![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waltzmatildahTitle: Concentrating on falling apart...
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Alex/Lexie, Alex/Meredith, Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie.
Word Count: 2050
Rating: R
Prompt: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
softly_me at the Doomed Ship Ficathon. We're concentrating on falling apart. We were contenders. Now, we're throwing the fight.
Summary: Alex and Meredith and the aftermath of the season six finale. An angst ridden and entirely dysfunctional AU for season seven.
Author's Note: I feel really bad, because all I've really done here is doom them again, which is kind of ironic considering what this ficathon is attempting to do. Title, prompt and cut text by Brand New.
Spoiler Warning: One 'blink and you'll miss it' mention of a vague S07E02 moment that hasn't even been confirmed. But trust me, if you don't do spoilers, you won't notice this one.
Lexie leaves him on a Wednesday morning. Eighteen days after he's discharged. Packs her bags and clears the bathroom and abandons the bed un-made.
He shrugs at the mascara that trails tracks to her chin. Can't give her answers to the never-ending questions that dip and swing from her lips.
(I don't know is not a legitimate response it would seem.
Even if it is the bone numbing truth.)
He carries her bags to the car. Closes the door with a soft thud and doesn't blink until her tail lights blur from red to black in the night.
He thinks she's ripped a hole in his chest. He's had experience with that recently. The searing memory is still fresh for comparison.
He inhales tequila like it's a rush of cold air. Presses his thumb against the channel button on the remote and pretends his eyes can still focus on the screen. Meredith sits beside him, slides her eyes to the left and watches him settle on self destruct.
(He can almost feel the moment his insides crumble to his toes. A tangible sense of the beginning of the end.)
The hangover just feels like proof.
They won't clear him for work. Scoff at suggestions that he's fine and ready and whole and healed. And he wonders when he so completely lost the ability to fake it all.
Meredith follows him around the house with her eyes. Sits in silent judgment as he swallows painkillers with scotch and antibiotics with beer and glares back at her viciously with a daring snarl. He's a cliché and he can no longer bring himself to care.
They fight about him; Meredith and Derek. Loud and long. Like nails down a blackboard.
He's a mess--
He's grieving--
You need to do something--
He's fine--
He drinks too much--
We all drink too much--
The house goes silent after that.
(He thinks it's only the inevitable finally come to haunt him.)
Some days he gets out of bed.
Some days he doesn't.
And they still won't clear him for work.
Psych evaluations have been made compulsory. He laughs; a bitter echo down the hallway that numbs his blood.
He waits for the thaw.
Is still waiting. Ice and snow and sleet in his veins.
Lexie's engagement filters like sand through the gaps between his fingers. Slippery and rough and falling. Fills his ears with the hum of bugs and bees.
There's to be a party. An invitation is shoved under the front door when he refuses to answer the timid knock. He tears it to shreds and sets the remnants on fire with a slug of something that burns as fiercely as any flame ever could.
He doesn't understand why he cares.
Can't reconcile the intensity of his hurt with what he thought he knew about himself.
She calls him. To explain. To apologise.
Meredith finds him later. The bathroom mat only just big enough for the two of them, side by side.
He shrivels and shrinks.
(I'm sorry.)
Listens to them fight about him. Again. Still.
(I'm so sorry. I promise.)
Contemplates a one way trip to anywhere that isn't here but knows without having to stand up that he won't make it as far as the end of the street. Celebrates his stagnancy with a bottle of something cloudy.
Meredith confronts him.
Orders him to get his shit together or get out.
Retracts her threat almost immediately. Panic and pleading on the tip of her tongue. Fingers scrabbling for purchase in the scruff of his t-shirt.
I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it...
He blinks dumbly. A smoky haze of confusion and disbelief.
(And he almost wishes that she did.)
He silences her garble with his own lips. Clamps down on her words until they stop the tingling reverberation in his bones.
Tries not to notice the moment when she works her tongue between his teeth and starts to kiss him back.
They don't speak to each other for two whole days. Communicate instead via a short hand code of shuttered eyelids and doors slammed to shut, locked.
She tosses a plate into the sink. A low, slow crack appears along its diameter. He runs fingertips reverently over the stain.
Dumps the lot in the trash as it divides completely in two. A phantom ache in his chest where a bullet once carved a jagged path.
Derek leaves. Kisses her goodbye in the doorway and promises to call when he arrives.
Says he misses her already as she laughs back that it's only for three days...
Alex bites his tongue until it bleeds. Fills his mouth with a copper tang that churns his stomach to mortar and rocks.
