Title: Alex Suarez
Summary: On the night of his Brother's funeral, Daniel Meade meets a girl who completely changes his life. Her teeth are crooked and she's wearing glasses that actually resemble coke bottles but she's there for him during the dark days after his brother's untimely death. 18 months later she falls back into his life as his new assistant and she brings along a little 'surprise' that's going to alter everything again.
This is an AU that is very heavily grounded in Canon. However, I am changing certain things for the sake of realism and plot purposes. For example I think that Alex/Alexis may have started embracing being transgender before faking her death. In addition, I wanted Daniel to not be completely clueless to what was going on with Alexis' struggle with her gender identity. Also, I decided that Daniel had to be doing something in the company other than making more work for the PR department. In this story Betty's mom died in November 2004 and Alex 'died' in January 2005.
The first part of the story begins at Alex's 'funeral' in winter 2005. It was originally just supposed to be a short prologue but for everybody to stay in character I needed to extend my original idea. The second part of the story begins in fall 2006 then becomes a rewrite of the first season.
Pairings: Betty/Daniel, Bradford/Claire, Bradford/Faye, Alex(is)/Jordan, Alex(is)/OMC, Marc/OMC, and Amanda/? (I'm willing to listen to any suggestion, regardless of gender, for her.)
Past Daniel/other and Betty/Walter
There may be other pairings as things go forward. I'm still not sure how far I'm going to take Amanda and Daniel's relationship. I love the two together as friends and I'm okay with the two having a sexual relationship as long as it leads him straight to Betty. However, Henry is staying in accounting.
Rated M for sexual situations, language, and mature subject matter such as suicide and cancer.
Disclaimer: I don't own Ugly Betty. If I owned Ugly Betty we would have had something much less ambiguous than Daniel following Betty to London.
Chapter 1: My Brother's Wake
This was the worst Dinner party ever probably because it really wasn't a dinner party. This was his brother's wake, of sorts. Maybe it was his mother's little nervous breakdown, he wasn't sure at this point. The only good thing was the food but he had no appetite. It disappeared when he saw the morbid pictures of his deceased brother everywhere. Alex would've hated this.
Daniel hated his brother because he was always perfect. He was the one that his father really loved and Daniel was just the family fuck up. He and Alex were always competing against each other whether it be for the girl or their father's affection and Daniel always felt lacking. He could never be Alex Meade, Paragon of perfection. Being Daniel just didn't cut it and at a certain point he just stopped trying. Negative attention was better than no attention at all.
But he loved his brother too. Alex was his best friend growing up, his only friend really. Most of their schoolmates only cared about him because he was rich and had the best summerhouse. Their dad was always away. No, let's be honest, his dad was always off sleeping around with other women. Because of that his mother was in and out of various rehab centers. When he was about eight years old, she spent an entire year at some center in South Dakota. They were practically raised by the nanny. Daniel thought of her as a mother figure until he was 14 and she took away his virginity. Then things got complicated.
Alex was really the only family Daniel had. He remembered playing dress-up together when they were six. His brother always loved wearing their mother's clothes and shoes. Also he did horrible things to her makeup. Daniel was usually his unwilling guinea pig. That seemed to be when Alex was most comfortable.
Daniel remembered Alex saving his ass when he pissed off the wrong guy in private school. He rescued Daniel when he was 18 and thought that it was a good idea to sleep with this girl who enjoyed handcuffs a little too much.
Daniel also remembered their summer together in Paris when he fell in love with a French hand model named Lucy. Alex was there when it all fell apart and Lucy said that she couldn't come back with him to America. She was the first woman that he ever really loved and it was a disaster. As they commiserated over alcohol, Alex said that she wasn't worth it and she obviously didn't care about Daniel as much as he cared about her. Alex also said that he was too good for her. His brother seemed guilty about something but Daniel wasn't sure what.
They knew each other secrets. Alex knew the real reason why Daniel fucked around. Daniel was just too jaded for another relationship. He loves sex he just hated the emotions that went along with it. He didn't try harder at Meade because their father would never care. He was the spare.
Daniel knew his brother's secrets too. For example Alex wore make up. Just foundation and lip gloss but Daniel knew that he did. Also Daniel is not 100% sure that all the pumps and dresses in his brother's closet belong to his long-term girlfriend Jordan. Daniel knew that his brother was bisexual or possibly even gay. His girlfriend, who Daniel wished was his, was probably just a means to please their father. Also, she was an extreme sports junkie and X-game winner.
