Title: Christmas in Hospital
Author: loozy
Rating: R death
Spoilers: none
Summary: When he was a kid, Alex had been sick a lot.
Disclaimer: Grey's Anatomy does not belong to me. It belongs to Shonda, even though it reallt should not.
A/N: Unbeta- ed. This is my first GA- fic. Feel free to rip it to pieces with constructive criticism. This is based on rhree prompts given to me by a friend.
cold- slip of paper- cot
When he was a kid, Alex had been sick a lot. Born prematurely, thanks to his father kicking his mother in her 6-and a- half- months- pregnant stomach, his immune system was barely existent in the first decade of his life, and even now he is still on asthma medication, always carries an inhaler with him and has to be extra careful in autumn to not get a cold as it develops into pneumonia very fast.
Anyways, he was in hospital about a dozen times before the age of seven. He even had to spend three Christmases in the PICU, though that did not matter that much to him as Christmas was not a holiday celebrated in his family. His parents could not afford presents, as the meagre amounts of money that they had either were thrown out the window by his father's drug habits or used for essential things like rent or food. Not heating, though, as his mother was convinced that it was enough to just bundle up beneath a lot of blankets and duvets at night.
During the day, Alex and his older sister usually were at the bars where his father played or stayed in school for extracurricular activities. Getting older, the latter was the more common, as they did everything to escape their father's existence or their mother's depressed presence in the tiny flat that they called home.
He had been about eight, and was in hospital after an asthma- attack had left him coughing his lungs up, and breathing with a constant rattling sound. His mother, worried hen that she was once she was able to come out of her shadow, had taken him to County Hospital on the bus, his sister accompanying them, holding his donkey, his security blanket, while Alex was wrapped in a comforter, his mother trying to soothe his hacking and wheezing.
That was his fourth Christmas in hospital.
Alex did not care. Christmas in hospital meant that there was a Santa Claus walking around with a sack, handing out candy or little knick knacks to the sick kids. Most of them did not even need presents in Alex' opinion as their parents left them with stacks piled up close to their beds. For Alex, the only presents he ever got for Christmas were those of Santa Claus.
He didn't like Santa, though. He was allergic to chocolate, and all he ever got, except for second- hand books, was chocolate. His sister always ate it, and he liked that he was able to give her something at least. Once he had read the books, classics, he gave them to his mother, who hid them from her husband as he frowned upon her doing anything but chores in the house. But then again, he was not home often enough to really know what she was doing all day long. A good thing, Alex thought.
There was another girl in the room with him, Colleen, with two e's and two l's, as she proudly informed him. Alex simply stared at her, and told her through his oxygen mask that he was Alex. Just plain, simple Alex. Nothing special about him. A common name for a common boy. Or, according to Daddy Dearest, a loser name for a loser son. A disgraceful name for a disgraceful son. Colleen smiled, and said that it was alright to have a common name because that meant that people would always get it right, while with her she had to correct them when she told them her name all the time.
She was not overly pitiful when she saw that Alex didn't have any presents, or that his parents never came to visit him, and she agreed that Santa was creepy and shouldn't hand out chocolate to children who were allergic to the sweet. Then she gave Alex her stash of chocolate for his sister and mother.
On Christmas Day, her parents came in early to take her out for a nice family dinner at the diner round the corner. Colleen had to be in a wheelchair and her nasal tubes were connected to the oxygen tank at the back of the chair along with the small bag of drugs that connected to the IV in her left arm, but the doctor had given her okay as long as her parents didn't take her out longer than an hour and a half.
Alex grabbed the book he had gotten, Freud's Dream Analysis, wondered what retard would give children a book like this, and then got to reading. He didn't have anything better to do, and besides, Alexander Christopher Benedict Karev was a lot more well- read and intelligent than he let on.
He soon was hooked, and forgot everything around him. He read all day, escaping reality, only coming out of the alternate universe when the nurses came to check on him. He only ate when Nurse Miranda, a gruff but kind woman told him in her no- nonsense voice that he might have been able to skip lunch but dinner was going to be eaten or she was going to kick his scrawny skinny butt six different ways into the New Year. Alex just smiled at her and then ate the desert. He never ate much, and while it worried his doctors, and also the nurses, he just couldn't eat much. There wasn't a lot of food around at his house, so his body had adjusted.
Colleen had gotten a board game, and they sat together on his cot, because she could move around, while he was on strict bed rest, and they played Monopoly until lights out. They talked about her wish to live long enough to enjoy her freshman year in college, and him wanting to make a difference with people despite his father saying that he was Alex Karev and he was good for nothing. Not even breathing properly.
The next morning, he found a slip of paper on his night stand, tucked away in the well- read pages of his book. It was a drawing of him and Colleen, and a message was written in the left corner: For what it's worth, I believe you can make a difference.
Colleen's cot was empty. She had died in her sleep.