fic: we can hear the rain come down (lexie, lexie/alex)
Title: We Can Hear The Rain Come Down
Characters/Pairings: Lexie, Alex/Lexie
Word Count: 4200
Rating: PG
Prompt: From rorylie for writing4acause. Anything where Alex and Lexie end up together... (vague prompt is vague and awesome and only mildly dangerous!)
Summary: Set post 7.08. An AU attempt to put back together everything about them that splintered to dust in the aftermath of the shooting, Lexie's breakdown and the news about Aaron.
Disclaimer: At my user info. page.
Author's Note: Beer and apple juice is a disgustingly delicious habit that I can't seem to break... Title, cut text and lyrics from “What Do I Know About Pain” by Gyroscope.
This is not a game I play discretely,
even if it does sound kind of creepy.
I'll make sure you're tucked in when I leave you,
so no-one else can get to you...
*
Lexie thinks that in the immediate aftermath of the day the world tumbled down to somewhere around their well worn shoelaces, the rumour mill at Seattle Grace went into a kind of warp speed overdrive. There was a period of a couple of months where it seemed that nothing went unnoticed. When someone freaking the fuck out was a daily occurence somewhere within the myriad hallways and on-call rooms, and talking about that was a way of not talking about your own impending demise.
She's not sure when it stopped. Just knows that it did with a resounding rush of winter cold air. She suspects it has something, suspects it has everything, to do with the fact that it should be over by now. The freak outs and the rage and the complete avoidance. It should all be over by now and it's not even close and so the rumour mill has shut itself off.
Because gossiping about the public failings of a peadiatric nurse you've never met is no where near as satisfying when your own seams are one decent loud noise away from unravelling completely.
“So, I was thinking...”
They're at lunch. Seated haphazardly around a cafeteria table, french fries and barely picked at salads and upturned pudding cups, pointedly not talking about the proverbial elephant that is missing from the room.
Cristina.
“That's always dangerous...” Alex doesn't even look up from the chart he has balanced across one knee. And the fading purple around his left eye is only noticeable to those who were there to witness it inflicted in the first place. She cocks her head at him and pulls a face that she knows he won't see. Rolls her eyes at Meredith who shrugs back half-heartedly before sighing around words she's sure she's about to regret.
“So, I was thinking, we should do Christmas this year.”
He snorts. Still doesn't look up.
It's Meredith's turn to roll her eyes.
“What?” She's immediately on the defensive. Determined to be given the chance to state her case.
“It's like, August, Lexie. And do you not remember how successful that was last year?” Meredith's sarcasm is dripping as April and Jackson share an amused glance of 'outsider' solidarity.
“We need to plan ahead and that was Thanksgiving, I'm talking about Christmas. We never do normal things, we need to do normal things-”
Alex snorts again and she shifts in her seat 'til her knee is pressed against his, a deliberate move to get his attention.
It works for a lightening flash as he lifts his eyes from the chart with a bemused frown. Sees through her thinly veiled attempt at manipulation almost immediately.
After all, it's a game they've been playing at for some weeks now.
“I was thinking Molly might come for a bit, and April, you have sisters don't you? And you could invite Aaron and your sister...” She's in ramble mode now, speaking without really taking in her surroundings as her plans for the holiday season get more and more elaborate with each verbalised syllable.
It's not until the toe of Meredith's tennis shoe launches repeatedly at her shin and his chair slides back with a metallic shriek that runs her blood to ice cold that she notices the shift.
He's streaking towards the doorway then, hastily closed chart clutched protectively against his chest, and she turns in her seat back to Meredith, panicked, wide eyed. “What? What did I say?”
“Just...” Meredith sighs around the word and makes a move to stand, indicates that she'll go after him.
But there's something screaming inside Lexie's chest telling her to chase him. To make it right. And she has no idea what it is or what the hell it might mean but she's halting Meredith with a raised hand before she even reconciles the movements and is snatching her pager from the cracked formica table top and sprinting after him without pausing to process her blind panic any further.
As she pushes out the swinging double doors she can't help but to think that the derailed Seattle Grace rumour train has a lot to answer for because, in the past, she'd have known exactly what was going on.
Countless not so hushed conversations at vending machines and coffee carts would have well and truly seen to that.
*
In the end she finds him in the tunnels. And really, it's not a difficult deduction to make. His favourite on-call room had been otherwise occupied when she'd burst in, and hiding out in supply closets was something akin to riding the elevator or crossing the catwalk these days...
He's curled on the floor beside a gurney, which is a telling choice in itself. Like maybe anything higher than ground level and he'd have to fight the urge to jump clean off.
She twists her fists into her scrub pants and takes a tentative step in his direction.
She not entirely convinced he's aware of her presence. That he's aware of anything other than the desperate battle he appears to be waging over the effectiveness of his own lungs.
“Alex?”
He startles viciously at the sound of her voice. Slams the back of his head into the wall with a resounding crack that has his eyes widening in pained surprise.
