Viscosity

Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post Some Kind of Miracle and for the rest of the season. This chapter is Alex's POV.

Rating: T.

Author's note: This chapter was oddly hard to write, so be nice with it. Maybe it's the post-last-episode depression. Oh, and like I said with the last chapter, I really do promise they'll work it out.

Chapter 10: I Know, and I Said Forget It

After Addison left his bed the morning after—morning after, ha, he thought, as though there'd been anything to talk about last night, it was a morning after nothing whatsoever, but he couldn't complain about the way she didn't mind that they woke up with his leg between hers—Alex sat and stared at the ceiling. It didn't surprise him that she could get him worked up by just being in his bed, but it also didn't make this sleeping-together-without-sex thing any easier. The night before they'd been so close he could actually taste it, and then stupid, moronic Izzie had to come and interrupt—that wasn't Iz's fault. She was just being Izzie. He couldn't help the bristling of resentment towards her about it, but the beauty of this whole thing was he was pretty sure that wouldn't be his one shot with Addison. In fact, he was pretty damned positive.

He could also get used to this, the waking up with her thing, even if it meant dealing with the pager and the odd hours, and the fact that she was his boss, and all of the other bullshit that came along with it, but if Grey could figure it out, hell, so could he. Meredith was kind of getting her shit together, which was more than could be said for the rest of them, and if she could do it, anyone could. They'd all been through their own private hells, and Alex wasn't any different.

He started thinking about calling Addison back—weren't there other neonatal surgeons in the Seattle metropolitan area? Was it too much to ask to just get ten minutes—who was he kidding, he needed more than ten minutes—alone with her where they were both sober, lucid, and energetic? He had an itch that needed to be scratched, but more than that, it was possessive. He wanted to prove to her that he was in this. He wasn't going anywhere. He'd almost fucked everything up with his little diatribe in the closet, and he wasn't going back there again. His defense mechanisms, and this was something he'd always known, sucked. Olivia was pretty big proof of that. And Christ, when he hadn't been able to get it up for Iz, which was ridiculous and one of the most humiliating moments of his life. So sex was one coping thing, and fighting was the other, and as he stared up at the ceiling, he promised himself that he was going to make those into positive aspects of this rela—well, whatever it was.

After a minute, he realized Addison wasn't coming back, which meant his ass needed to get up and get ready for work. Nobody ever called out sick from a shift, but he would have contemplated it if she came back to his room and said, Hey, Karev, let's do it, let's stay in bed. She wasn't coming back, and he hadn't really expected her to, but it was a nice little fantasy—she in his shirt and nothing else except for maybe flimsy little panties, and God, he liked his shirt on her.

But all that said and done, he still had to go to work, not sit around and think about what he wanted to do to Addison. After that pager had gone off, they entered a weird place of professional behavior, and hell, he still had a job to do. So, grudgingly, he pulled himself out of bed, found a beanie and a t-shirt on the floor, slid on a pair of slippers and padded out into the hallway.

He and Izzie hadn't worked out the doing the toothbrushing-in-the-morning thing yet. They hadn't worked out much of anything. And as he groggily made his way into the bathroom to at least take care of the bare essentials, she glared at him in the mirror. It really was like college again, random girls from down the hall hanging out in his dorm room, except he wasn't sleeping with Izzie, and if everything went the way he was really hoping, he wasn't going to sleep with her ever again. Not that she wasn't attractive, because she was. There was no denying that. Even with her glaring at him in the mirror, her lips in that awful petulant pout. He'd always really liked blondes. And he liked stacked blondes. And he'd liked Izzie, but there weren't even any remnants of that left. Maybe this was what women meant when they said they could find someone attractive without being attracted to them. He'd always taken that for bullshit, but there she was, attractive as hell, and he had no desire to pull her into the shower with him.

Izzie blinked at him and then covered her mouth with her hand. He reached for his own toothbrush and toothpaste, still a little wet from Addison's use of it, which was kind of hot, actually, and he never thought that sharing his personal shit like that would be attractive, but hey, he'd never been one for cuddling for any entire night either, at least not without a promise of a pay-off, and it was halfway between the sink and his mouth when Izzie said, hand still hiding her mouth, "Could you turn around?"

"What, why?" he said, still too groggy to be able to interpret her girl shit.

"Because I have to spit and I don't want you to see it."

"Christ, Iz," he said, but he did it, because it was do it or get yelled at, and he just wasn't in the mood for the latter. He stuck his toothbrush in his mouth and listened to her spit and then turn on the faucet, and it wasn't until she told him he could turn around that he did so, and they met eyes in the mirror.

"Look, about last night—" she said, and he shook his head and she fell silent.

