series of drabbles
So, I thought about finally making an archive of all the fics I wrote for the different round of ga_lfas . By the way, I'm in the final four! *Dances around*
Thank you so much for voting for me or not voting for me negatively and keeping me in the game. I kinda feel like I'm hanging by a thread here, but yay! I would also like to apologize for the quality of the fics, most of them were written a few hours before deadline because, as usual, I forgot. *facepalm*
Round 1: Derek/Addison
In the back of his mind, they’re supposed to have an ending.
The perfect couple, the perfect wedding, seems like it’s only fair to have a perfect ending.
But instead they have sirens and flashing lights and chaos.
After all that, there is silence.
-
She lies on the hospital bed looking pale and lost; dark circles around her eyes and face devoid of any recognition.
Retrograde amnesia, they whisper. He’s a neurologist, for God’s sake. Of course he knows.
She doesn’t wonder why the black-haired doctor with those sad eyes keeps staring at her. There’s something blank inside her, she can feel it, like some empty page of a drawing book that needs coloring.
His eyes are full of brimming stories that always end in tragedy. Romeo and Juliet. Othello and Desdemona.
He knows too much, she decides.
-
This is a trip down memory lane:
They meet in gross anatomy class. They continue their lives without knowing the other, but then one day, he is late and her lab partner has abandoned her.
The first thing he notices about her is the hair. She notices the eyes.
They had been clear blue and bright when he’d asked her out for coffee.
She’d said yes the fourth time.
-
Meredith’s come up to him a few times with questions like will you be okay and maybe you should go take a shower.
But she doesn’t know what to say to him. He’s not mourning his family or his love or his friend. She thinks it goes a lot deeper than that.
He doesn’t cry. Not once does she see him crying or drinking or throwing things in anger or self-deceit or pity.
Instead his eyes are clouded like he remembers too much, things that he can’t let go of.
He’s mourning all he can’t forget and she doesn’t know what to say.
-
In retrospect, they’ve always retaliated in the exact same way with each other.
She’d slept with his best friend on their bed. Strike one for her.
He’d slept with an intern 15 years his junior during their prom date. Strike one for him.
She’d left him for LA. Strike two.
He’d left her for Seattle. Strike two, again.
In the words of Mark Sloan, “they spent most of their lives together trying to even one another out.”
But this? She’s hit the bull’s eye with this.
-
It was supposed to be strictly official.
Two surgeries and she would be out. And then she would’ve been free until the next time someone decides to show up at Seattle Grace with a rare illness.
It was only one drink at Joe’s.
And Addison? She’d been laughing until she could see nothing but red.
_
He talks to her on the fourth day.
Nothing grand at all, he just buys her coffee and sits on the edge of her bed.
“I’m Derek,” he says. Maybe this is supposed to be life-altering.
But she doesn’t remember.
Round 2: Mark/Addison
She meets him on the night before her wedding.
They meet at a motel just outside New York, and she checks them both in under fake names.
Secrecy, she whispers under her breath, but he’s not so sure. Nevertheless, he doesn’t object when she books only one room.
-
“This is the last time I’m seeing you,” she tells him once they’re inside. Her eyes are sad and defiant at the same time and he can almost read a silent apology in them.
“What are you talking about? You’ll get to see me all the time,” he tries to reassure her. They’ve both gotten too good at this charade; it’s almost as if he doesn’t know what reality is anymore.
“No,” she shakes her head, “I’ll be your best friend’s wife then.”
She leans closer to him and whispers, lips just touching his earlobe. “There won’t be an us anymore.”
Her breath smells like stale cigarettes. He closes his eyes.
-
“Don’t you think this is just a little inappropriate?”
She smiles and twirls her half-finished glass of wine. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, the way her hand casually rests on his thigh and the way their hips touch when she shifts.
It’s a favorite here, the receptionist had said about the wine with a twinkle in his eyes. He drains his glass as she slowly reaches up to kiss him on the cheek.
Her lips are wet against his cheek and he doesn’t have the strength to move away.
-
“I’m getting married,” she exclaims in a moment of inebriation whilst he’s uncorking yet another bottle of wine, “married married. I’m getting married tomorrow, Mark.”
He nods because there’s nothing else to say and he doesn’t trust himself that much.
