(no subject)
Title: I'm Finally Seeing
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: George | Lexie/Mark, Lexie/George
Word Count: 823
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to 5x03 - Here Comes The Flood, vagueness beyond.
Summary: George just has the most atrocious timing in the world, really, because if he isn't doing things too late then he's not noticing things at all, getting blindsided at the worst moment possible.
It feels like it happens faster than it really does. One minute Lexie’s standing in the kitchen laughing at him, telling him his cooking is only slightly better than Meredith’s, and ordering Chinese - the next she’s gone.
George isn’t really sure about the timing - she was there when he got home Monday, he never came home Tuesday, and on Thursday he woke up on the couch to a silent apartment. They lose concept of time very easily when twelve hour days can blend into sixteen and eighteen hour ones so seamlessly.
“Dude she moved out; even I know that.” Alex replies to a question that wasn’t posed to him, more to Meredith, who only nods and steps off the elevator with nothing but a sympathetic frown.
Her stuff was still there though, in the apartment, clothes shoved in drawers, her toothbrush still next to the sink. The apartment still smelled of her shampoo and candles that alternately reminded him of apple pie and sugar cookies (it always made him feel at home because his mom used to bake and then Izzie - ). He only saw her in the halls, always when he was busy, and she was always assigned to plastics (a connection he won’t make until it’s spelled out in big letters).
And George never really noticed so much as took for granted but he misses her and the apartment feels too big and silent and there’s this void, the best friend void, which she’d strolled right in and filled when Izzie couldn’t, and he doesn’t really know what to do.
“Sloan,” Alex says, this time because he was asked, since he’s apparently the authority on this, or at least the only one who will talk, and George doesn’t get it. At all. Except he does because he thought she was sleeping with Sloan when she started telling him to shut up and didn’t get yelled at for it, and maybe this is just confirmation.
Not that he can ask because she’s either avoiding him or they’ve added a whole other wing to this hospital.
It’s not hard to find out where Mark Sloan lives. With the amount of people in this hospital who’ve slept with him you only have to ask about three nurses before you get both the hotel and the room number.
When Mark answers the door the day George finally gets the guts to, you know, knock, there’s this brief, gnawing fear that Alex just lied to him completely, because making a fool out of George is like in Alex’s top ten favorite things to do, but then he says something like, “and now he notices” and there’s Lexie sitting on the bed in a white bathrobe, looking very much like she might throw up.
This is, obviously, the point at which everything starts to become clear.
Because the smiles and the laughing at lame jokes, the late-night study sessions and avoidance of surgeries in order to help him, the ‘I feel like we’re something more’, they were all big red, flashing indicators that she likes him and he missed that too and now they’re here.
“George,” she says, like a whisper, like a prayer, and then its, “What are you doing here?”
He thinks he might just be developing a stutter twenty-some years late when he can’t quite manage to get out, “am I interrupting something?” in one smooth sentence. Mark’s still laughing, predictable, like clockwork, because he mocks everyone, and he would’ve thought that wouldn’t be the kind of guy Lexie would go for but then again it wasn’t. He was just the one waiting in the wings.
“Not…” she starts but she’s not great at lying and Mark has stopped long enough to come back into view and grabs the doorknob, his body partially blocking George’s view of Lexie and there’s this knowledge somewhere deep in his gut that this is where he’s going to lose her when he never even knew he had her.
“Actually you were O’Malley.” There’s not even a goodnight, just the door closing, softly, and George stands there, processing, in an empty hallway of the hotel he used to live in, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It does.
On the other side of the door he can hear her back smacking against it, her laughter high and breathy, and he can picture the smug, self-satisfied grin on Mark’s face. Got another one, another notch on his bedpost, except apparently she’s unofficially living there now and George really wants to know what that means but there’s no one to ask and she was the one he would’ve talked to about these things.
(But like he said, he lost her, and if she’s the kind of girl who can hold down a guy like Mark Sloan for more than one good lay then he really wonders just how much he missed out on - with a girl like that -- )