hot and cold running ghosts {grey's - lexie; alex/lexie}
Title: Hot And Cold Running Ghosts
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie. Alex/Lexie.
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,450
Author's Note: This was supposed to be comment fic. It's decidedly not. For rorylie.
Summary: Future fic. There is a funeral and a metaphor, something about bodies sent six feet under and the daisies that grow above, new life after death. It's misleading, you see, for Seattle is full of nothing but history.
They meet at a funeral.
Technically, they meet again at a funeral and, technically, they actually did that at the bar the night before. His eyes had been on her ass, she thinks, quite possibly before he even realized who she was. She might’ve smiled. Jackson hooked an arm around her and pulled her into a hug and pulled her eyes away and he just wasn’t there by the time she remembered to look back.
There were no words exchanged; she dismisses the whole moment as a case of mistaken identity and unfortunate luck and as luck would have it, he was probably just drunk enough to buy into it, if he even remembers seeing her at all.
But, for all intents and purposes, they meet at a funeral on a Sunday in the middle of June, while the clock approaches two and the mercury skyrockets high enough to make the men sweat in their suits and the women pull at their pantyhose and everyone to question all the black and heavy fabrics. It’s a sea of dark colors and weary faces contrasting with all of that green - death amid new growth - and it feels like there’s a metaphor, there, but it also feels like they’ve all stood here too often in their still-short lives for it to feel like anything but routine.
Her mother died. George died. There was a straight week of funerals after the shooting, one where she ran out of black and waterproof mascara.
Now it’s her father being put into the ground and she can’t really do much besides blink and offer watery smiles. Molly cries. Meredith stares. She still fits neatly in the middle of a family that never truly existed and now certainly never will.
Alex is there, somewhere behind her, and she doesn’t discover that by sight but instead by the sound of his voice, the murmured you sure you don’t want me to call him and her sister’s resounding no. The look she gives them over her shoulder isn’t subtle but it also goes unnoticed. Derek’s absence is notable. Not notable enough to mean anything. They’re doctors and it entitles them to, among other things, miss a whole host of weddings and funerals - never births - and Alex is that sibling Meredith never had and Lexie was never going to get to be. There are some things that are stronger than blood and DNA, things that settle in your bones and under your skin.
Meredith finds her somewhere between the grave site and the car. There is a winding sort of walkway that leads out into the parking lot and asphalt under her heels -- old shoes that have somehow worn down uneven, and she hadn’t meant to pack these, she’d meant to pack the ones she bought two weeks ago at the mall, on a whim and thinking of cocktail parties and the mixer for the new interns, and not her father dying in the fucking grocery store, cleanup on aisle five, and the way her hands felt cold as she tore through her closet and shoved everything in a suitcase - and her sister half-collides with her and half envelops her in a hug.
And then she says, “I’m sorry.”
Because it was Lexie’s father, not hers, not really, and the irony is that Meredith was the only one still on the same coast as him, fifteen minutes away from his house, when he died.
Alex is with her. Alex is with her and when she pulls back, pulls away, Lexie’s left with his eyes on her and feet that won’t walk her forward or backward. She’s never been sure of the protocol. Do you hug the people you used to sleep with and then were friends with and then stopped being anything with? Is a funeral enough to erase all of that history, turn you both into people who can deal with the basic exchange of giving and receiving comfort? She’s never been sure and Alex has never been the kind of guy you go to for a hug.
At least he never was. She doesn’t know him anymore. She hasn’t known him for years and at some point he’s become the kind of man who lets her sister grab for his hand and dig in her nails while they lower the coffin.
So it’s an awkward hug. Uncoordinated and loose and both too long and too short. The hug of people who have barely met and don’t understand how to fit the other’s body against their own. He says, “I’m sorry” with his hand at the crook of her elbow and Meredith tells her they’re heading back to the house, the same house she used to live in, and she should come and they should catch up.
She goes because she still believes in third and fourth chances, and new life amid all of that death.
-
Alex still remembers how she likes her coffee. Remembers that she likes less sugar, not more, and that she’ll burn her hands on her old favorite coffee cup if you don’t hand it to her handle first because she forgets that that one’s different, special somehow.
“You changed your phone number,” she remarks, and he sinks into the armchair with folded hands that find their way into the pockets of his hoodie like it’s a security blanket. She feels overdressed, him in a sweatshirt, Meredith in jeans, and her in a dress and heels, minus the pantyhose that she’d stripped off in the car at a red light. She’s half tempted to ask if they’ve got any of her old clothes, knows that there are things she lost in the move, and that was before Boston.
“Yeah,” he says, no further explanation.
Meredith comes down the stairs; her line of questioning dies on her lips.
-
Meredith leaves on a page and Derek walks in not five minutes later. Alex scrolls through the channels and Lexie works up ways to say well, I should be going but doesn’t get around to using any of them.
There is tequila here and a familiar couch to pass out into, and there is none of that in her hotel room.
