It Will All Work Out
By: Amanda Croft
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy - Derek/Meredith and Lexie/Mark
Spoilers: Heavy spoilers for major events in Merder's relationship and some pretty significant ones for Slexie's. I don't think it will ruin any episodic plots, but a couple or relationship arcs are definitely revealed.
Disclaimer: I do not own Grey's Anatomy or anything associated with it, if I did, there would be a lot of changes made to the show.
Summary: "It will all work out in the end Lexie" "How can you know that? You can't know that" Lexie Grey rebutted. "You're a Grey, Lexie. It comes with the territory. We self destruct any relationship that looks like it might possibly work. It's what I did, even years after I met Derek, and look how that turned out" Meredith countered calmly.
Meredith Grey sat at the kitchen counter trying not to laugh at the most recent rant about Mark Slone. As she listened to her sister rage against his choices and irresponsibility between bites of Reece's cups, she couldn't help but be thankful that she and Derek were well past this stage of the Grey Women's Mating Ritual. "It will all work out in the end Lexie. You and Mark will eventually stop looking reasons not to be together and it will all work out."
"How can you know that? You can't know that. No one can know what's going to happen. It's impossible." Lexie Grey rebutted in a frenzy of words and chocolaty peanut butter. "And we don't look for reasons for it to not work," she tacked on almost as an afterthought.
"I can know that and I do. You're a Grey, Lexie. It comes with the territory. We are all dark and twisty and afraid to let someone hurt us and people think we're crazy, but we're just Grey's. We self destruct any relationship that looks like it might possibly work before the guy has a chance to break our hearts. It's what we do," Meredith countered calmly after taking a long sip of coffee to hide the smile her little sister's rant induced. "It's what I did, even years after I met Derek. It took me a really long time to let myself believe that it was ok to really love him and let him love me back. A really, really long time. Years and years, and look how that's turned out. It's the same for you and Mark. One day, something will happen and you will realize that it's worth the risk and that you deserve to be happy. Then everything will work out."
Lexie stared at her sister for several silent minutes assembling her thoughts. Meredith was every bit as stubborn as she was – another Grey family trait –, so whatever arguments she made, they had to be bullet pro– no air tight, bullets brought back too many bad memories. It was annoying how Meredith just assumed she knew what was going on all the time. Just because they were sisters didn't mean anything! She and Meredith had only even known each other for a few years. Resolve firmed up, Lexie argued her point, "I am not you Meredith! Not all Greys are like you! Molly is completely happy with her husband and her baby. So there goes the 'it's a Grey thing' theory right out the window. Besides, Mark and I are totally different from you and Derek. I'm not scared to have a mature relationship; I just can't have one with Mark! He is a liar and he only thinks about himself and, and, and he's a womanizer! He slept with Addison, and Amy, and Teddy, and Reed, not to mention half the nurses in the hospital! Oh, and don't forget Callie! He didn't only have sex with Callie, he got her pregnant! He has a baby with Callie! How am I supposed to trust him? At least you can trust Derek." As she finished, a small self-satisfied smirk made its way to Lexie's face. She was completely right here, a relationship with Mark would never work if she couldn't trust him. Even her sister couldn't argue that point.
"Sometimes I forget that you only really knew me and Derek in relatively good times. But it wasn't always happy or good. It started out as a one night stand the night before I started work at the hospital. I never intended to even see him again. Then I show up at work, and surprise!, that really hot guy I had dirty, dirty couch sex with last night works at the hospital and is my boss's boss. I tried to act like that night never happened, but he wouldn't let me. So after weeks of avoiding him as much as I could, we started dating secretly because he was an attending and I was an intern – just like you and Mark. Only it was worse for us, because Izzie and George found out and wouldn't speak to me because they thought I was only sleeping with him for surgeries, and Baliey caught us having sex in his car in my driveway and kicked me off of any surgeries she could. And as messed up and hard as all of that was, it was nothing compared to getting ready to leave for a date with Derek only to have his wife come introduce herself to me and call me a whore!" Meredith paused to take a couple of swift swallows of coffee at this point, because no matter how much she was over it and happy now, that was still one of the worst nights of her life.
