Summary: Because you think you could have loved her, but now you never can. Alex drabble set during s6 finale. Title from "Weeds or Wildflowers" by the Parsonfields.

The bullet hits you but you don't know it at first.

All you can tell is that you're falling, twisting, hitting the ground hard. Yours ears ring but vaguely you can hear footsteps walking away from you, leaving you here. It's then that you can feel the sharp, shocking, stabbing pressure in your chest. Your mouth moves to scream, but no sound comes out, and you know that's the first bad sign of many.

It takes you a while to figure out where you are because as soon as the bullet hit you your mind went blank. All your energy goes in to moving your hand to block the wound, to stop the bleeding, but it's not enough because you're lying in a halo of your own blood and that is something you don't just walk away from.

You don't know how you make it to the elevator. In fact, you don't remember this at all. But one moment you're lying in the storage room floor and the next you're in the elevator and the doors are closing, abruptly ending the trail of blood you've made from there to here.

Before the doors shut you make eye contact with her, but she isn't making eye contact with you, because she's dead.

Your mind flashes back to when you stole her surgery, to when she stole yours, to her visiting you in the NICU, to her being there for you when no one else was. Your mind flashes back to when she was Reed, and you were Alex, and everything was ok.

You think you could have loved her, but now you never can. There is a hole in her head, and now you never can.

The elevator doors close and you know you are going to die.

\\-||-/

You wake up once, but you don't remember. You don't remember anything but Izzie's blonde hair sweeping across your plain of vision. You just don't remember, but you're pretty sure you saw some red hair in there, too.

\\-||-/

When you wake up again there is a tube in your throat and your body aches, it just aches, and you wish you could feel anything else than what you are feeling.

You clench and unclench your hands, you move whatever you can move and soon the convulsions aren't happening because you want them to. Your body is doing things you don't want it to do and you want it to stop more than anything -

It stops. You stop. Everything stops.

It starts again way too soon.

\\-||-/

When you wake for the fifth, possibly sixth time (you've far lost count), you know it's for real but you know it's way too soon. Your eyelashes are stuck together and your mouth is too dry. You can feel almost every pore in your body but it aches, it just aches, and you can't - you can't...

Someone grabs your hand. "Alex?" It's a soft, gentle, female voice. "Alex, can you hear me?"

You want to say something. You need to say something. Before you can even try to wrench apart your eyelashes, another voice joins the first. "He's crashed twice, Mer. He might...he might not..."

"Cristina!"

"I'm being realistic!" There's a pause. "I have to be realistic, because otherwise..."

"I know," the first voice says, stopping her. "Trust me, I know..."

You open your eyes. You don't know how, you don't know why, but when you see Meredith and Cristina you don't care so much about not being able to love her anymore.

You know you always will, anyways.