it's a green christmas in this town (1/4) {ensemble}
Title: It's A Green Christmas In This Town (1/4)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek (light in this chapter), Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Sadie, Cristina, George, Callie. Other implied relationships.
Word Count: 5,163
Rating: PG-13 (for this part)
Prompt: #12 - Blizzard for 100_situations
Author's Note: I owe this to the following people for putting up with my bitching/complaining/explaining, and for cheering me on: superduperkc, kickaboutheart, and bebitched.
Summary: "They're calling for a blizzard," Sadie says, three days before Christmas, and Meredith rolls her eyes. The weathermen were always wrong.
Two weeks later, on a Monday, three days before Christmas, Meredith wakes up to an empty bed, an empty bathroom, and a shitload of noise coming from downstairs.
Nearly every light downstairs is turned on, plus the television, which is never on, and she nearly gets her foot caught in the sleeping bag that lies haphazardly on the ground, a flaw in the ‘taking in strays’ methodology that she’s adopted. When she looks up from glancing at the offending item that could’ve broken her ankle, Sadie’s laughing at her over a mug full of coffee. “Perhaps something should be done about our current situation.”
“Three beds. Six people. Unless you and Lexie want to bunk together and we can somehow convince Izzie to pick a room, then you’re stuck.” Meredith answers, simply. Their living situation is, in a matter of hours, going to be the least of her concerns. She’ll have patients and surgeries to scrub in on then. Thank goodness. “Why is everyone up?”
Sadie nods towards the television, which currently is airing some traffic report that Meredith doubts has anything to do with this. Unless there was some big multi-car accident and they’re expecting causalities. In which case she wants to know why she wasn’t woken up. Sadie clears it up fairly quickly, “They’re expecting some big blizzard.”
Meredith frowns at the television. “Of course they are,” she answers, resignedly. They’ll have their work cut out for them then. At least maybe then Cristina will be in a better mood (it’s been weeks, and they’ve only just barely gotten to some form of a happy medium; it’s nowhere near where they used to be and that kills her but she certainly isn’t going to let that show).
There’s a shrug and then Sadie takes a seat on the couch amid the blankets and Meredith continues on into the kitchen, which appears to be where everyone’s gathered. Derek with his orange juice, his Muesli, and his newspaper, Alex with a half-asleep, half-annoyed expression on his face, Izzie looking alternately distant and vaguely amused at absolutely nothing at all, even while cooking, and Lexie, sticking close to Derek and looking like she didn’t belong here and so thus was trying to fade into the wallpaper. Nothing new here.
“Morning,” she tries for, receiving two groans, a quick kiss on the lips from Derek, and a chirpy ‘morning’ from Lexie. “Snow?” she asks, as a way to get more of a reply. It works.
“Bullshit,” Alex says, with a shake of his head. “All it’s going to be is ice, and then there will be car crashes and the OR’s will fill up.”
“Karev, want to try not to sound so happy about that?” Derek speaks up, looking at him from over the top of his newspaper. It does absolutely nothing to deter Alex, not that she thought it would.
“I’m just saying.” He replies, moving past Izzie to get to the coffee.
“Snow’s good. Snow means happy people and white Christmases and...snow’s good.” Izzie pipes up, and Meredith shoots Alex a concerned look, which he catches and answers with one of his own. The more she watches Izzie lately, the more she thinks George may have had a point. Whatever’s going on, it stills the retort that snow also leads to the aforementioned traffic accidents and, well, death.
It won’t matter anyways; Alex is right, the weathermen are usually, almost as a rule, wrong.
---
“I’ve got to get out of there.” Lexie’s eyes are wide and tired, and she can stare at charts all she wants but it doesn’t look like much is being processed. Mark thinks it’s the sneaking around; she’s neither used to it nor very good at adapting to it.
Which is why he says, “You know there’s always my hotel room. Might solve a lot of problems.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want Derek and Meredith to know?”
“I don’t. Tell them you’re moving back in with O’Malley.” He makes a face on the man’s name, one that she catches judging by the half-amused look that flashes on her face, ever so briefly.
She’s quick to point out the flaw in his logic anyways, even if she is sleep deprived. “And when Meredith asks George and finds out I’m lying?”
“Then Derek draws and quarters me. If I’m lucky.” He sighs; she has a point. “Tell them that you got your own place.”
“On an intern’s salary? Please tell me you’re kidding.” She gets this mischievous glint in her eye then, and he’s not sure he wants to hear what comes next. Usually that’s either really bad or really good. “Are you really that insistent on me moving in with you?”