She's emptied his booze down the kitchen sink. An acrid river of amber and black.
But she hasn't yet filled Joe in on his dirty little secret.
(Tequila and scotch and bourbon and beer.)
And Joe is only too happy to oblige.
I've missed you! Where've you been hiding?
There is an answer to that. He doesn't bother to offer it.
They fuck on the second night. Fall into age old habits to soothe wounds that never seem to come close enough together at the seams to heal. Raw and wrenching.
(He hates himself even as he's lifting her shirt over her shoulders and toeing his jeans off the corner of his bed.
I'm sorry, breathy and silent into the waves of her hair.)
She won't meet his stare in the aftermath and something about the way that she gets up and leaves without a word deflates his insides to flattened.
They make the post-it official.
(She doesn't choose him.)
A civil ceremony at city hall that he can't quite bring himself to attend. He cracks the blinds as they drive away, catches a glimpse of flowers and fabric as she slides into the backseat of a vehicle that he doesn't recognise.
(He didn't expect that she would.
He has his own cross to bear.)
His cell phone bleats a pitiful mew and he thumbs it to life but doesn't bother to speak. When the voice at the other end, distant and dim, asks where he is, he ends the call.
It takes him seven hours to pack an old sports bag full of his clothes. He has to stop every thirty four seconds to breathe.
Slumped in a corner. Head on his knees.
He feels like crap.
It's the most he's felt in months.
He can't sleep.
He can't sleep because bullets fire through dreamscapes. Blood leaks and wives die in his arms and best friends marry post-it husbands and girlfriends get engaged to ex-boyfriends while brain matter stains at the tips of his toes.
He can't sleep.
(They tell him he's depressed and he can't help but wonder why they all seem so god damned surprised.)
There's a piece of metal in his chest taking up space.
A black hole that is only getting bigger.
Words leak before he can reign them in.
(You tell him it's my name you scream when he fucks you?)
Meredith shakes her head. Disgusted. Surprised.
Sad.
Squares her shoulders and steps towards him. Delivers a slap that he almost doesn't feel.
Almost. She's stronger than he's ever given her credit for.
But she knows as well as he does that their first time was never going to be their last.
He sleeps in his car for three nights. Stubborn and stupid and a heady combination of both. It's summer so she lets him.
(Fool.)
Reluctantly, the powers that be allow him back to the hospital.
(No surgeries 'til you have that damn bullet removed.)
Bailey's words tumble around his cavernous insides.
The thought of cutting someone open, of tearing skin and red, raw scars and the slick slip of blood on his hands, means he leaves at lunch time and doesn't bother to return.
He calls Izzie.
(Where are you?
Are you coming back?
I don't think I meant it when I sent you away...)
He calls Izzie but hangs up before the line connects through.
Meredith and Derek and silence and ice.
They fight again. And it's not about him.
He offers her tequila.
She pretends for seconds that she's not interested. Ends up in his bed as he spends the next four and half hours not touching her.
(It's the eighteen minutes at the end that brings them both to undone.)
(Please--)
She doesn't finish.
She doesn't need to.
They fall into it comfortably.
Lies and deceit and everything in between.
(It's a routine they've both lived through countless times before.)
Alex follows the inevitable reconciliation with baited breath. An apology muttered into a coffee cup. An acceptance sighed over a shoulder into the cold night air.
It counts for little in the end.
And she still crawls into his bed when the moon is high.
(This is the last time...
It's not.
We can't keep doing this...
They do.)
He begs off a hernia repair and spends the afternoon with his fingers wrapped tightly around a crystal cut tumbler filled to shallow with something pungent and fiery.
Bricks and mortar come together to build a home on a hill on the other side of town.
Meredith eyes him cautiously. Something that tastes of pity and regret fills a black hole that continues to grow.
You can stay here for as long as you need.
(He hopes it burns at the back of her throat as much as it does his.)
She moves out and it feels a lot like history rolling around and around in his head.
He hides out in the clinic. Treats chicken pox and meningitis and the common cold until Doctor Bailey seeks him out with a grim determination.
(What the hell are you doing?)
She plants both her palms flat against the base of his ribcage.
He stiffens to rigid.
No up, no down, no in-between.
Nothing left but thin air and anti-gravity.
It earns him a repeat visit with the trauma counsellor.
(Reed...
It's out before he even recognises it's an issue.)
The remaining forty three minutes are filled with a loaded kind of silence and when he pushes the door to open, making a desperate getaway, new appointment card scrunched to plausible deniability in his fist, Meredith's waiting for him.
