Written for the ga_fanfic Character Writing Challenge on livejournal.
You mess things up.
You mess things up and then you whine about it.
You're freaking messing this up now because you're writing 007 on her hand as a gesture, a Hey and Goodbye and You meant a lot to me kind of gesture, even a kind of joke. Although you totally get that it's only funny if you're the almost dead guy, because death, you're rapidly realizing, looks a lot different when it's happening to you instead of someone you love or you're supposed to be saving. Anyway, you're messing this up because she's freaking out and rushing off to find people to save you and that wasn't the point.
Meredith, you want to say. It's okay. It'll be okay. And I will always love you, but not in the stupid way I tried to before, just . . . But your voice doesn't work, and she's gone.
Yeah. You mess things up.
Meredith, Callie, Izzie, Lexie, your family, your internship . . . . soonish or too late, too much or too little. God! It would be tragic (in the colloquial sense) if you weren't already tragic in the all too literal sense. You'd laugh if your body would let you (the almost dead guy humor thing again) at the beyond pathetic final decree.
Except there's that idea - the idea that death is the most important event in life. You never understood it before; but now, speaking as the almost dead guy, you're starting to get it.
There have been moments when you didn't mess things up. There have been moments when you were the guy who saved the day. There have been moments when you loved right, thought right, said and did the right thing at the right time and maybe never more so than the last few days, the days that turned out to be the last ones of your life.
You found out who you were; you saved a woman's life; and your lungs can't really breathe, but in your mind you let out a long exhale and it's as good if not better than the physical act.
And it really is okay.
Because it's a sequence. Everything you did adds up to one moment. This moment. Now. And now, now you are not messing up.