Chapter Text
Pacing.
Lexie Grey is pacing. She is hungry and pacing. But McSteamy is in the cafeteria, again, and she’s freaked out, again, and she’s in no mood for a lecture from Meredith about relationship woes or off-handed ‘Barbie’ comments about her dye job.
So Lexie is pacing down the back rooms of Seattle Grace, losing herself in the maze that is it’s boiler room. This whole “ticking-timebomb” thing is getting really extreme. Extreme and pathetic and completely embarrassing.
Lexie turns a corner - another dead end. Her frown deepens. She turns around and goes another way.
Paces, again.
Lexie knows she should cry. It is a human release of emotion, after all. She should, really, just break down right then and there and cry. But she didn’t feel like crying. She felt like puking and doesn’t do that either. She felt very alone and wouldn’t know what to do with company except lie.
And so, she paces.
It doesn’t take long for her to give up trying to find any semblance of an exit-door or lunch table. Lexie sits where she is, under the woven puzzle of pneumatic tubes and boiler pipes, and stares at some spot between the wall and the floor.
She chews her cold ham-and-cheese on a roll slowly, and tries to not feel like a little schoolgirl. She sits wherever she is for a long time because she doesn’t have anywhere to go. She breathes, even though she doesn’t quite remember how.
“Erm, hello?”
The voice cuts through the noise in her head, and she snaps her head to find it’s source - a blue-uniformed man.
Lexie gets up immediately. Her spine straightens naturally and her face sets in place. Her hands instinctively reach into the deep pockets of her white coat, fiddling with the stethoscope. “Yes, can I help?”
The man is confused, he cocks his head. “That’s what I was about to say… er, any reason you’re down here, Dr. Grey?”
Dr Grey - she is Dr Grey. It is a title. No, it’s more than a title - and Lexie is something less than a person.
“Just having lunch.” she informs, bringing up her sad excuse of a sandwich for him to see.
But the handyman doesn’t buy it. Lexie sees inklings of concern grow in his eyes, and immediately she wants to leave again. She had a enough pity to go around from her friends, she did not need it from strangers too.
“Lunch… in the boiler room?”
“Yep!” she smiles so wide that her cheeks hurt. Please leave - scream her dimples and pearly whites.
But the young man must’ve been dense or stupid, or perhaps both, because he does not move. “Won’t the dusty air get all up… in your food?”
Lexie closes her eyes, her nerves close to snapping. “I-I’m not too phased with that.” her doctor-voice is close to crumbling, she is close to crumbling.
The handyman shifts in place, and Lexie doesn’t need to read the DSM-5 to know that he was uncomfortable. She expects him to leave her be, wants him to. Instead he asks, “Are you okay, Dr. Grey?”
Five words. Five simple words. Lexie has dealt with much more complicated questions. Questions about prognoses and diagnoses and life and death.
Why was this one tripping her up and putting a hole in her chest?
Lexie doesn’t know how to answer it, simply put. And so does what any good professional does, she poses a question of her own:
She pats the dusty ground next to her, “Do you wanna sit, and have lunch with me?”
She hopes he turns her down. She hopes she doesn’t regret it.
She gets to know a little about the handyman - because of course, like any good doctor, she establishes a background of facts.
So Lexie learns that he was the newest electrician on the hospital team. He was from Boston. He always brought a cold-cut sandwich and diet coke for lunch.
Oh, and his name was Giovanni.
She nearly spits her food out when he tells her that, “Giovanni?! What kind of name is that?”
His lips pout slightly, eyes dropping like an offended kindergartener’s. “It’s… Italian.”
“Yeah? What’s your last name then?”
His face scrunches up, like he expects some hazing. “Garbanzo.” he murmurs.
Lexie’s food leaves her mouth like a slingshot, lips establishing into a wide smile. “What! Nooo! Like the bean?”
The handyman tries hard to contain his own smile, eyes toying with the salami on his white bread. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Dr. Grey. But I’ll have you know that I enjoyed being called ‘Mr. Bean’ in high school.”
Her laughs slowly fade into a lulled silence, and for a brief moment she is simply able to eat her lunch. There is no sound of chatter. No looking over shoulders for glances. It’s just her - and him, she supposes - and the echo of a kind of laughter she hasn’t felt in a while.
… but even echoes fade, and the next moment her pager goes crazy. And Lexie Grey is brought back into her world. Away from funny-named handyman and terrible sandwiches.
She stands up instantly, instinctively. Checking her pager, she notes that she is needed in the ER immediately.
“Apologies,” she says quickly, packing up her litter. “But, I’m needed elsewhere.”
The handyman’s eyes widen in surprise, and perhaps at the precipitance of it all. “I— not a problem, Dr. Grey.”
She waits a second longer for him to say more, expects him to say more. But he doesn’t, and somehow that disappoints her. Lexie’s lips purse into the smallest smile, “Catch you later, Mr. Bean.” it was her way of saying, thank you.
The handyman laughs, the first bit of confidence she’s seen in him thus far. Lexie thinks confidence suits the handyman.
Lexie knows that lunch in the boiler room should’ve been a one-off. A blip. Because, she’s Little Grey, goddamit. And a Harvard graduate. And a brilliant doctor in her own right.
She should not be eating lunch on dusty boiler room floors with handymen who have funny names.
…
and yet, here she was again for the second time. And the third. And the fourth.