As she collected herself again she watched Lexie's face to make sure she was getting the point. "By the next day, I was the slutty intern that had had a nasty affair with my married attending. Somehow I ended up the bad guy to everyone in the hospital even though I never knew he was married! Then, because that wasn't painful enough, he took her back! I had to spend an entire year working in a place where my married attending ex-boyfriend and his perfect wife worked while everyone gossiped about me being the slutty home-wrecker. I had to work on cases with them and try to act like I wasn't broken about everything that had happened. On top of that, as much as I hated Derek for lying to me and for choosing Addison, I couldn't not love him, so I had a bunch of one night stands to try and move on, and he called me a whore. So don't tell me that I don't get the betrayal and hurt that you feel towards Mark. At least he never cheated on you or made you the other woman. He never chose another woman over you after you had begged him to choose you."
"He chose Sloane and her baby over me!" Lexie interrupted indignantly. "He didn't even give me a choice. And it doesn't matter that Sloane left and gave the baby away, because he still chose them over me!"
"Yeah, he chose to support his daughter when her mother wouldn't. He chose to follow the example of Mr. and Mrs. Sheppard and do the right thing by his family. He didn't choose them over you either, Lexie. You're the one who decided to leave over that."
"Don't say that like it makes it any less painful. You don't win more points just because you fell in love with a guy with a secret wife." She knew she was being unfair and nasty, but she really didn't like anyone pointing out the mistakes she had made. It was so much easier to just blame everything that went wrong on Mark.
Mere closed her eyes and counted to ten before she even contemplated opening her mouth. Lexie was just being defensive; she didn't mean to hurt anyone except maybe Mark, even if her words did feel like a sucker punch to the stomach. "It's not a competition Lex, I'm not trying to earn more points. I just want you to understand that I get it, ok? I get the whole he betrayed me and stomped on my heart for extra measure thing. If anyone can understand how you feel, it's going to be me, or maybe Derek. I know you know that or you wouldn't have come to me to work out your feelings. You could have gone to any number of people. You could have called Molly if you were just looking for 'sisterly advice', but you came to me because I get it. I fell in love with a man with a secret wife, and after a year of seeing them together, he decided that he didn't want her anymore, he wanted me again, and he just expected me to be ok with everything and get back with him like nothing had ever happened. I still loved him, but I couldn't trust him with my heart again. I wanted to be with him so badly it hurt, but I had to protect myself. For a while I dated two guys at once – they both knew about it of course," Meredith was quick to add when she saw the scandalized look on the younger Grey's face. "And when I was ready to choose Derek, he decided to be all noble and 'give me up' because Finn was the 'better man'. Eventually things were good again for a while, but I let my mother get into my head, and I drowned, and pushed Derek away even though it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do."
"Wait, you drowned? Like literally drowned? How did I not know this? I'm your sister!"
"Yes, yes, I don't know, and it was before I even knew you. Now do you want me to finish the story or not because I have to be back at the hospital in less than nine hours and I would like to at least get some sleep."
"Yeah, sure, finish your story."
"OK then, so after I drowned and pushed Derek away I came up with this stupid S&M thing so that I could still have him without the emotional drama. And it – "
"Wait, sorry, but S&M? I think I'm missing something here." Lexie interjected yet again.
Fighting off her agitation, Meredith explained, "It stands for Sex and Mockery, basically a friends with benefits kinda thing with rules like no sleeping over and no emotional baggage. Anyway, I finally was better, I had been seeing a shrink, I got all whole and healed for Derek so that we could have a real relationship again, but he started dating a scrub nurse, so I had to stand back and watch them like I did when he was with Addison. Do you have any idea what it's like to get yourself ready to actually commit to someone, to actually purposely work at getting to a place to commit, and then see the person you did all this work for be with someone else?" Meredith asked, genuinely curious.
"Yes! I had just gotten over Mark sleeping with Addison again when he started dating Teddy! That killed me, because he wasn't just sleeping with her, he was really dating her." Lexie answered wiping away a few tears and reaching for another piece of candy from her stash.
"Didn't you sleep with Alex while he was in LA sleeping with Addison?"
