Word Count: 4200

Disclaimer: Not mine...mostly.

Rating: This chapter...PG.

Spoilers: A rough AU continuation from Ep. 402 and 403.

Summary: Alex-centric drama that also includes all other characters, conventional pairings and break ups as a car crash and subsequent shooting have far reaching repercussions for many Seattle Grace staff members.

Chapter Summary: Bailey goes all mother hen, George and Izzie talk, Alex takes matters into his own hands, leaving Norman to pick up the pieces.

Beta: IceWhisper...thank you!!!

Author's Note: I know nothing really excuses the absurd lateness of this chapter BUT...(and there is always a but, right?!) in my defence, between this chapter and the previous one I have moved continents, started a new job, gone on a road trip and been in a car accident, so please forgive me and enjoy chapter 5 (which was meant to be an epilogue but somehow turned into a chapter all of its own).

Time in Tableaus – Chapter Five

-

"Excuse me." There is no polite inquisition in Miranda's voice, no calm questioning, and she plants her feet belligerently between the woman and the door she seems headed towards. "What do you think you are doing?"

"Um, I've got an appointment with the patient in this room. Is there something I..."

"Have you even met him yet? Introduced yourself?"

"No, I was planning to..."

"Because I can assure you, if you walk in there now, like that, with that, then the battle will be lost before you've even had a chance to begin it."

"Dr. ahh..." she squints, small grey eyes, at the tag clipped to Miranda's lab coat, and Miranda fights the urge to slap her across the face, "Dr. Bailey...I know this patient..."

"This patient has a name, this patient is Alex Karev, and I can assure you, you do not know the first thing about this patient" Miranda takes a step backwards, closer to, and still in front of, the aforementioned doorway, raises a hand in the woman's direction, fingers spread. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I suggest you wait out here a moment and re-think your strategy on this one."

Before the bewildered physiotherapist can respond, Miranda turns and passes through the doorway herself, tugs it quietly closed again behind her.

"Dr. Bailey?"

The voice is quiet and hoarse, raw from lack of use and still recovering from the various tubes that have been fed down it, listening to it is like listening to fingernails across a chalk board, and in some ways it's got nothing to do with how it sounds.

"Alex. I'm sorry, I thought you'd be sleeping, I was just coming to..."

"Who was that?"

"Pardon? Who was who?"

"Outside just now, you were talking to someone. Who was it?"

She can tell from the set of his jaw and the dark clouding of his eyes that he knows already, is just waiting for her confirmation.

"I'm sorry, Alex. I didn't realise you could hear what..."

"I'm crippled, not deaf." Defensive terror, something she is becoming accustomed to. "Who was it? What did they want?"

"Alex..."

"Who was it?"

"It was the physiotherapist..."

"What did she want?"

"Alex..."

"What did she want? Did she have a wheelchair?"

"Alex, please..."

"Did she?"

Miranda nods because she can't bear the thought that her words are going to break his heart. It makes no difference.

"I'm not...you can tell her...I won't...Dr. Bailey, tell her? Tell her I'm not..."

"Alex..."

"...Tell her I'll never...that there's no way...no freakin' way..."

"Alex..."

"...I don't need...Dr. Bailey, make sure, okay? That she knows...make sure she..."

"Alex."

He stops this time, unspoken words hanging loosely from the tip of his tongue. Miranda has moved to the side of his bed and has her hands pressed against his shoulders, making him listen.

"Alex, it's only temporary, okay?" She has no idea if this is true, but wishes it with all her heart and, somehow, she thinks that will make this all okay.

"No...no, no, no..." he shakes his head maniacally in time with his words, so she moves her hands to the sides of his face.

"Alex, listen to me. Okay? Promise you'll listen to me?" She can feel the muscles in his jaw clench as he grinds his teeth under her palms before acquiescing with a fleeting nod. "Okay, good. Now, Alex. You need to do this, okay? You need to do the therapy, you need to sit up, to get in the chair, and it's going to hurt and you'll be exhausted and it'll be the hardest thing you've ever had to do, but...you have to do this. There are no choices here. No options, hell, there's definitely no easy alternative. This is it and you will do it."

"What if I can't?"