Despite his reputation even he wasn't sleazy enough to try to sleep with a woman who just buried her boyfriend of two years (even if Daniel is half convinced that Alex also had a boyfriend for the entire course of their relationship). There have been casual hookups in the past that Daniel knew about. If you share an apartment with somebody for a few years you learn a lot about their sexual habits. He saw his brother making out with various guys enough that he was perfectly okay with it. However, Daniel was convinced that something else was going on this time. Alex has been so closed off in the last few months, as if he was hiding something big from Daniel. Maybe it was a serious boyfriend and Alex was terrified. Bradford Meade would never tolerate a gay son, so Alex tried to be straight which explained Jordan. Bradford has no trouble with the gay population in general several of his top editors were members of the LGBT community. But not his son, they had to be fucking perfect and carry-on the name.
Daniel wonders if that's what killed Alex. Maybe he kept doing these extreme sports things to get their fathers approval or maybe prove his own manhood. In the end it's what killed him. Alex didn't come back from his last adventure. The darker part of Daniel's mind wondered if the ski accident really was an accident. What if Alex wanted to die? What if he was just tired of everything?
The whole situation made him sick. He threw up when he found out his brother was dead. He didn't cry, He could not cry. He so badly wants this to not be real. He's been numb for days.
Then that could be the amount of antidepressants that his now ex fun buddy was giving him. He considered it pure luck that he was sleeping with a therapist when he found out that his brother died. Of course she decided that due to the current circumstances it would be best that they stop the sexual relationship. When he suggested that sex is what he needed to get through this, she referred him to a specialist that dealt with sex addiction. He hasn't seen her since nor has he called the number. Instead he decided to take some model named Bambi or some other Disney name to the dinner party from hell because nobody wants to be alone at a funeral even if it's being disguised as a dinner party.
The Memorial service was that morning and was horrible. Paparazzi were everywhere and his date kept posing for the camera. They may not have had a body to bury but it was still a sickening experience. He threw up twice before he even left his Apartment. His mom has been slightly sauced since they heard the news. He knew rehab attempt number 16 would be happening soon. His Mom is an alcoholic. He's known that for a long time. He knew what spa was a code word for by the time he was 10. Maybe Alex's death will be what gets her sober, although more than likely it will lead to something like cirrhosis of the liver or alcohol poisoning.
His father hid behind his normal society façade. He was more aloof than normal. The only person who could get any emotion out of him was his longtime Mode Magazine EIC, Faye Somers. She was just as heartless and cutthroat as Bradford, but she was the only one who could really reach his father when he went into ice code bastard mode.
At some point during the funeral services his mom got on stage and started talking about her lost children before she threw a shoe at Wilhelmina Slater. She was another heartless person at Meade publications and she was currently sharpening her knives to take over whenever Faye left. Of course everybody knew that Faye Somers would not be leaving Mode unless it was in a platinum hearse. The whole funeral disaster was currently being shown on repeat on Fashion TV. This was followed by scattering his brother's ashes at sea. He felt… Actually Daniel doesn't have a big enough vocabulary to express how the whole thing made him feel. Again, Alex would have hated this.
The funeral this morning was bad but tonight was worse. Somewhere in his mom's alcohol-based insanity she decided that the best way to deal with burying her oldest child, metaphorically at least, was to throw a dinner party. This dinner party included most of the editors at Meade publications. Just the fact that the dinner party was happening after a funeral was enough to make it awkward. The animosity between his mother and his father's friend made it worse. However, the situation that had the most potential for awkwardness/bloodshed was the fact that his brother's longtime girlfriend was sitting next to who Daniel suspected was Alex's longtime boyfriend, Jamie West.
Jamie was the creative director at Hudson, the magazine that his absolutely perfect brother started from scratch. Jamie was the one that brought Alex's vision to the page. They knew each other perfectly. Because Daniel was not the perfect child, he was basically a lonely 'editor' at the magazine who rarely got any assignments. His major purpose was to take prospective advertisers to strip clubs and the like. Things he wrote were rarely used. Despite that Daniel knew that there had to be something more going on between Jamie and Alex when they were behind closed doors. They were just in sync with each other. He knows from personal experience that the desk in Alex's office was the perfect height for someone to deliver special 'dictation'.
