Title: Come to Nothing
Author: Waltzmatildah
Word Count: 3722
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Meredith/Alex (implied Mer/Der, implied Alex/Izzie
Spoilers: Season Five.
---
Alex doesn't leave the hospital for nine days.
He doesn't even go outside.
He rationalises it with thoughts that are desperate and unfounded and unfair but he goes with them anyway. Anything is better than nothing, and people are better than no people. He gets that now.
They, the nurses, someone he doesn't see, do end up putting a cot in Izzie's room. He sits on the cold floor beside it until his legs are numb and then he stays there because the numbness is comforting, distracting. The only time he moves is when she is awake but those times are infrequent and brief so he mostly sits, numb from the waist down, and waits.
Sometimes there is another body beside him, an arm against his, a warm show of solidarity, and he has to fight the desire to lean into it, to let it take some of the weight he can feel, settling heavily onto his own already overladen shoulders. Sometimes the pressure of it is so great he stops breathing and it's only when his vision blurs and his head lightens that he remembers to take a breath. Sometimes he thinks that before this all comes crashing down, which it will, he is going to go crazy.
He never looks at the person beside him, he doesn't even know if it's the same one every time. He can't bring himself to look because he is too afraid of what he will see. He imagines though, who it might be, who is probably isn't, what their motivations are.
He never remembers having eaten, but at the same time he is never hungry so he figures that someone is feeding him and he makes a mental note to thank them. After.
Dr. Bailey comes regularly. She sits above him, on the cot, with her knees drawn up under her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs and her fingers balled into a green scarf that she is never without. She talks constantly, a stream of platitudes and reassurances that he doesn't want and doesn't believe anyway. She tells him that it will be okay, which it won't, and that Izzie will be okay, which she won't and that he will be okay, which he already isn't.
She tells him that he won't be alone and that, whatever happens, they will all get through it together. He answers her, just once, his voice detached and alien, to tell her that he already is.
She doesn't talk to him any more after that. When she visits she sits on Izzie's bed or pulls a chair up to her side and holds her hand and whispers things into the air that Alex can't hear. He wants to take back what he said, he wants her to speak to him again, to offer him false hope and thin prayers, but he doesn't and she doesn't and he forgets to breathe.
At the end of that ninth day, when they are removing the machinery and forcibly pulling his fingers from her hair and taking her away from him, at the end of all that, he finally leaves.
---
Meredith watches Alex sit for nine days.
He doesn't even go outside.
She rationalises his behaviour with thoughts that are scared and sad and more than a little worried but she goes with them anyway, because at least he is here and like he said in the hallway outside the operating rooms, people are better than no people. She gets that now.
She insists they put a cot in the room for him and is dismayed to find him sitting on the floor beside it, leaned back against the wall in a restless doze. It becomes his new ritual. When Izzie is lucid enough to know that he is in the room he strokes her face and presses kisses into her hair and smiles and laughs and cries. But these moments are fleeting and preciously rare, so most of the time he sits, buddah like, on the cold floor, motionless and barely alive himself. Waiting.
She sits beside him whenever she has the time, which, with both Izzie and Alex out of action and George zombie-like and ineffectual, is not nearly as often as she would like. She likes to press her arm against his, to impart a sense of support and understanding. She doesn't speak because she knows words mean little to him, especially now. Sometimes she thinks that he stops breathing and she forces herself to wait, to be patient, to listen carefully for a sharp intake of air. It always comes. Just when she thinks it isn't going to, it always comes. That is why she sits, going numb from the waist down, not for herself and not even for Izzie, she sits to make sure he keeps breathing. She sits for him.
He doesn't choose to eat so she brings him food, presses sandwiches into his grip and sits bottles of water by his left knee. He never mentions anything, but the sandwiches disappear and the water bottles empty and that is all the thanks she needs.
