(no subject)
Title: Funny How It All Works Out When You've Given Up On It
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Izzie, Cristina, Alex, Meredith | Alex/Izzie
Word Count: 1,664
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: #18 - Banana for 25_foods
Author's Note: To say this is off-season is an incredible understatement. Forgive the setting, I just crave writing our former interns interactions. Also, I'm taking a guess as far as the timeline goes.
Spoilers: Up to 4.16/17 - Freedom
Summary: If anyone ever asks how she spent New Year's Eve 2007 she's going to be really hard-pressed to tell them the truth. She'll make up some like about parties or Times Square and too much champagne. Whatever the story is it won't be 'suturing a banana out of boredom on a gurney in a basement corridor of Seattle Grace'.
If anyone ever asks how she spent New Year’s Eve 2007 she’s going to be really hard-pressed to tell them the truth. She’ll make up some lie about parties or Times Square and too much champagne.
Whatever the story is it won’t be ‘suturing a banana out of boredom on a gurney in a basement corridor of Seattle Grace’.
Even if that is the truth.
“See don’t you feel better?” Cristina’s leaning back against the wall, content for the moment, sitting on the gurney next to hers. She isn’t suturing a banana. No, she’s fresh from surgery, like usual.
“No, I don’t feel better.” She pushes the needle through the thick yellow skin with enough force that the movement is audible.
Cristina looks over at her - not her exactly, but the banana - then, “I hope you don’t treat your patients like that.”
Exasperated, she hooks the needle through the skin sideways, an unfinished stitch, and lets it lay there in her lap. She feels like she needs free use of her hands right now, whether it’s throwing them in the air or punching Cristina. She hasn’t decided yet. “It’s a banana. It doesn’t emote.”
“It’s practice.” Cristina corrects.
“Which would be fine if I was an intern. But I’m not. I’m a resident. And I get that we all have to work holidays sometimes but I’m suturing a banana right now, okay, a banana. Tell me why I need to be here instead of at home?”
Cristina never seems to lose the calm expression. “Relax. It’s New Years’ Eve; people are bound to be setting off fireworks and that means lots of injuries. Burn patients especially.” Izzie doesn’t care to think about the smile that comes to Cristina’s face as she adds, “God it must be a nice night to be in plastics.”
“It’s not.” And it’s like Alex was waiting in the wings for his cue. If it wasn’t for the way he threw himself on the gurney next to her she would think he was. Meredith strolls right in after him, joining Cristina. “Sloan’s,” he goes to make some motion to accompany his words but he gives up with a, “whatever.”
“Quit being a baby.” Cristina tells him, already making a face like he had single-handedly ruined her night.
“It’s eleven twelve.” Meredith announces, having checked her pager. She looks at them like it means something. It means, to Izzie, that she’s got three hours and change left of her shift.
“Why do you care?”
“Three hours and forty-eight minutes of suturing bananas.”
“I heard they got Dick Clark on in the lobby.”
They all speak at once and yet Meredith seems to manage to split her attention three ways.
“Because, no, and I know.” She answers and Izzie isn’t sure if she’s the second or the third answer. She hopes it’s the ‘no’. Mostly. “You can see the fireworks from the roof.”
“Really?” Izzie’s only this excited because it means she’ll have something to do other than wait for a page.
“Really.” Meredith confirms, looking at Cristina who’s not looking at Meredith, at all. “Isn’t that better than this?”
Once Cristina deduces that the question is aimed at her, she shrugs in reply. “I wasn’t the one complaining.”
Meredith’s pager goes off then and after a moment of looking at it, she frowns. “Shit, I’ve got to go check on a patient. But seriously, rooftop, forty minutes, okay?”
They all nod or murmur their consent and Cristina goes back to her zen state against the wall, while Alex picks up her banana and waves it at her suggestively. Izzie grabs it out of his hands with a “shut up”.
Then she waits.
---
She’s the only one who doesn’t get paged or run off of their own accord and so she’s the first one on the roof.
Eleven fifty on the dot.
It’s cold enough that she wishes she thought to bring her jacket, feeling the cold through her thin blue scrubs, but she keeps her arms crossed, close to her body, and that seems to help. It’s better than the gurney and that damn banana.
Up ahead she can se bright lights, to the North, and if she had to guess then she’d say that was the direction she needed to be looking in. It’s not the best view, from what she can see, but it has potential.