She drops to her knees beside him, barely notices the sound of her own bones meeting solid surface as she slides her fingers through his hair, wedges them between his skull and the unyielding plasterboard.
Feels at a complete loss to offer anything more substantial than that.
He stiffens at her touch. Guard immediately locked into place.
She's expecting it. Has her counter attack already planned.
She curls the fingers of her free hand tightly around his calf. The physical contact is so much more than they've dared for months now and she's counting on it to ground him in a way that no amount of carefully thought out words ever could.
His chest is still heaving and his eyes are still wide and disconcertingly vacant and she's three quarters to convinced he's in the throes of a full blown panic attack and all she has to offer him is everything she has already given...
*
His palms are flat against the floor on either side of him. The backs of his hands, bloodless.
She can't tear her eyes from them.
Nail beds almost blue.
She thinks this moment has been oddly inevitable for months. Like everything that's happened between before and now has been building to a devastating crescendo and that this latest drama, whatever it may be, has simply provided the proverbial straw.
And that this is the camel's back well and truly broken.
*
Ask her later and she'll say they sat that way for hours. Surrounded only by the sawing sound of air being forced into lungs that wanted nothing more than to pack up and go home...
In reality it was probably only minutes.
She knows the medical facts. Knows physically that it can't have been much longer than that.
But it felt like days and the way she pulled him, half asleep, into her lap as it drew to a shuddering end, makes her think it felt like weeks to him.
*
She drives him home. Knows without even having to find her that Meredith will cover for them. He's zombie-like and she's so beyond terrified she can barely recognise the sound of her own voice as she whispers his name over and over like a mantra.
Completely devoid of anything more articulate than the two syllables making up the breathless Alex she seems to have stuck on some kind of endlessly looping repeat.
“Alex...” There it is...
“You can stop now.” His reply stuns her to frozen solid on the spot. It's the first time he's spoken since his off handed insult about her 'thinking' back in the hospital cafeteria at lunchtime. “The freak show is over.”
His voice is flat. Exhaustion and terror laced through every clipped verbalisation. Barely drowning out the desperate attempt at cold nonchalance.
Barely...
“Alex, don't...”
But he already is.
Well and truly.
She follows him because she's still completely in the dark as to what is really going on and she's still more than convinced he's just looking for the nearest bridge to throw himself off or speeding bus to...
The thought fizzles and dies somewhere in very depths of her roiling stomach.
Settles somewhere beside an image of him with a gun pressed to his right temple.
*
He makes it to three quarters from the top before slumping to seated on the stairs. Head between his knees and fingers clenched around the wooden framework of the faded bannister.
She climbs from the bottom. Takes the steps two at a time until she's inches from where he's collapsed.
“Alex? Alex you're gonna make yourself sick.” And as much as she's still got no idea what is driving his panic, she also has no desire to mop it up in the aftermath.
His chest is heaving and his whole body is shuddering to a beat that only he can hear and his face is tear-stained and she's more than convinced he hasn't got a clue about any of it beyond his desperate fight for oxygen.
He disappears then. Blurs out behind a wall of saltwater, and she has no idea when that started or even why, just knows that now is so not the time for more tears. She blinks him back into focus resolutely, uses the back of her hand to viciously swipe away the evidence of her own failings.
“Alex, look at me.” She clamps her hands on either side of his face and drags his chin up until they're eye to wild eye. His are almost rolling around in his head, testament to the lack of air he's managing to drag in with each ragged inhale.
She only just resists the urge to slap him.
She moves into position behind him instead. Wraps her legs around his sides and her arms around his chest and pulls him tightly into her, lets his head loll back against her collarbone and refuses to burst into tears at the guttural sounds he's making.
Pain and fear and absolute devastation all desperately shoved into one choked echo that she can't imagine she'll ever quite manage to forget.
*
He sleeps for seven straight hours after that and she spends most of them camped out at the base of the staircase, fingers and thumbs drumming impatiently against her thigh.
She stops counting after the fourth voice mail message and the thirteenth unanswered call she leaves on Meredith's cell phone. The first is a rambling monologue that details the exact happenings of the last several hours and is unceremoniously cut short by a piercing beep. The last is much more to the point.
“Come home. Now.”
*
“Lexie?”
She startles to awake. Instantly furious with herself for falling asleep in the first place.
“Crap.” Breathless, lurching to upright from where she was still slumped on the stairs. “What time is it?” Meredith's gaze lowers to the watch at her wrist but really, time is irrelevant here and so she doesn't bother to wait for a response. “Where the hell have you been?”
Meredith answers the question with one of her own, “Where is he?” Couples the sentence with a cursory glance over her shoulder and the ghost of a deepening frown.
“What is this? A fucking intervention?”
He appears then. And Lexie spins so fast to face him that she almost lands in a heap at Meredith's feet.
Her lips move but no sound comes out and really, she thinks it's probably for the best.
At least for now, anyway.
*
She busies herself making coffee that she doubts any of them are going to drink. Stirs sugars into the acrid black and tries not to listen to the muffled conversation taking place in the den.
