-the animal I have become
“So what if you can see
The darkest side of me?
No one will ever change this animal I have become
Help me believe,
It’s not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal I have become.”
Why don’t you come see me anymore, baby?” he always asks, voice thick with bourbon when he calls in the middle of the night, two, sometimes three in the morning.
Their lives are built around the routines they carry out, and Lexie answers, always, despite every muscle in her body telling her not to. She’ll breathe her greeting and listen to him slur his speech for a few beats. Lexie will close her eyes and picture him in his chair, tumbler on the arm, capillaries spider-webbing at the corner of his eyes.
“Daddy,” she always breathes, slipping out from the bed, away from Mark, locking the bathroom door behind her. “I’m sorry,” she’ll say, because she is. She should be a better daughter, a better person. Check in on him more, be with him more. But it’s hard, always a battle, and she’s trying to move on and he doesn’t even know how to even begin the process.
Last week she had gone to see him on her day off and he had been drinking then too. She brought groceries and tried her best, but he was slurring his words already, even at eleven AM and she was too tired. So she had cleaned up a week’s worth of dishes, wrote checks for bills that were long past overdue and kissed his forehead and whispered I love you, Daddy like she still fully meant it before something started him off and then came the grabbing and he’s screaming in her face it doesn’t matter about what because it’s always irrelevant and by the time she’s get’s out the front door she has to sit in the car for a full twenty minutes to stop shaking. rakes her hair with her shaking fingers and pulls her sweater past the finger marks indented red and angry on her arm.
he is her father and she is his daughter and they’re family and that means, above all else, for better, for worse, right?
The bruises heal but not the scars and she’s not sure how much more for worse she can handle.
- - -
“Lexie,” he says, and she breathes out a sigh, long and heavy because she already knows. She always knows.
“Yeah?” She asks quietly, not bothering to turn around. She stands a bit taller, clips her ID onto her front pocket and prepares herself.
She does not say of course, does not breathe obscenities under her breath. She just closes her eyes and counts to five backwards and forwards before opening them again. When she does, she turns to face him, voice even when she asks, “Where?”
Alex just smiles sadly, that corner of his mouth curling upwards for half a second, his turn at trying to make her feel better.
Thatcher Grey makes his latest appearance at Seattle Grace, drunk and accusing, fresh out of a one-car accident.
“What happened?”
“I was working in the pit when he came in. Apparently he was at a bar and the bartender had cut him off and things just sort of… escalated from there.” Lexie, stands still a few feet away, he offers a look that hovers somewhere between sympathy and apology.
We all cope in different ways her mother always used to say. At least it’s him and not Cristina or Meredith or anyone else. There are some things you just don’t know how to share with people. Every family has their secrets, every person their own type of cross to carry and her mother’s we all cope in different ways became a mantra of sorts, a false understanding of why things were they way they were.
She’s a doctor, she’s an adult and a mother and she knows the vast amount of knowledge she has on that or any particular subject has so much to do with the man lying in front of her. She looks at him behind the glass, so utterly helpless as he lays in there, cuts and bruises scattered across his face and feels sorry for him in a way she supposes you’re never suppose to feel in regard to your parent.
She braces herself for a second, fingers curing into a fist by her side before she pushes open the door.
His injuries are minor, but the insults he sends flying aren't. His smiles, bearing his teeth when he sees her.
“’Bout time you got here,” he says and she’s been through this enough times to know the way he presses his lips together into a straight line means the alcohol has worn off; that he’s angry.
There are stages he goes through.
Euphoria, first, when he feels the glass tumbler thick in his hand. Depressed, second, when the initial buzz wears off and he’s stuck with himself and his glass and everything he’s been trying to erase. Angry, third – at her, at the world, at her mother for leaving them. And then, finally, he progresses into a man she barely recognizes, a man who is mean and spiteful and lashes out over and over with the full purpose of wounding.
“I was working,” she replies, near his side now, and she crosses her arms over her chest and settles her weight evenly over both of her feet. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry,” he says, not looking at her. “In case you haven’t noticed that hasn’t done me a whole hell of a lot of good.”
“It’s funny, you know, you calling me that. Dad like it still means something.”
This time it was only a kick that he manages to land. He’s screaming red faced and slurring “Your mother would be very disappointed in you, Lexie. Carrying on the way you do. Abandoning your family when they need you the most.”
