Forever Never

Word Count: 1800

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: I own nothing and I definitely make nothing out of it.

Character: Alex AU Oneshot (that became a Twoshot by popular demand).

Summary: A continuation of At Last (which can be found here and at my own page) where Alex takes a swim instead of Meredith. 'He knew they hadn't noticed yet and while it saddened him in a way he couldn't begin to reconcile he honestly wasn't surprised. He just hoped they would notice eventually'.

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I

Alex was first.

As the cold slowly seeped from his bones and as the crushing in his chest lifted and as the black spots in this vision became larger exponentially and merged together to deny him light of any kind, he knew. The fight had stopped minutes ago, or was it only seconds? Time had lost all sense of rhythm and balance. In the end he'd welcomed it. Anything to end the cold and the wet and the loneliness of this watery prison. He knew they hadn't noticed yet and while it saddened him in a way he couldn't begin to reconcile he honestly wasn't surprised. He just hoped they would notice eventually.

The point where life became death, where flickering chance became a void of hopelessness, where existence became extinction was fleeting. It was there and then it wasn't, the slight ripples on the glassy surface of the water far above his head slowly ebbed and evened out.

A final clue, a wave goodbye.

II

Meredith was second.

She was still at the site when a rumour started to ripple through the exhausted throng. Initially it was just a body in the water, not so big a deal. There had been plenty of those all day. Then it was a rescue worker in the water, slightly more alarming but even that was quickly amended to a rescue worker's jacket in the water, no body. There was ominous silence for a couple of hours after that and she began to forget the suggestion altogether. Then it hit.

She was still there when the divers arrived. She was still there when the shoe was discovered. She was still there when, finally, strangers with strong arms and even stronger hearts than hers could ever be, emerged from the black depths. She'd been watching over the side with morbid fascination, knees drawn to her chest and teeth chattering from a bone chilling cold she couldn't even feel. She blinked but refused to cry.

Alex didn't do tears, she would honour that.

III

Miranda was third.

She had just jumped into the back of an ambulance, her gloved hand practically inside the gaping chest would of her critically injured patient. At first she'd looked at the search and rescue worker as though he were mad when he'd suggested that she might want to send someone else with the patient, that she might want to stay. Then he told her why.

Izzie had dissolved completely and Meredith was a solid trembling lump in front of her as they brought him up. His heavy body a shade of grey so grotesque that she couldn't tear her eyes away but, equally, she couldn't step closer either. They placed him on a gurney and his right arm fell to the side momentarily, the angle unnatural, acute. Her hand was over her mouth and her heaving lungs were almost hyperventilating as her mind spun crazy webs from unrelated words. Desperate, forgotten, anything but typical.

Everything about him had been against the odds.

IV

Richard was fourth.

Miranda called him in a completely out of character panic, the degree of which initially shocked him so greatly that he failed to absorb her disjointed words and incoherent rambling. He even hung up on her once accidentally and had to hold his breath impatiently as his attempt to reconnect with her was thwarted by her ringing him back at the same time. He was collapsed to his knees in the middle of the ER when the call finally dropped through and he only just found the courage to ask her to repeat herself.

He met the ambulance at the emergency bay and had it ushered on to an entrance as close to the morgue as mechanically possible. If he couldn't protect his staff in life then he sure as hell would do it in death. There was a detached eeriness to the hospital, as though even those who should have had no idea what had happened still knew instinctively and they walked with their heads ducked and spoke with their voices hushed.

Respect for the unknown, gone.

V

Derek was fifth.

He'd walked into the ER as the Chief dropped to the floor and was initially relieved when he didn't go any further than his knees. There was a phone pressed into his right hand but it was hanging limply just below his hip. He appeared unfocused and Derek called his name with an unexplainable urgency and was met with a confused frown and the emptiest eyes he had ever seen.

Meredith was in an ambulance directly behind it. It pulled up alongside but didn't follow as the first pulled out again and crept further along the side of the building. Derek could see her struggle to stand before stumbling slightly and as he rushed forward to assist he could see she was being weighted down by another body meshed so tightly and so completely to her own that it was difficult to see where one ended and the other began. They were trembling and soundless and one.

So he held them both until he was holding them up.

VI

Izzie was sixth.