Sinking onto a stool at the kitchen counter she lowers her head to her crossed arms and lets her eyelids slide to sandpaper closed.
Steels herself for whatever it might be that happens next.
*
Meredith returns first. Steps through the entrance and into the kitchen as the front door slams to a resounding close.
“He's gone for a run.”
“He's what?”
“I know, I know...” Meredith's sigh fills the endless space between them and the set of her shoulders is clearly defeated. “But he wants me to tell you...”
“Tell me what?” Her hands are wrapped tightly around her mug and she lifts the drink to her lips and slurps noisily before she remembers that she made the coffee almost an hour ago.
“Tell you everything, I guess.” She shrugs with a forced casualness. Lexie feels something inside her chest shift at the movement.
“Everything?” she clarifies. Curious and terrified and a heady mixture the two.
“Yeah, everything...”
*
It takes Meredith twenty three minutes to get it all out.
And by all, she really does mean all.
Lexie cries silently for nineteen of them. And for so many more than that once she's done.
*
He storms back through the front door almost an hour later. Dripping with sweat and rainwater and the heavy weight of his own memories.
She expects him to shove past her and up the stairs. To ignore her completely and to keep his eyes on his shoes and to hold his breath until he's well and truly out of sight.
But he does none of those things.
And so it's her that is on the back foot.
He pauses in the doorway to the kitchen where she's been resolutely seated and ticking off the minutes 'til she could officially report him as missing. Sure as she's ever been about anything that they were never going to see him again.
That she was never going to see him again.
He's looking at her through rain damp lashes. Dark eyes clouded with more than several shaded layers that Lexie can't quite bring herself to name, let alone look at.
“I'm so sorry,” she whispers without meeting his stare. Offers an apology even though none of it is her fault.
Not really.
She can see his shoulders as they shift. A quick up and down that she assumes is meant to resemble a shrug. “S'not your fault,” he confirms. Voice raw and rare.
“Alex...” she looks up because she needs him to see that she knows what she's doing this time, that she had no idea before but that she knows now. “I'm so sorry.”
He shrugs again but it's a little less certain this time, a smaller movement that fails to hide his hesitation. His almost tangible desire to flee.
“I'm so sorry.” She's stuck on the phrase. Completely incapable of coming up with something new. Isn't entirely convinced that he believes her yet anyway.
He turns to walk out and she staggers to standing. “Alex, wait.”
She can hear Meredith moving around upstairs, and April as she flicks from one insipid reality show to another in the den, had almost forgotten for a moment that they don't exist in a vacuum.
Alex pauses mid step but doesn't turn around. She counts on him trusting her, gives herself just enough time to move across the faded linoleum to the fridge. Pulls it open with a rattle of jelly jars and white wine and manages to secure his interest with a stuttered, “D'you want a beer?”
Deliberately blanks out the memory of the last time they'd stood in this position.
Can't help but to note the complete role reversal that has taken place since that telling time point.
*
They've made their way through most of the beer and half a bottle of white wine before a search for tequila brings their tentative housemates into the room.
Lexie has a striped martini glass half full of a beer and apple juice mix in one hand. Is mid-way through a passionate soliloquy about why it tastes so much better like that when Meredith appears in her periphery.
“What the hell happened in here?”
She giggles and surveys the carnage. Keeps giggling.
Can't quite figure out how to stop.
“Apple ale?” she inquires. Lifts her glass in Meredith's direction by way of a question mark.
“Urgh. Pass. You two are disgusting.”
“April? Apple ale?” She grins at the other girl's horrified expression. “Wow, that's alotta a's right there...” Slurps sloppily at the lip of her glass and maybe just concedes that she's tasted better cocktails in the past.
But she's also tasted worse so, really? It's all win win right now.
*
The iridescent figures on the microwave oven blink the time as somewhere after three but definitely before four. Anything more specific than that she can't be sure of.
She can't even confirm if it's am or pm.
Alex is tugging her insistently towards stairs that April and Meredith have long since disappeared up. His eyelids are to half mast and his shirt is somewhere between where they were and where they now are and she's pretty sure every last scrap of her resolve when it comes to him is right there alongside it.
Discarded.
*
Later, they're both draped haphazardly across his mattress. A scene so reminiscent of how this all started way back when.
Booze and the somewhat misguided notion that sex will make it all better.
She says somewhat misguided because it sure takes everything away in the short term.
And a gunman who shoots your friends to dead and almost dying sure puts anything beyond the short term into a sharply shifted perspective.
*
Needless to say, she lets the Christmas plans slide...
*
It's days before she manages to scrape together enough courage to mumble out a request to talk. Already knows in her head how most of the conversation is sure to go.
He sighs. Resigned. But nods his head quickly in acquiescence.
His fingers fiddle constantly with her wrist. As though the joint is the most fascinating thing he's come across.
It's nothing more than a half hearted defense mechanism and so she resists the urge to snatch her hand away and make him look at her.
“I don't want to have the 'what are we?' conversation...”