“Shouldn’t you stop it?” she asks, and her voice is alive with a sense of desperation and fear. “I think you should stop it,” she repeats. “Stop it and make it go away.”
He watches the tears half-forming in her eyes and there’s nothing more that he wants to do than comfort her and tell her mindless lies like it’s going to be okay.
Instead, he kisses her fiercely on the lips and her eyes close too fast, like she was expecting it.
He takes care not to crush the half-lit cigarette lying on the floor.
-
“I should go,” he whispers when he sees the first rays of light through the half-open window. “I should go and you should rest before the wedding. You wouldn’t want to have dark circles on you big day, would you?” he teases.
She looks at him expressionlessly through her kohl-rimmed eyes and he moves forward to wipe the smudges of lipstick off her face.
“I’m sorry,” he half-whispers on his way out, but she’s fast asleep by then.
He shuts the door quietly.
Round 3: Owen/Cristina
“Is this a part of my therapy that I didn’t know about?” He looks warily at her setting up the pencils and the notepads. “How is playing board games possibly going to help me?”
She looks at him unbelievably while putting down the hourglass. “It’s not a board game,” she scoffs, “its Pictionary.”
It’s his turn to roll his eyes now. “Why do you want to play this? So that we can make bunch of drawings about my trauma and try to ease through it all?” He almost feels guilty when the beaming smile on her face fades slightly.
She recovers quickly though. Silently, she opens the game board, picks out a word and begins sketching something on her notepad.
“Fine,” he relents and sits down opposite her on the mat. “I’m pretty sure you need to set the hourglass before you begin.”
One corner of her mouth twitches slightly upwards. “The sand has already started trickling, Owen,” she says simply. He isn’t able to read her expression as well as he used to. She simply puts her head down and continues drawing.”
“Is that a… cuckoo?” He asks softly, only for her to sigh and shake her head. He watches her furious strokes on the paper for a few seconds before suddenly reaching out to grab her hand. She stops suddenly and turns to face him with a defiant look in her eyes.
“I know what she said, okay?” she gushes out before he can speak, “I know she told us that we were barely making progress and that we couldn’t be close to each other. I know she means well. But I’m Cristina and you’re you and we can work this out, alright? I want to be able to hold you and comfort you. I need to be good at this because I wasn’t before and Burke left and I didn’t know what to do. So, I know you have trauma that you haven’t told me about but I want to help you and I need you to be okay with that and I need you to help. Because Burke left and if you leave, if you leave-”
He wraps his arms around her to soothe her slightly trembling body. “I won’t leave,” he whispers into her hair, “I have a lot of issues but you’re here now and I won’t leave. So you need to stop freaking out. Okay?”
She looks up at him; some of the defiance having returned back to her eyes. “Okay,” she says simply.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that the sand has finished trickling down through the hourglass.
It’s his turn to draw now.
Round 4: Izzie, (Alex/Izzie)
You wonder how you’ve gotten here, from being the overly optimistic and cheery girl who used to be the life of her social circle to the shell of a person who’s perpetually exhausted with everything.
Sitting in the locker room, packing your bags, you try to pinpoint the exact moment when everything started going downhill. Sometimes you think it was the cancer, other times you blame it on Denny, and on particularly bad days you blame it on Seattle Grace. But you’ve never been too good at remembering minute details anyway.
You don’t know what to do except leave and hide; you don’t think you have any option other than going away and leaving it all behind. Your life has been on public display long enough for you to loathe the irony and everything else it stands for. So you decide to leave it all behind and forget the atrocities and the perplexities life had offered you all the while. You decide to leave, not because of a clean and fresh start, but because you deserve, at least, this much.
It’s telling him goodbye that’s the hardest part. You’re not sure if you’ll come back and the sadist in you wants him to suffer for things that he didn’t do. You remember all the things he’s done for you, all the things he’s gone through for you when you were just a stranger. He carried you out when Denny died and he was there for you through your illness and he married you when you were dying. He gave you the life you didn’t have and you think you owe it to him to stay and fight again and again. You think you owe everything to the man who was willing to risk his job for your life and risk his life for your happiness.
So your feet falter for a second and you almost turn around and go back to him, and later, you would always wonder why you didn’t go back.