This time he only lands a kick to the hip. Everyone on the floor can hear Karev hollering for Thatcher to back off, calm down, sticking a syringe full of sedation, into his thigh. Thatcher's quiet and out like a light barely a minute later. Lexie pushes past him on her way out the door with red-rimmed eyes.
He does this. He picks fights and pushes, punches, hard and it bothered her once, would pull at her nerve endings and tug at her heart until she would break, crying and apologizing for whatever thing he thought she was doing wrong. But it has been years, of him falling apart and her getting wounded physically and mentally, trying to put the pieces back together and somewhere along the way she just gave up.
It’s not long before Mark finds out and he is furious.
She arrives home he’s pacing and ready to take her father’s head off. Panic runs through her as she’s standing in front of the front door. Trying to stop him before she loses her husband & her father. When he finally retreats she’s gnawing at the skin on the side of her thumbnail, she takes a deep breath tears streaming down her face.
“He’s my father,” she replies without hesitation and he doesn’t press any further, doesn’t push any harder. They remain silent it’s only hours but it feels like days, being with him but without him & it claws at her insides. It’s not his fault none of this is, it’s hers for not stopping it or helping him better.
Lays in bed restless staring at the ceiling so many things to say and no ways to say them.
Throws on her sneakers, Picks up her keys & drapes a blanket over him and her sleeping family, all nestled together, on her way out the door.
- - -
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Joe asks and Lexie does her best to glare, but her face is kind of numb from the excess amount of alcohol she has consumed. He pours her another bourbon (like father, like daughter, isn’t that how the saying goes?) and she downs it in a single swig.
There are fingers against her back, too firm, too persistent; Chase’s voice in her ear. “I’ll take you home,” he says and she cannot, for the life of her, remember when he got there. she’s not sure what’s happening but suddenly her jacket is on and her feet are unsteady against the floor. Her mind is a blur of nothing as the world starts to tilt on its axis, and she tries to focus on concrete things.
and when she opens her eyes again.
There is shifting, the sound of fabric rustling and she counts his movements as he nears her, feels him hovering.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, rubbing her shoulders, her back and all she can think about is it shouldn’t be like this.
It shouldn’t be like this. She tries to sit up, pushes herself upwards on unsteady hands, but her stomach lurches in protest and instead and he throws an arm over her face, she falls gracelessly back.
Pressing her eyes tightly shut.
It’s daybreak the coolness of the tiled floor is flush against her cheek, the iron taste of blood thick on her tongue when she finally forces her eyes open. Looks at herself and starts to gag softly. Drawing her legs up to her chest her whole body aches, every muscle protesting with the littlest movement. Movements slow and methodical as she crawls to the phone on the side table night stand. “Meredith-”
He spent the night on the couch greets her sardonically as she walks in the door.
“Good to know you’re alive,” Mark says quietly, voice thick with exhaustion. It is hard to talk and her voice is raspy and thick as she does so, “I’m sor- I’m sorry.” She barely recognizes the sob that escapes her lips as her own. “No,” she gasps between tears, moving away from his touch. “Don’t. I’m disgusting. He whispers, lips on her cheek, and the sobs come harder after that.
Lexie’s shoulders crumble within seconds as Mark pulls her towards him effortlessly. Folding into his arms because it’s the safest place she’s ever known. There are these feelings balled up inside of her that she wouldn’t even know how to begin to articulate, but her lips part to mumble and the no words will come out of her mouth. The tears pool at her eyes again and she pushes them away angrily. Presses her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose and wills them stop. They don’t and her shoulders start shaking, the sobs leaving her lips one right after another.
The night comes back to her in random bursts – her father, an argument, Joe’s – and she starts to cough, head pounding, stomach lurching with every movement she makes. The wounds were still brand new, she had cried so much that her throat was sore for weeks, and now it is almost as if there is nothing left but the lump caught in her throat and the dull ache in her chest.
She keeps Mark at arms length, she is disgusted with herself, ashamed and broken to a point there is little concealing. Drinking becomes regular and nights on the couch or the floor a constant.
“You have to stop doing this to yourself,” Meredith says, voice thin, fingers firm on her elbow. “You have to tell him.”
She looks up and wonders how does she tell her husband all she can remember is waking up bloody and all used up in another man’s bed?
“You tell him Lexie or I will.” the next week she makes good on that promise.
