes the times. Nine forty eight. Realises with a start that the sun and the dust motes weren't sun and dust motes at all. The light above her head is switched to on, the tiny dancing particles were all in her imagination.
She's slept for almost nineteen hours.
“Oh...”
She gets it then.
What he's asking.
The thought of pouring more alcohol down her throat is almost horrifying.
She nods though, reaches out a hand she doesn't even try to pretend isn't trembling and clamps tentative fingers around the base of the bottle, “Sure.”
Hopes the syllable is infintely more convincing out loud than it is as it echoes around inside the cavernous spaces of her head.
Tilts her head back and swallows like the seasoned drinker she's surely about to become.
--
His first day back is three days after that. She manages, only just, to disregard the beers he consumed last night, notes with a degree of trepidation that any judgment on her behalf would be hypocritical to say the least.
She's also not sure how the bedroom next to his became hers. But she's never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when her handbag and her coat wind up on the bed in the spare room she lets out a huff of air in place of a rambling monologue of thanks and catches Meredith's shoulders shrugging in reply.
--
She's consumed more alcohol with him in the last three days than she thinks she possibly managed to do with Reed over all the years they knew each other.
He gets chatty and morose when he's drunk and the house has been perpetually empty save for them.
So they drink.
And chat.
And pretend they don't remember a damn thing the next morning, when the birds wake them with incessant chirping and Lexie Grey slams cutlery and plates around in some kind of silent protest that April couldn't care less about in the grand scheme of things.
And when Lexie moves out, she asks no questions. Alex offers her no answers.
She's come to expect very little else and it's an arrangement that is working perfectly for them both right now.
--
She makes the decision that morose is his default setting because the chat certainly dries up when he's sober enough to know what he's doing, but the morose? She's beginning to think it's etched into his veins, encoded somewhere in his no doubt complicated strands of DNA.
Meredith gives her sidelong glances over coffee mugs and surgical charts. Like she knows something that April doesn't.
Which is probably the truth.
She just arches her eyebrows in reply and strides away with a false air of purpose before the questions and recriminations and well meaning warnings can start up.
And really? It's well and truly too late for any of that now.
Jackson corners her outside the sliding doors to the ER. There's a brief reprieve between sun-showers that she's doing her best to make the most of, and the feel of the sun on her nose drops her guard for just enough.
“I hope you know what you're doing.”
She doesn't even bother to pretend she doesn't know what he's talking about.
“I'm not doing anything...” Which, if you take away the tequila and the beer and the ghost that has finally caught up to her, is almost not even a lie.
Almost.
He shakes his head like he doesn't believe her and takes a few steps away, turns his back and stares out at the endless nothing of people and cars and places and sky. She notices his fingers are curled into fists at his side and the effect is confusing.
Wonders what exactly it is that he thinks she's doing, and why he seems so angry about it.
“Jackson.”
He turns back to her with a spin that is so fast and so furious that he almost overshoots. Has to steady himself and angle his head back in her direction somewhat.
“What? What do you want me to say? We almost died, April. Everyone almost died. Your best friend did die. And it's like you're using it as an excuse to get into his pants.”
The words flatten her. The ferocity with which they're delivered. The stinging impact as they collide with surface of her skin.
She opens her mouth to retaliate. Loses the words before they even form and closes it again. He's shaking. Visibly. Trembling to such a degree that she can almost hear his teeth chattering.
He looks tired. And old.
And she wonders, just for a second, where he's been these past few weeks.
Refuses to forgive him his assumptions nonetheless.
“Well, if that's what you think then, clearly we don't know each other at all...”
Musters up every degree of ice she has in her and clutches tightly at the echoing outrage of Reed's disbelief in her periphery.
You go, girl...
She does.
--
Alex avoids the elevators with a fervor that fails to escape what April begrudgingly admits is her ever present stare. She suspects his inevitable unravelling is beginning to unfurl.
Whether he can bring himself to admit it or not.