He opens his mouth.
Closes it again without speaking as her fingers curl loosely into his.
They're barely off the hospital grounds before he's pulling her face towards his. Kissing her hard as the world crumbles to memories and dust at his fingertips.
(Alex.)
She's pleading and pushing. That much is clear.
But he's exploding. Months and days and minutes and years of weight and now it's his turn to plead.
His turn to push.
(Please, please, please, pleasepleaseplease...
Even to his own ears the word rings hollow.)
She leaves him there. On a park bench in an area of the city that is remarkably unfamiliar to him. He has no recollection of their arrival and, for now, his desire to leave is negligible.
In the end he walks. Asks for directions twice and buys a packet of cigarettes that last him fifty nine minutes.
The next one lit from the dying embers of the last.
(Tar and nicotine to fill the endless emptying.)
He arrives home under the cover of a thin mist that fails to hide him completely.
(The parts that fail him remain glaringly obvious.)
She's perched on the corner of his bed. Eyes closed.
Waiting with breath held.
(Where've you been? she doesn't ask.
She doesn't need to.)
And when she leaves, his name etched into the soft touch of her fingertips, he knows that now, this time, she won't be coming back.
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Alex/Lexie, Alex/Meredith, Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie.
Word Count: 2050
Rating: R
Prompt: For
softly_me at the Doomed Ship Ficathon. We're concentrating on falling apart. We were contenders. Now, we're throwing the fight.Summary: Alex and Meredith and the aftermath of the season six finale. An angst ridden and entirely dysfunctional AU for season seven.
Author's Note: I feel really bad, because all I've really done here is doom them again, which is kind of ironic considering what this ficathon is attempting to do. Title, prompt and cut text by Brand New.
Spoiler Warning: One 'blink and you'll miss it' mention of a vague S07E02 moment that hasn't even been confirmed. But trust me, if you don't do spoilers, you won't notice this one.
Lexie leaves him on a Wednesday morning. Eighteen days after he's discharged. Packs her bags and clears the bathroom and abandons the bed un-made.
He shrugs at the mascara that trails tracks to her chin. Can't give her answers to the never-ending questions that dip and swing from her lips.
(I don't know is not a legitimate response it would seem.
Even if it is the bone numbing truth.)
He carries her bags to the car. Closes the door with a soft thud and doesn't blink until her tail lights blur from red to black in the night.
He thinks she's ripped a hole in his chest. He's had experience with that recently. The searing memory is still fresh for comparison.
He inhales tequila like it's a rush of cold air. Presses his thumb against the channel button on the remote and pretends his eyes can still focus on the screen. Meredith sits beside him, slides her eyes to the left and watches him settle on self destruct.
(He can almost feel the moment his insides crumble to his toes. A tangible sense of the beginning of the end.)
The hangover just feels like proof.
They won't clear him for work. Scoff at suggestions that he's fine and ready and whole and healed. And he wonders when he so completely lost the ability to fake it all.
Meredith follows him around the house with her eyes. Sits in silent judgment as he swallows painkillers with scotch and antibiotics with beer and glares back at her viciously with a daring snarl. He's a cliché and he can no longer bring himself to care.
They fight about him; Meredith and Derek. Loud and long. Like nails down a blackboard.
He's a mess--
He's grieving--
You need to do something--
He's fine--
He drinks too much--
We all drink too much--
The house goes silent after that.
(He thinks it's only the inevitable finally come to haunt him.)
Some days he gets out of bed.
Some days he doesn't.
And they still won't clear him for work.
Psych evaluations have been made compulsory. He laughs; a bitter echo down the hallway that numbs his blood.
He waits for the thaw.
Is still waiting. Ice and snow and sleet in his veins.
Lexie's engagement filters like sand through the gaps between his fingers. Slippery and rough and falling. Fills his ears with the hum of bugs and bees.
There's to be a party. An invitation is shoved under the front door when he refuses to answer the timid knock. He tears it to shreds and sets the remnants on fire with a slug of something that burns as fiercely as any flame ever could.
He doesn't understand why he cares.
Can't reconcile the intensity of his hurt with what he thought he knew about himself.
She calls him. To explain. To apologise.
Meredith finds him later. The bathroom mat only just big enough for the two of them, side by side.
He shrivels and shrinks.
(I'm sorry.)
Listens to them fight about him. Again. Still.
(I'm so sorry. I promise.)
