InsaneJournal

[411] open prompts & closed voice
[Gym]

[Alex Karev is pushing fifty with a rough, on the rocks kind of look. He's had his ups and downs in the dome, suffered through lapses of things he swore he'd never get caught up in and then some. But he's over 1000 days sober. Three years, if you want to make it sound less of an achievement. He'd given up on medicine for a few years before that, the Bad Years, and while he's retained knowledge and started to mildly practice again he's much more reclusive. That's what happens when your life royally screws you, repeatedly, to the point where you screw it right on back by pushing away a good thing. The Best Thing that's happened to him here. The best person-- who isn't here. So it doesn't matter.

He's at the gym in a hoodie an sweats, doing a little shadow boxing or beating up a punching bag with the hood up and a strained cloud of anxiety looming overhead. He's aged, no longer as fit as before but there's still a core of strength in him. A rage, even, that doesn't go away. Of course it doesn't go away. And knowing it's what links him to his father, that just fuels it further. At least tonight he'll have some bloody knuckles to look over.]

[Daffodil Dive]

[This is the only bar he lets him set foot in, and only then because he knows it's the only bar that wouldn't give him a drop from the tap if he begged. (And there are some sad, blurry memories of when he might've done just that.) It has the atmosphere that he misses, that feeling that he craves, but it doesn't fully satisfy the itch. Nothing does, of course. And it's feeling much worse tonight as he sips on his club soda and picks at bar nuts, bloody knuckles loosely wrapped in gauze.

He'll be there for a while, longingly staring at the taps with a look half disgusted. Then after he's loitered enough he'll shuffle away, either to the restrooms or back off into the night when he's finally had too much.]

[Private to Aidan Reilly]

[The last two years had been far better than the first one, it seemed he actually got self-sufficiently stable in the last twelve months. Maybe he'd just been internalizing since then but he'd stopped checking in with Aidan the way he used to, in the end dismissively waving off the notion of ever drinking again and assuring his sponsor - like many others - that he was perfectly in control now. That there wouldn't be another slip up.

But she came. And then she left again, and ever since the world seemed grayer. Cliche, pathetic, a whole slew of other words could describe it too but it all just build up inside him like the repressed desires for a drink and the want of a forgotten night. Three years. Over one thousand nights, some of them the worst days of his life. And here he is, pacing outside of Lyrical at a god-forsaken hour of the night on the verge of a mistake.

So, Spons. Hey.] Aidan? Yo, you - you got a minute?