He backs up real quick at that. “I never said moving in. I said staying, briefly.”
She gives him a look like she doesn’t believe him, not even a little. “Of course not. Just staying. For a while. Because that’s so very different.”
There are some times where he wishes he was just banging one of the brainless girls at the bar, or one of the more boring plastics nurses. This might be one of them.
It’ll pass.
---
“Hey,” Meredith calls from behind her, walking up one of the hallways on the fourth floor. Cristina slows her pace, subconsciously, an automatic reaction, to let Meredith catch up with her. “Did you hear about the snow?”
“No.” She doesn’t understand why Meredith sounds so delighted by this. Or maybe sounds like she thinks Cristina should be delighted by this.
“Well they say there will be. Like of blizzard proportions. Lots of interesting surgeries on accident victims.” Now she gets it. She gets that Meredith’s trying. She appreciates it. Like normal, she also won’t be verbalizing that. “Doesn’t that kind of thing normally make you happy?”
Cristina all out stops now, so that she can look at Meredith, maybe get a better grasp of what exactly she wants from her, when she says, “Yes. But right now I have another interesting surgery to scrub in on so is there something you need?”
Meredith might have flinched. Maybe. Maybe she’s seeing things. She recovers quickly either way, somehow keeping her voice steady, even, as she replies, “No, I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Okay.” Cristina pauses, one last opportunity for Meredith to say whatever it is that seems to be eating at her. She doesn’t, just keeps her eyes on Cristina. “Thank you.”
There’s a tense moment before they go their separate ways. She wishes they could go back to the way they were before, really, she does; she just doesn’t know how to get there.
---
“White Christmases?” Denny asks, finally getting his say in now that she could reply without having people look at her like she had grown three heads because she was talking to herself. This is becoming a pattern. A pattern that was, at one time, novel and now has just grown tiring. She’s tired of having what feels like two realities to deal with. It’s just too much.
“Not today,” she sighs, for lack of anything better.
---
“Lexie,” George has been trying to get to her all day, she realizes, but she also knows what he’s going to ask, and she has no answer for him at all. At least not one that she can say. He’s determined though, and so he corners her eventually. “Did you move out and not tell me?”
She looks everywhere but into his eyes. “No, I’ve just been staying over at Meredith’s lately.”
He frowns. “Meredith’s? Really?” And it’s not that he doesn’t believe her, it’s just that he’s confused, which is way better than suspicious. Now she just has to keep it that way. That doesn’t seem too hard a prospect because he gets this look like it all suddenly makes sense as he says, “Oh are you and Meredith…I mean are you two trying to do the…”
When it doesn’t look like he’s going to find the words, she tries to supply him with an end to that sentence. “The sisterly bonding thing? I guess, sort of, yeah,” she lies right through her teeth, “In theory anyway.”
“Oh, okay, well…that’s good.”
“Yeah.” Lexie doesn’t know what else to say.
“Alright, well, I’ve got to go, but…” and the thing about George is that they communicate perfectly well in that neither of them really ever knows what to say in these situations. Maybe that was their problem. “I know things haven’t been so great but…I miss you.”
A few weeks ago that would’ve been all she needed to hear. But it’s much too late for her to say anything but, “Yeah, I miss you too,” before she walks away from him.
---
“Can I give you a hand with that?” Sadie’s lips curl, her fingers brushing against him as she moves her hips just right so that they couldn’t possibly be closer. She has yet to find a way to deal with Alex Karev so that he doesn’t end up yelling at her, and hitting on him was a last resort since he’s already got his own hot blonde - granted one who doesn’t appear to be around much these days, so there is some wiggle room.
Alex looks at her through furrowed brows and she just peers up at him, bats her eyelashes a little. “I thought you were hitting on Torres.”
Okay, well, maybe he’s a little too astute for this game. “Who says you can’t shake things up every once in awhile?”
He nods his head, like he can appreciate that, but only hands her the chart, one that by the looks of it she will have to rewrite later, and moves away, to the door. She follows, which he actually seems to expect, considering he keeps talking. “Sleeping with your superiors will get you nowhere.”
Sadie laughs, “Hardly. If I was aiming to do that I’d be sleeping with an attending now wouldn’t I?”
“Nice. But no. Not if you’re trying to shake things up like you just said.”