Contemplates a one way trip to anywhere that isn't here but knows without having to stand up that he won't make it as far as the end of the street. Celebrates his stagnancy with a bottle of something cloudy.
Meredith confronts him.
Orders him to get his shit together or get out.
Retracts her threat almost immediately. Panic and pleading on the tip of her tongue. Fingers scrabbling for purchase in the scruff of his t-shirt.
I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it...
He blinks dumbly. A smoky haze of confusion and disbelief.
(And he almost wishes that she did.)
He silences her garble with his own lips. Clamps down on her words until they stop the tingling reverberation in his bones.
Tries not to notice the moment when she works her tongue between his teeth and starts to kiss him back.
They don't speak to each other for two whole days. Communicate instead via a short hand code of shuttered eyelids and doors slammed to shut, locked.
She tosses a plate into the sink. A low, slow crack appears along its diameter. He runs fingertips reverently over the stain.
Dumps the lot in the trash as it divides completely in two. A phantom ache in his chest where a bullet once carved a jagged path.
Derek leaves. Kisses her goodbye in the doorway and promises to call when he arrives.
Says he misses her already as she laughs back that it's only for three days...
Alex bites his tongue until it bleeds. Fills his mouth with a copper tang that churns his stomach to mortar and rocks.
She's emptied his booze down the kitchen sink. An acrid river of amber and black.
But she hasn't yet filled Joe in on his dirty little secret.
(Tequila and scotch and bourbon and beer.)
And Joe is only too happy to oblige.
I've missed you! Where've you been hiding?
There is an answer to that. He doesn't bother to offer it.
They fuck on the second night. Fall into age old habits to soothe wounds that never seem to come close enough together at the seams to heal. Raw and wrenching.
(He hates himself even as he's lifting her shirt over her shoulders and toeing his jeans off the corner of his bed.
I'm sorry, breathy and silent into the waves of her hair.)
She won't meet his stare in the aftermath and something about the way that she gets up and leaves without a word deflates his insides to flattened.
They make the post-it official.
(She doesn't choose him.)
A civil ceremony at city hall that he can't quite bring himself to attend. He cracks the blinds as they drive away, catches a glimpse of flowers and fabric as she slides into the backseat of a vehicle that he doesn't recognise.
(He didn't expect that she would.
He has his own cross to bear.)
His cell phone bleats a pitiful mew and he thumbs it to life but doesn't bother to speak. When the voice at the other end, distant and dim, asks where he is, he ends the call.
It takes him seven hours to pack an old sports bag full of his clothes. He has to stop every thirty four seconds to breathe.
Slumped in a corner. Head on his knees.
He feels like crap.
It's the most he's felt in months.
He can't sleep.
He can't sleep because bullets fire through dreamscapes. Blood leaks and wives die in his arms and best friends marry post-it husbands and girlfriends get engaged to ex-boyfriends while brain matter stains at the tips of his toes.
He can't sleep.
(They tell him he's depressed and he can't help but wonder why they all seem so god damned surprised.)
There's a piece of metal in his chest taking up space.
A black hole that is only getting bigger.
Words leak before he can reign them in.
(You tell him it's my name you scream when he fucks you?)
Meredith shakes her head. Disgusted. Surprised.
Sad.
Squares her shoulders and steps towards him. Delivers a slap that he almost doesn't feel.
Almost. She's stronger than he's ever given her credit for.
But she knows as well as he does that their first time was never going to be their last.
He sleeps in his car for three nights. Stubborn and stupid and a heady combination of both. It's summer so she lets him.
(Fool.)
Reluctantly, the powers that be allow him back to the hospital.
(No surgeries 'til you have that damn bullet removed.)
Bailey's words tumble around his cavernous insides.
The thought of cutting someone open, of tearing skin and red, raw scars and the slick slip of blood on his hands, means he leaves at lunch time and doesn't bother to return.
He calls Izzie.
(Where are you?
Are you coming back?
I don't think I meant it when I sent you away...)
He calls Izzie but hangs up before the line connects through.
Meredith and Derek and silence and ice.
They fight again. And it's not about him.
He offers her tequila.
She pretends for seconds that she's not interested. Ends up in his bed as he spends the next four and half hours not touching her.
(It's the eighteen minutes at the end that brings them both to undone.)
(Please--)
She doesn't finish.
She doesn't need to.
They fall into it comfortably.
Lies and deceit and everything in between.
(It's a routine they've both lived through countless times before.)
Alex follows the inevitable reconciliation with baited breath. An apology muttered into a coffee cup. An acceptance sighed over a shoulder into the cold night air.