"Nah, don't—just don't. We can just leave it."

She kept her eyes on his, looking like she wanted to say something more or like she was itching for the fight, but the truth was, he just wasn't, and there was no point to doing the rumble. Maybe he was getting older—but really the answer was he'd just finally moved on from her, and he was comfortable with that.

…

It was after his shower that Izzie came back to put on her mascara, and he nearly dropped his towel as she burst into the bathroom. "I'm not looking, I'm not looking," she said, cupping her hand around her eye to illustrate her point, nevermind that she could look three inches to her right and see him in the mirror. "Not that I'd want to look. Because I don't. Want to see anything."

He wondered if anyone had ever told her she was crazy before, and then he decided that he probably had, and he went to the sink, oblivious to her scattered mumbling to herself. "Dude, chill, I have a towel on."

It was only then that she tentatively made eye contact with him in the mirror, and after she bent down to retrieve her mascara from the cabinet under the sink, she straightened up and narrowed her eyes at him. Then she tapped the tube of mascara against her mouth, as though trying to analyze him, and then she said, "You look happy. I don't mean happy. You never look, like, sad. But you look—you know, rested. Well, not rested, because rested would mean that you slept, and I bet you didn't, hubba hubba—"

"Iz."

"No, that's fine, you really don't have to tell me."

Her concern for his sex life was less-than-endearing. He might have found it cute under normal circumstances, but as it was, she'd been pretty essential in making sure he got none the night before. "But did you—you know. With Dr. Montgomery."

"Iz, seriously, knock it off."

"You seriously did, didn't you?" It was strange how her thinking he had, whether he had or hadn't, changed the scope of her face. She suddenly looked a little pissed at him, which wasn't his fault. He didn't even get that. What room did she have to be mad? Wasn't she the one who told him she wasn't ready? Did it just piss her off that Addison was an attending? Or that she and Addison didn't get along all that well sometimes? Was it just a girl thing?

"Dude, I'm not telling."

"Alex, you can tell me. We're like friends sometimes. And friends tell friends things, like when they have sex."

"Iz," he said again, but it didn't matter. Arguing with Izzie was like wrestling with a pig—he just got dirty, and the pig just enjoyed it. "Like rabbits," he finally said, bending down to look for his razor. "Is that what you want to hear? Dude, like, eight times."

That was all it took to turn Izzie off to the conversation completely, and she exploded at him with a high-pitched whimper and then took off out the door, slamming it behind her. And then she threw the door open again and opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, he said, "Rabbits, Iz."

That was when she yelled at him, "This house is a den of hedonism," and slammed the door once last time.

…

They sat down to lunch—or not even lunch, who had lunch at 10AM?—Alex and Grey and Yang and O'Malley, and Alex watched as O'Malley pushed a pile of congealing mashed potatoes around his tray. He had a shitload of reasons to be annoyed by the day already, and they'd only been at work for four hours. O'Malley messing with the potatoes was threatening to push him over the edge, and he was normally a pretty unflappable guy. But the list was getting longer—the fact that he hadn't gotten laid the night before, which was fine at the root of it, because, hey, he and Addison had survived a night at Grey's without suffering too much, and she'd come over without a lot of fight, which meant they were getting to the place of being a something, but it still made him cranky; Addison hadn't asked him to scrub in on her surgery, which was fine too, except that he was worried she was going to stop asking him to scrub in on things because people might think she was playing favorites—and she'd chosen Izzie to go with her, which was cool, but he had started to genuinely like being in the NICU, and her not choosing him meant he had to be down in the pit all day, but whatever; and Izzie was being a total psycho, on and off again faster than he could tell her to shut up.

He taught himself when he was a lot younger never to show that he felt like anything about anything. His dad'd beat the shit out of him if he so much as cried, and even being a little testy was enough to make the old man shit a brick. So he didn't like to show it, because there was something innate that made him feel like if he did, he'd get a fist across his jaw. It didn't happen a lot when he was a kid, but it happened enough to make him anticipate it.

He was over-thinking things. That had to be Addison's fault. He could always see when she did it, her brain starting to churn, and then she'd get that look on her face which was pretty cute, but usually something he didn't like all that much came out of her mouth after that happened. She was rubbing off on him, but unfortunately not rubbing off on him, and he had to stop thinking about that kind of thing at lunch.

"Dude, would you knock it off," he finally said to O'Malley, who had started pushing the potatoes into a smiley face. O'Malley jerked and looked at Alex like he'd been pinched, and he picked up a green pea and put it in where the eyes should have gone anyway.

"George, are you okay?" Grey asked him.