The smile she gives him is less of a perfectly calculated, trying to get him to look at her like that kind of smile, and more of a sudden understanding that they share a few more similarities than she had initially thought. “So it’s not just any hot blonde that does it for you?” she asks, giving up on the flirting angle altogether, in favor of some sort of newfound comfort level of bantering that they’d just found.
“Now you’re getting somewhere.” He replies, with a smirk. She thinks he might be much more tolerable after this point.
---
The clinic is busy by the time Meredith wades her way through the sea of patients, nurses, and various interns, over to George, who stands amongst it all with a sort of concerned look on his face, one that seems to have taken up permanent residence there the past few times that she’s seen him. “You paged me? Overload?”
“Izzie isn’t here. Again.” He says, like that single fact could possibly make or break his day, the world.
Meredith, for her part, simply shrugs, unconcerned. “She’s probably just with Alex. Or busy with other patients.”
“No.” George shakes his head. Apparently she’s missing the severity of the situation, because he adds, “Izzie hasn’t been here in four days. Before it was a week. She forgot to open it up last time, and I think she forgot to close it because there were people inside before there were doctors and…something is really wrong here Mer.”
She frowns. “You should ask Alex what’s going on. He probably knows more than we do.”
“I tried that, weeks ago. He just told me never to bring Izzie up with him again.” It sounded enough like Alex for Meredith to know that George had probably pressed and prodded on the topic too. “Izzie won’t talk to me. Says everything’s fine. But sometimes she’ll talk to herself or she’ll forget things. She can be looking in your general direction but you can tell she’s got her attention on something else.”
Izzie has been distant, that’s for sure, and noticeably so. But Meredith’s never seen her talk to herself, and, unless George is the one imagining things, that’s something that bears bringing up and doing something about. “I’ll try talking to him. He listens better when it’s me.”
“Thank you.” He sounds unsurprisingly sincere. It’s the desperation that creeps into his voice that concerns her.
---
“Mark.”
Every day is a new day to possibly get caught and have his ass kicked back to square one by Derek, which is why he takes a moment, pretty much every time he runs into Derek, to get his story straight, his head straight. In the space of one long, deep breath, he pulls it together, puts a look of nonchalance on his face. Then he can turn around. “Morning.”
“More like afternoon,” Derek smiles when he says it, and Mark throws a quick glance at the clock to find that he’s right. It’s almost two. Lexie isn’t the only one with a messed up sleep schedule, and thus an equally messed up internal clock. “When do you get off shift?”
“Nine.” It’s when he’s supposed to meet Lexie at the bar, drive her back to his hotel room, same old, same old. “Why?”
“My car broke down, and Meredith drove in before me with Sadie and she gets off at six. I was wondering if I could get a ride back home if it isn’t too much trouble.”
So much for those plans. However, this is Derek, and, well, unfortunately he kind of has to take precedence. “Yeah, sure, no trouble at all.”
“Thanks.” There’s a nagging little voice in the back of Mark’s mind that tells him Derek wouldn’t sound so grateful if he knew, and that voice is slowly driving him toward insanity. Derek turns to leave, but he still throws over his shoulder, “I think Dr. Torres needs you for a consult by the way.”
Of course, now the question becomes whether she meant a consult involving patients or…something else.
---
“Is everything alright with you and Izzie?” There’s just no other way she can figure out to broach it with him. Besides, Alex has always been a fan of the straightforward, no bullshit approach.
He looks ever so slightly annoyed with her, or maybe it’s the lab results he’s looking out. Either way, his words come out tinged with irritation. “First George, now you. Is Yang next?”
Meredith sits down next to him, despite getting what amounts to the cold shoulder, and tries again. “She’s out of it Alex. You know that as well as I do. And George has tried talking to her and got nowhere.” She sighs, waiting for a retort that doesn’t come. “If anyone you’re the one who needs to talk to her.”
There’s an absence of the normal defensiveness, more of disappointed admittance, as he replies, “She won’t talk to me either, okay. I’ve tried, and the farthest I got was burning a sweater, okay, so just…don’t.”
“A sweater?” She asks, confused, thinking, then, “The sweater she made for Denny?”
“Yeah, I know. The heart patient guy shows up and then all of a sudden she disappears. I know, okay. I know and I don’t know what to do about it, and I definitely don’t want to think about it until I have to.” He talks in circles, never quite looking at her. She nods, even still. “It has to pass. Right? This has to pass on its own.”
No, she wants to say, but that simply isn’t what he wants to hear and she isn’t really in the mood for truth-telling and hurting people. What she says is, “Right. Everything will be fine. She’s strong; she’s gotten through worse.”
