Fic: Seattle Grace Senior Prom (Izzy/Denny, AU)
Title: Seattle Grace Senior Prom
Author: dancinbutterfly
Rating: R for language
Disclaimer: I don't own Grey's Anatomy
Spoilers: Losing My Religion
A/N: This is my first Grey's Anatomy fic and the first hetero story I've written in awhile. If you guys like it, let me know. If people are interested this might become a series. PLEASE REVIEW!
Summary: Izzy stops in to see Denny on her way to change for prom. AU
Izzy doesn’t like prom. She didn’t like either of her own, she got pregnant at her junior prom and she got smacked around by her date at her senior prom for a solid minute before she caught a hold of his family jewels, twisted and yanked. Neither of them went well and if her track record with proms stands, then she doesn’t really want to go to Camille’s.
And since she doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t see the harm in going late. The Chief can give her a lecture on tardiness later, if he even notices her absence. She doubts he will until later in the night, what with all the chaos.
So instead of heading to the locker room to change she heads to Denny’s room. She only darted home for half an hour to grab a few choices for tonight but it’s already been a half hour to long.
“So, how was senior your prom?” She asks, leaning against the door frame, her garment bag draped over her shoulder. She can’t pull her eyes from Denny’s face, from lips that have gone from bluish to pink with the return of healthy circulation.
“I took my cousin. Which is embarrassing considering how much older than me he was.”
She smiles at his joke and he smiles at her smile.
“Oh did you? I thought you were from Washington, not Alabama.”
“Our love was forbidden. Even in the Deep South.”
She laughs and moves to sit on the bed next to him. His hand reaches out to hold the nape of her neck, beneath her hair, warm against the skin. She loves his hands, they’re large and calloused and now they’re warm.
“I love you.” She says softly, telling him because she can, because he’s alive to hear her and he smiles all the way up to his eyes. The skin around them wrinkle and she knows that she will love those wrinkles when she’s eighty.
“I don’t think I will ever get tired of hearing you say that.”
His voice is gravely and his eyes are bright and for once, they’re not watery from pain, exhaustion, or the fear he would never ever admit too. She could get lost in them and does. So she’s startled when he speaks more so when she realizes it’s another woman’s name.
“What?”
“Kristen Murphy. I went with Kristen Murphy. She was a freshman and a friend of my younger sister.”
“That’s right. You have a sister. And an older brother, right?”
In all the chaos, she’s forgotten a lot. Nothing about him, about the way he looks at her, and speaks to her, the hours of laughter and smiles. But the specifics, about his dad who likes monopoly over the scrabble they adore, about the mother who cleans as compulsively as Izzy bakes, about his sister who had her first baby last year and his brother who is on divorce number three.
“Yeah.” His hands covers her neck and his thumb comes up to caress her cheekbone and it’s a wonder that she’s not melting like the wicked witch of the west. “Evan and Annie. I think you’ll really like her. She’s like you. Only I don’t want to sleep with her. Although that I think I could get away with. Not in Alabama but South Carolina maybe.”
She doesn’t laugh this easily with anyone else. She smiles, she finds things funny, but he’s the only one who can make her consistently laugh. If he wasn’t so beautiful it made her ache, she’d diagnose herself with Jessica Rabbit syndrome.
“I can’t wait to meet her.” She whispers.
“At the wedding. She’s going to be my best man.”
At the wedding. Her wedding. *Their* wedding. She’s engaged. She’s getting married. Its still a little surreal. Then again it’s only been an hour. Still, she cant help but try out the names, Isobel Stevens Duquette, Izzy Duquette, Dr. Izzy Duquette, in her head over and over and over. And each time it makes her want to cry and smile at the same time. This is no exception.
“What about Evan?”
“He can be your best man if you want.”
She makes a face at him and slaps him, gently, on the chest and he gasps. And its n ot a good, flirty gasp. It’s a gasp that goes with him clutching his chest and he looks at her with eyes that are truly afraid.
“Izzy?”
She hates that voice. It’s the voice he had when she cut the wire on his LVAD. The voice that she’s only heard him use when he was dying.
This is not going to happen. It’s not. Not when he has a new heart beating in his chest. Not when they have a future. Not when she hasn’t met his sister and niece yet. She moves fast and she knows now that god or karma or whatever put her in this profession for this exact reason to save this specific man and she’s able to keep him from crashing until he gets to surgery.
