Work Text:
Family has always been a complicated thing for Alex Danvers.
Her birth father was a drunk and when her mother died giving birth to her little sister, his alcoholism escalated. CPS had to get involved when his neglect turned into child endangerment and that’s the last she saw of her father.
Alex kept in touch with Molly but they were both too young to really form a bond and they were both happy with their adoptive families.
Molly got adopted easily, being a baby, but Alex was in foster care much longer. She doesn’t talk about her time in foster care and doesn’t remember most of it, but the impact of being in that crowded home has affected her for the rest of her life.
The Danvers were like parents out of the TV. They were loving and adoring and dedicated their attention to being with and caring for her.
It was overwhelming, the sudden switch, and it took Alex a long time to adjust and to finally accept that they weren’t going anywhere and they weren’t going to stop caring about her.
Well, that was, until they got Kara.
Kara brought out a nasty part of Alex. The fear of impermanence and abandonment ran deep within her and there was no way to articulate that to the alien who was a lone survivor of her entire species and planet.
But jealousy is ugly and complicated and so is fear and it took an adjustment for both of them.
And then, she got a best friend.
Neither of them really knew how to have a sister or be one, but they figured it out together and along the way became inseparable.
Krypton was lightyears ahead of Earth when it came to STEM, so while Alex helped Kara understand Earth history and English, Kara taught the scientific wonders of her planet.
It helped that Alex had an eiditic memory and soaked up information like an endless sponge.
So it wasn’t a surprise that after graduating as valedictorian, she entered the medical field.
Sometime in medical school she got the nickname Pepsi Lexie after constantly chugging Pepsi while she was anxiety binge eating her way through finals that shortened to Lexie which, hey, there are worse nicknames.
School flew by and Lexie found herself in Seattle at Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital for her internship.
There was a lot she had expected when going into her internship. A couple mental breakdowns, a couple dozen pounds from more nervous eating, and hopefully a great education to lead her to becoming a great doctor.
What she wasn’t expecting was to find out she had another sister.
Dr. Meredith Grey’s appendix burst suddenly and she was in desperate need of blood to which Lexie happened to be a match. And that match happened to also come with a DNA match proving they were half siblings.
Lexie was both weary and eager to have a half sister and she can tell that Meredith was even more apprehensive. At first they mostly bonded over their shitty bio-dad but over the months they got to know each other and forged a bond only possible when working in a hospital as cursed as theirs.
Lexie gained the nickname of Lexie Grey, being Meredith’s half sister and the two of them more similar than they let themselves believe. Lexie never really liked the nickname, the name Grey attaching them both to their father they both loathe. But, then she embraced it, stomping on what the Grey name had meant and making it something that was theirs.
Things started to make sense for Lexie Grey.
And then Lexie fell in love.
She didn’t mean to and they both tried to deny it for far too long but eventually he chose her and she knows that he will be her forever.
And then forever ended too soon.
A plane crash. Her body crushed beneath tons of metal. Mark holding her hand as the life drained out of her.
Waking up hooked to alien machinery. Kara holding her hand so hard she’s surprised her bones weren’t crushed to dust. Her heart beating again when she knows it had stopped.
“I was able to revive you,” Kara says, eyes puffy and exhausted from days of crying. “There was Kryptonian technology in the Fortress of Solitude that was able to bring you back.”
Technology that doesn’t exist on Earth. Technology that Lexie Grey shouldn’t have any access to. Technology that did the impossible.
It hurt. It hurt more than being crushed and killed by that plane.
She had to give up her life as Lexie Grey. Never return back to Seattle, never see the friends and family she made there because they saw her die and she shouldn’t, couldn’t, be alive.
So, ever the workaholic, Alex joined the DEO and threw herself into her work.
And, well, there was a lot of work to be done.
With Myriad and her boss being a Martian and alien invasions and other Earths and Reign and the Wordkillers and sexuality crises that led to failed relationships, Alex didn’t have any trouble keeping herself busy.
But, of course, her past was bound to come back.
And of course it had to be another plane crash.
You’d think statistically that if you’ve already been in a plane crash, but after working in the DEO, Alex has gotten into far too many plane crashes. And spaceship crashes. And even more crashes of other flying transportation.
Doesn’t get easier though.
And now, she’s in a DEO private plane to investigate new extraterrestrial technology that had crash landed in Vancouver when their plane gets shot down and she’s knocked out cold in the impact and being brought to the place she never thought she'd be again. A place with a new name but the same people she loved and left.
Grey Memorial Hospital.