Hi MJ, it truly makes my day when I happen to open the Tumblr app, and you’re playing the AU fun facts ask game. The folks sending you ideas are brilliant, and in equal measure, so are your responses. It’s all just so much fun, thanks for bringing that energy to my Tumblr dashboard! 💕
If it’s not too late to participate in the game, I had an AU idea come to me early this morning—
Medical/Arthur Lives AU - perhaps a universe where Alex is somehow involved in Arthur’s treatment/recovery, trying very hard (yet failing lol) not to be distracted by his patient's annoyingly handsome son. 👀
This is such a lovely, lovely thing to say, my friend, thank you. I genuinely wasn't expecting people to get quite so into this one but I've had a BLAST churning through these for the last day and a half, so your beautiful message seems like the perfect one to end on.
ONE: Alex spent three years working in hospice before he burnt out—not because of all the death. It was hard, of course, getting attached to patients and then losing them, but making their final weeks more comfortable was a privilege Alex didn't take lightly. What he burned out on was the way some families would spend those last precious few days sniping and dragging up old hurts and yelling at each other over their loved one's literal deathbed.
TWO: Naively, he thought cancer recovery would mean no more bad feelings—that people would be relieved about their second chance and would face their recovery plan with the optimism of reprieve. He's soon disabused of this; almost all his patients have a mix of positive and negative feelings, and some spent so long preparing themselves for their treatment to fail that it throws them off-course when it's successful.
THREE: Arthur Fox is not one of those people. He has, according to his notes, gone through a gruelling chemo/radiation regimen with the unbridled confidence of an upper-class white man who's never been denied anything he wants in his life (okay, that part might not be in his notes; Alex is annotating a little). He simply decided, no matter the prognosis, that he wasn't going to die, and so he didn't. Alex is honestly kind of obsessed with him.
FOUR: He meets Catherine early on, but doesn't get a chance to meet Arthur's children until three and a half weeks into their treatment plan, and Alex is sure he's not imagining the way Arthur spends so much more time introducing Henry to Alex than any of his other kids.
FIVE: Alex has always had a vested interest in his patients getting well and not needing him anymore, but every time he sees Henry during one of his visits to Arthur's home—chatting with him about the novel he's writing, lavishing attention on his dog—Alex has another reason to count down the days until Arthur is free and clear so that Alex can give Henry his number in a decidedly non-professional context.
[Send me a potential AU and I’ll tell you five fun facts that would happen in a story.]