“Hey.” Alex startles her, ten feet away from her and she hadn’t even heard him come up, hadn’t heard the door to the stairwell close, or his footsteps.
She turns with an easy “hey” and a smile that doesn’t quite meet her eyes.
“We early?” He asks, eyes finding the lights before they shift back to her.
“Not really.” Eleven fifty-three. “They’re running late.”
“Yang probably won’t show.” He replies, after a moment adding, “And for all we know Meredith’s probably celebrating the old fashioned way with Shepherd.”
“She’ll be here.” Izzie says and she really does believe it. “It was her idea anyways.”
“Yeah. And a cold one.”
She takes pity on him and the fact that he’s in short sleeves, while she left her shirt on underneath her scrubs. Win one for Izzie. She also cracks a smile, an actual one. “At least it isn’t raining.”
He smirks. “Oh just you wait. It’s not raining yet.”
“Sky’s clear.” She says, after a moment of looking up. It is, remarkably so, enough that you can see the stars if you look hard enough.
“They were last year too. Until they weren’t.”
Izzie tries to remember. She tries to remember if she was home or here working but finds she can’t say with absolute certainty. It feels like a long time ago, certainly more than a year. “What were we doing then?”
”New Year’s?”
“Yeah. Were we working or were we off? I can’t remember.”
“We weren’t anything I was working; you were making Meredith and O’Malley insane with the holiday decorations and the baking.”
Right. She remembers now. They weren’t anything because they were barely speaking. She remembers her New Year’s resolution too, to forgive him, to let go. It might be her first successful one in a long time, at least so far. For no reason in particular she exhales a “yeah”.
They hear what sounds like the door opening and turn towards it, looking for their missing friends, for a buffer that would dissolve some of this tension, but the door remains closed. So much for that.
Eleven fifty-six.
“This is better.” She adds, when the silence forces her to say something, anything so that she won’t just be listening to her own breathing.
“Yeah?” It’s a question. An uneasy one at that.
“Yeah.” Someone steps forward, or maybe they both do. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care, just knows it’s warmer here. It’s warmer and she is close enough to touch him with very little effort and she’s not adverse to that right now.
He must see something in her eyes because he repeats her words from earlier, as a means of distraction. “They’re running late.”
“I know.” She replies, empty words, as her teeth sink into her lower lip and she tries to focus on things like time and other people.
She kind of doesn’t want to.
“Let them,” she mumbles and the next thing she knows she’s closing the gap between them, pressing her hands to his chest and her lips to his.
The last time they’d kissed had been on his bed. He’d tasted of salt and regret and his body shook under her fingertips. She closes her eyes against the memory, her hand coming up to rest on his shoulder, to pull him in closer.
He’s the one to break the kiss, again, just like last time, not for sobs but for air and a moment to process things. They both need a moment.
“Iz,” he says in that tone like he thinks she needs to be brought back down to earth again, like he’s afraid that five minutes or hours or days from now this is going to be looked back on as a mistake. Hell it might be. But by then it will be last year. “My resolution was to forgive and let go.” Her hand slides around the back of his neck, feeling tense muscles and tendons there. “I think this is the letting go part.”
It must be a good enough answer for him because his lips are back on hers a second later, open-mouthed, his fingers on her cheek, the small of her back, and it’s like old times without the chaos and the doubt. He still knows how to make her moan against his mouth, still knows the curves of her body.
She hears a nine, a door slam, and she’s pushing him away when she hears, “Can you really hear the counting from all the way up here?”
Meredith and Cristina make their way to them, clearly oblivious to the previous goings-on that they’d narrowly missed. To her credit they manage to disentangle themselves from each other pretty fast.
“Sounds like it,” she manages, arms crossed once more. Alex’s hand stays on her back, from beside her, and she half leans into it.
Six.
“View’s good.”
“I’m missing a surgery for this.”
Four.
“Stop ruining it.”
“Should someone have told George about this?”
“Crap.”
Two.
“How are we going to see over the lights?”
One.
“Shh, it’s starting.”
“Oh, that’s how.” Cristina remarks, as the lights go out and the choruses of ‘Happy New Year’ ring out from below and to the North as blue and silver bursts light up the night sky, followed by gold and green ones.
And they may not toast with champagne or shout along with the crowds but the dancing colors light up her face in more ways than one.