It became routine, almost. Sneaking past the other residents in the cafeteria, taking the sharp turn down the corridor towards the basement stairs. Lexie would feel a pent-up release of emotion as she walked through the boiler room each day, back to the very same spot underneath the memorable maze of pneumatic tubes and gas pipes.
Some days, the handyman - who she respectfully asks to call Gio, because Giovanni reminds her of a Scorsese character - is already there. Sat rather politely, criss-cross applesauce, like a determined schoolboy in a uniform that is one size too big for him. Other days, she’s early and waits politely herself, and tries to remember how to breath and just be.
They talk a lot during these lunches.
She asks him about Boston, and watches him squirm as he tries to answer.
“It’s a nice city,” she says, licking vinaigrette off her fingers. “I mean, I spent 4 years there for medical school. I found it lovely.”
The handyman rolls her eyes, “Sure, near the university where all you brainiacs lived. Go down to Dorchester, they’d eat you alive… and steal your car while they’re at it!”
Lexie licks her lips, “They’d steal my ‘cah’, huh?” her mockery of a Boston accent is terrible, if not a little endearing.
Gio chews slowly, the remnants of a smile forming, “Don’t you start now, Dr. Grey!”
“What shouldn’t I ‘staarh’?” Lexie tries keeping a straight face, and does not succeed. The unassumed look from the handyman encourages her to pivot the conversation. “Why did you move all the way here then?”
A beat. And Gio takes a whole second to digest the question. Lexie’s talked to enough liars to know when someone will turn into one. “For the scenery. Seattle views are like none other.” he lies charmingly.
Lexie nods, “They are.”
She doesn’t insist on having him answer the question, it’s something she had learned recently - to not go digging where dark things are buried.
And so she smiles at the handyman, and gets him to smile back. Both are them are able to eat their lunch, and talk about the weather, and pretend that there aren’t two gaping holes in the place of their organs.
“What would you be, if not a doctor?”
It was another one of handyman Gio’s ponder-worthy questions, and he asks Lexie on a rather particularly bad day.
Her blonde dye-job was in it’s dying stages, and she had a rather nasty nurse make a remark on her roots. But it was the mini-argument she had with her on-again, but mostly off-again, fling Dr. Karev, that had spiraled her into a realm of dejection.
“I dunno, Gio.” she mumbles, picking at her cold sandwich. She was starving, and yet her stomach could barely stand the sight of food right now.
“Aw, come on! What would you do?” he asks, like a little school child. “You’re pretty smart, maybe an astronaut? Or an alchemist?”
Lexie raises a brow, “That’s not a real—” she bites her tongue. She was not in the mood for corrective lectures, and so spins the question. “What would you do?”
He thinks, and so does she. Her entire profession was based on educated assumptions, and so she tries to take her mind of things and guess what he would say.
A young man from Boston: maybe a football player? Or a baseball player?
“I’d be a football player. Quarterback, to be specific.” he says softly. “I actually used to play back in high school, wanted to go to college and play too.”
Ding-ding, Lexipedia strikes again.
“Really?” she faux-mocks, “You, an athlete?”
Gio laughs, but she can’t quite ignore the sadness in it. He flexs his bicep, and though it’s not the biggest she’s ever seen, it was a respectable size nonetheless.
“What happened?” she finally asks, half-listening, half-trying to eat her lunch.
A beat. And the silence forces her to look at him. The handyman has a glaze over his eyes, and he seemed to be deep in thought.
“I wasn’t good enough.” he finally croaks out, and quickly washes down the sadness with a swig from his diet coke.
She watches him fiddle with the rim of the coke can, until finally speaking again. “For as long as I can remember I’d wake up at the crack of dawn and… practice. Practice my throws, and runs, and everything else. Only for it to not be worth it in the end.”
“Don’t say that.” she whispers, the words leaving her mouth almost instinctively.
Gio’s lips etch into a frown, “No? I gave everything I had, Dr. Grey. I made that sport my religion.”
He leans closer towards Lexie, closer than they’ve ever been before. Closer than what is respectable for two strangers who eat lunch together in the boiler room of their workplace. She can feel his eyes etch a hole in the side of her head.
“I gave my entire body, and in the end it wasn’t enough. I just didn’t have the talent. Do you know what that is like, Dr. Grey? To love something so much, and know that it will never love you back.”
Yes. Screams something deep inside her. She does know. Because she’s made love her religion before. She’s prayed at the altar and has begged for salvation, but it never comes. God never comes.
He - whoever he was, McSteamy, Alex, George - never comes.
All there was left was her.
It takes her all the courage to look him in the eye, and when she finally does, Lexie’s forgotten what he had asked her. So she does, like always, what any good doctor would do - she retorts with a question of her own.
“Do you believe in God, Gio?”
He’s confused, and gives her those big brown kindergartner eyes once more. “I’m a Catholic—”
“No, no - not what I asked. Do you believe in God?”
“Sometimes.” he says, and it sounds like a confession to Lexie. “But mostly, I believe in people. People like… you. I believe in you, Dr. Grey.”
She feels something in her chest lighten, and before Lexie can even conjure a response, her pager goes off.
Lunch is over, and she’s pulled back into real world. She fumbles her pager as she gets up, and accidentally knocks over the handyman’s coke can with her shoe. She yells a chorus of ‘sorrys’ and he replies to each with of them with a reassured ‘it’s no problem’.
She rushes out the boiler room. It was not an emergency call - a radiologist had requested her presence to review some x-rays.
And it’s only when her cheeks begin to hurt, that she realizes she had been smiling this entire time.