He was expecting an implosion any moment now and he was not disappointed. When his mother tossed a glass of wine at Faye and Jordan and Jamie started calling each other names as well as blaming one another for Alex's untimely demise Daniel decided to get the hell out of there. Actually, everyone did. His date Jasmine or whatever the hell her name is, was already out the door. He really should have brought the therapist or at least somebody with some common sense to help him get through this nightmare with minimal scarring.
He decided that the safest place to go was the kitchen. At the very least, there will be dessert and knowing his mother, alcohol. God, he needed a drink, badly. He assumed he would be in there alone because their waiter was currently trying to keep his mother and Faye from killing each other. Instead, there was this girl there with messy hair in the kitchen, arranging the tiny chocolate cakes that will probably not be eaten. Her glasses actually resembled Coca-Cola bottles and they were taped together. She handed him a piece a cake with a smile. The chocolate cake reminded him of Alex. When they were young and something bad happened, he would always give Daniel chocolate cake. For the first time since the entire thing began he felt like crying.
Betty was going to kill her sister. She was getting so tired of covering for her. Her day was turning into a complete disaster and it was all her sister's fault. At lunchtime today, her sister literally begged for her to take over her catering job tonight because she supposedly had to go to a parent teacher conference thing for her son Justin. It wasn't until later when she saw her sister getting ready that she suspected she was lied to. It was confirmed when her sister's coworker told her that she really called off for a hot date. Because of student loans and the extra money she needed to get her braces, Betty decided to work the catering job anyway.
On the way to the subway for the long trip into Manhattan, she saw her boyfriend of six months, Walter, making out with some unidentified girl. When she confronted him, instead of apologizing he said that he was only doing that because she wouldn't have sex with him again. The first and only time was right after her mother's funeral a little less than two months ago. She let it happen because she was drunk and just wanted to feel anything other than overwhelming loss. The whole thing was horrible and over in about two minutes. She lit a candle every day until her period came. She couldn't understand why everybody said sex was so great because she didn't really like it. But she liked Walter or at the very least she liked not being alone. As her sister said, girls like her don't get many chances or choices. However, she would rather be alone than with someone that cheats on her. She ended things immediately.
Things were miserable before she arrived at the property to find out she was working at a dinner party for a funeral. The death of her mother was still so raw. Even though her mother had been battling cancer for years, her death just before Thanksgiving was still jarring. She couldn't be sunny and happy during a time like this. She could not be around people going through the same thing. Because of this, she just dished out the food and stayed in the back. She was glad she was already in the kitchen when the fighting began. She wanted to leave but couldn't besides she needed to clean up. She wasn't surprised when one of the guests also joined her in the kitchen. The majority of the other guests were currently running out the front door.
Considering that she saw pictures of him on the mantle, when she was setting up, with the deceased she assumed that at the very least he was a relative. The fact that he came in, in mental daze confirmed that.
"Here," She said passing him one of the many chocolate cakes that were supposed to go out for the dessert course with the biggest smile she could muster.
"I came in for alcohol but this will do." He said tentatively taking a bite.
"Chocolate cake always makes me feel better." She said trying to be cheery.
"I can see." He said looking at her closely. This annoyed her.
"I'm not skinny like that girl you were sitting next to. I've never been a big fan of carrot sticks." She said in an annoyed tone.
"Or throwing up in the bathroom." He added as a joke. She wasn't expecting him to say something like that.
"I wasn't going to say that." Betty said as she started to clean up the table.
"I am sure you are much too polite for that," He said pausing to look at her name tag.
Because she was pretending to be her sister for the night, it had Hilda on it. When he called her that name she chose not to correct him, instead she walked to the refrigerator.
"Trust me I know I made a mistake bringing her to this funeral, sorry, dinner party. I should have brought a date who was intelligent enough to take me with her when she got the hell out of here." The man joked as Betty handed him a glass of milk. She had the desire to laugh.
"It's not alcohol but I'm sure it will go better with the cake." She smiled at him again.
"I'm sure my mom has some red wine that will go really good with dark chocolate. Actually, I'm surprised you found milk in the refrigerator." He joked halfheartedly. "I'm also sorry for what I accidentally implied. You're not fat. My brother always says that I'm an asshole or rather he used to say that." The man broke off almost on the verge of tears, leading Betty to only drawl one conclusion.
