Chapter One - Deciphering Me

Rating - T to be safe

Word Count - 2059

Disclaimer - I hear nothing, I see nothing, I speak nothing...I definately own nothing!!!

Summary - Alex backstory, eventually...

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'Dr. Bailey?'

Even in the subdued midnight hustle of the Seattle Grace Emergency Department the voice was little more than a desperate whisper. Miranda Bailey lifted her eyes in the direction of the sliding doors and took a step forward.

'What's going on?'

'Dr. Bailey? I'm sorry...I...fuck...'

The quivering figure standing just inside the doors raised a left hand to his face and pushed his fingers deep into his eye sockets.

'Dr. Karev? Alex?'

Miranda felt her pulse quicken ever so slightly, she wasn't easily ruffled but something about this whole scene, this whole night was making her uneasy - she wasn't used to feeling uneasy, Miranda Bailey didn't do uneasy. Alex stumbled slightly but regained his footing quickly. His movements were jerky and disjointed and when he moved his hands to the wall to steady himself Miranda could see his eyes were unfocused and hazy.

'Alex?' she repeated, immediately figuring that her intern had spent the six hours since he knocked off at Joe's, 'How the hell much have you had to...'

'Dr. Bailey, I didn't...I just wanted...it was my fault and I wanted...but, shit...now, I don't think...', the words tumbled from Alex's lips in a tangled mess, barely comprehensible and Miranda felt her chest tighten with the realisation that more was going on here than she'd first thought. Their exchange was beginning to draw the attention of other sections of the ED. Moving swiftly, Miranda started towards Alex but a heartbeat later realised, shockingly, that she was going to be too late. His eyes rolled grotesquely back into his head as his legs gave way and he crashed ungracefully to the hard linoleum floor. The sickening sound of skull meeting concrete as the back of Alex's head met the cold floor made bile rise in the back of Miranda's throat.

'I need some help over here people,' Miranda commanded with a certainty and an authority that were all instinct and training and practice.

'Dammit Alex,' she muttered as she reached the figure on the floor, carefully pulling his tangled limbs straight and pressing a shaking finger to his neck in search of a pulse, it was rapid and erratic and weak but it was there. Releasing a breath she didn't know she had been holding, she looked up. A row of onlookers had gathered and were all watching intently but doing little to help.

'Dammit people, this is an emergency department, act like you are trained to be here!' In seconds Alex had been lifted gently onto a gurney, an oxygen mask secured over his nose and mouth and a gauze wad bandaged temporarily over the gash on the back of his head. The small pool of blood was being mopped away as Miranda guided the gurney into an empty exam room. Clothes were cut with disregard as electrodes were placed on Alex's chest. A cannula was inserted into the back of his right hand - Alex was a leftie, Miranda remembered this, he'd be annoyed if he woke to find a needle in his left hand. A saline bag was hung and his temperature - too high, 39.1 - was taken.

'Olivia, page Chief Webber and get Derek Shepherd in here, book a CT, I'll get the bloods started. I want a crash cart on standby, prep for stomach pumping just in case, we'll need a 14 french endotrach tube...dammit, sats are dropping...Karev, what the hell are you doing? I need an intubation kit, now people...move it!'

'I swear to God, Karev,' Miranda muttered as she located the vocal chords, slid the intubation tube expertly into Alex's airway and checked the air entry, 'you interns are going to be the death of me.'

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'Dr. Bailey, you paged - oh geez, what the hell happened?'

'That, Dr. Shepherd, seems to be the twenty four thousand dollar question.'

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To Miranda it felt like her whole life had been spent in the white washed corridors and state of the art operating theatres of Seattle Grace, cleaning up other people's considerable messes. She hadn't always been the authoritative, commanding 'Nazi' she was now so famed and regarded and feared for but she had known this was to be the path she would tread. She didn't mind the adjectives, not all of them necessarily complimentary, used to describe her. She was yet to meet a surgeon who didn't posses a certain degree of arrogance and absolute self-belief. Another of her current interns, George O'Malley, was probably the least confident of any of the too many to count doctors of all persuasions she had so far encountered but even he had come a long way from the bumbling school boy who had turned up on that fateful first day. Miranda had long ago come to the realisation that it takes a special kind of person to practice medicine and surgery in particular. While she would never argue that all surgeons were the same - hell, she only had to look at some of the attendings in her own hospital to know that wasn't true - she did believe that they all shared something intrinsic that made it possible for them to turn up and switch off and sew up day after day.

She especially enjoyed her role as teacher and mentor to the interns. Agreed, they had caused her no end of grief in the short time she had known them but she was damned proud of what they had achieved and more importantly of what they had survived through these past few months. If she'd had even a glimpse of some of the situations she'd find herself in since taking the job of guiding them through their first year she may have thought twice but looking back now there were only a few things she would do differently.