She feels weird when Dr. Bailey comes, like she's intruding on something that is not meant for her. But she likes Dr. Bailey's words, feels comforted by the cadence of her voice, by the hope in her heart, by the reassurances, meant for Alex but applicable to them all. She likes that Dr. Bailey wears her green scarf without fail, no matter what the weather is doing and she especially likes her unshakable belief that they are in this together, she's never really had that before, a support system that shares a common goal, a support system that means they will never be alone.
When Alex replies, voice dark and broken, that he already is, she feels a soft thud in her stomach, disappointment and despair.
Dr. Bailey comes less often after that, and when she does she no longer sits on the cot above them, instead she sits close by Izzie, holding her hand and murmuring reassurances that Meredith finds herself desperate to hear. She notes that Alex stops breathing more often when Dr. Bailey is whispering to Izzie and she is so distracted and preoccupied with waiting for him to start again that she forgets to listen in.
At the end of the ninth day, after Cristina has removed the machinery and Meredith has disentangled his fingers from a handful of blonde hair, after all of that, she watches as Alex finally leaves.
---
Alex finds it odd to be sitting in his car and he is surprisedto find that it starts on his first attempt. He reverses from his parking spot and heads to the exit but slows the vehicle to a stop when his vision blurs to black and his hands tingle and fall from wheel. Then he remembers to breathe again.
He arrives at Meredith's house with no memory of how he got there and no recollection of a rationalisation that had him head in that direction to start with. He parks by the curb on the opposite side of the street and has to vomit into the gutter before he can bring himself to approach the front door. He knows there will be no-one home, Meredith, Derek and Lexie are at the hospital and Izzie is dead, there will be no-one home this time.
It is easy to pack up his room, he has gathered little by way of possessions, they never held any significance for him, simply a means to an end, there to be pawned for rent money or booze or a loaf of bread. He wraps his trophies tighly in t-shirts and fits them haphazardly into a box. At first glace one would assume they were all for wrestling, and the majority of them are, but two are different. Two set him apart from people's stereotyped expectations of him. He unwraps them again and sets them back on the shelf, they are no longer relevant.
The hallway is suffocating and he relishes the feel of having all the air compressed out of him. Izzie hasn't set foot in this house for nearly two weeks, despite this, or maybe because of it, he can no longer tell, she is everywhere, she is in every room, she is in every piece of furnishing, she is in him. Her bedroom door is closed and he presses his nose tighly into the crack and inhales deeply, he doesn't know why but he does it again anyway. Maybe he is saying goodbye but he doesn't think so because, traditionally, he doesn't do goodbyes. They are typically messy and, in this day and age, completely unnecessary. Mostly.
Three boxes are aligned across the backseat of his car. The sum total of his past twenty nine years. He is fully aware of how pathetic that is, of how pathetic he is. It is something he accepted many years before this moment. Three boxes are a good sign now, he came with three and he is leaving with three, he has gathered nothing here, nothing tangible, nothing of substance. He can leave as easily as he came.
Except he can't.
He drives to the end of the street and has to pause momentarily to give way to an oncoming vehicle. Once it has passed he finds he can't bring himself to accelerate again. He is stuck and frozen, terrified to look back but completely unable to move forward. He sits, breathing heavily, his rasped inhalations deafening in the closed confines of the car, until it is all he can hear and all he can feel. He wrenches the driver's door open as the car jerks to a stall and the wipers freeze as he lurches out and down, knees and palms colliding heavily with rough rain soaked gravel and broken glass. He refuses to allow himself to vomit again because he has just enough foresight remaining to realise that he will only end up laying it in.
---
Up until the point that she kneels beside him, rainwater soaking the knees of her scrub pants and her heart pounding somewhere high in the back of her throat, Meredith is convinced that she is too late, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is already dead. The relief that floods her veins when he blinks, slowly, mechanically, shiny lashes wet and heavy, is so great, so utterly overwhelming, that she bursts into a spasm of inappropriate laughter. She sits back heavily, ignoring the wetness seeping into her clothes, and watches as he responds, the corners of his mouth edging up in a way that only makes her laugh harder, louder, more hysterically.