---
This Part Continued...
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Meredith/Derek (light in this chapter), Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Sadie, Cristina, George, Callie. Other implied relationships.
Word Count: 5,163
Rating: PG-13 (for this part)
Prompt: #12 - Blizzard for 100_situations
Author's Note: I owe this to the following people for putting up with my bitching/complaining/explaining, and for cheering me on: superduperkc, kickaboutheart, and bebitched.
Summary: "They're calling for a blizzard," Sadie says, three days before Christmas, and Meredith rolls her eyes. The weathermen were always wrong.
Two weeks later, on a Monday, three days before Christmas, Meredith wakes up to an empty bed, an empty bathroom, and a shitload of noise coming from downstairs.
Nearly every light downstairs is turned on, plus the television, which is never on, and she nearly gets her foot caught in the sleeping bag that lies haphazardly on the ground, a flaw in the ‘taking in strays’ methodology that she’s adopted. When she looks up from glancing at the offending item that could’ve broken her ankle, Sadie’s laughing at her over a mug full of coffee. “Perhaps something should be done about our current situation.”
“Three beds. Six people. Unless you and Lexie want to bunk together and we can somehow convince Izzie to pick a room, then you’re stuck.” Meredith answers, simply. Their living situation is, in a matter of hours, going to be the least of her concerns. She’ll have patients and surgeries to scrub in on then. Thank goodness. “Why is everyone up?”
Sadie nods towards the television, which currently is airing some traffic report that Meredith doubts has anything to do with this. Unless there was some big multi-car accident and they’re expecting causalities. In which case she wants to know why she wasn’t woken up. Sadie clears it up fairly quickly, “They’re expecting some big blizzard.”
Meredith frowns at the television. “Of course they are,” she answers, resignedly. They’ll have their work cut out for them then. At least maybe then Cristina will be in a better mood (it’s been weeks, and they’ve only just barely gotten to some form of a happy medium; it’s nowhere near where they used to be and that kills her but she certainly isn’t going to let that show).
There’s a shrug and then Sadie takes a seat on the couch amid the blankets and Meredith continues on into the kitchen, which appears to be where everyone’s gathered. Derek with his orange juice, his Muesli, and his newspaper, Alex with a half-asleep, half-annoyed expression on his face, Izzie looking alternately distant and vaguely amused at absolutely nothing at all, even while cooking, and Lexie, sticking close to Derek and looking like she didn’t belong here and so thus was trying to fade into the wallpaper. Nothing new here.
“Morning,” she tries for, receiving two groans, a quick kiss on the lips from Derek, and a chirpy ‘morning’ from Lexie. “Snow?” she asks, as a way to get more of a reply. It works.
“Bullshit,” Alex says, with a shake of his head. “All it’s going to be is ice, and then there will be car crashes and the OR’s will fill up.”
“Karev, want to try not to sound so happy about that?” Derek speaks up, looking at him from over the top of his newspaper. It does absolutely nothing to deter Alex, not that she thought it would.
“I’m just saying.” He replies, moving past Izzie to get to the coffee.
“Snow’s good. Snow means happy people and white Christmases and...snow’s good.” Izzie pipes up, and Meredith shoots Alex a concerned look, which he catches and answers with one of his own. The more she watches Izzie lately, the more she thinks George may have had a point. Whatever’s going on, it stills the retort that snow also leads to the aforementioned traffic accidents and, well, death.
It won’t matter anyways; Alex is right, the weathermen are usually, almost as a rule, wrong.
---
“I’ve got to get out of there.” Lexie’s eyes are wide and tired, and she can stare at charts all she wants but it doesn’t look like much is being processed. Mark thinks it’s the sneaking around; she’s neither used to it nor very good at adapting to it.
Which is why he says, “You know there’s always my hotel room. Might solve a lot of problems.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want Derek and Meredith to know?”
“I don’t. Tell them you’re moving back in with O’Malley.” He makes a face on the man’s name, one that she catches judging by the half-amused look that flashes on her face, ever so briefly.
She’s quick to point out the flaw in his logic anyways, even if she is sleep deprived. “And when Meredith asks George and finds out I’m lying?”
“Then Derek draws and quarters me. If I’m lucky.” He sighs; she has a point. “Tell them that you got your own place.”
“On an intern’s salary? Please tell me you’re kidding.” She gets this mischievous glint in her eye then, and he’s not sure he wants to hear what comes next. Usually that’s either really bad or really good. “Are you really that insistent on me moving in with you?”