"Of course he's okay. He got to scrub in on an anterior posterior spinal fusion," was what Yang said. "And if he's not okay, he's ungrateful, and if he's ungrateful, he should let other people do the complex surgeries."

"I'm—if you knew something about someone and it's something that could really change—I mean, not a lot of things, but it could affect people, but it's, like, a secret, or at it's not something everyone should know or does know, and it might not even happen anyway, would you tell?"

"Do you listen to yourself when you talk?" Yang said.

"George, what is it," Grey said in that weirdly patronizing way she always had with O'Malley.

His mouth twitched. The thing about these people, as far as Alex was concerned, was that they weren't the people he'd ever have chosen to spend time with. Yang was high-strung and sometimes just downright mean, Grey could be a little bit of a weakling and her brain was a little scrambled, and O'Malley was nice enough but there was no way that the Alex Karev Alex had been a year ago would have been caught dead with these people, but here he was. At the cafeteria table. And O'Malley's mouth twitched again, and Alex was beginning to think maybe he knew something interesting. Seattle Grace was filled with shitty rumors.

"Dr. Burke said—I think that—"

"Just say it," Yang said.

"Dr. Burke—I think Dr. Montgomery-Sh—I think Dr. Montgomery is leaving."

"Dude, what," Alex said before he could even keep it from flying out of his mouth. Dude, what, his brain said again, and he turned anything else he had to say into a cough, burying it in his hand. When the hell had that decision happened? This morning? Did she get out of his bed and think, 'I seriously can't do this, I just have to leave' and just went to Weber and said, I gotta go?

"What, why would she leave?" Grey said.

"Seriously. Isn't she making like, seven figures a year to watch women shoot babies out of their birth canals?" Yang said.

"Did he say when?" Alex said, and there wasn't any reason for panic. He hadn't even slept with the woman yet—but still there was something in his chest that was like, hey, look at me, we're drowning here, and that was exactly what it felt like. An odd, suffocating, drowning feeling. Where was she going to go? Mercy West? Maybe that would even be a good thing, but how the hell was he going to find time to see her? What if she met some McDreamy or McSteamy or McWhateverthehell at her new hospital?

And then panic gave way to anger. Maybe she knew all along that she was getting the hell out of dodge, which made him just some fling, which pissed him off. He'd had flings, but Jesus Christ, he told her about his dad, and she told him about her abortion, and it had stopped being a fling. Flings had more sex and more make-out sessions in supply closets.

"I don't know, and you guys, you can't say anything, because I don't think anything's official, but—Dr. Burke said, he said that he thought she wasn't happy here and that she wanted to go."

Yang laughed and leaned back in her chair and said, "Oh, you have told the wrong people if you don't want it to go anywhere."

Dude, what, Alex's brain was still saying, but he couldn't find it in him to be anything but pissed at her. He could just go ahead and add that to his list of reasons why today sucked.

…

And then he saw her, and it was pretty impossible to be pissed at her. He'd had this girlfriend when he was in high school, Melissa, and they broke up because she wouldn't put out (his version) and he was an asshole (her version), and that didn't matter now anyway. He'd been a kid back then, and fucking up was a rule of thumb, but he didn't know why seeing Addison by the coffee cart reminded him of her. They didn't look anything alike, and they weren't anything alike, but the truth was, just being around Addison had started forcing him to make sense of and peace with a lot of shit in his past. It was all one big mess of bullshit that he never really wanted to untangle, because it wasn't worth it, so he just kept it there, at the back of his brain, until maybe one day it'd make him explode. He wondered, suddenly, where Melissa was, what she was doing, if she figured things out in the end. If she ever put out. If she was still the virgin-fucking-Mary. It didn't matter to him anymore. He couldn't be angry about that.

He watched her from the other end of the walkway, and he didn't get how McDreamy—Dr. Shepherd—could ever give her up willingly. Sure, she was a pain in the ass, but she was nothing short of being a seriously hot woman. What had he and O'Malley said—McHot. That was what they'd said. He thought about telling her that. And then he thought not, because that'd blow her ego up, but she deserved to have a hefty ego. She deserved to have men tell her all the time that she was beautiful. He hadn't told her that at all, he didn't think. He should tell her that. And he was allowed to tell her that. He was allowed to, because they were in a thing. They were in a … thing, and she wasn't going anywhere. She'd have told him that. She would have.

He pretty much had himself convinced when Izzie came up behind him and said, "Wow, you're seriously into her, aren't you?"

"What is with you?" he said, but he couldn't help smiling. Yeah, so what if he was. He didn't need to advertise it, and he certainly didn't have to tell Izzie all about it. But yeah. Yeah, so what if he was.