“I was sorry to hear about your father,” Derek tells her, looking tired and unpolished, mussed up hair and his age showing in the lines of his face. “He was a wonderful man.”
Derek didn’t know her father. Derek married her sister, and if that is any indication of the extent of his knowledge of the man then he’s lying for her sake.
So he’s lying. It’s well intentioned. She smiles regardless.
She always did like him.
He wants to ask about Mark, she can tell, it’s in the false starts where his mouth moves without sound and his body shifts in the doorway. It’s in the air and Alex must feel it too because he won’t meet her eyes.
Her finger bears no mark from the ring that only stuck around for a year and a half, and the man who only stuck around for three months after that. New York, New York, and he lives in a brownstone in Manhattan now with a woman named Leanne. She hasn’t seen the inside of it but she has seen the inside of the coffee shop he likes two blocks over several times since then and that’s enough for her.
It should be enough for everyone else too but Derek still swallows his question and he still disappears upstairs soon thereafter as the clock turns over, another hour, and it’s nine in the evening, she’s been here a whole six hours, and still she isn’t moving.
“Nothing changes,” she says, while a house in Tacoma goes down in flames on the news, and Alex watches her like he wants to say something but never knew what.
She finds the tequila and the glasses on her own.
-
The official story he gives her is that he saw her car in the driveway.
It’s a rental, a sand-colored sedan, and there was at least a dozen similar ones on the short drive over here, so, in reality, it could’ve been anyone’s. In reality, he must have talked to Meredith and she must have told him Lexie would be here and he must’ve taken it upon himself to concoct a story because god forbid anyone be honest with anyone else is this place.
She used to love him for his honesty. Or like him, anyways. She’s never really been clear, she just knows that she used to feel something towards him, where now she just feels confusion and an odd sense of intrigue with regards to how the years have treated him.
“You need any help?” He asks, and she laughs because she’s cleaning out her father’s house - her childhood home - and she needs a small army and maybe a therapist or two for this.
Lexie doesn’t tell him that. She tells him “yes” because she could use the extra set of hands and she could use the distraction he provides.
She could use a barrier between her and these four walls but she’ll also settle for the illusion of one.
-
It’s forever surprising, all of those things that her mother thought were worth saving. Old baby teeth and a pair of her first shoes, mixed in with that dress she wore on her first date in high school and a whole host of prom photos she hasn’t seen for years.
That her father kept them too is relatively unsurprising. Her mother’s ghost still walks these halls and she would feel right at home here.
Alex chucks a stuffed pig at her with a raised eyebrow that says he would’ve thought teddy bears, something achingly traditional and she just says, “I liked pink. A lot. My whole room was pink until I was thirteen.”
She leaves out the part about the green that came after or how the walls in her apartment are just white, no frills, and it doesn’t feel like her. It feels like Boston, that in-between place that she spent her college years while she tried to map out her life, the identity linked closer to the city than to herself.
She leaves out the part where her father won that stuffed pig for her at a carnival when she was six, and just hugs it closer.
“Sounds about right,” he replies, with a shrug.
Lexie scoffs. “How would you know?”
“I had a feeling.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes find the box of her mother’s old photo albums, things that will probably go to Molly instead of on the flight back to Boston, and she frowns. “I didn’t know you ever even thought about it.”
“Yeah, well,” and she knows it’s going to be cliché before it even comes out of his mouth, “there’s a lot of things you don’t know.”
She contemplates adding that it was the always the ones who left that he could never get off of his mind but she marks it down as too cruel and too cutting. It still might have snapped him out of whatever this quiet, subdued fugue is that’s rendered him kinder and practically unrecognizable to her eyes.
-
Molly calls to tell her that she’ll split the work, come over and sort through everything Lexie doesn’t get to tomorrow. Halfway into the afternoon that’s a case of easier said than done and so she splits the upstairs in half and adds in the kitchen for good measure. Someone’s going to have to go up into the attic, an all day job in and of itself, and Molly’s got the kids and Lexie’s just got herself, so it’s going to be her. It’s going to be her in an attic digging through the rest of her childhood alone.
She can hardly wait.
Alex turns out to be actual help. He can’t fold for shit, and half of these clothes are going to have to be sold in some sort of yard sale so presentation will eventually matter, but he can clean pretty well. She boxes up the odds and ends in her parents’ bedroom and he wipes down the dresser and the nightstand, thin layer of dust collecting over everything in what only appeared to be a lived in room from the unmade bed. She hadn’t seen her father since two Thanksgiving’s ago - a product of not enough time and the thought that there would always be another year - but she called him every week and he’d always sounded fine. Maybe he had insomnia or maybe he slept in the guest room because it reminded him too much of mom.
It’s all for naught; these are questions she’ll never have answers to.
So she asks some that she can have answers to. “Why did you go to the funeral? I mean, I know Derek was busy but…well, no offense but I always assumed Cristina was her person.”
“Cristina doesn’t live here anymore.” He tells her, relatively unaffected by the admission. He holds up a picture frame in askance, and nine year old her stares back. She nods. “Anyways, I was returning the favor.”