And she's oddly curious to see how it will progress.
--
In the end it's she who finds him, which is surprising.
After, she'll discover she was the only one who didn't know he was missing.
He's crouched against the wall in the supply area, perpendicular to the spot where Reed's life bled out of her.
There's only two people that recognise the significance of this spot. Of this square feet of tile that can never be truly scrubbed clean.
Him and her. And if they never have another thing in common, they will always have this.
“Reed died right there...”
He doesn't bother to indicate a position and she doesn't need him to.
“I know...”
She cuffs her fingers around his wrist and pulls, hints that he should stand up with her, shake it off and get out of there.
He drops his eyes instead, collapses 'til his head is pillowed on his crossed arms, disappears into himself so completely that she's left stunned to frozen for seconds, minutes, disjointed segments of time and place.
It's only as the elevator behind them whirs to life that sound returns to the bubble she's floating in and she notices for the first shocking time that he's crying and she is way out of her depth.
She sinks to seated in front of him, legs crossed and hands hovering inches from touching him. At a loss. In the end she squeezes her fingers around his ankle once in a gesture that is meant to be reassuring and stands again.
Seeks out Lexie who only ignores her the first four times she tries to explain what's going on.
Counts it as progress and heaves a sigh of something that tastes a lot like relief as she eventually cuts her off with a defeated, Where?
--
She hides out in the tunnels instead of going home.
Swallows the bitter taste that surrounds the word, home. Realises with a shudder that she doesn't actually belong anywhere right now.
Notes with a clarity that burns like gravel rash how she drove the only person who'd showed a sign of wanting to be her friend, to the kind of madness she spends all her own diminishing resources not falling into. Plied him with alcohol and false pretenses and pretended that walking around with a bullet that terrifies you to your bone-marrow still carved into position in your chest isn't dysfunctional at all.
She's swinging absently, three quarters to asleep and seriously contemplating spending the night right where she is, when footsteps break the echo-y silence that had swirled and swept around her since she'd arrived. She ticks off the likely candidates, one by one.
Starts with the potential arrivals she simply doesn't have the energy to face...
Jackson...
Lexie...
Alex...
Almost giggles with exhausted relief when it's Meredith's voice that breaks the deadlock.
“Thank you.”
And of every sentence she could have contemplated to spill from the other woman's lips, thank you did not even come close.
She cracks open eyes that protest the buzzing flourescent light, tries to hide the frown she can feel developing, lest she really has done something helpful.
Something helpful that she's clearly forgotten all about.
Though, she did do the dishes this morning, so it could be that.
“Lexie, she told me what happened. I just wanted to say thank you. I'm really glad you were there...”
And April thinks she may just even mean it.
Gets a second dose of proof when Meredith stretches out a hand in her direction, wriggles her fingers authoritatively and drags April from her seat.
“Let's go take him home, yeah?”
And there's that word again, home.
She blinks furiously, relishes the painful burn for the fleeting distractor that it is and only just manages not to burst into train wreck horrifying sobs right then and there on the spot.
--
They move through the parking lot towards Doctor Shepherd's car in a semi-formed pack of disparate strangers. As the vehicle is unlocked, she's ushered into the cavernous back-seat alongside Alex, can't help but feel like some pathetic version of the child she once was all those years ago.
His fingers drum incessantly on the leather expanse between them and the last thing he said to her is still on echoing repeat inside her skull, Reed died right there... . The radio is on, the volume turned down low, a tune she vaguely recognises fails to drown out the constant hum of his skin colliding with the edge of the seat.
She stares at his hand. Wills it to silence. Feels the sound ramping up her own barely contained hysteria. If someone had spelled this all out for her when she was busy making new years resolutions under falling snow in the middle of a thirty nine hour shift of holiday carnage, she thinks she'd probably have quit on the spot.
Up and left and never looked back.
But it's too late for that now. Things have happened that she can't ever hope to undo.