"No, I think it's cute," she said, and Alex had no idea when Izzie became like a sister to him, but there she was, in all her sisterly glory, harassing him about his love life, and he could handle that. He could use a good friend or two, especially since he'd started making out with one of the few he actually considered a friend. "It is, it's cute. I mean, the last girl you were really into was … well, me."

"Iz, go away."

"You know, you and I could double date now. Well, or maybe not," she added, laughing a little to herself and then laughing a little harder in that weird Izzie way she had of over-responsive giggling, and he had no idea why he hadn't gotten it the night before—Sloan. He turned and looked properly at Izzie for the first time since she'd come up to him, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling even more, and he should have figured it out a long time before now.

"Dude. You are so busted."

Sloan. Of all people—it was the one into whose head Alex slammed his fist only a couple of days ago. Sloan. As in the jackass who came across the country to get Addison to go back with him. As in the jackass who sexually harassed Iz every chance he got—and Alex didn't know whether he should have felt relieved or pissed off or what the hell he should have been feeling. Mostly he was concerned for Izzie, because nothing he'd seen made him think Sloan knew how to take care of a woman, and that was what Izzie needed.

But maybe she needed to figure it out on her own too. And he had to be honest, he was pretty fucking relieved. There was no way Mark Sloan, with the advantage of all the history and whatever it was that was between him and Addison, was going to come after Addison again. Alex's Addison. His Addison.

"I didn't say anything," Izzie said, but she didn't really need to. He'd known her long—and intimately—enough to know how to read the guilt in her face.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get out of here. Go find an attending to make out with."

She giggled again and then tried to straighten her face, and she said, "You too, Dr. Karev."

When Izzie turned and went, he decided, fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck the rumor about her leaving—if she was leaving, he'd tell her. And fuck Mark Sloan, because Mark Sloan was no longer his problem, not even a little bit. And fuck whatever else, because for the first time in his life, he felt like maybe, just maybe, he was getting things together. He and Meredith Grey, fixing their fucked-up lives, one relationship at a time. There was that r-word. Thing. He was just going to keep calling it a thing. She'd have to call it a relationship first.

…

Grey was sitting by the outside brick wall, still in her scrubs, when he went out to grab a breath of fresh air, however cold it was. The entire day was making him angry—he knew he should have stayed in bed, not even bothered with it at all, but that wasn't a chance he ever really got. It wasn't that he doubted his surgical ability or being a doctor or any of those decisions he'd made, it was just that there was a very lazy man inside of him, dying to be left in bed. And Addison was just driving him insane. It was totally okay for Yang and Dr. Burke to be engaged, Grey and McDreamy to do whatever the hell it was they did, but Addison couldn't so much as lean in to him a little when they were in public?

When he got outside and he saw Grey, looking a little sad like she usually did, it felt a little like a relief. She wasn't going to judge anyone. She never did, which he appreciated about her. He sat down on the cold sidewalk next to her, pulling his coat shut around him, and she looked over at him and folded her hands in her lap and said, "Hi, Alex."

"Hi, Grey," he said back, and he stretched his legs out in front of her.

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah, why?"

"You just never come and sit with me unless something's up."

"I should be asking if you're okay."

"I'm okay," she said, but she wasn't convincing. He had to admit that he'd been scared when she'd almost been gone, gone, as though he didn't deal with dead people all day every day, as though he couldn't say 'died' when it was something that happened every day. "Derek wants me to move in with him. To his trailer. In the woods."

"Yeah? I think Izzie's seeing Mark Sloan."

"Yeah, I know she is," Meredith said, and it was with the quiet, unemphasized inner pout he was used to from her. She was so quiet sometimes she was almost easy to brush aside, but she saw shit. She knew what was going on. And sometimes he just had to give her credit for making it this far. He didn't know if he would have.

He didn't like to think about his mom, back home in Iowa, just trying to find a way to pay the bills, but Grey made him think about it, about the money he sent home to make sure she had enough for groceries and enough for the mortgage. Maybe she didn't need it, maybe it was just him, trying to look out for her, like he'd always done, or always tried to do—and if one day she weren't there anymore, he didn't know what he'd do. And he didn't know how Meredith did what she did.

"Do you think I should do it?" Meredith said, looking over at him.

"Do what, move out?"

"Yeah, move out."

He tried not to think about the fact that it'd leave him homeless, or that he and Izzie would be forced to split a cheap room at a Motel 6. "Do you want to move out?"

"You know how when you're just getting things figured out, you're just finally getting all of your Dominos where they belong, and it's perfect, and then someone comes along and wants to add on to your—your Domino thing, and you trust them, you do, you just think that if they're not careful, they could knock the whole thing over?"