“What do you mean?”
“She went to Iowa.”
Iowa. A state filed away as merely containing his hometown and a whole host of memories and people he always seemed content in running away from. They never talked about Iowa. That was always Meredith’s territory, another one of those things that he just wasn’t willing to share. But, she thinks, there was his mother and his sister and his brother that she only ever met once, and if she has to guess from those four words, surrounded in context, she’s pretty much stuck with, “Your mother?”
“Yeah,” he replies, and then adds, like it makes the whole idea so much better, “she was off her meds so…not that surprising.”
She doesn’t know what to do with that. “Meds?”
He skims over it. “Anyways, Meredith wouldn’t let me go alone, gave me some big speech about it, so I figured this makes us even.”
“Even?” And she doesn’t mean to question his phrasing out loud, it just sort of happens. Because who says things like that? It makes them even like he was giving her back the twenty he borrowed from her two weeks ago or covering for her at the hospital because she’d do the same for him. It’s such a warped way to look at it, but this is Alex and the less emotional meaning gestures carry the better he feels about them. “I don’t think people really keep score.”
He doesn’t bother refuting her.
-
Eventually, she moves downstairs to the kitchen, starts cleaning the fancy dishes her mother saved for special occasions and holidays and boxing them up. He stays upstairs, finishes scrubbing down the bathroom floor, except at some point he comes down, looking for water in lieu of the beer they don’t have, and when he’s reaching over her head for a glass she intercepts, grabs one for him, and gets as far as the brush of their fingers as she hands it to him before she kisses him.
She doesn’t know why but then she’s not really thinking when she does it. She’s thinking about the way her fingers are starting to prune and how the soap smells too much like lemon and how he if she would have kissed him like this years ago he would’ve had her up against the stainless steel refrigerator, hands up her shirt, in a heartbeat.
So, really, she kisses him just to see what he’ll do.
What he does is move her backwards against the edge of the counter as he licks inside of her mouth, open to him while she curls her hands around his biceps and tries not to grin something self-satisfied because this is the Alex she’s been looking for since she came back, the one with some fight left in him. He gets a leg in between hers and it throws off her balance, keeps her up on tiptoe, and she squirms, tries to get a better angle and keep herself from grinding down against his thigh at the same time, and that’s when he lifts her up onto the countertop and takes her hands out of the equation with his own, pressing them against the sun-warmed window pane.
His mouth moves to the column of her throat and she gasps, head thrown back, as his only free hand moves to palm her breast through her shirt.
The water from the faucet rushes down the drain and she tries to reach out to turn it off, has to bite into his wrist with her fingernails to convince him to let her go, and her wrist knocks against that glass instead, sending it clattering to the ground.
There is a pause as the sound reverberates and the running water ceases, and she leans forward ever so slightly to find that it hasn’t broken, just fallen.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself, and by the time she looks back to him he’s pulling her shirt over her head.
-
“I missed you,” he will murmur against her neck, semi-coherent and swallowing thickly, half a second before he pulls back and thrusts into her hard.
Her shoulder hits the frame of the window.
-
Afterwards, she scrubs down the counters again, while he moves boxes down to the basement.
The sun starts to set.
(“Thanks for today,” she says, and her laugh sounds kind of choked at the end there, because she’s thanking him and he just fucked her in the kitchen of her childhood home and there’s an excellent chance that she will now go back to Boston and he will go back to her sister’s house and they won’t see each other again for another three or four years.
It feels very ‘leave the money on the nightstand; I’m going to go take a shower’, impersonal and empty.)
-
She brings Molly lunch the next day.
Sandwiches from this deli that’s been around since they were kids and Molly’s crying again, over cardboard boxes and mom’s old afghan, romanticizing stories of their father in his later years, and how at least they’re together now, and Lexie takes it all in with a deep breath that she holds.
Molly didn’t live here when he was drinking, didn’t deal with all the late night runs to the liquor store or the constant berating, desperate ramblings of a drunken man who only looked and sounded like her father. She wasn’t there when he sobered up or when she had to practically beg Meredith to give him part of her liver - part of her - for that transplant. Molly wasn’t there and she was, so she lets her sister cry over an idea of a man who only really existed before their mother’s death, because this is her burden and she knows better than to speak ill of the dead.
-
On the third day, she cleans out the attic while her sister gets on a plane back home, leaving her set of keys and the number for a realtor.
Lexie leaves both where she found them.
-
She waits for him on the bench outside of the hospital. It hasn’t rained since she got here but the wood is old and starting to rot through, one of the last things remaining while Seattle Grace Mercy West got its guts torn out and repainted and refurnished post-shooting, serving the two-fold use of burying as many reminders as possible and remaining camera ready for the retrospectives that always seemed to crop up around the same date every year.
It’s a pretty convincing picture, as long as you don’t stand too close and squint.