The desperate fear in the quiet words tears Miranda open to her very core.

"What if I can't do it?"

"If you can't do it, I'll help you do it until you can do it. Izzie will help you, hell, your new shadow, Norman, will help you, until you can do it. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Mmhmm, okay."

"So, can I let her in now?"

"Not now."

"Alex..."

"Please. Tomorrow, or later today even, just...not now...please? Not now..."

Miranda can feel her resolve slipping even as she tries her damnedest to keep it in place. Her head begins to nod, to agree, she can't help it, can't stop it.

"Okay, not now."

-

Izzie can count the hours of sleep she's managed to snatch in the last three days on one hand, and to say that it's becoming obvious is one hell of an understatement.

"Stevens?"

The sound snaps her from her reverie, sends her elbow sliding out from underneath her head and her chin plummeting towards the counter top. A hand on her upper arm saves her from putting her teeth through her tongue as she is pulled roughly upright again. It takes a moment for the room to stop spinning and for more than just a bright white light to register in her vision.

"Dr. Stevens?"

"Ummm," she blinks furiously and tries to focus.

"Are you okay?"

Mark Sloan.

"Yes. Yes, I'm fine," she raises her hands to push some wayward strands of desperately in need of a wash blonde hair behind her ears. "I'm sorry, what can I..."

"Have you slept at all? I mean, since the accident? Have you actually left the hospital and had real food and sleep in an actual bed?"

"Um, no. I don't, I can't...no. No, I don't think so."

Mark is disgusted to find that this piece of information and the distracted, exhausted way in which it is delivered, affects him. It's been three days. These things should be irrelevant to him again by now.

"Izzie..." He sighs, resigned and somewhat uncomfortable, "You're no good to the patients like this, you're no good to him like this. Go home, get some sleep, have a shower..." he grins and wriggles his eyebrows, can't help himself, even under these circumstances. She doesn't grin back. "Come back in the morning."

"I can't. I have interns and Alex...what..."

"There are people falling over themselves to help Alex now, he's going to need you when all of that help dries up and you're not going to be able to do that if you don't get some food and some sleep. In that order...and now."

Izzie nods in apparent agreement but he can tell it's the nod of someone who knows you are speaking sense but they are going to ignore you anyway.

He shrugs his shoulders and turns, walks away, tells himself he doesn't care.

-

Alex clenches his eyes shut as Dr. Bailey turns to leave. Holds his breath and prays that he can keep it together until she is gone. Just a few more seconds.

Just a few more seconds.

He bends his cast-free right arm across his eyes, attempts to hide in its crook. He's not used to being so out in the open, so defenseless. He thinks that just maybe it's worse than everything else. Then he remembers what everything else is and changes his mind.

Nothing is worse than his current everything else.

Before he even has time to register the movement he flings the thin blanket that covers him to the side. He's still dressed in a hospital issue gown, no-one has thought yet to bring him something to change into, something a little more dignified, something a little less crippled freak.

Alex stares hard at his knees, like foreign objects that have been randomly placed in the bed with him. At least the catheter is gone. As soon as he was aware enough he made sure that was gone, he thinks they knew he'd probably have pulled it out himself if they didn't just do it.

They would have been right, too.

He stares again, wills movement, a twitch, something. He expects nothing. He gets nothing.

Sitting up is painful and exhausting and the hardest thing he has done in days, just like Dr. Bailey said it would be. He is listing heavily to the right, all of his weight on his right arm, recently sliced through stomach muscles quivering from exertion. Exhausting and hard are fast overtaken by pain, pure and simple. It burns from his lower back to the very top of his head, the fact that none of it registers below his waist somehow intensifies the agony above it. It takes his breath and squeezes his heart until he is sure that if he doesn't lay back down he will pass out.

But laying back down is not an option now.

He reaches his casted left arm out and attempts to slide it under his left knee, to drag it upwards and over the side of the bed. His right arm is still holding him up and the cast is bulky and restrictive but he is nothing if not resourceful and eventually his left foot appears from beneath the blanket before a desperate shove has it sliding over the edge of the bed and out of sight again. He draws in a ragged breath as his back muscles spasm in violent protest, a moan, deep and guttural and from a place he does not recognise escapes before he can reign it back in. He tries to ignore it, to push past it, pulls his left arm across himself in preparation for doing the same thing with his right leg.

