Start of the Lawsuit

"I agreed to sue, but I didn't agree to this," Alex said, standing from the table and the questioning lawyers. Meredith glared at him, Derek looked at him with confusion. Each person looked at him a different way, but those two stood out to him. He didn't understand how nobody could understand how all these questions made him feel.

"Doctor Karev," one of the lawyers said softly. "We need to get an idea of how much this has affected your life in the long run." He audibly scoffed at the woman.

"How much…" He shook his head, trying to wrap his head around it. "How much it's affected my life?" He pulled up his pant leg to show the prosthetic. "This is how much it's affected my life. I still feel Cristina's hands inside my leg – a leg that's not even there. I suffer from phantom limb syndrome. I haven't slept through the night since the accident. Five months and six days of not sleeping through the night. This is what you wanted to hear, right? I mean, you have those three who don't deal with it like I do. Yeah, Derek may not operate, but Callie's working to help him. None of you have done anything to help me. It was pretty much, 'let's cut off his leg' and then not talk to him until we need him. Well, screw you all." He walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

He was fuming in anger. How dare they! Everything he said in there was true, even the fact that Meredith hadn't said two words to him since they got back aside from asking for him to agree to the lawsuit. By the time he made it to the elevator, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest as if it was going to break through his ribcage. He took a few deep breaths to slow himself down and calm himself down. It was one of those times he still had his leg, so that he could run. That's what he really needed. He needed to feel the pavement reverberating through him as he tried to outrun his problems.

This was the guy who won All State in wrestling. This was the guy who got a wrestling scholarship that put him through his four years of undergrad at Iowa State. This was a guy who had gone running practically every morning for nearly fifteen years. And now he couldn't. He wasn't Alex Karev anymore, and he really felt like it that day. Who was he? That was the question he'd been trying to answer ever since they'd been brought back from the woods. The fact was that to him, he'd died out there. A major part of him had died, and he didn't know how to recover from that.

Jo had been spending more time with Chest Peck—Jason Meyers. He'd promised he'd try and call Jason by his actual name. But, she'd been spending more time with him and wasn't spending as much time with Alex. He wasn't jealous per-se, but it was definitely an adjustment. Jo had hung out with him nearly every night for the past three months and now it was as if she'd never been there.

"What do you have for me?" he asked Arizona once he'd reached the nurse's desk. She looked at him with confusion, and he knew that she knew he was supposed to be in a conference room preparing for the lawsuit. "I don't want to talk about it."

"New admit in Room Three – CF. It's pretty advanced. She's here waiting for a lung transplant. Oh. Can you talk to Jenny in Room Six? She's also a new admit. I think you can get through to her better than I can." He nodded, taking the patient files from her and flipping through them.

"Hey, Jenny. I'm Doctor Karev," he announced as he walked into the room. When he looked up from the chart, his breath caught in his throat.

"It's okay. I'm used to the stares," she told him with a roll of her eyes and a sigh. He did a double take. Both of her legs had been amputated at the knees. "It was a car accident, if you were wondering. But they're infected, so yay, right?"

"I wasn't staring," he assured. He pulled up his pant leg just enough to show her his prosthetic. "Because I'm used to the stares too. Sometimes, the kids I work with ask me if I'm a robot." She laughed at that as he took a seat next to her.

"At least you get that. Even if they weren't infected, it's hard to be fitted as a double amputee." He nodded, knowing fully well that double amputees had it harder than singles.

"Your vitals seem to be doing pretty good right now. One of the nurses will be in soon to change the dressings, as you probably already know. I'll be back in a while to check up on you." He smiled, giving her a high five before he stood up and walked out.

He didn't understand why Arizona would give him Jenny's case. To an extent, he did. It was sometimes easier for kids to process when they knew somebody understood their pain, but she seemed oddly fine with it all. According to her chart, the amputations had been done barely two months prior. It was enough time to start processing, but it took him nearly three to finally even start to accept it all. It seemed like so long ago that he'd been fitted for the prosthetic, odd to think it was only two months before.

He wanted to run, hard and fast. He wanted to feel the sun beating down on his skin and the feeling of the air against him and the feeling of his heart pounding in his ears. He wanted that high that came from it, just like he longed for the high of surgery again, but he didn't get it. It was as if he was on auto-pilot the entire time he did a surgery, and he couldn't run, so what was there for him.

"Hey, you want to grab drinks tonight?" Jo asked as she fell into step beside him. She had a smile on her face, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

"Not tonight." His voice was harsher than he'd wanted it to be, but what was said was side. She glanced at him with confusion, but just gave him a nod.

He walked into the apartment, surrounded by Mark's things. There were still pictures of Mark and Lexie or of Mark and Sofia or of Mark and Derek. This wasn't home, it never was. It had been and would always be Mark Sloan's place.

He sat on the couch and pulled out his laptop from his bag. Flipping it open, he logged in before typing his search into the search bar. It was time to find out who this new Alex Karev was without being held back by all the memories Mark's place held.