"Yeah, so what's your point?" she was defensive again.
Meredith looked at her younger sister wearily, "I guess my point is I never really got why you were so upset with him for having a fling with Addison after you broke up, when you were having a fling with Alex."
"I didn't have history with Alex! He and Addison have this epicly dramatic history. He lived with her for months and he moved across the country to try and win her back! You can't just have a fling' with someone you have that much history with. It can't not mean something. My thing with Alex didn't mean anything. We were both hurting and lonely and drunk."
"Lexie, you dated him for months, how can you tell me that it meant absolutely nothing?" Meredith asked not quite believing how deluded her companion could be.
"I didn't say everything with Alex was meaningless, just the first time, before I found out about Mark and Addison. Didn't you want to finish your story so you could get some sleep?" she diverted, "So Derek's dating this scrub nurse, then what?
"Then," Mere continued while giving her sister a look that clearly said 'this is not over', "we had our first clinical trial and it finally worked and we saved our first patient, so I decided to just go for it. I made a candle house on his property and waited for him to show up. When he did, I gave him this speech about being ordinary apart and extraordinary together and how much I wanted to make us work. He broke up with Rose, and came back to me, and it was great until I started having nightmares about him dying or leaving me for someone else. Then, then Susan died … Thatcher blamed me, and, and I pushed him away again. That's where you came in, so you know the rest."
"Have you ever thought about selling your story? It would make a great movie of the week, maybe even a mini-series," Lexie tried to joke.
"Very funny, that wasn't the point though. The point is that even though I was afraid of commitment anyway, and Derek hid a wife from me, betrayed me, and didn't wait for me, chose other women over me, and called me a whore, I still loved him and decided that for better or worse he was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I decided that I loved him enough to make it work, even though it would be hard. And Derek did too. He decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me despite my commitment issues, daddy issues, and trust issues, my string of random one night stands, and making him compete with Finn, pushing him away and insisting on sticking to S&M. The point is, in the end, Derek and I both stopped looking for reasons not to be together and focused on the reasons that we wanted to make it work. We decided that regardless of what had happened, or would happen, we would put in the effort to make it work. When we did that, it all worked out." Meredith sat back and watched it sink in. She was getting much better at this whole big sister thing, if she did say so herself.
Taking her empty cup to the sink, she decided on one last piece of advice. "Lex, I can't tell you want to do or what to feel. I can't say that what you feel for Mark is the same as what I feel for Derek. I don't know if you are willing to do whatever it takes to make it work with him. But I do know that if you are willing, and you really love him so much that you can't picture your life without him, you need to tell him or show him. You need to get to a place where you are both mentally and emotionally ready, then work like Hell to make it work. If you do that, I promise you it will all work out."
Lexie sat staring at the door her sister had disappeared through for a long time after that. She had never really bothered to learn much about Mere and Der's history before because it was unimportant. All she had needed to know was that Meredith was her sister and Derek was off limits because he was hers. For the first time in a long time, Lexie actually took the time to take stock of her and Mark's relationship. There were a lot of similarities to her sister and brother-in-law. That being said, as much as some of the things that had happened in her relationship hurt, it was really petty compared to secret wives and 'emotionless sex'. If she were being completely honest, almost every time something major happened, something that caused them to break up, she was the one who had run. She pushed Mark away because she couldn't or wouldn't deal. Lexie smiled as she realized Meredith was right. Running really was something that Grey's did. But if Meredith could make a lasting relationship work, one that was happy – so could Lexie. She just had to get, how did Mere put it, "whole and healed" first. Maybe tomorrow she would find out who the miracle worker Meredith had seen was, and tell Mark that she wanted to work on getting them back for good. If listening to Meredith's story had taught her anything, it was that she couldn't just wait around and hope things worked out, she actually had to be proactive.
The first step of her plan – set a goal – was done; she would fight for a healthy relationship with Mark. The second step was to get some sleep. The third and fourth – getting the shrink's name and telling Mark – she would take care of in the morning before rounds. Any further steps she would figure out with some professional help. Feeling lighter than she had in a very long time, she cleared away the proof of her near emotional breakdown, and headed to bed.
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