It counts for little in the end.
And she still crawls into his bed when the moon is high.
(This is the last time...
It's not.
We can't keep doing this...
They do.)
He begs off a hernia repair and spends the afternoon with his fingers wrapped tightly around a crystal cut tumbler filled to shallow with something pungent and fiery.
Bricks and mortar come together to build a home on a hill on the other side of town.
Meredith eyes him cautiously. Something that tastes of pity and regret fills a black hole that continues to grow.
You can stay here for as long as you need.
(He hopes it burns at the back of her throat as much as it does his.)
She moves out and it feels a lot like history rolling around and around in his head.
He hides out in the clinic. Treats chicken pox and meningitis and the common cold until Doctor Bailey seeks him out with a grim determination.
(What the hell are you doing?)
She plants both her palms flat against the base of his ribcage.
He stiffens to rigid.
No up, no down, no in-between.
Nothing left but thin air and anti-gravity.
It earns him a repeat visit with the trauma counsellor.
(Reed...
It's out before he even recognises it's an issue.)
The remaining forty three minutes are filled with a loaded kind of silence and when he pushes the door to open, making a desperate getaway, new appointment card scrunched to plausible deniability in his fist, Meredith's waiting for him.
He opens his mouth.
Closes it again without speaking as her fingers curl loosely into his.
They're barely off the hospital grounds before he's pulling her face towards his. Kissing her hard as the world crumbles to memories and dust at his fingertips.
(Alex.)
She's pleading and pushing. That much is clear.
But he's exploding. Months and days and minutes and years of weight and now it's his turn to plead.
His turn to push.
(Please, please, please, pleasepleaseplease...
Even to his own ears the word rings hollow.)
She leaves him there. On a park bench in an area of the city that is remarkably unfamiliar to him. He has no recollection of their arrival and, for now, his desire to leave is negligible.
In the end he walks. Asks for directions twice and buys a packet of cigarettes that last him fifty nine minutes.
The next one lit from the dying embers of the last.
(Tar and nicotine to fill the endless emptying.)
He arrives home under the cover of a thin mist that fails to hide him completely.
(The parts that fail him remain glaringly obvious.)
She's perched on the corner of his bed. Eyes closed.
Waiting with breath held.
(Where've you been? she doesn't ask.
She doesn't need to.)
And when she leaves, his name etched into the soft touch of her fingertips, he knows that now, this time, she won't be coming back.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-20 06:41 pm (UTC)This was phenomenal and horrible, everything and nothing.
♥
no subject
Date: 2010-09-21 12:14 am (UTC)But, thank you for reading! And I'm glad you liked it, even if it was horrible at times! You know me, there is rarely a happy ending in sight.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-21 05:03 am (UTC)Great stuff.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-21 06:34 am (UTC)And thank you so much for reading and reviewing, I really appreciate it. This was meant to be a comment fic for a drabble-a-thon but seem to take on a life of its own as it went, so I'm not even really sure where it came from!
Thank you again.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 01:51 pm (UTC)THIS PAIRING. IS FAST BECOMING MY OTHER OTP (Cristina/Burke are numero uno) ON THIS FRAKKING SHOW THAT CAN KILL YOU WITH TENSION AND STUFF.
Holy Crap do I love this fic. It's totally going in my memories of course. I don't even know how to write like this. I couldn't even if I tried, it would come out sounding pretentious and forced.
I freaking bow at your mightily impressive feet.
The imagery, the dialogue, THEM... seriously, DUUUUDE!
Favorite bits:
He shrugs at the mascara that trails tracks to her chin. Can't give her answers to the never-ending questions that dip and swing from her lips.
-- what beautiful, beautiful prose.
He's a cliché and he can no longer bring himself to care.
-- Oh Karev!
He doesn't understand why he cares.
Can't reconcile the intensity of his hurt with what he thought he knew about himself.
-- Oh man!
They fuck on the second night. Fall into age old habits to soothe wounds that never seem to come close enough together at the seams to heal. Raw and wrenching.
-- I totally saw that coming but was still pleasantly shocked.
It counts for little in the end.
And she still crawls into his bed when the moon is high.
-- Oh the imagery, the inevitability of it all. The tragedy too. And the inner HAWTNESS.
(He hopes it burns at the back of her throat as much as it does his.)
-- OUCH.
He arrives home under the cover of a thin mist that fails to hide him completely.
-- Just. perfect.
Seriously, you and my girl slybrunette have an incredible way with imagery, brevity and prose all rolled into one.