But the twisting required to reach his right leg is more than he can handle and his right arm gives way suddenly, collapses underneath him, betrays him. The fall twists his back even further, seizes the muscles down his spine completely and he bites through his bottom lip in an attempt to stop from screaming.

He screams anyway.

It tastes of blood and failure.

-

"How're you doing?"

"How's Alex?"

"Callie..."

"Don't, please. Just...don't." Callie raises her eyes to look through her lashes towards George. "How's Alex?"

"Um, I don't...he's, well, I'm not..."

"Forget it, I'll go see him myself." She stands abruptly to leave, to end the bumbling, to get out before she loses the strength to move.

George watches her walk out, knows instinctively she has no intention of visiting Alex, that she just wants to get out of the same room that he is in. They have been doing this dance for days now. Have it almost perfected, a choreographed tragedy of tempest and torture that has them meeting in the middle time and time again only to be ripped apart once more and flung to opposite ends of the harshly lit stage that their life has become.

George smiles wryly to himself and tries to guess what the next act will bring.

-

"Would you rather lose your arms or your legs?"

The random question jolts Meredith attention away from the blushing depths of her strawberry milkshake and she raises an arched eyebrow quizzically in Christina's direction.

"Excuse me?"

"No really, arms or legs...what would you rather?

Christina is sitting back in an office chair with her arms outstretched and her legs straight in front of her, as though pondering the question herself. Her head is inclined to the side and Meredith is slightly surprised to see that she appears very serious in her deliberations.

"I think I'd definitely have to say legs. Yes, legs. For sure. You can still operate with no legs. No hands and your career is over, no legs, I could work with that..."

She raises her eyes to catch Meredith's gaze and Meredith can see that she is looking at her for confirmation and reassurance. Not knowing what else to say and completely unsure where this conversation has come from and, more importantly, where it is going, Meredith nods slowly back.

"Yeah, for sure," comes her ambiguous reply.

-

"Izzie?"

"Oh, George." Izzie slows her steps slightly, raises her hands to her face. "Sorry, I didn't see you, I didn't...just...sorry, for everything. God, it feels like I've hardly spoken to you in days..."

"You haven't, but..."

She stops suddenly, turns to face him, and he has to divert his course to prevent himself from ploughing straight into her.

"I know, I know, I'm so..."

"Izzie, Iz..." George captures both her hands between his own palms, presses them together to get her attention, 'It's okay, really."

"It is?" Izzie's brows crease in confusion and lack of sleep.

"Yeah, it is. You've been...busy, and..."

"Oh God...Alex...you said...and I, and you said it back and then I've been...Alex..." Her words are a jumble, make perfect sense in her own head, not so much when spoken out loud. George, however, understands completely.

"Izzie, Izz...shhh. Listen to me. I love you, you know that."

She smiles brightly, widely and with more than a little sleep deprivation induced craziness, bright blue eyes blinking without really focusing, head bobbing in naive agreement.

"I love you too."

"But it's not...it's...Alex. I've seen you with him, and the way you love me...it's not the same is it?"

The confused frown returns and George silently berates himself for doing this to her when she should be in the middle of eight solid hours of uninterrupted sleep but, it's time.

"What? George...?"

"The way you look at him, the way he looks at you, like you're the only person in his whole world, which...actually, is pretty close to the truth which is kinda sad in a way too...but, anyway. He needs you Izz, he loves you and you love him. You love me too...I think, but it's not the same...you don't look at me like you look at him..."

"But..."

"No buts, Izz. No more buts...He needs you more than I do and, maybe...maybe, he loves you more than I do, too."

-

It's almost evening before Norman has a spare moment with which to check in on his resident. In Alex's absence he has been reassigned to Meredith Grey and they have a mutual agreement that he is to check on Alex whenever possible and to report back to her. It has never been spoken in words but both parties have fallen into a comfortable, assumed pattern. Norman finds Meredith fascinating, as intriguing as Alex but in a slightly different way. He has no idea what stories make up Alex's background, whereas parts of Meredith's past and present are regularly gossiped about facts that Norman has managed to pick up on during his short time at Seattle Grace.

