waltzmatildah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waltzmatildah) wrote2007-06-05 04:44 pm
waltzmatildah) wrote2007-06-05 04:44 pm
Fic: Don't Even Want To Talk About It (Alex)
Title: Don’t Dream It’s Over (Chapter Five)
Character/Pairing: Alex, Bailey, Addison, Izzie, Cristina
Word Count: 1600
Summary: One event, four people, four different reactions.
Character/Pairing: Alex, Bailey, Addison, Izzie, Cristina
Word Count: 1600
Summary: One event, four people, four different reactions.
Disclaimer: I hear nothing, I see nothing, I speak nothing…I definitely own nothing.
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Miranda had made it all the way to her car, in fact she had even inserted the key into the ignition and turned it far enough that the radio had burst to life, before she sighed in resignation and slammed both her palms down onto the steering wheel. Closing her eyes briefly and scrubbing her hands over her face in an attempt to wake up or calm down or for some other reason she couldn’t bring herself to try and rationalise, she then leaned forward and switched the ignition off again. She had phoned her husband earlier in the evening to explain why she would be even later than the late she had already warned him about and she knew that he didn’t believe her when she said she would be home eventually.
She re-entered the hospital five minutes later and made her way to the resident’s lounge, finding it blissfully empty and refreshingly silent. Refusing to look at the clock on the wall, large digital numbers glowing in mocking neon, she settled down on the couch and rested her head on the overstuffed cushion in one corner, intending to make the best of an absolutely shocking night by getting at least a few hours sleep.
She was just stepping onto a Broadway stage to receive her standing ovation for the contemporary dance piece she had just performed to the dulcet tones of Simon and Garfunkle when her pager sounded, ending the dream the rapturous applause she was busy basking in. Jolted from a deep sleep, it took her a few minutes to remember where she was and more importantly, why she was there. Despite the countless hours she had spent in this room the pitch-blackness was making her dazed and disoriented. Snatching the offending electronic device from where she had carefully placed in on the floor beside her, prepared for exactly this situation but not expecting it; definitely not expecting it, she squinted at the flashing words.
911 ICU CODE BLUE
For a split second Miranda could have sworn everything in her body stopped. Her heart, her blood flow, her breath, her brain, her nerve synapses, frozen for that one moment in time, before bursting back to life with such determination and speed and vigour that she almost doubled over.
She was at the door before she realised that she hadn’t even put her shoes and socks back on, her toenails, hot pink, laughed up at her with mocking contempt. Forgoing the socks altogether she slid her feet into her clogs and forced herself to breathe, he wasn’t the only person in the ICU, hell he wasn’t even her patient, in all likelihood the page had nothing to do with him.
Except Miranda already knew that it did.
Izzie’s pager was the first to sound, followed at regular intervals by Meredith’s and then George’s. Despite hers being the first she was the last to react, only woken by the rush of cold air that enveloped her when George extricated himself from her grasp. Opening one sleep glazed, hung-over eye she could see Meredith rise slowly, gingerly across and up from her, her long hair tangled and sticking up in a manner that Izzie was sure she would have found hysterically amusing had she not been fighting to keep the tequila and the chardonnay and the, argh…the beer, from rising in the back of her throat and making a reappearance.
George was the first to speak, he had reached his pager and Izzie guessed he had managed to focus for just long enough to read the words before they blurred back into a blue haze.
Meredith was next, her oh God muffled slightly by the fact that her wrist was in her mouth, her teeth clamping down hard enough to create purple, serrated indentations and her fist clenched in a tight, white-knuckled ball. Something deep in Izzie was telling her things were not at all okay here but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she was in bed with George… again, and why Meredith looked so terrified, and why her own hands were shaking so badly that it took her three goes to pull her pager from her handbag.
911 ICU CODE BLUE
And then she figured it out.
Her stomach rebelled, reacting violently in a way that her voice and her heart and her brain didn’t seem able.
She pushed up from the mattress and with a speed and a determination and a desperation that belied her current state, sprinted out the door and burst into the bathroom opposite, one hand over her mouth, the other, still clutching her pager, wrapped around her mid-section. Flinging back the door to the first stall she emptied the liquid contents of her stomach into the bowl in one heave. Tears mingled with vomit on her lips and she reached to flush the toilet before exiting the cubicle and rinsing her mouth out with ice-cold water at the sink.
Turning so her back was against the cold, tiled wall she slid to the floor, legs awkwardly splayed beneath her, entire body shaking so badly her bones felt like they were knocking together. It was only now, from her spot on the floor, that she realised she was not alone. Someone was mirroring her position on the floor against the far wall, turning something small and black over and over in their hands, staring at nothing or, maybe, staring at everything.
‘Christina?’
Addison was awake, had been ever since she had made her way to the vacated on-call room at Christina’s suggestion. Despite the screaming her body was doing, telling her to relax, unwind and sleep she just hadn’t been able to switch off enough to actually do so. It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that she had been in too many on-call rooms doing too many things besides sleeping to be able to feel completely secure enough to sleep in one any more.
She was busy trying to visualise her schedule for the day ahead, actually, who was she kidding? She was busy trying not to visualise Alex, shirtless and sweaty and sweet on her lips. She was busy trying not to re-live the feel of him pressed up and hard against her when her pager sounded, breaking into her conscious, an unwanted intruder, banishing the images from her mind and the smell of him from her nostrils and the feel of him from her fingertips.
She took a guess before unclipping the pager from the band of her skirt, Baby Jacobs in the NICU, born addicted to ICE, heroin and cocaine that she knew of and showing all the signs of foetal alcohol syndrome.
911 ICU CODE BLUE
There were no babies in the ICU ward.
Christina didn’t know if it was possible to hate yourself as much as she currently did. The ferocity of the hate was threatening to melt her skin and dissolve her muscles and disintegrate the small shred of composure she had managed to scrape together since gutlessly fleeing in the face of a raw and open and perhaps irreparably broken Alex, begging, pleading, imploring her to tell him what to do. But how could she tell him what to do when she couldn’t even explain what she was doing there, when she couldn’t even tell herself what to do?
Alex was a rock and Christina was a rock, they were solid and unmoving and definitely did not break and shatter and fall to the ground in a thousand tiny pieces. They always knew what to do and never asked opinions of others because other people’s opinions didn’t matter, they knew what they were doing and where they were going and who they were. They didn’t questions themselves or second-guess their own instincts.
But Alex was broken and he was shattered and was falling towards the ground at break neck speed with no-one to catch him, to soften the blow, to kiss away the invisible bruises and if that could happen to Alex then what was there to say that it couldn’t happen to Christina?
Moving on autopilot, Christina had initially headed back in the direction of the on-call room that housed her sleeping friends. Pressing her ear to the door she could hear no movement or murmured sound on the other side indicating that they were still as she had left them, blissfully unaware. Instead of entering she turned one hundred and eighty degrees and made for the bathroom directly opposite, relishing the drop in temperature as she entered the fluorescently lit room and slid to the floor, unable to move, or think, or feel; a welcome relief from the emotional overload of only five minutes earlier.
Time lost all meaning, Christina had no idea how long sat there, her legs going numb under her, it could have been thirty seconds, it could have three days later that the bathroom door burst open with a sudden bang and a flash of blonde hair and blue scrubs as a body dashed past her and into the closest stall, retching and crying and gasping for breath. The activity barely registered in Christina’s blank gaze, still hypnotised by the flashing blue that had appeared on her pager somewhere in the infinity that had existed between her sliding to the floor and the blonde and the blue blurring past.
911 ICU CODE BLUE
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