(no subject)
They share a room.
The house has three bedrooms, his mother’s, his old one, and what she guesses was his sister’s. Izzie gets the option to sleep in his sister’s but, honestly, her and Alex have slept together so it’s not like sharing a bed is something new and different.
She stays on her side and he stays on his, and somehow it’s not awkward at all. It just is. She has a comfort level with Alex by now, like an old worn t-shirt that you’ve long since stopped trying to fix the holes in. They’ve been through a lot of wear and tear, but their both still in one piece.
“I don’t know why you thought I would regret going.” She says, already in bed, listening to him shuffling around in the adjoining bathroom that connects his room to his sister’s old one.
“It’s not like we’re bestest best friends. We’ve gone entire days without saying word one to each other.” He pokes his head out the door, toothbrush in his mouth, muffling his words. “I’m surprised you’re not spending Christmas with O’Malley.”
“George and I are broken up.” She tells him, rolling onto her side, facing him. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
His voice is rough as he says, “And it all makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“You’re here avoiding him. This has absolutely nothing to do with me.”
Caught. At least when she thinks of how this started. “That’s not true.”
“Don’t even bother.” He walks out of the bathroom, hand up as if to silence her. He doesn’t want to hear anything she has to say, he’s already decided that he knows what this is all about. Whether or not it’s the truth is irrelevant.
She doesn’t quite sleep very well that night, him on one side, her hugging the other, backs to each other. She’s in the same bed as him but she’s never felt more cut off.
---
“So wait a minute,” Meredith frowns, “you’re doing what with Alex?”
“I’m going with him when he flies home.”
“Why?”
She’s very aware of the semi-condescending tone in Meredith’s voice. “Because it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do over the holidays.”
“I thought you were going to do the whole decorate the entire house while we stare at you like you’re crazy thing. Like last year.”
“Last year was different. Last year I had a best friend. Last year you and Cristina weren’t dancing around the house in the mornings. Last year we could do things like lay underneath the Christmas tree or hide from Doc.” Meredith gives her a look that says she’s sorry she asked but Izzie pushes forward anyway. “Last year was just different.”
She thinks she must have made her point since Meredith makes no objections. In fact she makes no sound until, “Where does he even live?”
“Iowa.” She says automatically before she fully processes the question and turns to her friend, surprised. “How can you not know where he’s from?”
Meredith shrugs, “It never really came up.”
Which is true enough, Izzie thinks, considering up until a few days ago she hadn’t known either. Or at least not consciously. “That’s weird right?”
“That I didn’t know?”
“That no one knows. I mean we’ve known him for over a year and we know less about him than we know about most of our patients.”
Meredith doesn’t seem to see the problem with this. “Some people don’t like to talk about their past.”
“Yeah, when they have something to hide.” She pauses, finally fully catching Meredith’s attention with that. “Or have something they want to forget.”
Somehow, she’s pretty sure she isn’t that far off.
---
Despite the small setback of the night before her and Alex manage to put that behind them and they’re back to normal (or about as normal as they’ve ever been) by Christmas Eve.
Apparently normal entails wrestling with the Christmas lights because that’s what they wind up doing. His mother has those lights where if one goes out then they all do and, wouldn’t it figure, that one had gone out during the night. So Alex tasks himself with trying to figure out which one it is and Izzie, figuring it would go quicker if there was two of them working at it, decides to help.
Nearly fifteen minutes later and she’s sure that damn light is somewhere in the middle of this strand which insures that sometimes two people aren’t better than one. Alex looks livid, she’s just edging on annoyed, and his mother looks vaguely amused by this, standing in the doorway watching them like somehow she knows exactly which one it is but she wants to watch more then she wants to help them.
And then someone knocks at the door. Actually bangs is the more appropriate term.
“Mom, I did not sign up for guests.” Alex tells her, looking up and fumbling one of the bulbs as he does, sending it flying Izzie’s way.
“I didn’t invite guests.” Elena replies, sounding nervous as all hell.
The look on Alex’s face is one she doesn’t want to see ever again. He gets up, drops what he’s doing altogether, and goes to the door, just a bit menacingly. She can hear him pretty much rip the door of its hinges and then a heavy, slightly relieved, exhale.
“Nice timing,” he says, presumably to the unexpected guest, sounding more than a little irritated.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on the other side of the country?” The voice, distinctly female, matches his tone perfectly.
Recognition sparks in his mother’s face and she rushes to the door, leaving Izzie sitting in a pile of dead Christmas lights. So she does what any curious but mostly respectful person would do. She eavesdrops but stays well out of sight.
“I would be if you could get it together once a year and show up here.”
“I have a life you know.”
“And I don’t?”
“Yeah, you’re a hotshot surgeon. We know.”
His mother cuts in, briefly, with a timid, “Ash...”
“Lay off, mom, alright.”
“Oh, that’s real nice.”
“What? You’re the good son now? Are you high?”
“I’m supposed to be asking you that question, aren’t I?”
Elena doesn’t even get out an entire word the second time she tries before they cut her off, and Izzie can’t help but peek into the other room, to catch a glimpse of this woman. Brown hair, a shade darker than Alex’s, and Izzie thinks the girl looks a little bit like his Jane Doe strangely enough.
“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
”Then why did you come here?”
”Certainly not to see you.”
“Just get out.”
“Alex!” Elena gets in.
“No, you know what, you said you have a life, go live it.”
“Are you trying to play hero again? Like with dad? Because you fucked that up enough that I would think you would have learned.”