He still finds her intriguing.

She is standing at the nurses station in the ER when he catches her raised eyebrow, a silent question that he doesn't have an answer for, yet.

The sight that confronts Norman when he enters Alex's room is so far from what he is expecting that at first he can't speak, and then, suddenly, he finds he can't stop.

"You know...my youngest, Elizabeth, she's about your age, maybe a little younger..." he walks to the side of Alex's bed, debates pressing the call button to get some assistance, decides to see how long he can manage without it first. "I've got four altogether, the first three, they're quite close in age, but then it was another eight years before we had Lizzie. She was a bit of an unplanned surprise actually, not that I'd ever tell her that."

Norman works quickly, goes for the pain meds first, depresses the button to administer the drugs he can see Alex needs desperately, but will never accept. Alex makes no move to acknowledge Norman has even entered the room, seems to be putting all his effort into sucking in oxygen and not screaming if the clenched way his mouth keeps opening and closing is any indication.

Norman reaches up and above Alex's head, pulls an oxygen mask from the wall and presses it tightly over his nose and mouth, the plastic instantly fogging and clearing and re-fogging in a visual representation of Alex's panic and fear. His eyes are clenched shut, and for that Norman is grateful for there are empty tears on his cheeks, translucent tracks of pain and terror, and Norman knows if he had to look into them and see it for himself he would not be able to do what he needs to do next.

"Well, anyway...I think you'd like her, she's a bit like you in a lot of ways, I think. Not that I presume to know you at all of course, just...well, my perceptions of you, of what I think you are like, I think you would get on well with her. And trust me, there aren't many young men like yourself that I would ever admit that to." Norman smiles to himself, finds his thoughts lingering on his youngest daughter and the stubborn streak that has always been splashed brightly across her round face and trusting eyes.

"It was tough for my wife when she was born," Norman rounds the bed, sees Alex's left leg dangling loosely over the side, the angle acute and he winces internally as the white gauze covering the majority of his lower back come into view, tries not to imagine the raw skin and surgical incision concealed beneath it.

Permanent reminders.

"It was clear to me as soon as she entered this world that she had Down's Syndrome, but as soon as she opened her tiny mouth and started to scream I knew that she'd be just fine. And she is, you know? She's definitely a fighter, Alex. A determined, fiesty, misunderstood fighter, and that's what I think she has in common with you."

Norman can see that the pain meds are starting to kick in, Alex's eyes are open to half mast and are hazy, not completely focused. His breathing is evening out and the fogging of the mask is less frantic and ragged than it was. He wraps his age wearied fingers carefully around Alex calf and knee and lifts carefully, slowly. The groan that accompanies the movement is low and soft, a whimper, and he lays one arm across Alex's chest to straighten him up in the bed again, pulls the blanket back up and rests his casted arm by his side, squeezes the cold fingers slightly and is surprised when they squeeze back, tighten, latch on, just momentarily, fleetingly, before relaxing once more.

Norman thinks he's beginning to become fluent in the art of unspoken communication.

-

"Dr. Yang?" Lexie's voice is timid and hesitant and she hates it, hates that Christina makes her feel like this.

"What?"

"Um, I've completed those charts as you asked, did you want me to leave them here for you?"

She takes the grunted reply as a 'yes' and sets the charts neatly in a pile on the desk beside her resident. Takes a moment to consider how little things have changed, despite the fact that everything has changed, before turning on her heel to leave, dignity mostly intact.

A small victory.

"Lexie?"

"Yeah? Uh, I mean, yes. Yes, Dr. Yang?"

Dignity gone.

"I meant to say the other day, when everything was so crazy with Alex and well, anyway...you did good."

Lexie is sure she should say something here, anything, but words fail her and by the time her mouth opens to utter thanks, Christina has opened the top chart and Lexie can't bring herself to interrupt.

