Title: A lot more
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Character/Paring: Alex, Alex/Izzie undertones
Rating:T for language
Spoilers: All of Season 2
Summary: Why did Alex become a doctor?
Feedback: Please. Should I work on this character?
Author's Note: So I really like Alex and this is my first attempt at getting into his head. It might suck, but I'm taking that chance.

If you were to ask him why he became a doctor he'd tell you in a second that it was for the money and the women. That he was going to ride the plastics train to the bank and women damn sure liked to screw a doctor - it was the American dream. It wouldn't be a lie, he did become a doctor for the money and the women but that wasn't the only reason but hell if he'd ever tell anyone else that.

Alex Karev was as shallow and narcissistic as he seemed, he was also a whole lot more. Why did he become a doctor? To save lives, sure, to end up with million dollar hands? Oh hell yeah, but it was more than that. He'd been powerless his entire life, the kid who curled up in his closet and listened to his bastard father beat the hell out of his mom. He'd been that kid until he started wrestling; then he'd beaten the hell out of his old man and the bastard had split. So yeah, Alex wanted to save lives, he wanted the money and the women – but he liked the power.

He knew he should have taken another internship, if there had been any others to choose from, why did a boy from Iowa want to head to Seattle when he'd rather have been in New York and Los Angeles – obviously he didn't really have a choice. He'd just nodded at Sloane when he suggested transferring to a place that saw more heat with plastics, like there was some deep seeded reason why he'd decided on Seattle.

He didn't care about kids in wheel chairs who couldn't separate themselves from their mothers brain and he didn't care about near corpses with southern drawls who captured the attentions of ex-models who had the vague idea that they wanted to be good doctors. Alex didn't care, he didn't.

Fuck it. He cared and he'd been trying his hardest since this internship started to keep everyone at arms length. Attachments meant you got weak, you got involved and that was weakness. He didn't want to fucking care – he didn't want to regret sleeping with a nurse in the on-call room. He didn't want to hold Izzie in his arms while she poured out her soul over a corpse and wish she'd be able to feel a fraction of that if he'd been the one who'd kicked it.

Alex hated it. Hated the internship, he hated Izzie and he fucking hated Denny Duquette.

It was his own fault and knew it, he'd never had anything good in his life and anything that even seemed to be good he'd screw it up. He came this close to screwing up the internship itself, he failed the boards and he would have failed them again if hadn't been for Meredith, Cristina, George and Izzie – god Izzie. He'd had Izzie, as much as he could have and he'd gone to the on call room and fucked Olivia – again. He'd always been the type to screw something up, ruin it before he had a chance to get in deep. Ruin it before he hurt everyone involved so deeply that they were unrecognizable.

Being the asshole was easy, it was easy to go through life and be honest to the point of brutality. It was easy and he wasn't going to be some pansy like George. He was Alex fucking Karev; brutally honest to the point of cruelty. He didn't get involved.

Then why did everything suddenly seem to hurt so much? Why did he feel so helpless? Like he had when he'd been curled up in his closet listening to his mothers sobs as a fist connected with the side of her face or jaw or stomach.

He didn't get involved, he didn't get emotional. He just held her and prayed to the god he didn't believe in that she'd heal.