He slows his pace when he sees her, lit up by the street lights spread out through the parking lot and the blast of fluorescence that seeps out through the hospital doors, dropping onto the bench when he reaches her. “Thought you were leaving.”
“I am.” She stares at the keys in her hands. “Not yet, though. We’ve got to do something about the house and Molly had to go home because the kids have to go back to school, so I guess it falls on me.”
Alex doesn’t say a word and she feels more than sees the nod he gives, prompting to her to push forward.
“What did you do with yours, after…” she starts to ask it before she realizes this is uncharted territory and her navigation equipment in so far seems to be on the fritz. “I’m sorry, that was - ”
“Mortgage is paid up,” he replies, effectively stopping her apology mid-stream, “my sister’s living there still.”
“What about Aaron?”
He avoids her eyes. “He’s somewhere else.”
(She’s seen Meredith again, since the day of the funeral. They were at Joe’s and Meredith was twice as drunk as she was, and Lexie used that to her advantage when she asked about Alex, about his mother, about Iowa.
“She put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger,” Meredith said, and it was like the words had sobered her because her hand came up to half cover her mouth, like that would force the admission back inside, but it couldn’t and Lexie felt like vomiting instead of crying, her stomach churning and the tequila that burned down her throat feeling more acidic than usual.
Lexie hadn’t had the heart to ask anything else.)
She leans back, bumpy wooden slats against her spine, and twirls that ring of keys around her finger, round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows, and she’s approaching thoughtful about this whole thing, determined not to just throw all of her clothes in a bag and hop on a plane like she did back in Boston. Not to just hand this off and go back to her life because it’s her parents’ house, her childhood, and she put her fucking father in the ground and hasn’t even shed a tear yet.
It’s unlike her. It’s so beyond unlike her and Lexie has learned to recognize these things, to pay attention to them, because there’s no one to check her into the psych ward this time.
“I thought about sticking around until I could sell it,” she tells him, “but that could take a while. I don’t even know if I want to sell it. I mean…it’s my home. I didn’t live there anymore but it was just nice to know it was there.”
He’s probably the last person who wants to wax poetic about things like home and the value of childhood memories, but he listens, he sits there and listens, even if he isn’t looking at her, and it makes her want to curl into him and close her eyes and go back to a time where her father wasn’t dead and Boston was her past and all she knew of PTSD and mass shootings was gathered from the news and that semester of psych she had to take at Harvard. Go back to that point where he had just signed the divorce papers and everything, in that moment, was looking up.
She adds, “I thought about staying too. Moving in. I miss Seattle.”
“Nobody misses Seattle.”
“Maybe I miss the people in Seattle.”
His interpretation of her words, obvious in the way his eyes light on hers, brows knit together and the right corner of his mouth twitching but never actually falling into that half smile of his, isn’t exactly what she meant. Or maybe it is. Maybe that’s part of it.
He told her he missed her, and his hands on her hips had dug in as if to prove that point, perhaps unconsciously. And she misses the ease of a relationship with him before their own individual mental health hit a synchronized period of decline and she became the girl who couldn’t hold it together and he became the guy who couldn’t see outside of himself long enough to realize that not everything in the whole world was his fault. They’re different now, older and yet somehow with better vision. He’s become the guy who certain people have come to rely on and she’s grown into someone not so easily swayed and fairly confident in herself.
“I think I might stay.”
“You’ll regret it,” he says, like there’s not a doubt in his mind.
“Are you trying to keep me away?”
“No.”
“Good, ‘cause I really think I might.”
-
It seems to be a pattern for her.
Her mother died, the world came crashing down, and she gave up an internship at Massachusetts General for Seattle.
Her father died, the world tilted on its axis, and she ended up back in Seattle again, contemplating giving it all up for a city that holds the bulk of what’s left of her family.
These are signs and sometimes you have to take them at face value.
Except sometimes you don’t.
-
A week later, Lexie will blink awake in her childhood bedroom, well before her alarm is to go off, and she will realize in that ordinary split second, as daylight just begins to break over the horizon, that this isn’t where she needs to be.
She will be a great surgeon and live a great life; she just won’t doing it in Seattle for the time being. Instead, she’ll say her goodbyes and get on a plane, choosing to let go instead of holding on until it all slips through her grasp.
In the future, she will still make weekly phone calls, except they’ll be to Molly and to Meredith. She will sell the house, split the income from it between herself and Molly, and the next time she visits Seattle she won’t drive down that street. She’ll acquire the correct number for Alex, except her fingers will always hesitate and she’ll never get past the area code. Jackson will fly out and crash on her couch for a few days every few months, the closest thing she’ll see to Seattle for over two years, and she’ll never bother to question why. She won’t find the perfect husband and have the perfect 2.5 kids because, even after her thirtieth birthday has passed, and then some, it just doesn’t fit with her career and the circumstances. Her parents’ anniversary, the first one neither will be alive to recognize, will be the first time she cries over her father, but not the last.
Two years and four months after she goes back to Boston, there will be a wedding in Seattle.