He looks up sharply, fingers freezing against her pulse point. “You don't?”
She shakes her head quickly. Side to side to side as his eyes widen and the penny drops somewhere into the feet and inches of space developing between them.
“Alex, I just... I want to know if-” she pauses, can't quite come up with the right words for what exactly it is that she wants to know. “I want to know if you're okay.”
He pulls back then, rolls away slightly, takes the sweat stained sheet with him until the only thing he can possibly see is the faded paint on the ceiling of the first room that's ever felt like home to him.
“I'm not crazy if that's what you mean.” Immediately on the defensive.
And it's not what she means. Not even close.
“No, Alex...” she scrubs her hands down her cheeks. Inhales air 'til she thinks her lungs might burst before releasing it all in a wave that is not nearly as calming as she'd hoped it was going to be, “No, that's not... that's not what I mean.”
She rolls onto her belly. Their sides zippered together. Runs a tentative hand down the slight curve of his face before pressing slightly, pushing him to look at her. “That's not what I mean and I know you're not crazy.” She pauses, waits for the information to sink in. Double checks it with a quick, “Okay?”
He drags his eyes back to the ceiling and fails to acknowledge her statement. The silence builds between them 'til she's almost sure she's about to burst. Itches at her fingertips and fills the inside of her skull with a rushing white noise.
“I thought maybe you went crazy... for a second...”
The words are so quiet she can almost convince herself he never even breathed them in the first place.
*
Breath held, he's waiting for her to speak.
“I know... I thought maybe I was, too.” She pinches her eyelids to closed. Clamps down on vague memories that all the benzodiazepines in the world couldn't quite erase to completely. “But it wasn't your fault...” She snaps her head up as the dots Meredith painted seem to come together with a little more cohesion...
Shifting to seated she pulls the sheet around her in an entirely subconscious attempt at modesty, “You do know that it wasn't your fault, don't you?”
His silence is as telling as any denial could ever be and he blinks. Just once. Slips sliding saltwater tracks to the pillow beneath his head.
Almost eight months of chaos have come between them.
Days and weeks and endless hours of miscommunication.
Or of no communication whatsoever.
And she figures they're both a little to blame for that.
“You were an ass to me.” She doesn't wait for him to nod or stammer out an agreement, a disagreement, a mumbled combination of the two. That he was an ass to her is not the point she's trying to make. “You were an ass to me, but someone you'd never met put a bullet in your chest and I almost went crazy and Cristina did go crazy and people died and Izzie didn't call you-”
“Stop.” Pained. Eyes blinking wildly, raking across the room in any which direction that isn't hers. Fingers fisted, white knuckle tight, into the sheet pooled by is side.
“No, Alex it's okay, because all of that happened and none of it was your fault. Not one single second of it.”
Puzzle pieces sliding neatly into place.
She leans forward. All the way. Sinks until her head is pillowed against his chest. Reverberating heartbeat echoing all the way to her toes, “And what's happening to Aaron and your mom, that's not your fault either.”
All the air in his chest escapes, she can feel him physically deflate as any fight he might have had left in him evaporates, cloud-like.
And she wonders then if it was really there in the first place.
“None of that was ever your fault.”
*
She doesn't for a second think that he'll ever forgive himself enough to believe her.
*
They fall asleep curled into each other and wake exactly the same way. When her eyes blink to open he's already threading fingers through her tangled hair.
“Hey you,” she smiles. Slowly.
Endlessly lazy.
“Hey yourself, morning breath.”
She laughs. Properly.
And for the first time in far too long.
She rolls onto her side, traces the pads of her fingertips over the scar tissue on his chest and can't help but notice that he doesn't even flinch. Not anymore.
“Are we good?” She lifts her eyes tentatively to his face. Unsure.
Expectant.
“You called me an ass.” But there is a smirk in his tone that is achingly familiar.
“That's because you were an ass,” she chides playfully, “and you never answered my question.”
She might just be pushing her luck now but she needs to hear the affirmation for herself.
“What question?”
“Are you okay?”
He sighs and the sound carries the weight of a thousand boulders as his eyes roll ceiling-ward. She figures she should get used to conversations carried out in the direction of that particular structure.
“I tried to be a duck once-”
“You what?”
“I tried to be a duck once and I'm pretty sure I sucked at it but, I do know I want to be something...” He trails off and she's about as confused as she's ever been.
Biting her tongue, she waits.
“I don't really think any of us are okay. But I think we might be. One day. And all the crap with Aaron? I know it's not my fault but I still feel like shit because I ran, because I always freaking run from them. And then it was like I was kinda running from you too and I really, really don't wanna run anymore...”
Her throat burns, white hot, and she wills herself not to cry because she's fairly certain this is the most he's ever revealed to her in a single conversation.
Maybe the most he's ever revealed to anyone that isn't her half sister or his ex-wife.
“And if you say something cheesy right now I swear to god I'll convince Bailey you've forgotten how to do rectals...”
And there he is.
Just like that.
Alex.