Her hand moves of its own accord. Covers the ticking fingers so completely that the shock stills them to motionless in an instant. She can feel taught tension in the coiled tendons beneath her palm.
Keeps her eyes front and centre and curls her fingers around his ever so slightly when the resistance she's expecting fails to eventuate.
And it seems all that's left for her to do is battle out whatever comes next in the best way she knows how.
Characters/Pairing: April + Alex (Reed, Jackson, Meredith and Lexie)
Word Count: 5000
Rating: PG
Challenge: Big Bang for team_enfuego at shonda_land
Prompt: From summys_lj, the challenge was to use my recent April drabble as inspiration for a full fic where April and Alex become friends.
Summary: An attempt at an unravelling... April in the aftermath of the season six finale and how she develops reluctant friendships with both Alex and Meredith.
Author's Note: Title and cut text from “Paper Shoes” by Incubus.
She starts working on a speech as she sits by his bedside. Curled in a ball and pressed solidly into the curves of a plastic chair that she's beginning to think was specifically designed for maximum discomfort.
A machine breathes for him.
She's not sure if that fact makes it harder or easier for her to be here.
She dares herself to touch him, traces mindless patterns on the back of his hand with the lightest touch of her longest fingernail.
Launches back into her seat as his thumb twitches, an unconscious movement that she convinces herself to be a blatant back off.
The first draft of her monologue fizzles to a whimper on her lips and she backs out of the room with clumsy feet and held breath. Collides solidly with the chest of someone much taller than her, Dr. Sloan, stumbles momentarily, hands over head, defensive, automatic.
His eyes go wide, like maybe she's about to freak out and, if she's honest with herself, she probably is. He wraps fingers around the circumference of her left wrist, tugs gently 'til it's no longer covering her face and opens his mouth. Speaks words that she can't quite decipher.
She nods. Sends a silent prayer to whomever is listening that it's the correct response, lowers her mascara clumped lashes to the tangle of hastily tied laces at her feet and retreats cautiously. Overly aware of her every wobble and spin as she fights to regain some modicum of self control and dignity.
--
She heads for the benches that line the entrance of the third hospital she's come to know in the space of several months. Mercy West, Seattle Grace, Seattle Presbyterian. Wonders how long it will be 'til she manages to claim a full set. She huddles into her sweater despite the white, bright sunshine, tugs at sleeves that are too short and a waistband that is stretched to taught. It's not hers. It was never hers. But it's the closest thing to her best friend she has left and so she wears it nonetheless. Refuses to think about washing it lest the faint echo of perfume and laughter leach from the worn fabric.
Reed's mom has been in contact several times since the police knocked on her door and delivered news no mother should ever have to hear. The voicemail messages, for she always lets voicemail do her dirty work these days, are rambling and long. Wrought with tears and a seething kind of pleading for April to conjure magic she can't even comprehend let alone ever hope to achieve.
It's only been twenty seven hours.
It feels like a lifetime.
And she knows only too well that, for some, it is.
The rough path under the soles of her shoes is cracked and crumbling in patches. She scuffs her toe at a speck of green fighting its way to opportunistic life between shards of concrete that are shifting apart. Doesn't notice the tears until a blossom of damp, dark blue spreads across her bouncing knee.
--
She waits until three minutes before visiting hours are over before she lets herself venture back inside. Creeps along hallways that are slowly becoming intimately familiar with one hand pressed to the wall until she's inches from the end of his bed.
The ventilator has been removed. He's breathing on his own. She nods to herself, sharp and sure. It's a good sign thrown in amongst a day that's been full of bad ones.
Very bad ones.
The room is empty besides him and she's not sure what to make of it. Lets her mind wander to family and friends and girlfriends and colleagues and can't quite come up with a valid reason for why the beep of the monitors reverberates through a room that has no bodies in it to absorb the sound.