"The deceased was your brother?" She asked kindly.
"Yes, Alex was the good brother. He was perfect and I was the one screwing around literally and figuratively. Now he's dead and I don't know what..." He broke off crying and then she quickly handed him a tissue.
"It's okay. I know everybody says this, and it's annoying, but I understand, sort of. My mom died two months ago." Just saying that made her want to cry too.
"I'm sorry." Surprisingly enough he sounded genuine. She has dealt with a lot of fake 'I'm sorry' is in the last few weeks.
"I won't say its okay because it's not. It will be soon but I'm not quite there yet. I've been playing Gone on repeat a lot." She said not knowing why she confessed this to a guy she didn't even know the name of yet, his first name anyway. She assumed that he was also a Meade.
"Well, Justin is dreamy." He joked.
"I prefer Lance." She said with a blush. Why was she telling him this? For some reason he made her feel comfortable.
"That doesn't surprise me." Mr. Meade said with a smile. "Was it sudden?" She frowned at his question, not sure how to answer. Even if it takes years, death is always sudden. "Fuck, I shouldn't have asked that. I know with Alex we weren't expecting it. I mean he always did extreme sports things but I always expected him to come home." His voice was broken once more.
"It's okay." Betty said taking a deep breath before continuing. "It was and it wasn't."
"That was helpful."
"It was breast cancer. She was first diagnosed when I was 10. She went into remission about a year later. It came back my last month of high school and this time it was stage four. Instead of going to the prom, I spent the night with my mom in the hospital." As the tears began to prick her eyes she found a tissue and a piece of cake in her hands.
"Thanks for the tissue but I can't have the cake. We are not supposed to eat any of the food and it's not like I should have a piece of cake anyway. I'm trying to cut down." She said halfheartedly.
"You're working for me so I can say if you can have a piece a cake and I think you need it. When we were little, Alex always gave me cake when I was sad."
"Oh," was her only response.
"Also, I didn't mean to say that you are fat because you're not." He said stammering again.
"Okay, I'm going to need chocolate to tell you the rest of what happened anyway." She said taking a quick bite. I expected her to get better even when it became stage IV. I still had hoped that something good would happen. I expected her to come home from the hospital and one day she didn't." Betty told him desperately trying to fight back tears.
"Despite knowing it was a possibility it was still a shock." Betty said just as her fellow worker walked in.
"The client just dragged his lush of a wife upstairs to sober up so I think it's safe for us to get the hell out of here." She said obviously not realizing that Mr. Meade was with her.
"Especially, because you just insulted the client in front of his son." He said sharply.
"I didn't see you there Mr. Meade." She quickly apologized.
"Mr. Meade is my father. I'm Daniel." He said crossing has arms over his chest.
"I apologize Mr. Daniel." She stammered.
"It's okay. You will make it up to me by allowing this wonderful woman to accompany me as you clean up." Okay she wasn't expecting that.
"I don't think she's that type of girl." Okay, she wanted to laugh at that insinuation. No guy would ever want her for that.
"That's not what I mean." Daniel said angrily.
"Fine, I really can't risk getting another bad report." She said quickly.
"I can't imagine why that would be a problem." Daniel said sarcastically.
Before she realized it she was in a town car headed towards an all-night pizzeria with a guy who she just met 30 minutes earlier. This is turning into a very strange night.
Pizza was another thing that he and Alex did together. It didn't matter if it was Harvard pizza or Manhattan pizza, it was their thing. Usually after a night of clubbing they would end up together at an all-night pizza place or at some after party in Chinatown. Before Jordan, there would probably be another guy or girl involved. For some strange reason he decided to share the experience with Betty.
That was her real name, Hilda was her sister that she was covering for because she had a hot date. During the long car ride in late-night Manhattan traffic he found out a lot about her including the fact that they were both the younger sibling. Betty knew her parents loved her but her sister seemed to get more attention especially when the condom broke on prom night. Thanks to that, she was not allowed to date until she was 18. Surprisingly enough he understood this woman probably better than anyone else. She understood him too. He can't believe he cried in front of her. There was just something about her that makes him feel that he could be himself with her.