“Maybe I'll try being a pelican instead. They seem kinda badass...”
Characters/Pairings: Lexie, Alex/Lexie
Word Count: 4200
Rating: PG
Prompt: From rorylie for writing4acause. Anything where Alex and Lexie end up together... (vague prompt is vague and awesome and only mildly dangerous!)
Summary: Set post 7.08. An AU attempt to put back together everything about them that splintered to dust in the aftermath of the shooting, Lexie's breakdown and the news about Aaron.
Disclaimer: At my user info. page.
Author's Note: Beer and apple juice is a disgustingly delicious habit that I can't seem to break... Title, cut text and lyrics from “What Do I Know About Pain” by Gyroscope.
This is not a game I play discretely,
even if it does sound kind of creepy.
I'll make sure you're tucked in when I leave you,
so no-one else can get to you...
*
Lexie thinks that in the immediate aftermath of the day the world tumbled down to somewhere around their well worn shoelaces, the rumour mill at Seattle Grace went into a kind of warp speed overdrive. There was a period of a couple of months where it seemed that nothing went unnoticed. When someone freaking the fuck out was a daily occurence somewhere within the myriad hallways and on-call rooms, and talking about that was a way of not talking about your own impending demise.
She's not sure when it stopped. Just knows that it did with a resounding rush of winter cold air. She suspects it has something, suspects it has everything, to do with the fact that it should be over by now. The freak outs and the rage and the complete avoidance. It should all be over by now and it's not even close and so the rumour mill has shut itself off.
Because gossiping about the public failings of a peadiatric nurse you've never met is no where near as satisfying when your own seams are one decent loud noise away from unravelling completely.
“So, I was thinking...”
They're at lunch. Seated haphazardly around a cafeteria table, french fries and barely picked at salads and upturned pudding cups, pointedly not talking about the proverbial elephant that is missing from the room.
Cristina.
“That's always dangerous...” Alex doesn't even look up from the chart he has balanced across one knee. And the fading purple around his left eye is only noticeable to those who were there to witness it inflicted in the first place. She cocks her head at him and pulls a face that she knows he won't see. Rolls her eyes at Meredith who shrugs back half-heartedly before sighing around words she's sure she's about to regret.
“So, I was thinking, we should do Christmas this year.”
He snorts. Still doesn't look up.
It's Meredith's turn to roll her eyes.
“What?” She's immediately on the defensive. Determined to be given the chance to state her case.
“It's like, August, Lexie. And do you not remember how successful that was last year?” Meredith's sarcasm is dripping as April and Jackson share an amused glance of 'outsider' solidarity.
“We need to plan ahead and that was Thanksgiving, I'm talking about Christmas. We never do normal things, we need to do normal things-”
Alex snorts again and she shifts in her seat 'til her knee is pressed against his, a deliberate move to get his attention.
It works for a lightening flash as he lifts his eyes from the chart with a bemused frown. Sees through her thinly veiled attempt at manipulation almost immediately.
After all, it's a game they've been playing at for some weeks now.
“I was thinking Molly might come for a bit, and April, you have sisters don't you? And you could invite Aaron and your sister...” She's in ramble mode now, speaking without really taking in her surroundings as her plans for the holiday season get more and more elaborate with each verbalised syllable.
It's not until the toe of Meredith's tennis shoe launches repeatedly at her shin and his chair slides back with a metallic shriek that runs her blood to ice cold that she notices the shift.
He's streaking towards the doorway then, hastily closed chart clutched protectively against his chest, and she turns in her seat back to Meredith, panicked, wide eyed. “What? What did I say?”
“Just...” Meredith sighs around the word and makes a move to stand, indicates that she'll go after him.
But there's something screaming inside Lexie's chest telling her to chase him. To make it right. And she has no idea what it is or what the hell it might mean but she's halting Meredith with a raised hand before she even reconciles the movements and is snatching her pager from the cracked formica table top and sprinting after him without pausing to process her blind panic any further.
As she pushes out the swinging double doors she can't help but to think that the derailed Seattle Grace rumour train has a lot to answer for because, in the past, she'd have known exactly what was going on.
Countless not so hushed conversations at vending machines and coffee carts would have well and truly seen to that.
*
In the end she finds him in the tunnels. And really, it's not a difficult deduction to make. His favourite on-call room had been otherwise occupied when she'd burst in, and hiding out in supply closets was something akin to riding the elevator or crossing the catwalk these days...
He's curled on the floor beside a gurney, which is a telling choice in itself. Like maybe anything higher than ground level and he'd have to fight the urge to jump clean off.
She twists her fists into her scrub pants and takes a tentative step in his direction.
She not entirely convinced he's aware of her presence. That he's aware of anything other than the desperate battle he appears to be waging over the effectiveness of his own lungs.
“Alex?”
He startles viciously at the sound of her voice. Slams the back of his head into the wall with a resounding crack that has his eyes widening in pained surprise.
She drops to her knees beside him, barely notices the sound of her own bones meeting solid surface as she slides her fingers through his hair, wedges them between his skull and the unyielding plasterboard.