“Fuck you.”
“You know what, I will leave. Merry fuckin’ Christmas mom!”
The door slams. The house goes silent. She gets the guts to look in again and sees Alex and his mom just standing there, opposite of each other, Elena looking upset and Alex just looking plain angry. She’d go in there but she feels out of place as it is.
“Alex, why -“ Elena starts, but she doesn’t finish, just lets it hang there.
He doesn’t give her an answer, he doesn’t say a word to her, he just stalks off, toward Izzie, and she attempts to move back so he doesn’t see her around the corner but in the end the gesture is futile. Not that he seems to care.
“Alex.” She says, a tone of concern in her voice, her feet stuck to the ground, preventing her from following him.
He stops anyway, turns. She ends up wishing he hadn’t. “What?”
She tries to think of what she wanted to say in the first place. She has no idea what exactly is going on so that makes finding the right words easier said than done. So she asks, “Are you okay?”
His jaw sets, and he walks away from her too, slamming the bedroom door in her face before she can say anything else.
---
The thing that Izzie likes about packing - the only thing that Izzie likes about packing - is it gives her time to think. After a minute or two of getting a rhythm down it becomes automatic and she lets her mind wander.
In this case, she lets her mind wander to Alex. To this trip she’s taking. To her and Meredith’s conversation detailing every reason why she does and does not want to be doing this.
This is the problem she’s been having. This is the reason why sometimes she doesn’t know what to say to him. This is the reason she gets so mad at him she can’t see straight.
She doesn’t understand him.
She never realized the reason behind that until now. She doesn’t know anything about him. Nothing about what made him the person he is today.
It’s what makes her want to go. She wants to know. She wants to be able to understand him. For God’s sake she lives with him, she needs to know things like what his family was like, and why he has such a deep-rooted hatred for the drug addicts and the child abusers that filter through the hospital, more than anybody else. She needs to know why the hell he can’t make a relationship work.
She needs to know a lot of things.
---
A little later, after she hears him stop pacing in his bedroom, after she hears his mother’s muffled cries let up, after she’s sat still and tried not to fidget, tried to be quiet, for so long that she thinks she might explode if she doesn’t get up and do something or talk to somebody, she decides that she’s taken enough of his crap that whatever he throws at her now she’ll be able to deal with and she gets up and knocks on his door.
He doesn’t answer.
She tries the knob, remembers that there’s no lock on the door (it’s broken, interestingly enough), and opens the door slowly, sticking her head in first. He’s awake, on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, showing no signs that he recognizes or cares that she’s in there. Which she guesses is better than the “get out” that she thought she would receive.
“Do you want to talk?” She tries, remaining in the doorway.
“No,” he replies, gruffly, like a child who didn’t quite get his way. On any other day she would let him get away this, she would leave him alone. But it’s almost Christmas, and if you can’t say what you need to on Christmas then when can you say it.
She climbs up on the bed, lies on her back, facing the ceiling right along with him. He doesn’t move away from her. “Fine, if you don’t want to talk then I will.” She pauses, gives him the chance to protest but he doesn’t do that either. “I didn’t just come here because of the George thing. And I know that’s what you were thinking, and yeah, initially, that’s all it was. But Alex, I don’t know anything about you. You never talk about your family, where you come from. You’re so locked up about that. And this was my chance to change that.”
He’s listening, she thinks, at least that’s something, at least he’s hearing her.
“I don’t know what that was about earlier, I don’t even really know who that was at the door, but I’d like to. I want to.” She takes in a breath, taking a chance with it. “I want you to be able to talk to me. I’m sorry I never really told you that. I’m sorry I never really tried to listen before.”
There’s nothing left for her to say after that. If that doesn’t get to him then she knows nothing she can say to him will. If that doesn’t get to him then she’s done and at the very least she can say she tried.
She listens to him breath, counts to ten in her head, tells herself that when she gets to ten, if he still hasn’t said anything, then she’s going to walk out and see about getting a flight back home. They’ll sort this out there then. Maybe.
One, two, three.
Four, five, six.
Seven, eight -
“She’s my sister. She left when I was fourteen, followed in my dad’s footsteps with the drugs. I never really forgave her for up and leaving.”
And that right there is a start enough to keep her here.
---
“This is the final boarding call for flight 651 to Iowa City.”
He turns to her, “You can still get out of this you know.”
“I know.” She tells him, hating that he was presenting that option. All it did was encourage her to turn around and say it just isn’t worth it. But she wouldn’t let herself. She had a mission and she was damn well going to follow through with it. “I’m going. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Of course, she thinks, that’s one way to jinx it.
---
“Seatbelt,” she reminds him, as she lies back against the seat, settling in for the flight back to Seattle. He groans, almost imperceptibly, but she lets it go because she’s honestly too tired to nitpick.
“I never thought I’d be this happy to go back to work.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” She can already hear the mocking laughter before it starts. “Alright, it wasn’t that bad at the end.”
“I’ll give you that.” He settles in now; she can feel him stop jerking around in the seat, knows he’s attempting to relax, even with her eyes closed. “You going to sleep?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“Nothing.” His tone indicates that it’s a bit more than nothing that’s on his mind. She opens her eyes, finds him staring down at his hands in his lap. “Thank you.”
“For?”
“Going.”
She’s fairly sure that’s not the whole of it, but she’s also sure that Alex doesn’t say thank you a lot, so, for whatever reason that lies behind it, she’ll take it, no more questions asked.
Her hand finds his, linking their fingers, as she lets herself drift off.