Boy, did he. "Dude, me and Addison—"

"You and Dr. Montgomery," Meredith said, as though she were tasting the words, getting a feel for them. As though trying them on. He'd been trying it on too—me and Addison, he'd said, which was his way of saying we or us or yeah, that's right, we're a couple, the two of us. Couple, Christ. "You and … Derek's ex-wife. Derek's ex-wife and you. Is that weird? Do you feel weird about that?"

"Nah," he said, and it was true. It was true in the same way that he didn't have to think when he woke up in the morning about who it was he had his arms wrapped around. And it wasn't weird, just like every time he had to take a scalpel to someone's skin wasn't weird. It just wasn't. It made sense. They made sense. Even if sometimes she made him so angry he could hit something—but wasn't that part of it? Wasn't it part of the deal to fight and be angry and to take some time to figure some shit out? "Nah, it's not weird. She can be a real bitch, but, eh, I don't know. It's not weird."

"You really like her, huh?" Meredith said, and she looked over at him with that weird, soft look she had, the one that said she got it in whatever way he could.

He shrugged—but he laughed, and that was all the confirmation she seemed to need. She nodded, and they could at least share that. It wasn't like he could go to Yang and shoot the breeze about what it was like to be involved with an attending, and there was no way in hell he was going to compare notes with Iz about Mark Sloan. As if he didn't have enough reasons to hate the guy, he didn't need Izzie telling him that Sloan was more well endowed or a better lover or whatthefuckever. He had no jealousy towards Sloan, not where Izzie was concerned, but nobody was a fan of that kind of comparison. Especially not Alex.

"Well, good for you," Meredith said, a hint of amusement in the back of her throat. "I like her, you know. I just didn't like her with Derek. I tried to hate her too—but I don't think you can, really. And I have this new thing since my mom died. I'm going to be happier. I'm going to like more people. More people are going to like me. I'm going to drink less tequila. It's a whole big long thing."

"You guys are so boring," Izzie said, suddenly appearing from around the corner and standing in front of their pairs of feet, eating an apple.

"That's us," Meredith said. "Boring. I think Cristina has an arterial switch with Bailey and Burke, you could go sit in the gallery. Make popcorn. You know."

Izzie rolled her eyes and bit into her apple, and the sound of it smacked in Alex's ears. She was smug about something—and happier. And brighter— all lit up and flushed. She looked pretty that way, and he had seen her looking like that in the brightness of a post-coital glow. Maybe she hadn't been fucking around with Sloan in supply closets, but she sure as hell looked like it. And she was doing the Izzie thing where she was bursting like a fat champagne bottle to tell someone, anyone, what was going on in her head, but she buried it along with her smile behind her apple. That was when she filled in the empty space between Alex and Meredith with her ass, still happily eating her apple.

"What's with you?" Meredith asked as both she and Alex moved out of Izzie's way. "You're like … bubbly."

"I have always been bubbly, Meredith."

"Not lately. Not since—you know."

"Dude, she's getting laid," was what Alex had to say, and Izzie bit into her apple hard. Next to him, she drew her legs up to her chest and wrapped her free arm around them. Meredith leaned forward so that she could look at Alex and make meaningful eye contact, and when she withdrew, Izzie said:

"What, you guys. Was I supposed to mope forever? Denny would want me to be happy."

"With McSteamy?" Meredith said.

Izzie shivered, and Alex didn't know what it was, some knee-jerk brotherly reaction in him or something else, but he pulled off his coat and slid it around her shoulders. She hardly said thank you, but he got it. He knew.

…

Everyone got the 9-1-1 call at the same time, standby orange alert, which meant there was a major disaster heading their way, and the orange alert itself wasn't far behind. The hospital exploded into perfectly choreographed chaos, and Izzie was late to meet up with Bailey to hear what she wanted them to do. Her hair was a wreck and her cheeks flushed, and Alex watched her as she pulled her hair out of its ponytail holder and then slid it back in. Bailey dispersed them, mostly to triage, and as they started off down the hallway, Izzie grabbed Alex's arm and said, "Alex, I think I totally just got caught by Dr. Montgomery—having sex with her ex in the on-call room."

"Whoa, what?" Yang said, turning to stare at Izzie hard as they made their way to the elevators down to the imminent chaos. "Your modifiers are dangling. Who was having sex with whose ex? Montgomery?" Alex couldn't help the flair of jealousy that burned just under his sternum, but he knew better—even the knowing better didn't help out with the jealousy. He was a jealous guy. He was a jealous guy, and the thought of Sloan's hands on Addison ever again made him want to deck the dude. Again.