She’ll find Alex at the bar.
-
fin.
-
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie. Alex/Lexie.
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,450
Author's Note: This was supposed to be comment fic. It's decidedly not. For rorylie.
Summary: Future fic. There is a funeral and a metaphor, something about bodies sent six feet under and the daisies that grow above, new life after death. It's misleading, you see, for Seattle is full of nothing but history.
They meet at a funeral.
Technically, they meet again at a funeral and, technically, they actually did that at the bar the night before. His eyes had been on her ass, she thinks, quite possibly before he even realized who she was. She might’ve smiled. Jackson hooked an arm around her and pulled her into a hug and pulled her eyes away and he just wasn’t there by the time she remembered to look back.
There were no words exchanged; she dismisses the whole moment as a case of mistaken identity and unfortunate luck and as luck would have it, he was probably just drunk enough to buy into it, if he even remembers seeing her at all.
But, for all intents and purposes, they meet at a funeral on a Sunday in the middle of June, while the clock approaches two and the mercury skyrockets high enough to make the men sweat in their suits and the women pull at their pantyhose and everyone to question all the black and heavy fabrics. It’s a sea of dark colors and weary faces contrasting with all of that green - death amid new growth - and it feels like there’s a metaphor, there, but it also feels like they’ve all stood here too often in their still-short lives for it to feel like anything but routine.
Her mother died. George died. There was a straight week of funerals after the shooting, one where she ran out of black and waterproof mascara.
Now it’s her father being put into the ground and she can’t really do much besides blink and offer watery smiles. Molly cries. Meredith stares. She still fits neatly in the middle of a family that never truly existed and now certainly never will.
Alex is there, somewhere behind her, and she doesn’t discover that by sight but instead by the sound of his voice, the murmured you sure you don’t want me to call him and her sister’s resounding no. The look she gives them over her shoulder isn’t subtle but it also goes unnoticed. Derek’s absence is notable. Not notable enough to mean anything. They’re doctors and it entitles them to, among other things, miss a whole host of weddings and funerals - never births - and Alex is that sibling Meredith never had and Lexie was never going to get to be. There are some things that are stronger than blood and DNA, things that settle in your bones and under your skin.
Meredith finds her somewhere between the grave site and the car. There is a winding sort of walkway that leads out into the parking lot and asphalt under her heels -- old shoes that have somehow worn down uneven, and she hadn’t meant to pack these, she’d meant to pack the ones she bought two weeks ago at the mall, on a whim and thinking of cocktail parties and the mixer for the new interns, and not her father dying in the fucking grocery store, cleanup on aisle five, and the way her hands felt cold as she tore through her closet and shoved everything in a suitcase - and her sister half-collides with her and half envelops her in a hug.
And then she says, “I’m sorry.”
Because it was Lexie’s father, not hers, not really, and the irony is that Meredith was the only one still on the same coast as him, fifteen minutes away from his house, when he died.
Alex is with her. Alex is with her and when she pulls back, pulls away, Lexie’s left with his eyes on her and feet that won’t walk her forward or backward. She’s never been sure of the protocol. Do you hug the people you used to sleep with and then were friends with and then stopped being anything with? Is a funeral enough to erase all of that history, turn you both into people who can deal with the basic exchange of giving and receiving comfort? She’s never been sure and Alex has never been the kind of guy you go to for a hug.
At least he never was. She doesn’t know him anymore. She hasn’t known him for years and at some point he’s become the kind of man who lets her sister grab for his hand and dig in her nails while they lower the coffin.
So it’s an awkward hug. Uncoordinated and loose and both too long and too short. The hug of people who have barely met and don’t understand how to fit the other’s body against their own. He says, “I’m sorry” with his hand at the crook of her elbow and Meredith tells her they’re heading back to the house, the same house she used to live in, and she should come and they should catch up.
She goes because she still believes in third and fourth chances, and new life amid all of that death.
-
Alex still remembers how she likes her coffee. Remembers that she likes less sugar, not more, and that she’ll burn her hands on her old favorite coffee cup if you don’t hand it to her handle first because she forgets that that one’s different, special somehow.
“You changed your phone number,” she remarks, and he sinks into the armchair with folded hands that find their way into the pockets of his hoodie like it’s a security blanket. She feels overdressed, him in a sweatshirt, Meredith in jeans, and her in a dress and heels, minus the pantyhose that she’d stripped off in the car at a red light. She’s half tempted to ask if they’ve got any of her old clothes, knows that there are things she lost in the move, and that was before Boston.
“Yeah,” he says, no further explanation.
Meredith comes down the stairs; her line of questioning dies on her lips.
-
Meredith leaves on a page and Derek walks in not five minutes later. Alex scrolls through the channels and Lexie works up ways to say well, I should be going but doesn’t get around to using any of them.
There is tequila here and a familiar couch to pass out into, and there is none of that in her hotel room.
“I was sorry to hear about your father,” Derek tells her, looking tired and unpolished, mussed up hair and his age showing in the lines of his face. “He was a wonderful man.”