He backs up real quick at that. “I never said moving in. I said staying, briefly.”
She gives him a look like she doesn’t believe him, not even a little. “Of course not. Just staying. For a while. Because that’s so very different.”
There are some times where he wishes he was just banging one of the brainless girls at the bar, or one of the more boring plastics nurses. This might be one of them.
It’ll pass.
---
“Hey,” Meredith calls from behind her, walking up one of the hallways on the fourth floor. Cristina slows her pace, subconsciously, an automatic reaction, to let Meredith catch up with her. “Did you hear about the snow?”
“No.” She doesn’t understand why Meredith sounds so delighted by this. Or maybe sounds like she thinks Cristina should be delighted by this.
“Well they say there will be. Like of blizzard proportions. Lots of interesting surgeries on accident victims.” Now she gets it. She gets that Meredith’s trying. She appreciates it. Like normal, she also won’t be verbalizing that. “Doesn’t that kind of thing normally make you happy?”
Cristina all out stops now, so that she can look at Meredith, maybe get a better grasp of what exactly she wants from her, when she says, “Yes. But right now I have another interesting surgery to scrub in on so is there something you need?”
Meredith might have flinched. Maybe. Maybe she’s seeing things. She recovers quickly either way, somehow keeping her voice steady, even, as she replies, “No, I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Okay.” Cristina pauses, one last opportunity for Meredith to say whatever it is that seems to be eating at her. She doesn’t, just keeps her eyes on Cristina. “Thank you.”
There’s a tense moment before they go their separate ways. She wishes they could go back to the way they were before, really, she does; she just doesn’t know how to get there.
---
“White Christmases?” Denny asks, finally getting his say in now that she could reply without having people look at her like she had grown three heads because she was talking to herself. This is becoming a pattern. A pattern that was, at one time, novel and now has just grown tiring. She’s tired of having what feels like two realities to deal with. It’s just too much.
“Not today,” she sighs, for lack of anything better.
---
“Lexie,” George has been trying to get to her all day, she realizes, but she also knows what he’s going to ask, and she has no answer for him at all. At least not one that she can say. He’s determined though, and so he corners her eventually. “Did you move out and not tell me?”
She looks everywhere but into his eyes. “No, I’ve just been staying over at Meredith’s lately.”
He frowns. “Meredith’s? Really?” And it’s not that he doesn’t believe her, it’s just that he’s confused, which is way better than suspicious. Now she just has to keep it that way. That doesn’t seem too hard a prospect because he gets this look like it all suddenly makes sense as he says, “Oh are you and Meredith…I mean are you two trying to do the…”
When it doesn’t look like he’s going to find the words, she tries to supply him with an end to that sentence. “The sisterly bonding thing? I guess, sort of, yeah,” she lies right through her teeth, “In theory anyway.”
“Oh, okay, well…that’s good.”
“Yeah.” Lexie doesn’t know what else to say.
“Alright, well, I’ve got to go, but…” and the thing about George is that they communicate perfectly well in that neither of them really ever knows what to say in these situations. Maybe that was their problem. “I know things haven’t been so great but…I miss you.”
A few weeks ago that would’ve been all she needed to hear. But it’s much too late for her to say anything but, “Yeah, I miss you too,” before she walks away from him.
---
“Can I give you a hand with that?” Sadie’s lips curl, her fingers brushing against him as she moves her hips just right so that they couldn’t possibly be closer. She has yet to find a way to deal with Alex Karev so that he doesn’t end up yelling at her, and hitting on him was a last resort since he’s already got his own hot blonde - granted one who doesn’t appear to be around much these days, so there is some wiggle room.
Alex looks at her through furrowed brows and she just peers up at him, bats her eyelashes a little. “I thought you were hitting on Torres.”
Okay, well, maybe he’s a little too astute for this game. “Who says you can’t shake things up every once in awhile?”
He nods his head, like he can appreciate that, but only hands her the chart, one that by the looks of it she will have to rewrite later, and moves away, to the door. She follows, which he actually seems to expect, considering he keeps talking. “Sleeping with your superiors will get you nowhere.”
Sadie laughs, “Hardly. If I was aiming to do that I’d be sleeping with an attending now wouldn’t I?”
“Nice. But no. Not if you’re trying to shake things up like you just said.”
The smile she gives him is less of a perfectly calculated, trying to get him to look at her like that kind of smile, and more of a sudden understanding that they share a few more similarities than she had initially thought. “So it’s not just any hot blonde that does it for you?” she asks, giving up on the flirting angle altogether, in favor of some sort of newfound comfort level of bantering that they’d just found.