"No, shut up," Izzie snapped at her, and Yang's reaction was one of impressed curiosity. "Me and Mark," Izzie said, pulling Alex tighter to her, her gossip intended for him and him only. How had it become that he was the one Izzie turned to when she had gossip, whether it was her own or someone else's? How had he become Izzie's O'Malley? "I think she caught us. I think that was her, anyway. Someone opened the door, and it looked like her, only I was too—anyway, she put this note on the door that was really bitchy, and I just—"

"Stevens," came Bailey's voice, loud and clear through the hustle of her interns, and the entire group of them stopped, the mass of poor, scared interns that they were. The sea parted, and Bailey moved back through the two perfect lines they'd formed until she reached Izzie, and she put her hands on her hips and said, "Stevens, is that your sex life I'm hearing about?"

Izzie's face turned pink, and Alex felt for her, but there was something else on his mind. Addison, a bitchy note, Sloan and Izzie in the on-call room. She wasn't still hung up on that jackass, was she? There was the jealousy again, as rich and ripe as a big fresh apple that he could have reached out and plucked and thrown at someone's head. Maybe that was all it took, walking in on him and another woman, for her to realize that she'd just been dicking around with stupid Alex Karev. And how dumb was he for falling for it? Whatever made him think that she was going to be all that into him? Maybe he'd been right all along about what he said in that supply closet. Maybe this was just a big fucking mess.

"Can we get through one day without someone getting distracted by the people they may or may not be screwing around with? You see this," Bailey said, pointing to her face and drawing a circle in the air. "This is my unhappy face. We have a major car wreck, people, let's get a move on."

And for once, he was thankful for the work at hand. Anything to not think about Addison for a little while.

…

It was carnage in triage. Disaster after disaster, and they never got any easier. They weren't supposed to, which he knew, but he couldn't help looking at the waves of patients as they came in, some in worse condition than others, and thinking about the idiocy of one person, how sometimes all it took was one person to fuck up another person's life forever—or two-hundred people's lives, whatever the case may have been. It was carnage in triage, and he didn't know how many bones he'd set, how many sutures he'd done, how many basic medical exams he'd performed, and how many DOA tags he'd put on people's bodies. It didn't get any easier, and he didn't cope any better. He shut down. It was what he always did, just turned off. Got mean or petulant. Threw silent fits and sulked in a corner. That was how he handled things. That was how he disabled the pain.

And it was hours later, when Bailey finally told some of them that they could go home, and he was making his way back to the locker room, that Shepherd stopped him. He wasn't in the mood for chit-chat. He didn't want to talk about Addison, who'd been a bitch to him all day long, and he didn't want to talk about surgery or dead bodies or whatever the fuck else it was that Derek Shepherd might have to say to him. Alex knew his type: smarmy, cocky, arrogant assholes, who got by on their good looks and their smooth smiles. It was almost Alex's type, but he didn't use charm to survive. He used the bristles he shot out whenever the going got tough. His dad used to call him a moody son-of-a-bitch, and maybe that was true, but he was still alive, and sometimes, Alex stopped to give himself credit for still being around.

"Dr. Karev," Shepherd said to him, Alex's hand on the door to the locker room, ready to push it open, change into his street clothes, and call it one hell of a long, bad day. "Can I have a word with you?" Shepherd said. Alex hated the false sense of respect that he had to pay these people sometimes. Shepherd may have had more surgical experience, more years of training, but he wasn't any better than Alex was. In fact, at Alex's last count, only one of them had a ruined marriage.

"All due respect, it's been a long day," Alex said, and he pushed open the door. That had to be that. Nothing Shepherd had to say could have been important enough that it couldn't wait for the next day or the next day or, hell, three hours from then when Shepherd'd be showing up at the door of the home where Alex was living.

"All due respect, it's about my ex-wife."

That made Alex bristle, but he'd humor Shepherd. My ex-wife, he said, and Alex was trying to figure out whether or not it was possessive, whether or not there was anger or jealousy behind the other man's tone, but Shepherd was pretty impenetrable. "Look, man, I don't want to—"

"Dr. Karev. I wanted to say—what I wanted to say was, don't give up on her. She'll push and she will push and she will push until you don't feel like you have any option but to go. Don't give up on her. Don't let her bully you."

"No offense, but I don't need relationship advice from you."

"I deserve that," Shepherd said, and Alex narrowed his eyes at him. This wasn't out of the blue. This wasn't just Dr. Derek Shepherd showing up to tell him to be nice to the woman he once married. This wasn't friendly, conversational relationship advice. There was concern smeared all over Shepherd's face, and Alex felt a tug of something in his stomach. Had something happened to Addison? Was there something going on that he needed to know about? She'd kicked him out of her OR, and that was the last time he'd seen her. And with the things that happened around Seattle Grace—Yang collapsing during surgery, infectious airborne diseases, bombs in some guy's stomach, a surgeon being shot, and an intern going into the freezing water—there was no way of telling what could have happened to her.

