Title: If you've never heard that silence, it's a God awful sound...
Rating: soft R for implied sexual situations.
Characters: Alex and Lexie
Word Count: 467
Prompt: Cheap wine and cigarettes
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Alex becomes a widow while Izzie and George get funerals and headstones and flowers once a week. Derek and Meredith move to their castle on the hill and Mark buys a condo that Lexie never visits.
Years pass, very little else changes.
Alex grows bitter and angry, and with pity on his side, pushes the boundaries of his colleagues patience until they are as tightly wound as he is. Lexie remains tired, sad and empty, lost and losing.
They have no idea how they got to here.
- - -
The house echoes with ghostly memories from another time, some other place and they both say they can't leave because they have no where else to go.
It is only half a lie.
- - -
His lips are chapped and rough and the inside of her mouth tastes like lies and desperation and the bottle of cheap wine at their feet. It is an arrangement that has evolved through convenience and circumstance. They don't talk about it, half the time Lexie struggles to even remember it.
But he leaves scratches on her back that she can feel through the haze of not feeling anything else. Pin pricks of pain. She likes to think they're intentional, that he's marking his territory, staking his claim.
But she doubts it.
Her skin is under his nails and his breath is hot and heavy with the stale smell of cigarette smoke. She closes her eyes tightly, til they're scrunched shut and aching. Alex keeps his open, wide and unblinking, just to make a point.
They have no idea how they got to here.
- - -
Their lives fell out from underneath them; shattered circles and squares of what was never meant to be. The left over pieces, put back together all wrong, are a compilation of jagged edges and paper cuts. At least they have that in common.
Lexie pees on a stick with the light off and leaves again before the lines that will define her future, their future, have time to develop. Alex finds it the next morning, before Lexie finds him, cross legged on the mat in the middle of the bathroom floor. She knows there's something significant about that but she doesn't know what it is and she doesn't think that now is the time to ask.
She expects him to leave and when he doesn't she thinks maybe she's underestimated him.
“Alex...? Alex...? Alex...?”
She whispers his name like it's a series of questions he'll never know the answers to, over and over until he contemplates fleeing in the middle of the night. But then he remembers that he has no where else to go and this time it's not even close to the truth but it's still his excuse and so he stays.
They have no idea where they'll go from here.