Derek didn’t know her father. Derek married her sister, and if that is any indication of the extent of his knowledge of the man then he’s lying for her sake.
So he’s lying. It’s well intentioned. She smiles regardless.
She always did like him.
He wants to ask about Mark, she can tell, it’s in the false starts where his mouth moves without sound and his body shifts in the doorway. It’s in the air and Alex must feel it too because he won’t meet her eyes.
Her finger bears no mark from the ring that only stuck around for a year and a half, and the man who only stuck around for three months after that. New York, New York, and he lives in a brownstone in Manhattan now with a woman named Leanne. She hasn’t seen the inside of it but she has seen the inside of the coffee shop he likes two blocks over several times since then and that’s enough for her.
It should be enough for everyone else too but Derek still swallows his question and he still disappears upstairs soon thereafter as the clock turns over, another hour, and it’s nine in the evening, she’s been here a whole six hours, and still she isn’t moving.
“Nothing changes,” she says, while a house in Tacoma goes down in flames on the news, and Alex watches her like he wants to say something but never knew what.
She finds the tequila and the glasses on her own.
-
The official story he gives her is that he saw her car in the driveway.
It’s a rental, a sand-colored sedan, and there was at least a dozen similar ones on the short drive over here, so, in reality, it could’ve been anyone’s. In reality, he must have talked to Meredith and she must have told him Lexie would be here and he must’ve taken it upon himself to concoct a story because god forbid anyone be honest with anyone else is this place.
She used to love him for his honesty. Or like him, anyways. She’s never really been clear, she just knows that she used to feel something towards him, where now she just feels confusion and an odd sense of intrigue with regards to how the years have treated him.
“You need any help?” He asks, and she laughs because she’s cleaning out her father’s house - her childhood home - and she needs a small army and maybe a therapist or two for this.
Lexie doesn’t tell him that. She tells him “yes” because she could use the extra set of hands and she could use the distraction he provides.
She could use a barrier between her and these four walls but she’ll also settle for the illusion of one.
-
It’s forever surprising, all of those things that her mother thought were worth saving. Old baby teeth and a pair of her first shoes, mixed in with that dress she wore on her first date in high school and a whole host of prom photos she hasn’t seen for years.
That her father kept them too is relatively unsurprising. Her mother’s ghost still walks these halls and she would feel right at home here.
Alex chucks a stuffed pig at her with a raised eyebrow that says he would’ve thought teddy bears, something achingly traditional and she just says, “I liked pink. A lot. My whole room was pink until I was thirteen.”
She leaves out the part about the green that came after or how the walls in her apartment are just white, no frills, and it doesn’t feel like her. It feels like Boston, that in-between place that she spent her college years while she tried to map out her life, the identity linked closer to the city than to herself.
She leaves out the part where her father won that stuffed pig for her at a carnival when she was six, and just hugs it closer.
“Sounds about right,” he replies, with a shrug.
Lexie scoffs. “How would you know?”
“I had a feeling.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes find the box of her mother’s old photo albums, things that will probably go to Molly instead of on the flight back to Boston, and she frowns. “I didn’t know you ever even thought about it.”
“Yeah, well,” and she knows it’s going to be cliché before it even comes out of his mouth, “there’s a lot of things you don’t know.”
She contemplates adding that it was the always the ones who left that he could never get off of his mind but she marks it down as too cruel and too cutting. It still might have snapped him out of whatever this quiet, subdued fugue is that’s rendered him kinder and practically unrecognizable to her eyes.
-
Molly calls to tell her that she’ll split the work, come over and sort through everything Lexie doesn’t get to tomorrow. Halfway into the afternoon that’s a case of easier said than done and so she splits the upstairs in half and adds in the kitchen for good measure. Someone’s going to have to go up into the attic, an all day job in and of itself, and Molly’s got the kids and Lexie’s just got herself, so it’s going to be her. It’s going to be her in an attic digging through the rest of her childhood alone.
She can hardly wait.
Alex turns out to be actual help. He can’t fold for shit, and half of these clothes are going to have to be sold in some sort of yard sale so presentation will eventually matter, but he can clean pretty well. She boxes up the odds and ends in her parents’ bedroom and he wipes down the dresser and the nightstand, thin layer of dust collecting over everything in what only appeared to be a lived in room from the unmade bed. She hadn’t seen her father since two Thanksgiving’s ago - a product of not enough time and the thought that there would always be another year - but she called him every week and he’d always sounded fine. Maybe he had insomnia or maybe he slept in the guest room because it reminded him too much of mom.
It’s all for naught; these are questions she’ll never have answers to.
So she asks some that she can have answers to. “Why did you go to the funeral? I mean, I know Derek was busy but…well, no offense but I always assumed Cristina was her person.”
“Cristina doesn’t live here anymore.” He tells her, relatively unaffected by the admission. He holds up a picture frame in askance, and nine year old her stares back. She nods. “Anyways, I was returning the favor.”