Feels at a complete loss to offer anything more substantial than that.
He stiffens at her touch. Guard immediately locked into place.
She's expecting it. Has her counter attack already planned.
She curls the fingers of her free hand tightly around his calf. The physical contact is so much more than they've dared for months now and she's counting on it to ground him in a way that no amount of carefully thought out words ever could.
His chest is still heaving and his eyes are still wide and disconcertingly vacant and she's three quarters to convinced he's in the throes of a full blown panic attack and all she has to offer him is everything she has already given...
*
His palms are flat against the floor on either side of him. The backs of his hands, bloodless.
She can't tear her eyes from them.
Nail beds almost blue.
She thinks this moment has been oddly inevitable for months. Like everything that's happened between before and now has been building to a devastating crescendo and that this latest drama, whatever it may be, has simply provided the proverbial straw.
And that this is the camel's back well and truly broken.
*
Ask her later and she'll say they sat that way for hours. Surrounded only by the sawing sound of air being forced into lungs that wanted nothing more than to pack up and go home...
In reality it was probably only minutes.
She knows the medical facts. Knows physically that it can't have been much longer than that.
But it felt like days and the way she pulled him, half asleep, into her lap as it drew to a shuddering end, makes her think it felt like weeks to him.
*
She drives him home. Knows without even having to find her that Meredith will cover for them. He's zombie-like and she's so beyond terrified she can barely recognise the sound of her own voice as she whispers his name over and over like a mantra.
Completely devoid of anything more articulate than the two syllables making up the breathless Alex she seems to have stuck on some kind of endlessly looping repeat.
“Alex...” There it is...
“You can stop now.” His reply stuns her to frozen solid on the spot. It's the first time he's spoken since his off handed insult about her 'thinking' back in the hospital cafeteria at lunchtime. “The freak show is over.”
His voice is flat. Exhaustion and terror laced through every clipped verbalisation. Barely drowning out the desperate attempt at cold nonchalance.
Barely...
“Alex, don't...”
But he already is.
Well and truly.
She follows him because she's still completely in the dark as to what is really going on and she's still more than convinced he's just looking for the nearest bridge to throw himself off or speeding bus to...
The thought fizzles and dies somewhere in very depths of her roiling stomach.
Settles somewhere beside an image of him with a gun pressed to his right temple.
*
He makes it to three quarters from the top before slumping to seated on the stairs. Head between his knees and fingers clenched around the wooden framework of the faded bannister.
She climbs from the bottom. Takes the steps two at a time until she's inches from where he's collapsed.
“Alex? Alex you're gonna make yourself sick.” And as much as she's still got no idea what is driving his panic, she also has no desire to mop it up in the aftermath.
His chest is heaving and his whole body is shuddering to a beat that only he can hear and his face is tear-stained and she's more than convinced he hasn't got a clue about any of it beyond his desperate fight for oxygen.
He disappears then. Blurs out behind a wall of saltwater, and she has no idea when that started or even why, just knows that now is so not the time for more tears. She blinks him back into focus resolutely, uses the back of her hand to viciously swipe away the evidence of her own failings.
“Alex, look at me.” She clamps her hands on either side of his face and drags his chin up until they're eye to wild eye. His are almost rolling around in his head, testament to the lack of air he's managing to drag in with each ragged inhale.
She only just resists the urge to slap him.
She moves into position behind him instead. Wraps her legs around his sides and her arms around his chest and pulls him tightly into her, lets his head loll back against her collarbone and refuses to burst into tears at the guttural sounds he's making.
Pain and fear and absolute devastation all desperately shoved into one choked echo that she can't imagine she'll ever quite manage to forget.
*
He sleeps for seven straight hours after that and she spends most of them camped out at the base of the staircase, fingers and thumbs drumming impatiently against her thigh.
She stops counting after the fourth voice mail message and the thirteenth unanswered call she leaves on Meredith's cell phone. The first is a rambling monologue that details the exact happenings of the last several hours and is unceremoniously cut short by a piercing beep. The last is much more to the point.
“Come home. Now.”
*
“Lexie?”
She startles to awake. Instantly furious with herself for falling asleep in the first place.
“Crap.” Breathless, lurching to upright from where she was still slumped on the stairs. “What time is it?” Meredith's gaze lowers to the watch at her wrist but really, time is irrelevant here and so she doesn't bother to wait for a response. “Where the hell have you been?”
Meredith answers the question with one of her own, “Where is he?” Couples the sentence with a cursory glance over her shoulder and the ghost of a deepening frown.
“What is this? A fucking intervention?”
He appears then. And Lexie spins so fast to face him that she almost lands in a heap at Meredith's feet.
Her lips move but no sound comes out and really, she thinks it's probably for the best.
At least for now, anyway.
*
She busies herself making coffee that she doubts any of them are going to drink. Stirs sugars into the acrid black and tries not to listen to the muffled conversation taking place in the den.