You don’t know how to comfort him anymore so you decide to break his heart just a little bit more.
Round 6: Alex, Alex/Izzie
I’m not coming back to you.
This is what hits him the hardest, despite the cancer and George and the merger fiasco. This hits him so hard because this was the one decision that wasn’t solely about him being selfish. The last thing he had left that, like everything else, has crumbled like a house of cards.
He twirls his empty glass in his hand and thinks about opening another bottle of scotch. Instead, his eye catches the most recent catalog of Yellow Pages.
He picks it up and flips through, just because.
As a kid, he was always good at geography. Science and biology and sutures came later, but when he was young enough to idolize his Dad and think the world of him, he was excellent at geography.
It should count for something, he thinks.
The empty glass remains on the counter as he continues to make lists of agencies. The breadth of prospects brings about a sense of exhilaration in him. There’s so much to choose from; the age of the children, the stories of biological parents, the cultural implications.
He doesn’t go to sleep that night and never goes about refilling that glass of scotch. It stays beside the feverishly marked pages and his eyes remain bright.
He calls in sick the next day, trusting Cristina to page him if there’s an emergency or if he’s being fired. He tries calling Izzie once, but the operator tells him that this number is no longer valid.
He continues to read and reread through his lists of agencies and chooses one in Arkansas. A recently-widowed, soon-to-be mother in Little Rock is giving up her child, one of the profiles says, due to lack of sufficient funds.
He finds the number of the agency and his fingers are shaking as he dials. He almost wants to hang up when someone picks up on the other end.
“Hello?” he speaks into the phone finally.
He tries justifying all this in his head over and over again. A little voice in his head screams out that he’s just over-compensating for his wife leaving him but he tries not to let that deter him.
He picks up the empty glass from the table and puts it on his kitchen counter for washing.
He looks through flight fares and sick leaves and takes a deep breath before booking one to Little Rock. The pop-up window asks him if he’s sure of his destination and with a pounding heart, he clicks ‘yes’.
Then he goes and washes that glass and leaves it for drying. When he comes back, there is a smile on his face.
He thinks it feels like absolution.
Phew, that's all for now. Hopefully there are many more to come! *crosses fingers*
Thank you so much for voting for me or not voting for me negatively and keeping me in the game. I kinda feel like I'm hanging by a thread here, but yay! I would also like to apologize for the quality of the fics, most of them were written a few hours before deadline because, as usual, I forgot. *facepalm*
Round 1: Derek/Addison
In the back of his mind, they’re supposed to have an ending.
The perfect couple, the perfect wedding, seems like it’s only fair to have a perfect ending.
But instead they have sirens and flashing lights and chaos.
After all that, there is silence.
-
She lies on the hospital bed looking pale and lost; dark circles around her eyes and face devoid of any recognition.
Retrograde amnesia, they whisper. He’s a neurologist, for God’s sake. Of course he knows.
She doesn’t wonder why the black-haired doctor with those sad eyes keeps staring at her. There’s something blank inside her, she can feel it, like some empty page of a drawing book that needs coloring.
His eyes are full of brimming stories that always end in tragedy. Romeo and Juliet. Othello and Desdemona.
He knows too much, she decides.
-
This is a trip down memory lane:
They meet in gross anatomy class. They continue their lives without knowing the other, but then one day, he is late and her lab partner has abandoned her.
The first thing he notices about her is the hair. She notices the eyes.
They had been clear blue and bright when he’d asked her out for coffee.
She’d said yes the fourth time.
-
Meredith’s come up to him a few times with questions like will you be okay and maybe you should go take a shower.
But she doesn’t know what to say to him. He’s not mourning his family or his love or his friend. She thinks it goes a lot deeper than that.
He doesn’t cry. Not once does she see him crying or drinking or throwing things in anger or self-deceit or pity.
Instead his eyes are clouded like he remembers too much, things that he can’t let go of.
He’s mourning all he can’t forget and she doesn’t know what to say.
-
In retrospect, they’ve always retaliated in the exact same way with each other.
She’d slept with his best friend on their bed. Strike one for her.
He’d slept with an intern 15 years his junior during their prom date. Strike one for him.
She’d left him for LA. Strike two.