Eighties pop music blasts from the main lobby of surgery down the hallways to her seat on the floor. Meredith, done up in a black dress that was not made for sitting on hospital linoleum, is on her right with her arm around Izzy and she can’t keep from letting her head rest on Meredith’s bony shoulder. Callie is on her left, rubbing her back and Izzy thinks that she is so sorry she said and what she did to face Callie’s face and behind her back. Cristina is pacing. Alex and George are in the OR with Dr. Shepard and Dr. Bailey trying to keep the love her life from stroking out on the table and dying with tubes in his throat and a knife in his skin as they chase down the source of the problem.
They could go to the gallery. They could as Denny’s in OR 1. But Izzy can’t move. She can’t even really think. All she can think of is Denny smelling the sweater she made for him, smiling and recognizing her scent and she wonders, in a completely abstract, ‘this isn’t really happening’ sort of way, what she’s going to do if Dr. Shepard tells her that the love of her life is gone.
“How can you just sit there and do nothing?” Cristina fumes, taking her seventy billionth trip down the small strip of hallway and back. Her high heels click loudly on the floor and Izzy is reminded of reason nine hundred why it’s better to wear sneakers in the hospital. And Izzy starts to laugh.
She’s borderline hysterical and she’s engulfed in arms, Meredith’s thin skeletal ones and Callie’s thick soft ones and she just can’t stop laughing because she’s thinking of the value of Nikes over Manolos when Denny could be, probably was, *dying* and then she was crying, sobbing and grabbing at Callie’s back through her slick dress and trying to find something to keep her whole being from spinning off the planet.
“Shh, he’ll be fine. I know he will.”
That’s Callie.
“He didn’t get this far just to give up now. So much of what keeps a person alive is will. His whole will is behind loving you, Izzy. He’ll push through this.”
That’s Meredith.
“God, just shut up! That’s not what she wants to hear. The man she risked her career for is bleeding on a table, so just shut up all of you! Fuck.”
That’s Cristina and she’s the closest to right because Burke is a patient and Burke was on a table just like Denny only yesterday. Only Burke, for all the damage done, is stable and awake right now.
They’re still sitting there when Cristina finally gets sick and tired of waiting around and goes to see Burke. They’re still sitting there when the sun rises. They’re still there when Callie makes her apologies and goes to clock in for work. And it feels like an eternity before a figure in splattered pale blue surgical scrubs comes running down the hall to them.
Izzy is on her feet in an instant as she watches George charge her. He nearly barrels into her but comes to a screeching halt half an inch away from her.
“Is he-“
She can’t finish the sentence. She can’t. She wants to. But her vocal cords are paralyzed. The distanced doctor corner of her brain whispers that it’s psychosomatic.
“He’s stable.” George says on something that is almost a sigh as he pulls off his mask. In his haste he must have forgotten. “Dr. Shepard was amazing. There was this blood clot and-“
Izzy has her hands around is biceps and gives him a shake. “But he’s alive?”
“Yeah. We think he’ll be okay. Going to need an extra week of recovery but we know what we’re looking for now. He’s in post-op if you want to-“
Her feet move on their own down the hallway at warp speed and Izzy hopes not letting him finish his sentences is going to become a habit. Because it’s really sort of rude.
She catches a hold of the wall to stop herself when she explodes into post-op. his lips are still pink. His fingernails aren’t blue. His chest is rising and falling and the only the only tubes on him are the IV, the heart monitor, not pump but monitor, and the ventilator that Olivia is removing even as Izzy watches.
“Stevens, what the hell are you doing here?”
Dr. Bailey is blocking her path to Denny with her arms folded and her face determined in away that never failed to make Izzy nervous as hell.
“I’m his fiancée.” Izzy breathes. “I thought he might want me here when he wakes up.”
“Mm-hmm. I’m sure he would. But you’re not on duty and it’s another three hours until visiting hours.”
“Dr. Bailey I was just-“
“Did I say I was done talking?”
“No.”
She felt like a puppy called up on the carpet but when she glanced over at Denny, his chest rising and falling slowly and evenly, she couldn’t feel that bad.
“All right then. As I was saying. I want you to do the charts of every patient currently in post-op, and yes, that includes Mr. Duquette’s. I want you to know everything, every detail of their surgeries when I come back. I will want to know what was done, how long it took, the doctors who operated, everything. You can work on it while you wait. I expect them to be flawless and your memory to be sharper than a ten blade, or do you think that will be too much for you to handle?”
A knot of tension that had curled in her lower back released like a breath at the fact that she wasn’t being made to leave, that she could stay with him. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Dr. Bailey.”
She gave a mental cheer that she hadn’t stuttered.