She knows Mark Sloan has been here because she almost broke her nose on his sternum but if he's had other visitors then there is no sign of them scattered throughout the room. The plastic chair is still where she pushed it, the pitcher of water that is clearly not for Alex remains full to almost overflowing on a side table. His hands are still palms down and stained by the smudge of his own blood. No one has touched them since he arrived. No one has held them long enough to notice.
Long enough to care.
She heads out to the nurses station and asks for a bowl of warm water and some gauze. Sets about scrubbing the evidence from under his nails, swallows the lump in her throat that tells her it wouldn't be there if she'd been functioning a little more fully when she found Reed.
If she hadn't failed to put all the pieces together in a way that fit she might have managed to find him, too.
The was blood. So much blood. More than too much for one person. Looking back a day and a half it's painfully obvious to her now... but then again, her hindsight always was twenty twenty.
--
She steers clear once he wakes up. A constant stream of questions and apologies and information that is achingly irrelevant now (Reed thought you were a good person underneath all the gruff you pretend to be) plays on an echoing loop in her periphery. She's not convinced she has enough control over them all to stop them spewing out and staining the bandages that cover the damage a chunk of metal did to his chest.
The speech is still writing itself. In the moments where the soundtrack goes silent she thinks slowly, softly, about what she'd say to him, how she'd roll the words off her tongue, the delicate phrasing she'd use if he let her speak.
Which she absolutely doesn't expect that he would.
Reed may have thought the gruff exterior was a ruse, but April? She's not so sure.
The Seattle Presbyterian doctors have been very accommodating. Perhaps thanking their lucky stars that Allison Clark wasn't admitted to their wards for surgery. A toss of the coin.
Heads you win.
Tails you lose.
Whatever their motivations, they barely look up as the rubber soles of her sneakers echo the steps she takes along night dim hallways to the window of his room. Stands on the outside, looking in.
A familiar place she's fought so hard to escape.
And now, without Reed and Charles, exactly where she's destined to remain.
--
Reed's forty minute funeral service is the hardest thing she's ever sat through. She penned a eulogy onto the back of a napkin as she sat, numb from the waist down, on the floor outside Alex's room. The monotonous beep of machinery that provided the constant evidence of his continued survival the only background noise, as tears slid from her chin, smudged the messy ink to illegible and raw.
It didn't matter. The words forever etched into her soul.
She managed to get half way through without her voice tripping over the lump that had taken up residence in the back of her throat. She felt fingers that she couldn't see curl around her wrist, and a voice she longed desperately to hear whisper at her to get it over with so the drinking could start, and as a laugh she'd only ever hear again in her dreams faded out she managed to stumble through the rest.
The procession music has also been her job, because Mrs. Adamson couldn't bring herself to go through CDs searching for a song she wouldn't even know was the right one anyway.
She catches Jackson's watery gaze as they stand to leave and he nods, just once. His version of yes, you chose good.
She bites off the bitter laugh that catches in the back of her throat and tries to squash the memories of herself from the night before, bottle of red wine in one hand, remote control for the sound system in the other. She'd started with a glass, but on the seventh pathetic, tear-stained run through of Adam Duritz belting out the achingly perfect words to “Round Here”, she'd abandoned all pretense of normalcy and gone for long, noisy gulps straight from the bottle.
After all, she was soundtracking the end of her best friend's existence. Drinking cheap, red wine straight from the bottle seemed like a fairly minor concession to the occasion in the grand scheme of things.
--
( “...it's the song of the century, the entire century, April... don't you completely agree?” Bottle of cheap champagne in one hand, hairbrush clenched into a classic microphone pose in the other, pajama bottoms and tank top and short, spiky hair that she never could get under complete control without at least ten minutes and a straightening iron.)
--
Her apartment is empty. And cold. And too expensive for her to live in alone. Reed's ghost hangs in the corners, tied tight to curtains and dusted across picture frames, follows her into the bathroom and sits on the side of the tub as she scrubs away make-up and brushes her teeth 'til her gums bleed, stares back when she opens the fridge in search of food she knows won't be in there.