He’d left her for Seattle. Strike two, again.
In the words of Mark Sloan, “they spent most of their lives together trying to even one another out.”
But this? She’s hit the bull’s eye with this.
-
It was supposed to be strictly official.
Two surgeries and she would be out. And then she would’ve been free until the next time someone decides to show up at Seattle Grace with a rare illness.
It was only one drink at Joe’s.
And Addison? She’d been laughing until she could see nothing but red.
_
He talks to her on the fourth day.
Nothing grand at all, he just buys her coffee and sits on the edge of her bed.
“I’m Derek,” he says. Maybe this is supposed to be life-altering.
But she doesn’t remember.
Round 2: Mark/Addison
She meets him on the night before her wedding.
They meet at a motel just outside New York, and she checks them both in under fake names.
Secrecy, she whispers under her breath, but he’s not so sure. Nevertheless, he doesn’t object when she books only one room.
-
“This is the last time I’m seeing you,” she tells him once they’re inside. Her eyes are sad and defiant at the same time and he can almost read a silent apology in them.
“What are you talking about? You’ll get to see me all the time,” he tries to reassure her. They’ve both gotten too good at this charade; it’s almost as if he doesn’t know what reality is anymore.
“No,” she shakes her head, “I’ll be your best friend’s wife then.”
She leans closer to him and whispers, lips just touching his earlobe. “There won’t be an us anymore.”
Her breath smells like stale cigarettes. He closes his eyes.
-
“Don’t you think this is just a little inappropriate?”
She smiles and twirls her half-finished glass of wine. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, the way her hand casually rests on his thigh and the way their hips touch when she shifts.
It’s a favorite here, the receptionist had said about the wine with a twinkle in his eyes. He drains his glass as she slowly reaches up to kiss him on the cheek.
Her lips are wet against his cheek and he doesn’t have the strength to move away.
-
“I’m getting married,” she exclaims in a moment of inebriation whilst he’s uncorking yet another bottle of wine, “married married. I’m getting married tomorrow, Mark.”
He nods because there’s nothing else to say and he doesn’t trust himself that much.
“Shouldn’t you stop it?” she asks, and her voice is alive with a sense of desperation and fear. “I think you should stop it,” she repeats. “Stop it and make it go away.”
He watches the tears half-forming in her eyes and there’s nothing more that he wants to do than comfort her and tell her mindless lies like it’s going to be okay.
Instead, he kisses her fiercely on the lips and her eyes close too fast, like she was expecting it.
He takes care not to crush the half-lit cigarette lying on the floor.
-
“I should go,” he whispers when he sees the first rays of light through the half-open window. “I should go and you should rest before the wedding. You wouldn’t want to have dark circles on you big day, would you?” he teases.
She looks at him expressionlessly through her kohl-rimmed eyes and he moves forward to wipe the smudges of lipstick off her face.
“I’m sorry,” he half-whispers on his way out, but she’s fast asleep by then.
He shuts the door quietly.
Round 3: Owen/Cristina
“Is this a part of my therapy that I didn’t know about?” He looks warily at her setting up the pencils and the notepads. “How is playing board games possibly going to help me?”
She looks at him unbelievably while putting down the hourglass. “It’s not a board game,” she scoffs, “its Pictionary.”
It’s his turn to roll his eyes now. “Why do you want to play this? So that we can make bunch of drawings about my trauma and try to ease through it all?” He almost feels guilty when the beaming smile on her face fades slightly.
She recovers quickly though. Silently, she opens the game board, picks out a word and begins sketching something on her notepad.
“Fine,” he relents and sits down opposite her on the mat. “I’m pretty sure you need to set the hourglass before you begin.”
One corner of her mouth twitches slightly upwards. “The sand has already started trickling, Owen,” she says simply. He isn’t able to read her expression as well as he used to. She simply puts her head down and continues drawing.”
“Is that a… cuckoo?” He asks softly, only for her to sigh and shake her head. He watches her furious strokes on the paper for a few seconds before suddenly reaching out to grab her hand. She stops suddenly and turns to face him with a defiant look in her eyes.