If she really thought about the five mismatched individuals under her care the one who had caused the least amount of drama was the intern no one else wanted back when this all began. Dr. Alex Karev. The only reason he was under her tutelage at all was because his original resident had all but threatened to have him removed from the program. He was arrogant and brash and honest to a fault. Right from day one he knew - well, thought he knew - what he wanted, plastics, who he wanted it from, Mark Sloan and why he wanted it, fame and fortune and fast cars and even faster women. Miranda had found the way Addison Montgomery slowly bought him towards an alternate possibility fascinating to watch. Behind the cocky arrogance was a very determined and talented individual, the fact that he was even here a testament to his courage and ability. Miranda rarely asked personal questions nor gave out personal information. She was a firm believer that if someone wanted you to know something about them they would find a way to tell you eventually. Consequently she knew little fact about Alex's background and had relied mainly on hospital gossip, which she abhorred, to fill in the gaps. She had managed to ascertain that his childhood had been far from enjoyable, he had even let a few comments pass of his own volition before catching himself, often mid-sentence, and visibly swallowing the memory before repositioning the mask he wore and deflecting the moment with an easy grin what never quite reached his eyes. She knew he had recently moved into Meredith's residence but where he had been living prior to then was, she believed, a mystery not only to her but to everyone else as well. He had always been on the outside of their exclusive clique and she had a feeling that he preferred it that way.

Miranda had been fortunate to catch him once or twice in the NICU, completely unguarded and open. She always felt something unrecognisable catch in the back of her throat at these moments and while she would never admit this to anyone, least of all Alex himself, she secretly felt she would like some time alone with whomever it was in Alex's past that had taught him to hide that part of himself from anyone over the age of five. There was something about Alex Karev in those moments that made her want to hug her own son and never let him go.

Alex was difficult to get to know and even more difficult to get to like and whether it was by deliberate design or a deep seated inability to trust people (she thoroughly believed it to be a sad mixture of both), Miranda had a feeling that Alex was basically alone in the world. It was probably this assumption that caused her reaction to the news delivered so eloquently by Izzie Stevens about half an hour later. By this stage Alex had been to CT and was being prepped for a stomach pump and a trip to the ICU. The scan had shown slight swelling but no fracture and the blood work was due from the lab any moment, Miranda suspected a ridiculously high blood alcohol level to be a major factor in the reason her intern was still hooked to a ventilator. His temperature was still too high and his pulse still too weak and erratic and too many machines were currently doing his living for him but at least it was something, and something Miranda could work with.

The chief had ordered her remaining interns paged in an attempt to find out some information that may prove useful. A commotion in the hall alerted her to Steven's presence behind the curtain.

'Where is he? Where's Dr. Bailey? I need...'

'Izzie wait, please just stop for a second, Izzie we need to find someone who might know where they are. We can't just...'

'Jesus George, do you have any idea? Just...look, don't even...'

Miranda raised her eyes heavenward and let out a deep breath before turning to glance sideways at Derek. He nodded, almost imperceptibly and she took a step back and exited the cubicle, being careful to close the curtain completely behind her.

'Dr. Ste...'

'Oh, Dr. Bailey, thank God, we've been looking everywhere for him, like actually everywhere...' Izzie spoke so quickly her words were strung together in one indecipherable conglomeration of vowels and consonants and tears and hiccups.

'Iz...' George began, holding a hand towards Izzie's right shoulder but stopping short of actually touching her, 'Iz, he's okay.'

'Is he? Is he really Dr. Bailey? Oh God, this is all my fault...'

'Funny, that's exactly what he said to me right before he collapsed at my feet.' It was probably too much and she knew it but Miranda needed them to focus.

'Oh, God.' Izzie whispered, bringing a shaking hand to her mouth. She looked like she was going to eat her fingers and Miranda noted the wild, glazed way her eyes seemed unable to hold onto anything stable and unmoving. She had quite obviously been very drunk and was now hovering precariously in an in-between limbo where her blood alcohol level was unchanged but the situation was demanding sobriety and coherence and definitely not panic.

'Is he...?' Her eyes flitted to the curtain, then back to Miranda, searching, 'Can I...can we...me and George...shit...George and I, can we see him...please?'

'In a minute,' Miranda raised both her hands, palms out, a physical barrier between her and the words and the hysteria and the tequila fumes, 'Jesus O'Malley, how much damn alcohol have you lot had tonight? Izzie, you can see him in a minute but first I really need to know what the hell is going on. What the hell happened?'

'Oh, God, Dr. Bailey, we didn't know. Nobody knew, and then I had to go and...But I didn't know...he never said anything, in all this time...'

'Izzie, know what? You didn't know what?'

'His mother in law is here, his mother in law, I didn't know...did you know?' Not waiting for or even requiring an answer, Izzie leaned back against the corridor wall and slid floor ward until she was seated on her heels, arms wrapped around her knees. Looking like the small child she hadn't been for fifteen years and perhaps never was, Izzie looked towards Miranda with blue, tear filled eyes, wild with innocence and terror and disbelief.

'Alex has a mother in law...he has a wife,' she whispered.