“Now you’re getting somewhere.” He replies, with a smirk. She thinks he might be much more tolerable after this point.
---
The clinic is busy by the time Meredith wades her way through the sea of patients, nurses, and various interns, over to George, who stands amongst it all with a sort of concerned look on his face, one that seems to have taken up permanent residence there the past few times that she’s seen him. “You paged me? Overload?”
“Izzie isn’t here. Again.” He says, like that single fact could possibly make or break his day, the world.
Meredith, for her part, simply shrugs, unconcerned. “She’s probably just with Alex. Or busy with other patients.”
“No.” George shakes his head. Apparently she’s missing the severity of the situation, because he adds, “Izzie hasn’t been here in four days. Before it was a week. She forgot to open it up last time, and I think she forgot to close it because there were people inside before there were doctors and…something is really wrong here Mer.”
She frowns. “You should ask Alex what’s going on. He probably knows more than we do.”
“I tried that, weeks ago. He just told me never to bring Izzie up with him again.” It sounded enough like Alex for Meredith to know that George had probably pressed and prodded on the topic too. “Izzie won’t talk to me. Says everything’s fine. But sometimes she’ll talk to herself or she’ll forget things. She can be looking in your general direction but you can tell she’s got her attention on something else.”
Izzie has been distant, that’s for sure, and noticeably so. But Meredith’s never seen her talk to herself, and, unless George is the one imagining things, that’s something that bears bringing up and doing something about. “I’ll try talking to him. He listens better when it’s me.”
“Thank you.” He sounds unsurprisingly sincere. It’s the desperation that creeps into his voice that concerns her.
---
“Mark.”
Every day is a new day to possibly get caught and have his ass kicked back to square one by Derek, which is why he takes a moment, pretty much every time he runs into Derek, to get his story straight, his head straight. In the space of one long, deep breath, he pulls it together, puts a look of nonchalance on his face. Then he can turn around. “Morning.”
“More like afternoon,” Derek smiles when he says it, and Mark throws a quick glance at the clock to find that he’s right. It’s almost two. Lexie isn’t the only one with a messed up sleep schedule, and thus an equally messed up internal clock. “When do you get off shift?”
“Nine.” It’s when he’s supposed to meet Lexie at the bar, drive her back to his hotel room, same old, same old. “Why?”
“My car broke down, and Meredith drove in before me with Sadie and she gets off at six. I was wondering if I could get a ride back home if it isn’t too much trouble.”
So much for those plans. However, this is Derek, and, well, unfortunately he kind of has to take precedence. “Yeah, sure, no trouble at all.”
“Thanks.” There’s a nagging little voice in the back of Mark’s mind that tells him Derek wouldn’t sound so grateful if he knew, and that voice is slowly driving him toward insanity. Derek turns to leave, but he still throws over his shoulder, “I think Dr. Torres needs you for a consult by the way.”
Of course, now the question becomes whether she meant a consult involving patients or…something else.
---
“Is everything alright with you and Izzie?” There’s just no other way she can figure out to broach it with him. Besides, Alex has always been a fan of the straightforward, no bullshit approach.
He looks ever so slightly annoyed with her, or maybe it’s the lab results he’s looking out. Either way, his words come out tinged with irritation. “First George, now you. Is Yang next?”
Meredith sits down next to him, despite getting what amounts to the cold shoulder, and tries again. “She’s out of it Alex. You know that as well as I do. And George has tried talking to her and got nowhere.” She sighs, waiting for a retort that doesn’t come. “If anyone you’re the one who needs to talk to her.”
There’s an absence of the normal defensiveness, more of disappointed admittance, as he replies, “She won’t talk to me either, okay. I’ve tried, and the farthest I got was burning a sweater, okay, so just…don’t.”
“A sweater?” She asks, confused, thinking, then, “The sweater she made for Denny?”
“Yeah, I know. The heart patient guy shows up and then all of a sudden she disappears. I know, okay. I know and I don’t know what to do about it, and I definitely don’t want to think about it until I have to.” He talks in circles, never quite looking at her. She nods, even still. “It has to pass. Right? This has to pass on its own.”
No, she wants to say, but that simply isn’t what he wants to hear and she isn’t really in the mood for truth-telling and hurting people. What she says is, “Right. Everything will be fine. She’s strong; she’s gotten through worse.”
---
This Part Continued...