This was what he needed after this horrible day. Okay the alcohol helped. Thank God for pizza places that serve vast quantities of beer. Also, it is beneficial to be with someone who didn't see him as the ultimate Playboy. Apparently, Betty was so busy with school that she did not have a chance to read Page 6, so for once his reputation did not precede him. For some odd reason he actually wanted to have this woman like him and not just for his last name.
They were now on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the first time that he has seen the city from the other side. She talked about blizzards and how the city sparkled at this time the night. Then they started to talk about Alex and how he died. He started to cry again, a little. Seriously, how did she get him to respond like this?
"I'm not handling the whole thing very well. Part of me would like to pretend that he's just on some grand world toward and he will be coming home soon. Despite scattering his ashes this morning I want to believe that."
"I felt the same way when Thanksgiving came I pictured her making tamales in the kitchen like she always did. When she wasn't there that's when it really hit me. I don't think I reacted the best way either." Betty said blushing.
"I don't see you doing anything stupid. You don't seem like the type to get drunk and have sex by the Peter Pan statue. That's more my thing." He joked halfheartedly.
"Why do I have a feeling you'd have done that?" Betty said looking up at hand.
"Not yet, but it's on my bucket list." He joked again.
"No, I didn't do anything like that, although alcohol was involved. I just lost my virginity to my now ex-boyfriend. It was horrible and I didn't even…" She actually blushed. It was adorable, actually she was adorable.
Wait why does he like her? She's not his type. She's not a model or a size 0. But he doubted she would abandon him when he needed her the most.
"If you're old enough to have one, you're old enough to say the word orgasm." He said with a smile.
"I didn't have one, so I don't have to say the word." He was tempted to say something like, 'I could fix that' but he didn't want to scare her. The fact that saying that would not be a joke terrified him a little.
"Are you talking about that prick that you caught cheating on you today?" He asked.
"Same guy, girls like me don't have many options. He said he was cheating on me because I didn't want to have sex with him again." She said with annoyance.
"You mean girls with enough common sense to know how to avoid pricks like him and players like me?"
"I mean girls who look like me. In high school my nickname was 'Ugly Betty'." He was kind of shocked about that because she wasn't ugly.
"That uniform is not exactly flattering, but you're not ugly. You're just not supermodel pretty. You are real girl pretty. They're perfect pretty and you are imperfect pretty. You don't care that you're not perfect. I like that. Any guy would be lucky to have you." He said sincerely.
"That's not what my sister says. Did you notice the teeth and glasses?" He was starting to not like this sister. She reminded him of Bradford.
"That's just the outside; it can be fixed with contacts and clear braces. I had braces in junior high." He lied about the last part to make her feel better.
"You made me feel a lot better than that skinny model I brought with me. I'll make a deal. You stop listening to your sister and I will stop listening to my father. You can do a lot better than some guy that cheats on you and I can do better than being the family fuck up." He told her of remembering all the times that his mom got completely wasted because of his father doing the same thing to his mother.
"I doubt it. Name one." She said skeptically.
"Two guys at the bar asked for your number." Of course, Daniel scared both guys away by grabbing Betty's hand and kissing her on the cheek.
"It was probably just a joke. Thank you for getting rid of them." She said graciously.
"No problem. Okay, I would so sleep with you." Her initial response was to laugh until he said, "I am not joking. I know I can do better than your ex-boyfriend."
"Didn't you tell me you sleep with everyone and your last 'girlfriend' suggested that you see a therapist for sex addiction?" She actually did finger quotes when she said girlfriend.
"Yes, but I only sleep with pretty girls. Therefore, if I want to have sex with you, you must be pretty." He said using circular logic that probably will make no sense once he sober.
"How much beer did you drink?" She asked incredulously.
"I'm not sure but I think some of the pizza toppings were soaked in alcohol." He said slurring a little.
"You're drunk."
"My brother's funeral was today. I can do anything I want, even this." That's when he kissed her. When he felt her respond in kind he came to the conclusion that she was definitely better than that model earlier and her ex-boyfriend was an idiot. Although, when the alcohol wore off he's not entirely sure that he will remember this but he hopes he does.
To be continued.
Let me know what you think. Reviews make me set my alarm an hour earlier so I can work on this story before work.
Also, before I start getting reviews saying that this would never happen, just remember both characters are in a bad place emotionally, they are meeting each other outside an environment where a sexual relationship is taboo, and Daniel mixed antidepressants and alcohol. Also this is AU.