Chapter Text
Alex was raised in a deeply religious foster couple’s home, so it comes as no surprise that they called it ‘the demon in him’ and taught him that aid from other people was not the answer to his struggles with alternating “over-excitability” and “laziness”. Somehow, the necessity of prayer as the cure was lost in translation, but Alex had always been stubborn. Unyielding tenacity had been required of him his entire life. He lived on will power when he caught the same illness that took his mother. He did it again when he found his cousin’s body and decided not to use the last bullet in the gun for himself. And a third time, laying on a roof he had no memory of climbing, languishing in the hot sun and hoping the flood waters that had accompanied the worst hurricane St. Croix had seen in years didn’t rise enough to take him too. It was how he lived. Seemingly indomitable willpower. Even when one of the counselors at his high school called in a favor for a free psych evaluation that led to a proper diagnosis of Manic-Depressive Disorder, Alex shrugged and powered through it. Nothing was going to stop him except for death itself. And so it went until he met Lafayette. The two were inseparable after a week. And since wherever Laf went, Herc followed, Alex grew to care for him too. They became the first people he told about his past, his mother, his cousin, the storm, all of it, and they were there to help him rest, get him going, and do whatever was needed to make sure he was healthy as could be. There were days when he wouldn’t let them, or fought so vehemently that anyone else would be tempted to give up, but they loved their little lion too much and refused to be deterred from caring. Eventually, Alex came around completely, allowed Laf to drag him out of bed when he wanted to sleep for years, allowed Herc to put him to bed when the world seemed to be at his fingertips 80 some consecutive hours awake be damned, allowed himself to be vulnerable and let other people care for him. To his surprise, it made life better. He was still driven, but no longer as desperate. He’d finally found a balance between fierce independence and reliance on others. And (most of the time) his changes stuck with him.