And when the suffocating silences get to be too much, she twists her key in the lock and lets herself out. Drives clear across the city to where even more ghosts roam and watches Alex sleep through horizontal gaps in the blinds that are meant to shield his room from prying eyes.
Probably even her eyes.
But she tries not to think too much about that.
--
Her own mother calls in a high pitched fit of outrage three days later.
And it wasn't that she was hiding anything from them, her parents, her sisters.
She just didn't quite know how she'd ever get it all into the right words. It's the same fear that is stopping her from crossing the imaginary line that means she'd have to talk to Alex.
Because a man that shot and killed so many people pointed a gun at her chest and told her to run. And if someone could give her the answer for how to tell that to her mother, she'd be more than grateful.
So when her mother calls in a fit of outrage, she apologises quickly and offers hollow platitudes and reassures her that everything is fine now. Ends the conversation with shaky fingers and even shakier sanity.
Doesn't even hear the voice the first however many times it echoes to her from beyond the horizontal blinds. Momentarily forgets where she is and what she was doing and that her presence here is probably all levels of what the hell? to him.
She steps up to the doorway, slowly but surely. Like she's walking a line between assured and terrified.
Which, in reality, isn't all that far from the truth.
--
“Everything okay?”
His voice is rough. She doesn't expect it even though every medical text book she's ever read can tell her why. She nods quickly, hopes it doesn't look as mad as it feels as her hair tumbles around her shoulders and her vision swims to something thick and watery that she prays isn't tears.
Because now is so not the time for tears.
He shifts, lifts his chin by a few degrees. The vague colouring he's managed to regain fades in an instant as his face contorts into a fleeting grimace that tells her he's crossed some invisible pain threshold he's devised for himself and is probably in screaming agony right now.
She can imagine he'd be the sort of patient that would ignore the pethidine pump until until he passed out lest someone think he might be in pain.
She watches as he smooths his features out, a practiced movement that relaxes the muscles in his forehead and returns a shade of pale pink to his cheeks.
That it doesn't quite melt the terror in his eyes is telling.
“You sure?”
And the concern in his voice is all kinds of incongruous.
It's also her un-doing.
She backpedals. Stumbles over an apology that mostly trips over itself on the way out and does the only thing her brain has the capacity to come up with right now.
She flees.
--
It's days, maybe even weeks, before she sees him again, mostly because she can't quite bring herself to go back after that. Conjures images of him laughing about her, telling the others how odd she is, mimicking her manic head bob intended to portray how fine she was and absolutely failing on a number of levels.
Knows without having to think too long or too hard that the reality is probably much worse. He's not thinking about her at all.
Which is how it should be, really.
But she's watched his chest rise and fall for the past god knows how many nights and the thought that he's not the least bit curious as to why leaves her deflated in a way she's never really experienced before.
Jackson drags her from the apartment formerly known as hers and Reed's and buys her a drink at a Starbucks halfway between home and the hospital.
She sips cautiously at a chai latte that tastes a little too much like scalded milk, burns the roof of her mouth and the tip of her tongue before rushing out a confession of sorts.
“I'm thinking of going back to Ohio.”
To his credit, Jackson's perfect eyebrows rise from perfect arches into perfect arcs of surprise but he doesn't say anything.
Yet.
She continues at her usual stumble. Trips over words and phrases and uses the length of time a chai latte takes to turn stone cold to admit that she can't pay rent and the thought of operating at Seattle Grace again makes her stomach lurch and Reed's ghost is haunting the shadows of everything she does here so... it just makes sense.
He shrugs his shoulders, like maybe he also thinks it makes sense. And the way his hands shake, ever so slightly, as he reaches for his coffee tells her he just might be craving an escape, too.
--
She gets as far as packed. Toothbrush tucked into toiletries bag and boxes sealed with wide packing tape, labelled neatly in thick, black marker.
Ohio suddenly seems a world away.
