(no subject)
It doesn’t occur to her that saying she needs to talk to him means that she should actually have something planned to say until she’s closing the bedroom door behind them. She knows what she wants to say, she just doesn’t know how to say it.
“We don’t need to do this,” he tells her, sensing the tension, noticing that, although she’s temporarily lost for words, when she figures out what to say it’s probably going to be important and Alex likes to avoid having moments as much as possible.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she begins, and she doesn’t even have that far planned, she’s just talking.
“Obviously you were with the way you two were hiding it from everybody - “
She speaks over him, practically yells to get him to shut up. “I’m not talking about that.” It silences him well enough. “I wasn’t thinking when I told you. About the way I told you.” She pauses, takes in a deep breath. “I guess I didn’t realize that you still...”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” He cuts in, before she can finish and he’s back to being the guy who handed her tissues and told her to keep it down. The guy who’s voice says he doesn’t care while his actions say otherwise.
“Alex...” She moves to touch him but stops herself. That’s a method that gets her nowhere good. “I just want things to go back to normal with us.”
He shakes his head. “No. This is your problem; you think that everything can just magically go back to the way it was every time you snap your fingers. This isn’t all about you Izzie!”
“I know that.” She says, somewhere between wanting to scream at him and understanding where he’s coming from.
“Clearly you don’t or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I do, okay. You’ve all drilled that into my head by now so you can just give it a rest.” She snaps at him. Izzie doesn’t really feel like being attacked right now, especially since that’s not where she’d intended to go with this conversation. She thought this would be a nice calm, rational way to sort out their problems. That just didn’t appear to be happening any time soon now.
By that point he looks entirely fed up with the whole conversation and it’s sad that they can’t even have a civil conversation for longer than two minutes anymore. So he shuts his eyes and either tries to think of what to say or tries to block her out and she waits for his reply because she’s got nothing left to go on.
She hates herself a little bit for even bringing him up here.
“What do you want me to say Iz?” He finally asks, and she takes comfort that he’s back to calling her that instead of Izzie.
“I don’t know.” And she doesn’t. She knows what she wants from Callie (forgiveness), she knows what she wants from George (space), she knows what she wants from Meredith and Cristina (understanding) but she doesn’t know what she wants from him. “Maybe I just want everything to be okay with us. I need someone on my side.”
“Everything is not okay.” He responds, plainly, and she’s pretty sure her face falls. “We’re not okay. But I am on your side.”
And at least that counts for something.
---
“So nurses are your thing now?” Meredith slides up to Derek once nurse what’s-her-name leaves him alone, in search of the punch bowl. She’ll be back before long but Meredith thinks maybe she’ll take the hint and back off.
“Oh, are you jealous?” He asks, with an amused smile and raised eyebrows.
She is. But she won’t admit that to him. Not directly anyway. “Should I be?”
He gives her a look that she interprets as meaning that she shouldn’t be, before cocking his head to the side. “Was this get-up of yours intentional?”
Meredith’s almost forgotten that she is currently dressed as a nurse, and she has to smile at the irony of it. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” He says. Clearly he doesn’t believe her, but really he should. She doesn’t have that much foresight.
“And what are you exactly?” She asks, frowning at his costume.
Derek sounds quite proud of himself as he says, “Mad doctor. Kind of Dr. Jekyll-esque, don’t you think?”
She nearly laughs at him, but settles for smiling wryly, segueing into more dangerous territory. “And you’re dating now?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Flirting with nurses is a pretty good tip-off.” She tells him.
“Oh, you call that flirting?”
“I do. And I would know.”
Finally he gives in. “I might be dating.”
“I wasn’t aware that we were broken up.”
“I said I’d wait. I didn’t say how I’d wait.”
If anything, that gives her some hope that this isn’t entirely futile. She hasn’t lost him yet. “So this is just a way to bide your time. That kind of dating. Not ‘I want to marry you and have kids with you’ dating.”
“No. That would defeat the purpose of me waiting for you.”
“And I have nothing to worry about?”
Derek nods. “You have nothing to worry about.”
---
“Need help?”
Izzie almost loses her balance atop the chair she’s using to take down the flying paper bats as she turns to look at Alex, half-startled. The party had ended a nearly an hour ago and since then she hadn’t seen him or Meredith. “If you could just get the ones in the doorway down.” She points, even if it’s self-explanatory, and he moves to do as he’s asked. “What time is it?”
“One.” He drops the bat’s down into the small pile of various decorations she’s made on the countertop. “This can wait until tomorrow you know.”
“I don’t feel like sleeping.” She replies, undoing an especially tight knot.
“Neither does Meredith.”
Izzie gives him a raised eyebrow. “She’s got Derek up there with her doesn’t she?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
“Weren’t they just broken up two hours ago?” She asks, the night a bit of a blur.
Alex shrugs. “She was playing mind games with him earlier, trying to make him jealous.”
“Is that what I walked in on?”
“More or less.”
“They’re insane.” He gives her a look that she’s not sure what to make of. “I mean, they’re going to end up together it’s only a matter of time. I don’t understand why they keep dancing around it. Or why she does anyway.”
It’s callous but he still says it, “Are you really giving out relationship advice?”
She resists the urge to shoot a glare at him and instead keeps her eyes down, focused on what she’s doing. “What happened to ‘I’m on your side’?”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t get to be honest.”
“I’m not complaining about honest, I’m complaining about brutal.” She shakes her head. “I know that I messed up, I don’t need to be reminded about it constantly.” Izzie levels her gaze with him now. “We’ve all made mistakes.”
For a split second she’s sure he’s going to come back swinging with some remark that she’s not going to want to hear and this is all going to go straight to hell, which sucks because they were making progress. She should’ve just gone to bed. But he bites back his comment, he holds her gaze, and he plays the role of the bigger person and says absolutely nothing in return other than, “Yeah, we have.”
She looks back at him with grateful eyes and tries to figure out what to do next but the kitchen is cleaned and she’s already cleared out the living room earlier, which means there’s pretty much nothing left to do. And she’s still not tired and probably won’t be for at least another hour and she has no idea what to do until then because she is not laying in bed and staring at the ceiling again. It’s not happening.
Which pretty much leaves her with Alex and time to kill.
---
“Are you aware that Stevens and Karev are both in his room?”
Meredith sits up, shifting the sheets so that they come with her and frowns. “Seriously?”
Derek nods, “Her door is wide open and his is shut.”
“How do you know which one is hers?”
“I did live here for awhile you know.” He reminds her, as if she’s forgotten. “I do know who sleeps where.”
She’ll give him that, she thinks, as she sinks back down into the mattress. “That doesn’t mean anything. Besides they’ve been on the outs for way too long for anything to have happened.”
“Didn’t you tell me that she slept with George O’Malley?” He asks.
She nods, wondering where he’s going to go with this.
“Weren’t they on the outs not too long ago?”
“Point taken.” Meredith replies. She’s half tempted to crack open the door and see if they really have ‘made up’ so to speak, but Derek gets back in bed with her and getting up soon becomes the last thing on her mind.