She drags him home and angrily shoves him, trembling and fully clothed, into a hot shower. It takes every single ounce of self restraint that she possesses not to scream in his face and claw her fingernails down his cheeks. She is furious, an all encompassing rage that makes it impossible for her to even look at him because, how dare he?
She empties his car and tries not to think about the significance of the three boxes, of the fact that his entire life fits neatly into three boxes that can be packed and and unpacked and repacked on the run, no need to even slow down. She hates him for that, for having that to fall back on. She throws the boxes in his room with more force than is entirely necessary, not caring that they spill open and dump his meagre possessions on the floor, not caring that the trophies chink together, cheap and metallic, like they are laughing at him, at his attempt to protect them, to keep them safe.
They don't speak to each other for two days. Two days and three nights of absolute silence and chilling stillness. Alex barely functions and she tries not to leave her room, knowing that he can't stand to be in his, and that he won't even walk past the doorway to where Izzie used to sleep. She thinks a week off is the worst thing the Chief could have ordered and if she wasn't one hundred and ten percent convinced that Alex would flee as soon as her back was turned, she'd have been back at the hospital on that very first night.
The funeral comes and goes in a haze of devastated people and bad tequila and too much noise. Alex misses it completely because he refuses to move from the position he has taken up, curled on the mat on the bathroom floor. His presence makes peeing an odd experience but his eyes are glazed and his lips are chalk white and she knows he's not looking anyway, besides how can she tell him to move when she's not even speaking to him?
She can't remember giving Derek the ring back, she just knows that one day it was there and the next day it wasn't. Kind of like Izzie. It's all befores and afters now and even though Alex is still here, he's really gone too.
---
Alex sleeps on the bathroom floor every night of that first, dizzying week. Sometimes he lays on his side, curled into a ball to stop the shaking that slows but never, ever disappears. Other times he lays on his stomach and presses his nose into the mat beneath him, convinced that he can still smell her hair and feel her skin, she lay here once too. But mostly he lays flat on his back with his arms outstretched, palms downward, holding on to the floor with a desperation that eats him from the inside out, a terror that makes him forget to breathe.
He hates himself for missing her funeral, hates himself with a fierce burning that makes him want to scream into his crazed reflection and rake his fingernails down his own face just so he can feel something else. Something that isn't the familiar sting of loss and abandonment and helpless fear. He waits for Meredith to kick him out, not just of the bathroom but of the house altogether. He still hasn't figured out why she bought him back here in the first place.
She doesn't speak to him and she rarely leaves her room. He stays in the bathroom to keep out of her way, terrified of making her angrier than she already is, terrified of giving her an excuse to make him leave, terrified of being forced to take his three boxes and find somewhere else. Because there is no where else, he has already tried that.
She doesn't know that he watches her sleep. He tries not to but the fear that she won't be there in the morning, that she'll leave in the middle of the night, flee to a trailer on a hill on the other side of town, to a fairytale and prince and castle and dream, the fear that she'll decide to take all of that and leave him here alone, is crippling. It is a physical pain that builds in his chest until he is sure his ribs are about to shatter and he crawls into her room and watches her sleep, waiting for the pressure to ease and the panic to slowly fade away. It is a temporary fix, but it is a fix nonetheless.
When his seven days of leave are up he heads back to the hospital in a detached state brought about by a week of virtually no sleep and very little food. His right shoulder aches constantly, more than it should, and he knows the bathroom floor thing is going to have to stop if he's to convince everyone that he's fine. Yes, the bathroom floor thing is definitely going to have to stop. Eventually.
He is surprised by how much has changed in the last week. The difference is measurable, tangible but at the same time everything is still exactly the same. He knows there was talk of re-naming the clinic but as he walks past its entrance he is pleased to see that it still remains a tribute to and a reminder of another time, another place, another life. She would have wanted that, of this he is most definitely sure. The walls are still the same, the long hallways are still the same, the empty tunnels and the on call rooms, it is the people that have changed and as he keeps his eyes averted to escape the pity that hits him like a wall as he tries to work, to forget, he remembers thinking that people were better than no people, and now he's not so sure.
