Four

Did that just happen or had she imagined the entire thing? For someone who only wanted to be strangers who passed in the night, he sure did not act like it. Lexie was having a really hard time to understand Mark. One second he walked in the opposite direction if he saw her coming down the hall and then the next he was cornering her possessively in the slightly filthy bathroom of their regular bar. How was she ever going to move passed whatever it was that they had shared if he kept reeling her in as soon as she got close?

She left the bathroom in a haze, not even taking notice of her friends that where trying to catch her attention. With her mind still in the bathroom with Mark, she grabbed her coat and walked out.

The night had surely taken an interesting turn what with Mark's sudden change of heart and being called back into work. She was already exhausted from the past couple of days and she was not sure how much more she could take. The physical exhaustion was nothing compared to the emotional exhaustion she felt. Her new assignment did not just come with an insane tempo and crazy hours. It also came with a huge emotional strain from all of the patients that they were unable to save. Add Mark's recent rejection on top of that and she was almost at the edge. There had not been a free moment for her to process any of it and she was afraid that if she were to stop, she would fall apart and have no energy left to pick herself up again.

It had been close just moments ago up against the bathroom stall. The beeping from her pager had been the only thing to pull her back from the ledge. Something about Mark Sloan had her lose all sense. He got under her skin and being that close to him hade her forgetting everything but her own name.

Less than a minute Lexie arrived at the hospital and given the late hour, the lobby was more or less deserted. She quickly changed into the light blue scrubs in the locker room before she ran down to the ER. Putting her hair back up into a ponytail, she took one last deep breath before she pushed open the doors to get back to work. Just a few more hours before she could go home and get some sleep she thought.

The ER was a complete chaos when she arrived. People in white coats and scrubs were pulling beds with people on them into trauma rooms, all the while yelling out orders in different directions. Lexie found Dr Hunt in the middle of it all awaiting the next arrival out by the dock.

"Dr Grey." he greeted when he spotted her coming up next to him. "A car accident. Multiple vehicles. The victims are being transported here. It is not pretty."

Just as Dr Hunt stopped speaking they could hear the sirens of in the distance growing louder. A few seconds later the ambo rolled up in front of them and Lexie immediately went into battle mode, all the tiredness she previously felt disappeared and the adrenaline set in. The paramedics jumped out of the bus with a gurney and started to ramble off the patient's vitals. Dr Hunt gave orders as they went into one of the empty trauma rooms that she was too busy to take in, that it was first when they moved the patient from the gurney to the bed that Lexie could register who their patient really was.

"Dad?" she stuttered.

"What was that, Dr Grey?" boomed Owen Hunt's deep voice through the room.

"It's my dad." everyone in the room stopped what they were doing to all look up at her with big, wide eyes.

"This man? This is your father?"

"This is Thatcher Grey, mine and Meredith's father."

"I'm sorry Grey, but you need to leave. You cannot be in here!"

Lexie hesitated for a moment and looked at the man on the bed before complying with Dr Hunt's order. She stopped just outside the door though and looked on through the window. It was hard to grasp the fact that the man inside that room was her father. That the man that had taught her and her younger sister how to ride a bike and who came to every recital and graduation. It was hard to grasp that he was no longer that man. The person who lay on that bed was a shell of the man Lexie had used to know. He had not been that man since her mother passed away. It was like he had buried that part of himself with his wife that day and since then he could only be found at the bottom of a bottle. Thatcher Grey had begun and ended with Susan Grey. Yet she felt scared for the man's life in there.

A voice in the back of her head told her that she should go call Molly or Meredith, but she could not tear herself away from her position by the window. Eventually though she let her eyes move away from the scene and picked up her phone from her pocket. It wasn't very long conversations. Lexie shortly told them what had happened and what she knew. Her sisters confirmed that they were on their way. Neither of them were a big fan of their father right now either, but they also didn't want for someone to have to deal with this alone.

Five minutes later Hunt came out of the trauma room and Lexie could tell from the serious look on his face that she would not like what he had to say. He did not come baring good news.

"Lexie" he began "Your father is stable for now, but he needs surgery soon if he is going to make it through and recover completely."

"Okay… Why don't you operate now?" at her question he got that look on his face that she had witnessed so many times before.

"His blood-alcohol level is dangerously high and we can't put him under. There is too much of a risk that he won't make it through if we do." Lexie felt how the knot in her stomach grew the size of Texas.

"Excuse me?" came a voice from behind them and both Lexie and Dr Hunt whirled around. A man clad in the standard dark blue police uniform was watching them both with a gravely look on his face. It must come with the uniform thought Lexie. "Is your patient under the influence?"

"Yes." answered Hunt. "Why?"

"According to all the witnesses we have interviewed the driver of a silver Toyota swerved over to the wrong side of the road and slammed into the second vehicle, the third didn't have a chance of stopping in time. There was a bottle of bourbon on the floor on the driver's side. It was almost empty."

Lexie felt how the knot in her stomach only grew and she could feel a build up behind her eyes. The silver Toyota had belonged to her mother and bourbon was her father's preferred poison. It shouldn't come as surprise to her. She knew her father had problems and everyone knew that an alcoholic only got worse with time. But it still felt as if someone had knocked out all her air. She could have stopped it. She should have taken his keys or done something that prevented him from getting in a car.

Her eyes burned. She couldn't stand here any longer and listen to the damage her father had caused. It was the final push towards the edge that made her fall over. With a final glance at her father Lexie turned around and walked away. Dr Hunt's attempts to get her to come back fall on deaf ears, she just kept walking out of the ER, down the corridors and away from all of the noise. She needed to be alone to cry, to scream and to sleep. She didn't want anyone near to be able to find her when she did.

. By some miracle she managed to find an empty on-call room that she could hide in. You weren't supposed to lock the door and if you did, everyone would assume that you were not alone in there. Lexie contemplated locking it but decided against it, she did not need another rumour following her around.

She kicked off her shoes and lay down on one of the beds and let the tears fall. Within minutes the pillow she rested on was drenched in tears. Eventually the exhaustion won out and she succumbed to sleep.