She gives in. Does the one thing she's forbidden herself to do since the whole sky seemed to cave in on top of her. She calls her sister. Barely gets a hello out before the tears come and the rest of what she's planned to say drowns in a sea of saltwater at her toes.
Kimmy threatens to jump on the next plane to Seattle and knock some sense into her if she so much as even thinks about quitting now. She fails to mention that her stuff is already packed in cardboard boxes and she's done more than think about it, she's purchased a red eye flight for the very next night.
They're chalk and cheese, or however that saying goes. Kimmy is blonde and beautiful and had given April two nieces before she even managed to turn nineteen. She'll never leave Ohio despite her convoluted dreams of fame and fortune.
And despite their glaring differences, there's still something about Kimmy that April clings to with a desperate sense of familiarity and warmth. She's pretty sure it's that that finally forces her down off the ledge she'd been balancing on.
Knows only too well that Kimmy means every inarticulate word that tumbles out of her mouth.
Isn't entirely convinced that Reed's ghost is ready for the arrival of her larger than life sister and the two out of control nieces that come along with her as a package deal.
--
Her red-eye departs. She's sitting at the bar, sitting at Joe's, as she imagines the jet taxi-ing down the runway at Seattle-Tacoma International and disappearing into the night sky.
She's not sure if the vodka is making the image clearer or more cloudy. Just knows that it's vivid enough that the never-ending dark seems to leach into her skin and bones.
A weight settles next to her, the stool rocking slightly as a body slumps and an arm waves out a familiar hello to Joe. Tequila arrives. The whole bottle. Shot glass upturned on the runner next to it. She looks up then, tilts her head by degrees and takes in the woman on her left.
Meredith.
She nods a greeting that April can't begin to categorise. Tangles of dark blonde hair escape from behind her ears, cloak her face in a shadow that barely manages to hide the bone numbing exhaustion painted there.
“Everything okay?” She borrows Alex Karev's words because she's so far beyond thinking up her own at this point and his were surprisingly effective in a way.
The harsh belch of laughter that is Meredith's response provides all the answer April needs. She nods her head in silent agreement, taps the rim of her icy tumbler to the side of the tequila bottle in a mock salute, and tilts her head back. Drains her glass in a way that she hopes looks seasoned and calm and only just manages not to choke on the acrid fuel as it lights a path through her insides.
She'd never really been a drinker, not before.
Now it feels like it's all she's managed to do since the back of her best friend's skull was blown into oblivion.
That and semi-creepily watch a guy she barely knows sleep.
--
She crashes on Meredith's couch that night. Can't remember the cab ride over there, wakes up to sun bouncing off dust motes in front of her eyes and has no idea what suburb she's even in. Just notes, with a degree of relief that makes her bones ache, that Reed's ghost hasn't managed to find her.
Not yet anyway.
A cough, a throat clearing, a noise of some sort. Behind her. In the doorway. She startles to upright and only just manages to hold onto the liquid contents in her stomach. Twists her head frantically searching for the source, finds him propped cautiously against the frame of the door.
She didn't even know he'd been released. Though, if she'd thought about it, the progression was obvious. Nineteen days have passed.
She groans, a low murmur that bubbles out of her before she can gather enough control to reign it back in.
What a perfect start.
His eyes widen a little. Arms cross awkwardly over his chest.
“Tequila?”
She frowns, creases her brow and tilts her head in an attempt to make sense of the word.
He holds up a bottle, swings it in front of him like it's the answer to any questions she might have. It's only now that she notices the slight sway he's developed.
“Ahh, tequila? Now?”
She squints a glance at her wristwatch, notes the times. Nine forty eight. Realises with a start that the sun and the dust motes weren't sun and dust motes at all. The light above her head is switched to on, the tiny dancing particles were all in her imagination.
She's slept for almost nineteen hours.
“Oh...”
She gets it then.
What he's asking.
The thought of pouring more alcohol down her throat is almost horrifying.