“What do you mean?”
“She went to Iowa.”
Iowa. A state filed away as merely containing his hometown and a whole host of memories and people he always seemed content in running away from. They never talked about Iowa. That was always Meredith’s territory, another one of those things that he just wasn’t willing to share. But, she thinks, there was his mother and his sister and his brother that she only ever met once, and if she has to guess from those four words, surrounded in context, she’s pretty much stuck with, “Your mother?”
“Yeah,” he replies, and then adds, like it makes the whole idea so much better, “she was off her meds so…not that surprising.”
She doesn’t know what to do with that. “Meds?”
He skims over it. “Anyways, Meredith wouldn’t let me go alone, gave me some big speech about it, so I figured this makes us even.”
“Even?” And she doesn’t mean to question his phrasing out loud, it just sort of happens. Because who says things like that? It makes them even like he was giving her back the twenty he borrowed from her two weeks ago or covering for her at the hospital because she’d do the same for him. It’s such a warped way to look at it, but this is Alex and the less emotional meaning gestures carry the better he feels about them. “I don’t think people really keep score.”
He doesn’t bother refuting her.
-
Eventually, she moves downstairs to the kitchen, starts cleaning the fancy dishes her mother saved for special occasions and holidays and boxing them up. He stays upstairs, finishes scrubbing down the bathroom floor, except at some point he comes down, looking for water in lieu of the beer they don’t have, and when he’s reaching over her head for a glass she intercepts, grabs one for him, and gets as far as the brush of their fingers as she hands it to him before she kisses him.
She doesn’t know why but then she’s not really thinking when she does it. She’s thinking about the way her fingers are starting to prune and how the soap smells too much like lemon and how he if she would have kissed him like this years ago he would’ve had her up against the stainless steel refrigerator, hands up her shirt, in a heartbeat.
So, really, she kisses him just to see what he’ll do.
What he does is move her backwards against the edge of the counter as he licks inside of her mouth, open to him while she curls her hands around his biceps and tries not to grin something self-satisfied because this is the Alex she’s been looking for since she came back, the one with some fight left in him. He gets a leg in between hers and it throws off her balance, keeps her up on tiptoe, and she squirms, tries to get a better angle and keep herself from grinding down against his thigh at the same time, and that’s when he lifts her up onto the countertop and takes her hands out of the equation with his own, pressing them against the sun-warmed window pane.
His mouth moves to the column of her throat and she gasps, head thrown back, as his only free hand moves to palm her breast through her shirt.
The water from the faucet rushes down the drain and she tries to reach out to turn it off, has to bite into his wrist with her fingernails to convince him to let her go, and her wrist knocks against that glass instead, sending it clattering to the ground.
There is a pause as the sound reverberates and the running water ceases, and she leans forward ever so slightly to find that it hasn’t broken, just fallen.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself, and by the time she looks back to him he’s pulling her shirt over her head.
-
“I missed you,” he will murmur against her neck, semi-coherent and swallowing thickly, half a second before he pulls back and thrusts into her hard.
Her shoulder hits the frame of the window.
-
Afterwards, she scrubs down the counters again, while he moves boxes down to the basement.
The sun starts to set.
(“Thanks for today,” she says, and her laugh sounds kind of choked at the end there, because she’s thanking him and he just fucked her in the kitchen of her childhood home and there’s an excellent chance that she will now go back to Boston and he will go back to her sister’s house and they won’t see each other again for another three or four years.
It feels very ‘leave the money on the nightstand; I’m going to go take a shower’, impersonal and empty.)
-
She brings Molly lunch the next day.
Sandwiches from this deli that’s been around since they were kids and Molly’s crying again, over cardboard boxes and mom’s old afghan, romanticizing stories of their father in his later years, and how at least they’re together now, and Lexie takes it all in with a deep breath that she holds.
Molly didn’t live here when he was drinking, didn’t deal with all the late night runs to the liquor store or the constant berating, desperate ramblings of a drunken man who only looked and sounded like her father. She wasn’t there when he sobered up or when she had to practically beg Meredith to give him part of her liver - part of her - for that transplant. Molly wasn’t there and she was, so she lets her sister cry over an idea of a man who only really existed before their mother’s death, because this is her burden and she knows better than to speak ill of the dead.
-
On the third day, she cleans out the attic while her sister gets on a plane back home, leaving her set of keys and the number for a realtor.
Lexie leaves both where she found them.
-
She waits for him on the bench outside of the hospital. It hasn’t rained since she got here but the wood is old and starting to rot through, one of the last things remaining while Seattle Grace Mercy West got its guts torn out and repainted and refurnished post-shooting, serving the two-fold use of burying as many reminders as possible and remaining camera ready for the retrospectives that always seemed to crop up around the same date every year.
It’s a pretty convincing picture, as long as you don’t stand too close and squint.
He slows his pace when he sees her, lit up by the street lights spread out through the parking lot and the blast of fluorescence that seeps out through the hospital doors, dropping onto the bench when he reaches her. “Thought you were leaving.”