Sinking onto a stool at the kitchen counter she lowers her head to her crossed arms and lets her eyelids slide to sandpaper closed.
Steels herself for whatever it might be that happens next.
*
Meredith returns first. Steps through the entrance and into the kitchen as the front door slams to a resounding close.
“He's gone for a run.”
“He's what?”
“I know, I know...” Meredith's sigh fills the endless space between them and the set of her shoulders is clearly defeated. “But he wants me to tell you...”
“Tell me what?” Her hands are wrapped tightly around her mug and she lifts the drink to her lips and slurps noisily before she remembers that she made the coffee almost an hour ago.
“Tell you everything, I guess.” She shrugs with a forced casualness. Lexie feels something inside her chest shift at the movement.
“Everything?” she clarifies. Curious and terrified and a heady mixture the two.
“Yeah, everything...”
*
It takes Meredith twenty three minutes to get it all out.
And by all, she really does mean all.
Lexie cries silently for nineteen of them. And for so many more than that once she's done.
*
He storms back through the front door almost an hour later. Dripping with sweat and rainwater and the heavy weight of his own memories.
She expects him to shove past her and up the stairs. To ignore her completely and to keep his eyes on his shoes and to hold his breath until he's well and truly out of sight.
But he does none of those things.
And so it's her that is on the back foot.
He pauses in the doorway to the kitchen where she's been resolutely seated and ticking off the minutes 'til she could officially report him as missing. Sure as she's ever been about anything that they were never going to see him again.
That she was never going to see him again.
He's looking at her through rain damp lashes. Dark eyes clouded with more than several shaded layers that Lexie can't quite bring herself to name, let alone look at.
“I'm so sorry,” she whispers without meeting his stare. Offers an apology even though none of it is her fault.
Not really.
She can see his shoulders as they shift. A quick up and down that she assumes is meant to resemble a shrug. “S'not your fault,” he confirms. Voice raw and rare.
“Alex...” she looks up because she needs him to see that she knows what she's doing this time, that she had no idea before but that she knows now. “I'm so sorry.”
He shrugs again but it's a little less certain this time, a smaller movement that fails to hide his hesitation. His almost tangible desire to flee.
“I'm so sorry.” She's stuck on the phrase. Completely incapable of coming up with something new. Isn't entirely convinced that he believes her yet anyway.
He turns to walk out and she staggers to standing. “Alex, wait.”
She can hear Meredith moving around upstairs, and April as she flicks from one insipid reality show to another in the den, had almost forgotten for a moment that they don't exist in a vacuum.
Alex pauses mid step but doesn't turn around. She counts on him trusting her, gives herself just enough time to move across the faded linoleum to the fridge. Pulls it open with a rattle of jelly jars and white wine and manages to secure his interest with a stuttered, “D'you want a beer?”
Deliberately blanks out the memory of the last time they'd stood in this position.
Can't help but to note the complete role reversal that has taken place since that telling time point.
*
They've made their way through most of the beer and half a bottle of white wine before a search for tequila brings their tentative housemates into the room.
Lexie has a striped martini glass half full of a beer and apple juice mix in one hand. Is mid-way through a passionate soliloquy about why it tastes so much better like that when Meredith appears in her periphery.
“What the hell happened in here?”
She giggles and surveys the carnage. Keeps giggling.
Can't quite figure out how to stop.
“Apple ale?” she inquires. Lifts her glass in Meredith's direction by way of a question mark.
“Urgh. Pass. You two are disgusting.”
“April? Apple ale?” She grins at the other girl's horrified expression. “Wow, that's alotta a's right there...” Slurps sloppily at the lip of her glass and maybe just concedes that she's tasted better cocktails in the past.
But she's also tasted worse so, really? It's all win win right now.
*
The iridescent figures on the microwave oven blink the time as somewhere after three but definitely before four. Anything more specific than that she can't be sure of.
She can't even confirm if it's am or pm.
Alex is tugging her insistently towards stairs that April and Meredith have long since disappeared up. His eyelids are to half mast and his shirt is somewhere between where they were and where they now are and she's pretty sure every last scrap of her resolve when it comes to him is right there alongside it.
Discarded.
*
Later, they're both draped haphazardly across his mattress. A scene so reminiscent of how this all started way back when.
Booze and the somewhat misguided notion that sex will make it all better.
She says somewhat misguided because it sure takes everything away in the short term.
And a gunman who shoots your friends to dead and almost dying sure puts anything beyond the short term into a sharply shifted perspective.
*
Needless to say, she lets the Christmas plans slide...
*
It's days before she manages to scrape together enough courage to mumble out a request to talk. Already knows in her head how most of the conversation is sure to go.
He sighs. Resigned. But nods his head quickly in acquiescence.
His fingers fiddle constantly with her wrist. As though the joint is the most fascinating thing he's come across.
It's nothing more than a half hearted defense mechanism and so she resists the urge to snatch her hand away and make him look at her.
“I don't want to have the 'what are we?' conversation...”
He looks up sharply, fingers freezing against her pulse point. “You don't?”