She nods though, reaches out a hand she doesn't even try to pretend isn't trembling and clamps tentative fingers around the base of the bottle, “Sure.”
Hopes the syllable is infintely more convincing out loud than it is as it echoes around inside the cavernous spaces of her head.
Tilts her head back and swallows like the seasoned drinker she's surely about to become.
--
His first day back is three days after that. She manages, only just, to disregard the beers he consumed last night, notes with a degree of trepidation that any judgment on her behalf would be hypocritical to say the least.
She's also not sure how the bedroom next to his became hers. But she's never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when her handbag and her coat wind up on the bed in the spare room she lets out a huff of air in place of a rambling monologue of thanks and catches Meredith's shoulders shrugging in reply.
--
She's consumed more alcohol with him in the last three days than she thinks she possibly managed to do with Reed over all the years they knew each other.
He gets chatty and morose when he's drunk and the house has been perpetually empty save for them.
So they drink.
And chat.
And pretend they don't remember a damn thing the next morning, when the birds wake them with incessant chirping and Lexie Grey slams cutlery and plates around in some kind of silent protest that April couldn't care less about in the grand scheme of things.
And when Lexie moves out, she asks no questions. Alex offers her no answers.
She's come to expect very little else and it's an arrangement that is working perfectly for them both right now.
--
She makes the decision that morose is his default setting because the chat certainly dries up when he's sober enough to know what he's doing, but the morose? She's beginning to think it's etched into his veins, encoded somewhere in his no doubt complicated strands of DNA.
Meredith gives her sidelong glances over coffee mugs and surgical charts. Like she knows something that April doesn't.
Which is probably the truth.
She just arches her eyebrows in reply and strides away with a false air of purpose before the questions and recriminations and well meaning warnings can start up.
And really? It's well and truly too late for any of that now.
Jackson corners her outside the sliding doors to the ER. There's a brief reprieve between sun-showers that she's doing her best to make the most of, and the feel of the sun on her nose drops her guard for just enough.
“I hope you know what you're doing.”
She doesn't even bother to pretend she doesn't know what he's talking about.
“I'm not doing anything...” Which, if you take away the tequila and the beer and the ghost that has finally caught up to her, is almost not even a lie.
Almost.
He shakes his head like he doesn't believe her and takes a few steps away, turns his back and stares out at the endless nothing of people and cars and places and sky. She notices his fingers are curled into fists at his side and the effect is confusing.
Wonders what exactly it is that he thinks she's doing, and why he seems so angry about it.
“Jackson.”
He turns back to her with a spin that is so fast and so furious that he almost overshoots. Has to steady himself and angle his head back in her direction somewhat.
“What? What do you want me to say? We almost died, April. Everyone almost died. Your best friend did die. And it's like you're using it as an excuse to get into his pants.”
The words flatten her. The ferocity with which they're delivered. The stinging impact as they collide with surface of her skin.
She opens her mouth to retaliate. Loses the words before they even form and closes it again. He's shaking. Visibly. Trembling to such a degree that she can almost hear his teeth chattering.
He looks tired. And old.
And she wonders, just for a second, where he's been these past few weeks.
Refuses to forgive him his assumptions nonetheless.
“Well, if that's what you think then, clearly we don't know each other at all...”
Musters up every degree of ice she has in her and clutches tightly at the echoing outrage of Reed's disbelief in her periphery.
You go, girl...
She does.
--
Alex avoids the elevators with a fervor that fails to escape what April begrudgingly admits is her ever present stare. She suspects his inevitable unravelling is beginning to unfurl.
Whether he can bring himself to admit it or not.
And she's oddly curious to see how it will progress.
--
In the end it's she who finds him, which is surprising.
After, she'll discover she was the only one who didn't know he was missing.
He's crouched against the wall in the supply area, perpendicular to the spot where Reed's life bled out of her.
There's only two people that recognise the significance of this spot. Of this square feet of tile that can never be truly scrubbed clean.