“I am.” She stares at the keys in her hands. “Not yet, though. We’ve got to do something about the house and Molly had to go home because the kids have to go back to school, so I guess it falls on me.”
Alex doesn’t say a word and she feels more than sees the nod he gives, prompting to her to push forward.
“What did you do with yours, after…” she starts to ask it before she realizes this is uncharted territory and her navigation equipment in so far seems to be on the fritz. “I’m sorry, that was - ”
“Mortgage is paid up,” he replies, effectively stopping her apology mid-stream, “my sister’s living there still.”
“What about Aaron?”
He avoids her eyes. “He’s somewhere else.”
(She’s seen Meredith again, since the day of the funeral. They were at Joe’s and Meredith was twice as drunk as she was, and Lexie used that to her advantage when she asked about Alex, about his mother, about Iowa.
“She put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger,” Meredith said, and it was like the words had sobered her because her hand came up to half cover her mouth, like that would force the admission back inside, but it couldn’t and Lexie felt like vomiting instead of crying, her stomach churning and the tequila that burned down her throat feeling more acidic than usual.
Lexie hadn’t had the heart to ask anything else.)
She leans back, bumpy wooden slats against her spine, and twirls that ring of keys around her finger, round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows, and she’s approaching thoughtful about this whole thing, determined not to just throw all of her clothes in a bag and hop on a plane like she did back in Boston. Not to just hand this off and go back to her life because it’s her parents’ house, her childhood, and she put her fucking father in the ground and hasn’t even shed a tear yet.
It’s unlike her. It’s so beyond unlike her and Lexie has learned to recognize these things, to pay attention to them, because there’s no one to check her into the psych ward this time.
“I thought about sticking around until I could sell it,” she tells him, “but that could take a while. I don’t even know if I want to sell it. I mean…it’s my home. I didn’t live there anymore but it was just nice to know it was there.”
He’s probably the last person who wants to wax poetic about things like home and the value of childhood memories, but he listens, he sits there and listens, even if he isn’t looking at her, and it makes her want to curl into him and close her eyes and go back to a time where her father wasn’t dead and Boston was her past and all she knew of PTSD and mass shootings was gathered from the news and that semester of psych she had to take at Harvard. Go back to that point where he had just signed the divorce papers and everything, in that moment, was looking up.
She adds, “I thought about staying too. Moving in. I miss Seattle.”
“Nobody misses Seattle.”
“Maybe I miss the people in Seattle.”
His interpretation of her words, obvious in the way his eyes light on hers, brows knit together and the right corner of his mouth twitching but never actually falling into that half smile of his, isn’t exactly what she meant. Or maybe it is. Maybe that’s part of it.
He told her he missed her, and his hands on her hips had dug in as if to prove that point, perhaps unconsciously. And she misses the ease of a relationship with him before their own individual mental health hit a synchronized period of decline and she became the girl who couldn’t hold it together and he became the guy who couldn’t see outside of himself long enough to realize that not everything in the whole world was his fault. They’re different now, older and yet somehow with better vision. He’s become the guy who certain people have come to rely on and she’s grown into someone not so easily swayed and fairly confident in herself.
“I think I might stay.”
“You’ll regret it,” he says, like there’s not a doubt in his mind.
“Are you trying to keep me away?”
“No.”
“Good, ‘cause I really think I might.”
-
It seems to be a pattern for her.
Her mother died, the world came crashing down, and she gave up an internship at Massachusetts General for Seattle.
Her father died, the world tilted on its axis, and she ended up back in Seattle again, contemplating giving it all up for a city that holds the bulk of what’s left of her family.
These are signs and sometimes you have to take them at face value.
Except sometimes you don’t.
-
A week later, Lexie will blink awake in her childhood bedroom, well before her alarm is to go off, and she will realize in that ordinary split second, as daylight just begins to break over the horizon, that this isn’t where she needs to be.
She will be a great surgeon and live a great life; she just won’t doing it in Seattle for the time being. Instead, she’ll say her goodbyes and get on a plane, choosing to let go instead of holding on until it all slips through her grasp.
In the future, she will still make weekly phone calls, except they’ll be to Molly and to Meredith. She will sell the house, split the income from it between herself and Molly, and the next time she visits Seattle she won’t drive down that street. She’ll acquire the correct number for Alex, except her fingers will always hesitate and she’ll never get past the area code. Jackson will fly out and crash on her couch for a few days every few months, the closest thing she’ll see to Seattle for over two years, and she’ll never bother to question why. She won’t find the perfect husband and have the perfect 2.5 kids because, even after her thirtieth birthday has passed, and then some, it just doesn’t fit with her career and the circumstances. Her parents’ anniversary, the first one neither will be alive to recognize, will be the first time she cries over her father, but not the last.
Two years and four months after she goes back to Boston, there will be a wedding in Seattle.
She’ll find Alex at the bar.
-
fin.
-