It may not have been an especially glamorous New Year’s Eve but it was one that she was, for once, entirely content with.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Izzie, Cristina, Alex, Meredith | Alex/Izzie
Word Count: 1,664
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: #18 - Banana for 25_foods
Author's Note: To say this is off-season is an incredible understatement. Forgive the setting, I just crave writing our former interns interactions. Also, I'm taking a guess as far as the timeline goes.
Spoilers: Up to 4.16/17 - Freedom
Summary: If anyone ever asks how she spent New Year's Eve 2007 she's going to be really hard-pressed to tell them the truth. She'll make up some like about parties or Times Square and too much champagne. Whatever the story is it won't be 'suturing a banana out of boredom on a gurney in a basement corridor of Seattle Grace'.
If anyone ever asks how she spent New Year’s Eve 2007 she’s going to be really hard-pressed to tell them the truth. She’ll make up some lie about parties or Times Square and too much champagne.
Whatever the story is it won’t be ‘suturing a banana out of boredom on a gurney in a basement corridor of Seattle Grace’.
Even if that is the truth.
“See don’t you feel better?” Cristina’s leaning back against the wall, content for the moment, sitting on the gurney next to hers. She isn’t suturing a banana. No, she’s fresh from surgery, like usual.
“No, I don’t feel better.” She pushes the needle through the thick yellow skin with enough force that the movement is audible.
Cristina looks over at her - not her exactly, but the banana - then, “I hope you don’t treat your patients like that.”
Exasperated, she hooks the needle through the skin sideways, an unfinished stitch, and lets it lay there in her lap. She feels like she needs free use of her hands right now, whether it’s throwing them in the air or punching Cristina. She hasn’t decided yet. “It’s a banana. It doesn’t emote.”
“It’s practice.” Cristina corrects.
“Which would be fine if I was an intern. But I’m not. I’m a resident. And I get that we all have to work holidays sometimes but I’m suturing a banana right now, okay, a banana. Tell me why I need to be here instead of at home?”
Cristina never seems to lose the calm expression. “Relax. It’s New Years’ Eve; people are bound to be setting off fireworks and that means lots of injuries. Burn patients especially.” Izzie doesn’t care to think about the smile that comes to Cristina’s face as she adds, “God it must be a nice night to be in plastics.”
“It’s not.” And it’s like Alex was waiting in the wings for his cue. If it wasn’t for the way he threw himself on the gurney next to her she would think he was. Meredith strolls right in after him, joining Cristina. “Sloan’s,” he goes to make some motion to accompany his words but he gives up with a, “whatever.”
“Quit being a baby.” Cristina tells him, already making a face like he had single-handedly ruined her night.
“It’s eleven twelve.” Meredith announces, having checked her pager. She looks at them like it means something. It means, to Izzie, that she’s got three hours and change left of her shift.
“Why do you care?”
“Three hours and forty-eight minutes of suturing bananas.”
“I heard they got Dick Clark on in the lobby.”
They all speak at once and yet Meredith seems to manage to split her attention three ways.
“Because, no, and I know.” She answers and Izzie isn’t sure if she’s the second or the third answer. She hopes it’s the ‘no’. Mostly. “You can see the fireworks from the roof.”
“Really?” Izzie’s only this excited because it means she’ll have something to do other than wait for a page.
“Really.” Meredith confirms, looking at Cristina who’s not looking at Meredith, at all. “Isn’t that better than this?”
Once Cristina deduces that the question is aimed at her, she shrugs in reply. “I wasn’t the one complaining.”
Meredith’s pager goes off then and after a moment of looking at it, she frowns. “Shit, I’ve got to go check on a patient. But seriously, rooftop, forty minutes, okay?”
They all nod or murmur their consent and Cristina goes back to her zen state against the wall, while Alex picks up her banana and waves it at her suggestively. Izzie grabs it out of his hands with a “shut up”.
Then she waits.
---
She’s the only one who doesn’t get paged or run off of their own accord and so she’s the first one on the roof.
Eleven fifty on the dot.
It’s cold enough that she wishes she thought to bring her jacket, feeling the cold through her thin blue scrubs, but she keeps her arms crossed, close to her body, and that seems to help. It’s better than the gurney and that damn banana.
Up ahead she can se bright lights, to the North, and if she had to guess then she’d say that was the direction she needed to be looking in. It’s not the best view, from what she can see, but it has potential.