---
Meredith watches Alex like a hawk at the hospital, to the extent that it becomes an almost unconscious ritual, a sixth sense. There are too many exits there and a getaway car in the parking lot because, afterall, three boxes isn't really that much stuff to leave behind. She is still furious with him for running but she has also developed a degree of understanding, they were both born to run, she gets that, it's the one solid thing they have in common. And they are both running now, parallel paths that are getting faster and steeper but their rhythm is uncanny and whenever she thinks he is about to pull ahead she looks across and sees him, still right where he has always been. It is comforting and terrifying at the same time, because the longer he stays there more likely it becomes that he will make his escape.
At home he still pretends to sleep on the bathroom floor and she always makes sure he knows when she is going to bed, makes a deliberate show of brushing her teeth and washing her face. She knows he creeps into her room when he thinks she is sleeping, she waits for it, comforted by the regularity and predictability of his actions. She has no idea why he does it and she is too afraid to ask, afraid that he will stop and that she will have to go to him instead, will have to watch him pretend to sleep on the bathroom floor.
She knows little of his background but can guess enough to make her not ask questions. Not that she would ask them even if she wanted to, there was rarely a need for questions between the two of them before, so why start now? She thinks the answers will only make it all worse in the long run anyway. Izzie's door remains closed and his boxes remain where she heaved them and Lexie is long gone and George stays away and it will all only make it worse in the long run.
It is twenty seven nights before she gives in and pulls him, half asleep and teeth chattering, into her bed and under her covers. It is another eleven before he relaxes enough to touch her, even if only in his sleep. He is never there in the morning, never and her days start routinely with a bolt of panic that the boxes will be gone and the house will be empty and it's not until she gives in and creeps to the bathroom to reassure herself that she can begin to breathe again. She has no idea how this situation has evolved but she knows it has something to do with a certain blonde that broke both their hearts and remnants of a shared past that broke both their spirits.
He says Izzie's name in his sleep, says it peacefully, reverently, and Meredith feels like an intruder just hearing it. She has no right to drag him to her bed, she has no right to count his boxes and watch him pretend to sleep on the bathroom floor. She vows to stop guarding the exits and sabotaging the getaway car because she is an intruder and she has no right to any of this.
---
The night she pulls him into her bed he is sure he is dreaming. Her skin is warm on his arm as she tugs him gently sideways and he is too disoriented and too bone numbingly cold to protest like he should. The first thing he notices is that her pillows don't smell like Izzie and for a moment the despair is so great that he forgets to breathe.
He gets up before dawn, makes his escape back to the cold, the comfort, of the bathroom and the small mat at its centre. He thinks it's probably better this way, things always look different in the dark and if she has to imagine a shock of curly dark hair and a neurosurgeons hands to get through the night, well he's not going to ruin it for her.
He never did ask where the ring went, just noticed that one day it was there and the next it wasn't. Kind of like Izzie and if it's possible for a whole person to just disappear over night like that then he imagines something as small as a ring, well, that's probably easy to lose. But he doesn't ask in case it's somehow because of something he did, or didn't, or whatever. It's all about self perservation and if not mentioning the ring means she doesn't kick him out then that's exactly what he'll do.
It is the three month anniversary of the day their lives dissolved when too much tequila and a bad day of bad surgeries and bad patients and bad interns has them not even bothering with the pretense of bathroom floors and bedroom doors. It is vicious and loud and a lamp cracks, symbolic it its fragility, as she shoves him up against a wall and rakes her fingers painfully down his back. He knows without doubt that it is not him that she is seeing as she screams in a confused fury of arousal and rage. The bitter taste that fills his mouth in the aftermath lingers for days and he thinks she would appreciate the irony that all he could see when her hands were wrapped around him and his mouth was hot on her neck was the memory of a woman he could no longer bring himself to love.