"Is she okay?" Alex asked, and his voice sounded a little passive, a little too reserved for what was happening in his stomach, but that was how Alex always did. He shut down. He put all those dumb, useless feelings he never figured out what to do with into a locker and kept them there. Because they were exactly that—dumb and useless. And he felt that way, dumb and useless, standing in front of Shepherd and panicking over Addison.

"She's—quiet board," Shepherd finished weakly, shrugging his shoulders a little. "I know it's hard, Karev. She's hard. But you'll regret it if you just give up."

If she'd been hurt or injured in any way, Shepherd would have told him. He had to reassure himself with that thought. If she was lying on an OR table somewhere with someone's hands inside her, Shepherd would have told him. And the thing was—maybe Addison had talked to Derek about him. And maybe all that stupid insecurity and jealousy was just that—stupid. If Shepherd was standing in front of him, telling him to fight for her, there had to be a reason. She had to want to be fought for.

"Is that what you did? Give up on her?"

Shepherd looked away and laughed a little, and he didn't look back at Alex when he said, "Yes. But not when you think. I gave up on her long before Mark ever entered the picture."

"You regret that?"

"I regret giving her a reason to cheat, yes." And then he laughed again, and Alex thought that maybe that was Shepherd's defense mechanism. Everybody had their things.

…

Addison had her thing too. It was streaked all over her face, patches of mascara running down her cheeks, and that really wrecked him, because he wanted to do something about it, and she didn't want him to do anything about it, and there they were, in a Mexican stand-off, he on the outside of the elevator, she on the in. Burke passed by him, and he didn't give two shits about what he had to say, unless it somehow helped Addison. When he was gone, Alex weighed his next step carefully, and then he stepped into the elevator.

If he was some other guy—McDreamy, maybe—he might have had the perfect thing to say. He might have been able to pick her up, like he'd done with Izzie, and wrap her up inside of him, and maybe, probably, that would have made her feel better—but only if she were some other woman, someone a little more willing to let people do that for her. And the truth was, he'd never been that guy. Iz liked to tell him that he was soft deep down, but he wasn't. Deep down, he was hard, harder than he wanted to be, and colder too, and he could have blamed that on years of conditioning, but he was past blame. He was just past all of it, his dad and the alcohol and the drugs and the growing up in bars. And he just wasn't the better guy, but he wanted to be the guy Addison came to when she needed someone to wrap her arms around. It had shit to do with wanting to save her or protect her from the jackasses who had taken her for granted for years, it just had to do with wanting to be that guy. Her guy.

But she was looking at him with so much contempt that he felt himself bristle in spite of whatever else it was he was feeling, the stupid need to go to her and wipe her face dry, and what he said came out almost mean. "Dude, seriously. What's going on with you today?"

"You have no right to stand in front of me and ask me what's wrong," she said, gearing up and recoiling like a big vicious snake. How many defense mechanisms could one woman have? And it pissed him off, because he wasn't some stupid kid who just wandered into the elevator with her. He wasn't just some fucking intern. He was a guy who cared about her, who fucking held her while he slept, and she had no right to stand there and treat him like a stranger.

"Don't do that," he said.

"Do what?"

"That thing. Where you push me away." It was really pissing him off, the way she kept drawing lines between them. How thick were they going to get before they were on different continents altogether? She met his eyes in defiance, and what was it exactly that he'd done that he was having to pay penance for?

But then he started to get it a little—maybe it wasn't about him. Maybe it was just about Addison. Maybe she was pushing him away because she was so damned determined to be so damned strong all the time, and he could get that. He got it because he did it too, but he also knew how lonely a life that made. And he knew exactly how that story always ended, because he'd been writing it for years. It ended up with him, alone, and her alone, and if they both had to be alone, he didn't see the problem in doing it together.

And that was why, when she told him she didn't want him anywhere near her, he just wasn't going to let her push him away. He wasn't going to cater to her need to be the strongest person in the room—because fuck that. Fuck that. They could both be the strongest and the weakest and the best and the most fucked up people in the elevator. And he wasn't going to give up on her.

So when she crossed the small space to push the button to get the elevator moving again, he stopped her. He wasn't perfect. She wasn't perfect. And what they had wasn't perfect. What they had hadn't even matured into the kind of heavy-breathing can't-stop-thinking-about-you-thing that would drive them both crazy, but it didn't stop Alex from thinking about her all the time or wondering if she was doing okay or just wanting to see her smile his way. He was okay with that too—for the first time in all his crazy, fucked-up life, he was okay with it. With being open and bare enough to someone else that she could take a scalpel and slice his chest down the center.