“Hey.” Alex startles her, ten feet away from her and she hadn’t even heard him come up, hadn’t heard the door to the stairwell close, or his footsteps.
She turns with an easy “hey” and a smile that doesn’t quite meet her eyes.
“We early?” He asks, eyes finding the lights before they shift back to her.
“Not really.” Eleven fifty-three. “They’re running late.”
“Yang probably won’t show.” He replies, after a moment adding, “And for all we know Meredith’s probably celebrating the old fashioned way with Shepherd.”
“She’ll be here.” Izzie says and she really does believe it. “It was her idea anyways.”
“Yeah. And a cold one.”
She takes pity on him and the fact that he’s in short sleeves, while she left her shirt on underneath her scrubs. Win one for Izzie. She also cracks a smile, an actual one. “At least it isn’t raining.”
He smirks. “Oh just you wait. It’s not raining yet.”
“Sky’s clear.” She says, after a moment of looking up. It is, remarkably so, enough that you can see the stars if you look hard enough.
“They were last year too. Until they weren’t.”
Izzie tries to remember. She tries to remember if she was home or here working but finds she can’t say with absolute certainty. It feels like a long time ago, certainly more than a year. “What were we doing then?”
”New Year’s?”
“Yeah. Were we working or were we off? I can’t remember.”
“We weren’t anything I was working; you were making Meredith and O’Malley insane with the holiday decorations and the baking.”
Right. She remembers now. They weren’t anything because they were barely speaking. She remembers her New Year’s resolution too, to forgive him, to let go. It might be her first successful one in a long time, at least so far. For no reason in particular she exhales a “yeah”.
They hear what sounds like the door opening and turn towards it, looking for their missing friends, for a buffer that would dissolve some of this tension, but the door remains closed. So much for that.
Eleven fifty-six.
“This is better.” She adds, when the silence forces her to say something, anything so that she won’t just be listening to her own breathing.
“Yeah?” It’s a question. An uneasy one at that.
“Yeah.” Someone steps forward, or maybe they both do. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care, just knows it’s warmer here. It’s warmer and she is close enough to touch him with very little effort and she’s not adverse to that right now.
He must see something in her eyes because he repeats her words from earlier, as a means of distraction. “They’re running late.”
“I know.” She replies, empty words, as her teeth sink into her lower lip and she tries to focus on things like time and other people.
She kind of doesn’t want to.
“Let them,” she mumbles and the next thing she knows she’s closing the gap between them, pressing her hands to his chest and her lips to his.
The last time they’d kissed had been on his bed. He’d tasted of salt and regret and his body shook under her fingertips. She closes her eyes against the memory, her hand coming up to rest on his shoulder, to pull him in closer.
He’s the one to break the kiss, again, just like last time, not for sobs but for air and a moment to process things. They both need a moment.
“Iz,” he says in that tone like he thinks she needs to be brought back down to earth again, like he’s afraid that five minutes or hours or days from now this is going to be looked back on as a mistake. Hell it might be. But by then it will be last year. “My resolution was to forgive and let go.” Her hand slides around the back of his neck, feeling tense muscles and tendons there. “I think this is the letting go part.”
It must be a good enough answer for him because his lips are back on hers a second later, open-mouthed, his fingers on her cheek, the small of her back, and it’s like old times without the chaos and the doubt. He still knows how to make her moan against his mouth, still knows the curves of her body.
She hears a nine, a door slam, and she’s pushing him away when she hears, “Can you really hear the counting from all the way up here?”
Meredith and Cristina make their way to them, clearly oblivious to the previous goings-on that they’d narrowly missed. To her credit they manage to disentangle themselves from each other pretty fast.
“Sounds like it,” she manages, arms crossed once more. Alex’s hand stays on her back, from beside her, and she half leans into it.
Six.
“View’s good.”
“I’m missing a surgery for this.”
Four.
“Stop ruining it.”
“Should someone have told George about this?”
“Crap.”
Two.
“How are we going to see over the lights?”
One.
“Shh, it’s starting.”
“Oh, that’s how.” Cristina remarks, as the lights go out and the choruses of ‘Happy New Year’ ring out from below and to the North as blue and silver bursts light up the night sky, followed by gold and green ones.
And they may not toast with champagne or shout along with the crowds but the dancing colors light up her face in more ways than one.
It may not have been an especially glamorous New Year’s Eve but it was one that she was, for once, entirely content with.