“Good because I am not done with you, Stevens. Not by a damn sight.” It’s amazing how scary hands on hips can be when Bailey is doing it. “If I have my way, you’ll be doing charts as you walk down the aisle, understand?”
“Yes ma’am.” Izzy couldn’t help but smile. Married. She bit her lower lip and looked at her shoes and tried not to upset the Nazi any further.
Bailey’s eyes narrowed but she said nothing. She just turned and began to walk away and Izzy sighed in relief.
“Flawless, Stevens!”
Then she was gone. And Denny was awake and laughing at her. Or trying to anyway. His throat had to hurt from the ventilator.
“You think this is funny?” She asked as she walked to his bedside.
“A little.” He grates out, his voice hoarse from being scraped raw by the tube that was shoved down it and his eyes twinkling. “I think it’s mostly just a tension release mechanism. You know what else is a good one?”
She wonders if her face can split from smiling. “Scrabble?”
“Well it starts with an ‘S’.”
“You’re horrible.” She chuckles.
“You know you love it.” His grin was drowsy from the anesthesia he’s coming off and he looks pliant but she knows from experience just how strong he can be.
She rests her hand against the side of his face and feels the warm skin beneath rough stubble and loves him more than there are words to describe, more than she thinks is possible and yet somehow she manages to love him a little more when his hand covers hers. And she can’t not kiss him, slow and gentle and deep.
“How soon can your sister get here?” She asks she pulls back. She needs to get to work or Bailey is going to rip her yet another new one. But she can’t resist posing the question.
He’s falling back to sleep but he looks content and smug in a way that is only endearing on him. “A week. When can I go home?”
“A month, two at the most. But then its going to be at least six months before you can leave your house for anything but medical visits,” she answers, knowing what his question means. The second the words leave her mouth she’s trying to figure out how she’s going to explain it to the chief, how she’s going to get time off for at least a weekend, when she can get in to Dr. Burke to ask how long after a transplant it will be before she and Denny can do all the things they’ve spelled in naughty Scrabble, and how she’ll get her heart to stop beating quite so fast.
“At least I’ll have something to keep me busy while I recover.” He mumbles with a relaxed smile as he drops off. “’Sides…Annie likes… to plan…things… Izzy…”
She heads off to get the chart of the appendectomy next to him as he drifts to sleep, secure in the knowledge that she is the last thing he sees before he closes his eyes and fades into a safe sleep. They have a future now and she can wait six months.
Author: dancinbutterfly
Rating: R for language
Disclaimer: I don't own Grey's Anatomy
Spoilers: Losing My Religion
A/N: This is my first Grey's Anatomy fic and the first hetero story I've written in awhile. If you guys like it, let me know. If people are interested this might become a series. PLEASE REVIEW!
Summary: Izzy stops in to see Denny on her way to change for prom. AU
Izzy doesn’t like prom. She didn’t like either of her own, she got pregnant at her junior prom and she got smacked around by her date at her senior prom for a solid minute before she caught a hold of his family jewels, twisted and yanked. Neither of them went well and if her track record with proms stands, then she doesn’t really want to go to Camille’s.
And since she doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t see the harm in going late. The Chief can give her a lecture on tardiness later, if he even notices her absence. She doubts he will until later in the night, what with all the chaos.
So instead of heading to the locker room to change she heads to Denny’s room. She only darted home for half an hour to grab a few choices for tonight but it’s already been a half hour to long.
“So, how was senior your prom?” She asks, leaning against the door frame, her garment bag draped over her shoulder. She can’t pull her eyes from Denny’s face, from lips that have gone from bluish to pink with the return of healthy circulation.
“I took my cousin. Which is embarrassing considering how much older than me he was.”
She smiles at his joke and he smiles at her smile.
“Oh did you? I thought you were from Washington, not Alabama.”
“Our love was forbidden. Even in the Deep South.”
She laughs and moves to sit on the bed next to him. His hand reaches out to hold the nape of her neck, beneath her hair, warm against the skin. She loves his hands, they’re large and calloused and now they’re warm.
“I love you.” She says softly, telling him because she can, because he’s alive to hear her and he smiles all the way up to his eyes. The skin around them wrinkle and she knows that she will love those wrinkles when she’s eighty.
“I don’t think I will ever get tired of hearing you say that.”
His voice is gravely and his eyes are bright and for once, they’re not watery from pain, exhaustion, or the fear he would never ever admit too. She could get lost in them and does. So she’s startled when he speaks more so when she realizes it’s another woman’s name.
“What?”
“Kristen Murphy. I went with Kristen Murphy. She was a freshman and a friend of my younger sister.”
