He never got to say it because he didn't except that he needed to.
She was crushed under part of the plane. Her hair was sprawled on the ground around her head, reminding him of how it looked on the sheets of his bed so long ago. Her lips and teeth were stained red with her blood. It was a familiar sight to the surgeon, but now it made him sick.
Her breathing was short and shallow (so similar to the breathing of his patients before they took their last breaths). He didn't let himself remember that detail (he could never compare her to a dying patient). Her skin was becoming pale (like a ghosts) as she lost more of her precious blood.
Somewhere Inside him- deep, deep, deep down inside him- he knew she was going to die. His mind told him so, but his heart- his aching, aching heart- banished the though. He couldn't comprehend the fact that maybe- just maybe- she wouldn't make it.
He told her he loved her. He told her anything to keep her from giving up. From giving up on him. He told her about the wedding they would have when they got back to Seattle. Also, about the three children they would have so Sofia could have a sister and two brothers.
He held her hand and told her he loved her before she slipped away. Her eyes fell closed and her heart stopped, leaving her dead, crushed under the tail end of a stupid plane.
He couldn't feel as he looked at her corpse and Meredith's cries for her sister echoed in his ears, jumbling his thoughts even more. There was just one thing he could grasp (and even that was just barely).
Lexie is dead.
XxXxX
He didn't say it because he thought they had more time.
He sat in his hospital bed, his spirits high. He was alive after all. (Lexie might not be but he could live through that at the time being). He might not be up and moving like his best friend but he was alive at Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital with the people who cared about him most.
He had ordered Avery, his apprentice, to bring him his daughter. Little Sophia. He ignored him claiming "I can't bring a baby into the I.C.U."
"No, but you can sneak one in" he told the younger man. "C'mon, Avery, grow a pair. Forget it, I'll do it."
That's what got him to run out of the room and get his baby girl. The thought accrued to him that maybe (just maybe) it was a surge of energy that he had seen in so many other patients that woke him up, but he couldn't think like that. He knew he was going to be ok. He wished he told everyone what he really thought.
He never got to tell his daughter what he planned to say to her. He fell back under as she sat outside his room in Avery's arms. He wished more than anything that he would have gotten to hold her one more time. He wished he would have told his little Sophia he loved her, even if she never would have remembered it.
Most of all, he wished he said goodbye.
But he never got to say it. He never got to hold her one more time. He never got to tell her he loved her. They both slipped away before he got the chance. It's what he never said that hurt everyone the most.