She'd been hit with the rumours as soon as she'd exited the confines of the vehicle hold on the ferry, still high from her power tool surgery. A rumbling swirl of uncertainty developed deep in her gut that she couldn't quite explain away and she made a path to where she could see Meredith and Dr. Bailey, standing unnaturally close but seemingly oblivious of one another. She discovered she'd broken out into a slow, uneven jog and when her sudden appearance went by unacknowledged she grabbed at the dripping jacket in Dr. Bailey's hands and searched it frantically for a name-tag. George or Alex? George or...oh.

She shut her eyes when they lifted him out. She was standing but the world was swaying and the tears were making visibility minimal anyway. Instead of watching she remembered the smell of his skin in the mornings. She remembered, one by deliberate one, each and every fragile feeling he had ever evoked in her, hurt, fear, disgust, lust, desire, comfort, safety, love. She remembered the way she felt in his arms like it was yesterday.

Or a tomorrow that would never come.

VII

George was seventh.

The clinic had been inundated with frantic relatives and friends of people believed to have been on the ferry. Ironically, he thought bitterly, he had spent the majority of his day searching handwritten records and cold morgues and Goddam body bags for missing people. He imagined briefly what it would have been like to find out like that, to find him like that, another nameless faceless victim in a sea of nameless faceless victims. Then he vomited at his feet and was ushered by nameless faceless hands into the nearest bathroom.

He vaguely remembered Izzie's embrace being carefully extricated from Meredith's side, an unzipping of bodies that was excruciating to watch. Limp arms where then draped over him as she became his burden and his alone to carry. He still felt nauseous, still found breathing to be a painful exercise he had to constantly remind himself to carry out but he would put one foot in front of the other and he would hold on, to Izzie, to all of them, for dear life.

Because five had just become four.

VIII

Christina was eighth.

She'd been in surgery. A particularly gory but none the less successful surgery that she had enjoyed immensely and it had almost almost made up for not being allowed to attend the crash site earlier in the day. She scrubbed out with a satisfied smirk on her face, exchanging obligatory small talk with the other doctors mirroring her actions at the sink. Finished, she pushed the door to the scrub room open and stepped out into the hall only to find Meredith and George and Izzie lined up on the floor against the wall opposite her. Izzie was curled into George's side and her face was obscured from view but as she took an uncertain step towards them Meredith looked up and their eyes locked.

There were photos of wedding dresses spread over the coffee table, photos of flower girls and bridesmaids and smiling best men. Her own fiance was standing behind her in the distance and she could tell he was speaking. A muffled baritone reverberated somewhere in the back of her awareness but she couldn't tear her eyes away from the toothy grin of a dark haired groom printed crisply on the flimsy magazine paper between her frozen fingers.

The finality of forever terrified her suddenly.

IX

Addison was ninth.

The ferry crash had presented her with no end of expectant mothers in desperate need of her skilled services and she was nearing the end of her tether when Derek appeared in front of her. She'd refused to believe him at first, couldn't solidify his words, couldn't hear him over the rush of her own blood in her ears. Afterwards, alone, bereft, she tormented herself. You didn't notice.

Her whole career had been about life, its development, its beginning, its starting point. She stood in the hallway outside the neonatal unit and found herself unable to enter. A magnetic force repelled her from the swinging doorway and she felt tainted in some way, impure, jinxed to the point that no amount of juju could ever hope to rectify. Inside a tiny baby cried, all breathy screams and no tears.

It was only outside that the tears fell.

X

His mother was tenth.

She was in an alcohol-induced doze on her couch when the police officer knocked on her door. It took her a moment to fuse the two swaying images into one she could focus on and even longer than that for his words to penetrate the numb fog she liked to spend her days in. She laughed first when he asked if she had a son who was a surgeon at some hospital in another state that she could no longer remember. A sharp, bitter sound that was foreign even to her. Afterwards she hoped that Alex would find his father in an afterlife she believed wholeheartedly must exist because if there was nothing after this then what was the point? Then she wondered whether Alex would look for someone he didn't even know was there.

She phoned her boss and told him she wouldn't be in. Told him that the husband she'd never loved enough had died alone in a crack house and now the son she'd never wanted enough had died alone a tragic hero and she'd never wanted more than now to hold them both. She chain-smoked three packets of cigarettes and didn't so much as cough.

She laughed hysterically at the absurdity of that.

END