So maybe they were both a little bloodied and bruised from life. It didn't mean they had to bloody and bruise each other too.

He had to touch her, so he did. It was as easy as that. The logic was flawless. He put one hand on her face and the other on her hip, and she told him to get his hands off of her. He moved his hand to the other side of the face and he told her just what he'd been thinking—that she didn't have to be so strong all the fucking time. And that was when she broke in his arms, the strongest woman he'd ever met. It wasn't triumph. It didn't even make him feel good that she was letting him hold her. It wasn't about winning or losing or pushing her into a corner. It was just what they were supposed to do. It's what people in things did.

Her tears shook him. Not physically, because he had to be strong enough to hold her, but inside, where he was a little scared he was falling for her. There were a thousand things to say, but he couldn't come up with any of them. He dismissed every fleeting thing that hit his brain at a hundred miles per hour, like that she was beautiful, or that she drove him fucking crazy, or that he couldn't do this again, because it was so dramatic, but that was life—life was dramatic, and sometimes it ended, and sometimes it left surgeons, shaking and terrified, crying in elevators. And he wanted to tell her that she didn't have to be alone—that she had a choice. Most of all he wanted to press his mouth to her ear and tell her that he was scared out of his fucking mind, but it was the good kind of scared. He couldn't come up with any of it, not in words that didn't sound like bullshit, so he tightened his arm around her as much as he could without breaking her—but she wasn't breakable. She wasn't made of glass. She wasn't porcelain. She was real and warm and sobbing in his arms, and she kept him from having to say anything by kissing him.

And it scared him too that she let herself be here like this with him. It scared him that she might feel some ounce for him what she felt for her. It fucked him up a little, but maybe that was how all of this was supposed to be—a little unnerving, a little like falling, a little like stumbling.

But when she pulled away, it was like the sting of removing surgical gloves. No pain at all, just the cold shock of air to skin. Her fingers brushed over his lips, and he had to keep from kissing them, and what she said made no sense, not in the context of the way she was looking at him. "No, we can't. We can't do this. I can't do this, Alex."

"Yes, you can," he said, because it was time for her to start dealing.

"No." She started to stand up, pulling herself out of his arms, and up he went with her, and when she said the single-syllable word again, he saw that she really meant it. "We can't do this," she said, and there was a shutting-off in her eyes, a closing-down, like she'd moved on in the last four seconds without sending a memo his way.

He could only fight so hard. And he'd never known how to fight for a woman who didn't want to be fought for. "What the hell," he said, and the problem was he just didn't get it. Maybe there was nothing to get. Maybe he'd been right all along—that he was her rebound, that she was using him to get over Sloan or Shepherd or her baby, or whatever the hell else there was, and he could imagine just how angry she'd be if he made that accusation, but maybe there was truth in denial. "You and I, we make sense. What is this even about?"

"This is about the on-call room, Karev," she said, and everything about her was the cold surgical cauterization of her wounds that he hated.

"The on-call room?" What the hell did the on-call room have to do with anything? Was this more of the same we-can't-do-this-in-public bullshit she'd been feeding him for the last twelve hours? "When you and I—"

Dude, his brain went. Dude. You are such a moron.

Izzie and Sloan.

"Oh," he said. "You mean Izzie."

And that was jealousy, big and black and really fucking ugly, and it had taken up its residency in his chest and was doing pre-rounds and telling him to go fuck himself, because this was one woman he was never going to get. This was a woman who didn't belong to him, and she never would.

And Addison said nothing. She just stared at him, eyes narrowed with anger, rimmed with the blackness of her eye makeup, and he knew how angry and jealous he sounded when he said, "What does that have to do with anything? Unless—unless you're still—" He couldn't even say it.

It was worse than it had been with Denny, the jealousy. It was worse than any jealousy he'd ever had before, and the idea of Sloan all over Addison with his hands and his mouth and whatever else threatened to push Alex over the edge, along with the monster underneath his breastplate, and he had been such a God-damned fool. Such a miserable, played idiot. "You know," he said, before she could say anything else, "I totally get it now. So just—whatever. Forget the whole thing."

And just like that, it was done.

…

When he finally got back to his locker and the t-shirt was sitting there in front of it like a gold medal he failed to win, like the black eye someone else had given him, he went to go throw it away. But the thing was—it still smelled like her, and maybe that was all he'd ever get from this, the memory of her in his bed and whatever traces of her she'd left on his shirt, a long red hair here or there, and so he changed his mind about throwing it away and slid it into his locker instead.

To be continued.