Him and her. And if they never have another thing in common, they will always have this.
“Reed died right there...”
He doesn't bother to indicate a position and she doesn't need him to.
“I know...”
She cuffs her fingers around his wrist and pulls, hints that he should stand up with her, shake it off and get out of there.
He drops his eyes instead, collapses 'til his head is pillowed on his crossed arms, disappears into himself so completely that she's left stunned to frozen for seconds, minutes, disjointed segments of time and place.
It's only as the elevator behind them whirs to life that sound returns to the bubble she's floating in and she notices for the first shocking time that he's crying and she is way out of her depth.
She sinks to seated in front of him, legs crossed and hands hovering inches from touching him. At a loss. In the end she squeezes her fingers around his ankle once in a gesture that is meant to be reassuring and stands again.
Seeks out Lexie who only ignores her the first four times she tries to explain what's going on.
Counts it as progress and heaves a sigh of something that tastes a lot like relief as she eventually cuts her off with a defeated, Where?
--
She hides out in the tunnels instead of going home.
Swallows the bitter taste that surrounds the word, home. Realises with a shudder that she doesn't actually belong anywhere right now.
Notes with a clarity that burns like gravel rash how she drove the only person who'd showed a sign of wanting to be her friend, to the kind of madness she spends all her own diminishing resources not falling into. Plied him with alcohol and false pretenses and pretended that walking around with a bullet that terrifies you to your bone-marrow still carved into position in your chest isn't dysfunctional at all.
She's swinging absently, three quarters to asleep and seriously contemplating spending the night right where she is, when footsteps break the echo-y silence that had swirled and swept around her since she'd arrived. She ticks off the likely candidates, one by one.
Starts with the potential arrivals she simply doesn't have the energy to face...
Jackson...
Lexie...
Alex...
Almost giggles with exhausted relief when it's Meredith's voice that breaks the deadlock.
“Thank you.”
And of every sentence she could have contemplated to spill from the other woman's lips, thank you did not even come close.
She cracks open eyes that protest the buzzing flourescent light, tries to hide the frown she can feel developing, lest she really has done something helpful.
Something helpful that she's clearly forgotten all about.
Though, she did do the dishes this morning, so it could be that.
“Lexie, she told me what happened. I just wanted to say thank you. I'm really glad you were there...”
And April thinks she may just even mean it.
Gets a second dose of proof when Meredith stretches out a hand in her direction, wriggles her fingers authoritatively and drags April from her seat.
“Let's go take him home, yeah?”
And there's that word again, home.
She blinks furiously, relishes the painful burn for the fleeting distractor that it is and only just manages not to burst into train wreck horrifying sobs right then and there on the spot.
--
They move through the parking lot towards Doctor Shepherd's car in a semi-formed pack of disparate strangers. As the vehicle is unlocked, she's ushered into the cavernous back-seat alongside Alex, can't help but feel like some pathetic version of the child she once was all those years ago.
His fingers drum incessantly on the leather expanse between them and the last thing he said to her is still on echoing repeat inside her skull, Reed died right there... . The radio is on, the volume turned down low, a tune she vaguely recognises fails to drown out the constant hum of his skin colliding with the edge of the seat.
She stares at his hand. Wills it to silence. Feels the sound ramping up her own barely contained hysteria. If someone had spelled this all out for her when she was busy making new years resolutions under falling snow in the middle of a thirty nine hour shift of holiday carnage, she thinks she'd probably have quit on the spot.
Up and left and never looked back.
But it's too late for that now. Things have happened that she can't ever hope to undo.
Her hand moves of its own accord. Covers the ticking fingers so completely that the shock stills them to motionless in an instant. She can feel taught tension in the coiled tendons beneath her palm.
Keeps her eyes front and centre and curls her fingers around his ever so slightly when the resistance she's expecting fails to eventuate.
And it seems all that's left for her to do is battle out whatever comes next in the best way she knows how.