“I know what she said, okay?” she gushes out before he can speak, “I know she told us that we were barely making progress and that we couldn’t be close to each other. I know she means well. But I’m Cristina and you’re you and we can work this out, alright? I want to be able to hold you and comfort you. I need to be good at this because I wasn’t before and Burke left and I didn’t know what to do. So, I know you have trauma that you haven’t told me about but I want to help you and I need you to be okay with that and I need you to help. Because Burke left and if you leave, if you leave-”
He wraps his arms around her to soothe her slightly trembling body. “I won’t leave,” he whispers into her hair, “I have a lot of issues but you’re here now and I won’t leave. So you need to stop freaking out. Okay?”
She looks up at him; some of the defiance having returned back to her eyes. “Okay,” she says simply.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that the sand has finished trickling down through the hourglass.
It’s his turn to draw now.
Round 4: Izzie, (Alex/Izzie)
You wonder how you’ve gotten here, from being the overly optimistic and cheery girl who used to be the life of her social circle to the shell of a person who’s perpetually exhausted with everything.
Sitting in the locker room, packing your bags, you try to pinpoint the exact moment when everything started going downhill. Sometimes you think it was the cancer, other times you blame it on Denny, and on particularly bad days you blame it on Seattle Grace. But you’ve never been too good at remembering minute details anyway.
You don’t know what to do except leave and hide; you don’t think you have any option other than going away and leaving it all behind. Your life has been on public display long enough for you to loathe the irony and everything else it stands for. So you decide to leave it all behind and forget the atrocities and the perplexities life had offered you all the while. You decide to leave, not because of a clean and fresh start, but because you deserve, at least, this much.
It’s telling him goodbye that’s the hardest part. You’re not sure if you’ll come back and the sadist in you wants him to suffer for things that he didn’t do. You remember all the things he’s done for you, all the things he’s gone through for you when you were just a stranger. He carried you out when Denny died and he was there for you through your illness and he married you when you were dying. He gave you the life you didn’t have and you think you owe it to him to stay and fight again and again. You think you owe everything to the man who was willing to risk his job for your life and risk his life for your happiness.
So your feet falter for a second and you almost turn around and go back to him, and later, you would always wonder why you didn’t go back.
You don’t know how to comfort him anymore so you decide to break his heart just a little bit more.
Round 6: Alex, Alex/Izzie
I’m not coming back to you.
This is what hits him the hardest, despite the cancer and George and the merger fiasco. This hits him so hard because this was the one decision that wasn’t solely about him being selfish. The last thing he had left that, like everything else, has crumbled like a house of cards.
He twirls his empty glass in his hand and thinks about opening another bottle of scotch. Instead, his eye catches the most recent catalog of Yellow Pages.
He picks it up and flips through, just because.
As a kid, he was always good at geography. Science and biology and sutures came later, but when he was young enough to idolize his Dad and think the world of him, he was excellent at geography.
It should count for something, he thinks.
The empty glass remains on the counter as he continues to make lists of agencies. The breadth of prospects brings about a sense of exhilaration in him. There’s so much to choose from; the age of the children, the stories of biological parents, the cultural implications.
He doesn’t go to sleep that night and never goes about refilling that glass of scotch. It stays beside the feverishly marked pages and his eyes remain bright.
He calls in sick the next day, trusting Cristina to page him if there’s an emergency or if he’s being fired. He tries calling Izzie once, but the operator tells him that this number is no longer valid.
He continues to read and reread through his lists of agencies and chooses one in Arkansas. A recently-widowed, soon-to-be mother in Little Rock is giving up her child, one of the profiles says, due to lack of sufficient funds.
He finds the number of the agency and his fingers are shaking as he dials. He almost wants to hang up when someone picks up on the other end.
“Hello?” he speaks into the phone finally.
He tries justifying all this in his head over and over again. A little voice in his head screams out that he’s just over-compensating for his wife leaving him but he tries not to let that deter him.
He picks up the empty glass from the table and puts it on his kitchen counter for washing.
He looks through flight fares and sick leaves and takes a deep breath before booking one to Little Rock. The pop-up window asks him if he’s sure of his destination and with a pounding heart, he clicks ‘yes’.
Then he goes and washes that glass and leaves it for drying. When he comes back, there is a smile on his face.
He thinks it feels like absolution.
Phew, that's all for now. Hopefully there are many more to come! *crosses fingers*