"To die, to sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come"
- Hamlet, Act Three, Scene One
The first night, it isn't that hard. He's on so many pain medications and sedatives he sleeps like the babies he's watched over. Small and protectable.
Every time he wakes, Lexie is by his side. Awake. Restless. Hands still shaking. Scrubs still bloodied. Blonde hair tied back into a messy bun, renegade hairs framing a splotchy face.
She starts rambling as soon as his eyes flutter open. Stories and apologies and "oh God" and everything in between. Alex closes his eyes, because he can't deal with them when they're like this.
The second through fourth night it gets harder. They've begun to wean him off the intense meds, and have stopped with the sedatives all together. His body aches, and sometimes it flares with an intensity that is matched by no memory (except, perhaps, her leaving.)
They've moved him back to Seattle Grace, and Lexie is doing the work of four doctors because four doctors are dead or dying or holed up somewhere wishing they were dead instead. She checks in like clockwork every two hours and thirteen minutes. Checks his pulse, his breathing, touches him everywhere; making sure he's still alive, still here because it's "all her fault."
She still sleeps in his room at night, a silent guardian, as if ghosts could come back and harm him more.
Ghosts have harmed him.
The fifth through the eighth night it's awful. He tries his best to never fall asleep. Every time he closes his eyes he hears the sound of a single gunshot, the slight "pmph" as it enters the temporal bone of Reed and silences her like no one else has ever been able to do. He can't even remember if he actually saw it happen, or if he even heard her death occur. But in the nights that have followed, his terrorized mind has begun to create the scene. Her little pixie body and her little pixie hair stained with red and terror.
He can smell gun powder. Even now. It's stained the inside of his nostrils. Burned the scent deep into the hairs. He can't escape it.
He remembers seeing her, Reed. If only for a fleeting second before his own catastrophe began.
"Dude what the hell?" and then pain. And blood. And crawling away from Reed, from her blood, and the certainty of death that Reed had come to be.
He hears from the others that the police shut the elevators down during the retaking of the hospital. The elevators he had waited on for rescue. He freezes at the thought of him dying in one. Of not being found in time. Or never being found at all, forever stuck in that dammed elevator, slowly bleeding but never dead. Purgatory. His own little side show of hell.
He never wants to close his eyes again. He knows from Mer that all Derek does is sleep now, healing as quick as he can so he can return to his throne and begin rebuilding the castle. Yang complains that Owen snores in his sleep because of something in the pain meds, the valiant knight wounded but able to return to duty soon enough.
Reed and Percy sleep; in their own way, peasants lost in the war.
But he can't. He can't. The pain, and the blood, and the screaming and the "he's going to hear him and come back" and the wishing he could stop and wishing for his wife (ex-wife) and hoping Aaron never tells Amber he's a jerk and wondering whose going to pay for him mom's meds; Alex doesn't want to sleep, doesn't want that day, those hours to allow to resurface.
Lexie stops by when she can, but if she notices the deep set ringlets under his eyes (which she kind of has to have noticed, because it's Lexie and that's what she does) she doesn't mention it.
He just doesn't want to close his eyes.
your thoughts?