“That’s right. You have a sister. And an older brother, right?”
In all the chaos, she’s forgotten a lot. Nothing about him, about the way he looks at her, and speaks to her, the hours of laughter and smiles. But the specifics, about his dad who likes monopoly over the scrabble they adore, about the mother who cleans as compulsively as Izzy bakes, about his sister who had her first baby last year and his brother who is on divorce number three.
“Yeah.” His hands covers her neck and his thumb comes up to caress her cheekbone and it’s a wonder that she’s not melting like the wicked witch of the west. “Evan and Annie. I think you’ll really like her. She’s like you. Only I don’t want to sleep with her. Although that I think I could get away with. Not in Alabama but South Carolina maybe.”
She doesn’t laugh this easily with anyone else. She smiles, she finds things funny, but he’s the only one who can make her consistently laugh. If he wasn’t so beautiful it made her ache, she’d diagnose herself with Jessica Rabbit syndrome.
“I can’t wait to meet her.” She whispers.
“At the wedding. She’s going to be my best man.”
At the wedding. Her wedding. *Their* wedding. She’s engaged. She’s getting married. Its still a little surreal. Then again it’s only been an hour. Still, she cant help but try out the names, Isobel Stevens Duquette, Izzy Duquette, Dr. Izzy Duquette, in her head over and over and over. And each time it makes her want to cry and smile at the same time. This is no exception.
“What about Evan?”
“He can be your best man if you want.”
She makes a face at him and slaps him, gently, on the chest and he gasps. And its n ot a good, flirty gasp. It’s a gasp that goes with him clutching his chest and he looks at her with eyes that are truly afraid.
“Izzy?”
She hates that voice. It’s the voice he had when she cut the wire on his LVAD. The voice that she’s only heard him use when he was dying.
This is not going to happen. It’s not. Not when he has a new heart beating in his chest. Not when they have a future. Not when she hasn’t met his sister and niece yet. She moves fast and she knows now that god or karma or whatever put her in this profession for this exact reason to save this specific man and she’s able to keep him from crashing until he gets to surgery.
Eighties pop music blasts from the main lobby of surgery down the hallways to her seat on the floor. Meredith, done up in a black dress that was not made for sitting on hospital linoleum, is on her right with her arm around Izzy and she can’t keep from letting her head rest on Meredith’s bony shoulder. Callie is on her left, rubbing her back and Izzy thinks that she is so sorry she said and what she did to face Callie’s face and behind her back. Cristina is pacing. Alex and George are in the OR with Dr. Shepard and Dr. Bailey trying to keep the love her life from stroking out on the table and dying with tubes in his throat and a knife in his skin as they chase down the source of the problem.
They could go to the gallery. They could as Denny’s in OR 1. But Izzy can’t move. She can’t even really think. All she can think of is Denny smelling the sweater she made for him, smiling and recognizing her scent and she wonders, in a completely abstract, ‘this isn’t really happening’ sort of way, what she’s going to do if Dr. Shepard tells her that the love of her life is gone.
“How can you just sit there and do nothing?” Cristina fumes, taking her seventy billionth trip down the small strip of hallway and back. Her high heels click loudly on the floor and Izzy is reminded of reason nine hundred why it’s better to wear sneakers in the hospital. And Izzy starts to laugh.
She’s borderline hysterical and she’s engulfed in arms, Meredith’s thin skeletal ones and Callie’s thick soft ones and she just can’t stop laughing because she’s thinking of the value of Nikes over Manolos when Denny could be, probably was, *dying* and then she was crying, sobbing and grabbing at Callie’s back through her slick dress and trying to find something to keep her whole being from spinning off the planet.
“Shh, he’ll be fine. I know he will.”
That’s Callie.
“He didn’t get this far just to give up now. So much of what keeps a person alive is will. His whole will is behind loving you, Izzy. He’ll push through this.”
That’s Meredith.
“God, just shut up! That’s not what she wants to hear. The man she risked her career for is bleeding on a table, so just shut up all of you! Fuck.”
That’s Cristina and she’s the closest to right because Burke is a patient and Burke was on a table just like Denny only yesterday. Only Burke, for all the damage done, is stable and awake right now.
They’re still sitting there when Cristina finally gets sick and tired of waiting around and goes to see Burke. They’re still sitting there when the sun rises. They’re still there when Callie makes her apologies and goes to clock in for work. And it feels like an eternity before a figure in splattered pale blue surgical scrubs comes running down the hall to them.
Izzy is on her feet in an instant as she watches George charge her. He nearly barrels into her but comes to a screeching halt half an inch away from her.