-

Despite the fact that she is as dead on her feet as she has ever been, Izzie still takes the stairs. She relishes the thought of being between floors, a sort of purgatory for the confusing conglomeration of relationships and friendships that her life has become. She's almost at her destination when a figure comes into focus and she's almost at the figure when she realises who it is. She stops abruptly, feels nauseous fleetingly, before using the handrail to guide her in a one hundred and eighty degree turn. She's two steps back in the direction she has just come from when the figure sighs loudly, resigned and exhausted.

"Izzie."

She stops but doesn't turn back around, isn't sure what is expected of her.

So she does nothing, just waits.

The pause is so drawn out and deathly silent that Izzie almost re-starts her decent, doesn't think she has the strength to deal with this now.

"Izzie?"

The voice is more questioning this time and has Izzie turning slowly, hesitantly, trying to find something to say and failing dismally when she sees the ruined mascara and smeared lipstick.

"How's Alex?"

The question is not what Izzie is expecting and she also knows it is not the question Callie really wants to ask.

"Callie...I...I just..." she drags a hand through her hair and down the side of her face, feels tears burn hot and hard behind her eyes and wills them to stay there, knows she has no right to them but can't seem to stop them all the same. She sinks down heavily onto the step on which she is currently standing, half controlled fall, half collapse. "I really need to go...I haven't..."

She can't work out what she wants to say, what she needs to say, thoughts flickering between George's words and Callie's face and her need to see Alex. She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her fingers deep into the sockets, holds her breath to stop the sobs that resolutely find an escape anyway.

Callie watches as Izzie seems to fold in on herself, an exhausted, devastated heap. Small and only clinging on by the barest of threads. She bends her own head into her lap, covers it with both of her arms, wraps her fingers in her own tangled mess of hair and allows herself, if not to forget or forgive, to at least understand.

-

Miranda is about ready to bear hug the calendar that tells her this week is almost over, to kiss the clock that says only four hours and three minutes until a new day, a new week and a new month can begin.

"We're going to do another set of scans tomorrow..."

The voice comes from behind her but she recognises it instantly and understands instinctively what she is being told, she asks for confirmation anyway.

"Why? Has there been a change?"

She knows there hasn't.

"I just want to check how much swelling there is still, I was thinking..." Derek trails off, can't quite bring himself to complete the sentence.

"There should be more progress than there has been, right?"

"No, not necessarily," Derek lies and she sees straight through it but is grateful for it anyway.

"We just have to wait and see, right?"

"Yeah...wait and see..."

She nods robotically and turns back to the clock, watches the second hand tick, tick.

Waits with trepidation for the boom.

-

Alex is asleep when Izzie lets herself quietly into his room. She is both relieved and disappointed by this revelation. Relieved because she doesn't think...no, she knows that she doesn't have the strength to deal with him at the moment, she needs sleep more than anything else in this world. Disappointed because she misses him, the old Alex, the one she is waiting for, the one she so desperately wants back.

It takes her a moment to notice that he has been reattached to a nasal canula and her heart rate increases suddenly as she struggles to come up with plausible reasons for this that don't involve bleating monitors and emergency codes. She reads his chart three times before she realises that she's not really reading it at all, sits instead and stares at him, as though the set of his jaw and the length of his eyelashes and the rhythmic up and down of his chest will tell her all she needs to know.

She stares until her eyes lose focus, refuses to blink until the burn is cold and painful and the only thing she can feel. She has hold of Alex's fingers, is clinging on as though her life depends on it, and maybe it does.

Well, her sanity at least.

She lowers her chin and presses her lips against his fingertips, gently kisses each smooth fingernail, tastes only the salt of her own tears. They're hot and heavy, heavier than anything she has had to carry in the past and as they slide down her nose and drip off his pinky, soaking the white sheet beneath his hand, she tries desperately to figure out who they are for. Are they for a confused and grieving best friend who lost a father and gained a wife in the space it took him to blink and take a shuddering breath, or a devastated and heartbroken colleague who went from having it all to having nothing before the ink on the marriage certificate had even dried. Are they for a broken and terrified ex who has no one in the world to turn to, so instead clings desperately to the side of a long ago constructed wall of false bravado and arrogance, or are they for her, the little girl lost who wants nothing more than to love and be loved.

She thinks, just maybe, they are for all of them.