She shakes her head quickly. Side to side to side as his eyes widen and the penny drops somewhere into the feet and inches of space developing between them.
“Alex, I just... I want to know if-” she pauses, can't quite come up with the right words for what exactly it is that she wants to know. “I want to know if you're okay.”
He pulls back then, rolls away slightly, takes the sweat stained sheet with him until the only thing he can possibly see is the faded paint on the ceiling of the first room that's ever felt like home to him.
“I'm not crazy if that's what you mean.” Immediately on the defensive.
And it's not what she means. Not even close.
“No, Alex...” she scrubs her hands down her cheeks. Inhales air 'til she thinks her lungs might burst before releasing it all in a wave that is not nearly as calming as she'd hoped it was going to be, “No, that's not... that's not what I mean.”
She rolls onto her belly. Their sides zippered together. Runs a tentative hand down the slight curve of his face before pressing slightly, pushing him to look at her. “That's not what I mean and I know you're not crazy.” She pauses, waits for the information to sink in. Double checks it with a quick, “Okay?”
He drags his eyes back to the ceiling and fails to acknowledge her statement. The silence builds between them 'til she's almost sure she's about to burst. Itches at her fingertips and fills the inside of her skull with a rushing white noise.
“I thought maybe you went crazy... for a second...”
The words are so quiet she can almost convince herself he never even breathed them in the first place.
*
Breath held, he's waiting for her to speak.
“I know... I thought maybe I was, too.” She pinches her eyelids to closed. Clamps down on vague memories that all the benzodiazepines in the world couldn't quite erase to completely. “But it wasn't your fault...” She snaps her head up as the dots Meredith painted seem to come together with a little more cohesion...
Shifting to seated she pulls the sheet around her in an entirely subconscious attempt at modesty, “You do know that it wasn't your fault, don't you?”
His silence is as telling as any denial could ever be and he blinks. Just once. Slips sliding saltwater tracks to the pillow beneath his head.
Almost eight months of chaos have come between them.
Days and weeks and endless hours of miscommunication.
Or of no communication whatsoever.
And she figures they're both a little to blame for that.
“You were an ass to me.” She doesn't wait for him to nod or stammer out an agreement, a disagreement, a mumbled combination of the two. That he was an ass to her is not the point she's trying to make. “You were an ass to me, but someone you'd never met put a bullet in your chest and I almost went crazy and Cristina did go crazy and people died and Izzie didn't call you-”
“Stop.” Pained. Eyes blinking wildly, raking across the room in any which direction that isn't hers. Fingers fisted, white knuckle tight, into the sheet pooled by is side.
“No, Alex it's okay, because all of that happened and none of it was your fault. Not one single second of it.”
Puzzle pieces sliding neatly into place.
She leans forward. All the way. Sinks until her head is pillowed against his chest. Reverberating heartbeat echoing all the way to her toes, “And what's happening to Aaron and your mom, that's not your fault either.”
All the air in his chest escapes, she can feel him physically deflate as any fight he might have had left in him evaporates, cloud-like.
And she wonders then if it was really there in the first place.
“None of that was ever your fault.”
*
She doesn't for a second think that he'll ever forgive himself enough to believe her.
*
They fall asleep curled into each other and wake exactly the same way. When her eyes blink to open he's already threading fingers through her tangled hair.
“Hey you,” she smiles. Slowly.
Endlessly lazy.
“Hey yourself, morning breath.”
She laughs. Properly.
And for the first time in far too long.
She rolls onto her side, traces the pads of her fingertips over the scar tissue on his chest and can't help but notice that he doesn't even flinch. Not anymore.
“Are we good?” She lifts her eyes tentatively to his face. Unsure.
Expectant.
“You called me an ass.” But there is a smirk in his tone that is achingly familiar.
“That's because you were an ass,” she chides playfully, “and you never answered my question.”
She might just be pushing her luck now but she needs to hear the affirmation for herself.
“What question?”
“Are you okay?”
He sighs and the sound carries the weight of a thousand boulders as his eyes roll ceiling-ward. She figures she should get used to conversations carried out in the direction of that particular structure.
“I tried to be a duck once-”
“You what?”
“I tried to be a duck once and I'm pretty sure I sucked at it but, I do know I want to be something...” He trails off and she's about as confused as she's ever been.
Biting her tongue, she waits.
“I don't really think any of us are okay. But I think we might be. One day. And all the crap with Aaron? I know it's not my fault but I still feel like shit because I ran, because I always freaking run from them. And then it was like I was kinda running from you too and I really, really don't wanna run anymore...”
Her throat burns, white hot, and she wills herself not to cry because she's fairly certain this is the most he's ever revealed to her in a single conversation.
Maybe the most he's ever revealed to anyone that isn't her half sister or his ex-wife.
“And if you say something cheesy right now I swear to god I'll convince Bailey you've forgotten how to do rectals...”
And there he is.
Just like that.
Alex.
“Maybe I'll try being a pelican instead. They seem kinda badass...”