A/N: This story has been in my head for a long time now and it's an experiment, really. Some of it is very AU, some of it isn't, and there will be many characters from the Shondaverse, but sometimes differently than you might think. If you don't like the sound of that, stop right here. If you trust me when I say there are not gonna be aliens and if you're not afraid of the apocalypse, read on:)

Follow Me Back Into The Sun

- Prologue -

His steps on the dusty PVC floor coating clang through the corridor and he tries to blind out the occasional cadavers lying against the walls as well as the rotten fetidness they radiate. He makes the mistake of looking directly into a room only once and bows down, resting his hands on his knees, and takes a few deep breaths through his mouth, forcing the little amount of food he had for breakfast to stay in for digestion.

The early spring's sun illuminates the grey and white emptiness in a macabre kind of way, scornful as if wanting to show him how insignificant everything he once valued really is. The sun will keep shining even when everything else is gone. How foolish was the human race, how arrogant to think it could modify a nature that existed long before the first mammal set foot onto the earth. Every overpopulation finds a way to eliminate itself, one way or the other...

He shivers at the thought, feeling the cold metal of his gun in the back of his jeans hard against his skin. One way or the other. A pistol it is. Morphine or other narcotics have crossed his mind, but only shortly. He prefers to be the guy who kills himself the way his father was murdered to being the guy who kills himself with narcotics other people might still need in some way. And he ignores the question that pops up in his head. What other people? This hospital is most likely out of medicine anyway and he is too tired to try the safe.

Suddenly hearing the rustling noise of papers moving on the ground, ex-files of patients reminding of a time when they had still a spare moment for paperwork or alive patients, his fingers get a hold of the gun automatically in an instant. Someone's here, someone else, and probably not that far away from him. For a moment he thinks about shooting himself immediately, sparing the other one the trouble to either kill him or be the live audience of a suicide, but the remaining doctor-parts in him tell him to look if the other one's okay first.

He slides along the wall into the main corridor, stepping over a dead man his age, and almost drops dead himself, adrenaline rushing unhealthily fast through his body, as he sees her.

Her hair is short and dirty and her muddy clothes, jeans and lumberjack shirt that is, aren't only more than uncharacteristic, but even flabbier than men clothes normally are on her. Her high cheekbones peek out of her face while her big eyes seem even bigger, yet sunken somehow, and her neck is so thin that her vertebrae are visible through the skin. There is no reason on earth for him to recognize her so soon and radically and he can't tell if it's the way she stares at the OR board or the faint reddish shimmer in her hair that gives her away, or just something about her presence in general. But as soon as she comes into his view he knows and the magnitude of it almost wipes him off his feet.

He wants to laugh and cry and do so many things to prove to himself that this isn't just another damn dream, but as soon as she turns to him he condemns these thoughts, because there it is, his proof.

She wipes the blood off her nose with the firm sleeve of her shirt and his arms are just fast enough to catch her as she falls unconsciously to the ground.

A/N: Okay, how did it come to this, huh? And what's going on? Excited? Then keep reading:)