“Is he-“
She can’t finish the sentence. She can’t. She wants to. But her vocal cords are paralyzed. The distanced doctor corner of her brain whispers that it’s psychosomatic.
“He’s stable.” George says on something that is almost a sigh as he pulls off his mask. In his haste he must have forgotten. “Dr. Shepard was amazing. There was this blood clot and-“
Izzy has her hands around is biceps and gives him a shake. “But he’s alive?”
“Yeah. We think he’ll be okay. Going to need an extra week of recovery but we know what we’re looking for now. He’s in post-op if you want to-“
Her feet move on their own down the hallway at warp speed and Izzy hopes not letting him finish his sentences is going to become a habit. Because it’s really sort of rude.
She catches a hold of the wall to stop herself when she explodes into post-op. his lips are still pink. His fingernails aren’t blue. His chest is rising and falling and the only the only tubes on him are the IV, the heart monitor, not pump but monitor, and the ventilator that Olivia is removing even as Izzy watches.
“Stevens, what the hell are you doing here?”
Dr. Bailey is blocking her path to Denny with her arms folded and her face determined in away that never failed to make Izzy nervous as hell.
“I’m his fiancée.” Izzy breathes. “I thought he might want me here when he wakes up.”
“Mm-hmm. I’m sure he would. But you’re not on duty and it’s another three hours until visiting hours.”
“Dr. Bailey I was just-“
“Did I say I was done talking?”
“No.”
She felt like a puppy called up on the carpet but when she glanced over at Denny, his chest rising and falling slowly and evenly, she couldn’t feel that bad.
“All right then. As I was saying. I want you to do the charts of every patient currently in post-op, and yes, that includes Mr. Duquette’s. I want you to know everything, every detail of their surgeries when I come back. I will want to know what was done, how long it took, the doctors who operated, everything. You can work on it while you wait. I expect them to be flawless and your memory to be sharper than a ten blade, or do you think that will be too much for you to handle?”
A knot of tension that had curled in her lower back released like a breath at the fact that she wasn’t being made to leave, that she could stay with him. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Dr. Bailey.”
She gave a mental cheer that she hadn’t stuttered.
“Good because I am not done with you, Stevens. Not by a damn sight.” It’s amazing how scary hands on hips can be when Bailey is doing it. “If I have my way, you’ll be doing charts as you walk down the aisle, understand?”
“Yes ma’am.” Izzy couldn’t help but smile. Married. She bit her lower lip and looked at her shoes and tried not to upset the Nazi any further.
Bailey’s eyes narrowed but she said nothing. She just turned and began to walk away and Izzy sighed in relief.
“Flawless, Stevens!”
Then she was gone. And Denny was awake and laughing at her. Or trying to anyway. His throat had to hurt from the ventilator.
“You think this is funny?” She asked as she walked to his bedside.
“A little.” He grates out, his voice hoarse from being scraped raw by the tube that was shoved down it and his eyes twinkling. “I think it’s mostly just a tension release mechanism. You know what else is a good one?”
She wonders if her face can split from smiling. “Scrabble?”
“Well it starts with an ‘S’.”
“You’re horrible.” She chuckles.
“You know you love it.” His grin was drowsy from the anesthesia he’s coming off and he looks pliant but she knows from experience just how strong he can be.
She rests her hand against the side of his face and feels the warm skin beneath rough stubble and loves him more than there are words to describe, more than she thinks is possible and yet somehow she manages to love him a little more when his hand covers hers. And she can’t not kiss him, slow and gentle and deep.
“How soon can your sister get here?” She asks she pulls back. She needs to get to work or Bailey is going to rip her yet another new one. But she can’t resist posing the question.
He’s falling back to sleep but he looks content and smug in a way that is only endearing on him. “A week. When can I go home?”
“A month, two at the most. But then its going to be at least six months before you can leave your house for anything but medical visits,” she answers, knowing what his question means. The second the words leave her mouth she’s trying to figure out how she’s going to explain it to the chief, how she’s going to get time off for at least a weekend, when she can get in to Dr. Burke to ask how long after a transplant it will be before she and Denny can do all the things they’ve spelled in naughty Scrabble, and how she’ll get her heart to stop beating quite so fast.
“At least I’ll have something to keep me busy while I recover.” He mumbles with a relaxed smile as he drops off. “’Sides…Annie likes… to plan…things… Izzy…”
She heads off to get the chart of the appendectomy next to him as he drifts to sleep, secure in the knowledge that she is the last thing he sees before he closes his eyes and fades into a safe sleep. They have a future now and she can wait six months.