this is not goodbye, just time for me to rest my head {alex/izzie}
Title: This Is Not Goodbye, Just Time For Me To Rest My Head
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Izzie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,602
Prompt: #66 - Sick for 100_situations
Author's Note: This can either be depressing or uplifting. Pick your poison.
Summary: Post 5.15. Vague spec. Sometimes he thinks, really, this should be something he just laughs off by now. First his mother, then Rebecca, now her.
There’s a grieving period.
It lasts exactly four days, from the moment they find out right up until the moment when the plane ticket falls out of her purse and onto the wooden floor without a sound, just the way she planned to leave.
This is Wednesday.
---
Sunday morning he wakes up to an empty bed, not for the first time, definitely not for the last. The clock reads seven, no alarm, and it’s their day off so he reasons that she’s in the shower or downstairs eating breakfast.
“I haven’t seen her all morning.” Meredith tells him, over her cup of coffee, as Derek gives her a quick kiss on the cheek as he heads out - something about a patient he hadn’t known about until last minute.
Sadie’s observing them with carefully lowered eyebrows, like she knows something and they both catch on to that at about the same time. She shrugs out, “She said something about errands. Left about an hour ago.”
Meredith presses this for him. “Did she say when she’d be back?”
“No.” She wets her lips, runs a hand through messy blonde curls. “She did seem a little…off though.”
He turns his gaze to Meredith again, and it’s not that he’s worried it’s just that he’s only half-awake (that’s what he’ll claim anyway). She looks at Sadie, then back at him, and screws up her face into something that’s at least half reassuring. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
And then Derek’s car pulled back into the driveway almost six hours later. With Izzie in it.
She bypasses the living room, him, and everyone else and he takes one look at Derek’s somber expression before darting upstairs only to find the bedroom door locked and him on the wrong side of it.
“Iz,” he says, against the door, when he’s tired of knocking and twisting the knob futilely. “Just let me in.”
She doesn’t, and he drops to the floor, along the wall, and waits there.
Derek’s voice from downstairs is a soft murmur, interrupted every now and then by Meredith trying to straddle the line between whispering and yelling, mostly ending up on the side of the latter; he hears a lot of “why” and “how” from her. Sadie says something about “potentially life-threatening” and he lets his head roll back with a soft thunk against the wall.
He sits there for some ridiculous amount of time before Meredith finds him, following his example and folding herself against the wall. She doesn’t say anything and he listens to her breathe, before she puts a hand on his arm and then her head on his shoulder.
Izzie’s door never opens and he sleeps in that same spot that night.
---
Sometimes he thinks, really, this should be something he just laughs off by now. First, his mother, then Rebecca, now Izzie.
It makes him feel like a curse. Like it’s his fault. Like there’s something that either draws them to him, or that he causes to happen within them.
It’s stupid and unreasonable and illogical, but he can’t help thinking like that on days like these.
He should be laughing but tears sting his eyes, and it’s already taking all the energy he has left in him to stop them from becoming anything but a minor annoyance, to stop them from falling.
---
In the morning he tries the door, turning it too hard, to match his expectations. He doesn’t expect it to be open but the door gives easily, almost slamming into the wall until he catches it and stops it.
She isn’t asleep. Instead she’s cross-legged on the bed, watching him watch her.
“Iz,” he exhales, because that’s where this always starts, her name said like a prayer.
Her teeth bite into her bottom lip, draining the color from it, and she asks, “Are you still so sure you’re not going anywhere?”
Alex’s answer is the way he falls to the bed beside her, his hands on her arms as he presses a kiss to her forehead, to her damp cheek. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, against her skin, and she makes a noise that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “And I do love you.”
He says it again because he feels like he needs to, and because he can’t stop himself from thinking it, from thinking in the form of last times and finalities. He still doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, and he knows this feeling of desperation will dissipate once he does, but for now he’s going to say it.
She nods against him, their foreheads resting against each other. He doesn’t let himself focus in on the fact that she still hasn’t said it back.
---
There’s suddenly all these plans to make. Hospital visits and potential procedures, tests, and Derek explains them all rather patiently, or tries to, but they’re not two minutes in before Izzie gets up off the couch and walks out the door. There’s a long moment while they listen to the car door slam shut before she floors it down the street.
“Just explain it to me.” Alex says, when all he can hear is the wind whipping outside the windows and a ringing in his ears, tense breathing around him.
Derek looks like he’s about to start spewing some speech about how he really should be speaking to the patient first, the same speech that he’s both heard and given, but Meredith nudges him purposefully. “We’re all doctors here,” she reminds him.
By the time Derek’s finished rattling off everything Alex knows two things: they’re all doctors, and they’re all mostly helpless - it’s left up to luck and chance.
---
When Izzie comes back she locks him out again. It’s becoming habit, apparently, but he only has to knock three times before she opens it this time.
“Do you want to talk?” He asks, which is code for ‘do you want to hear what you’re about to have to go through’. He’s hoping maybe she’ll be more open to hearing it from him, but then again maybe not. He isn’t ever very sure whether he makes things worse or better, he just keeps hoping for the latter.
“Not really,” she replies, going back inside their bedroom but leaving the door open. He follows, closing it quietly behind him, and leaning back against it.
Alex racks his brain for something positive to say among all the negative he’s heard today and somehow comes up with, “He said you caught it early, that that gives you a better chance and more time to work with.”
She nods. Then, “I think I’m going to get some sleep. I didn’t get much last night.”
He’s aware. It’s hard not to be when she’s tossing and turning every five minutes, can’t stay still, and every sound she makes wakes him up once more.
“Alright,” he replies, watching her lie down on her side, curl into herself. It takes a lot to force himself to go back downstairs, but he gets it. She needs her space just as much as anyone else.
He just doesn’t know when he became the overbearing one of the two.
---
He gets home late on Wednesday. His shift isn’t over until almost ten and he bypasses the bar in favor of heading home. The Chief gave Izzie the rest of the week off, claiming something about how she needed time to process and figure out what she was going to do. He wasn’t sure it was a half bad idea - that was until he came home to found her gone, again.
This disappearing act was becoming about as much habit as locking him out was, and neither were very comforting from his angle.
“Hey,” he says, from the doorway and she startles a little, knocking her purse off the hook she’d just hung it on. It falls to the ground, on the clasp, its contents cascading to the floor.
They both kneel to pick up the stuff at the same time and that’s when he sees it. “You scared me,” she starts, but he only half hears her, plucking a rectangle shaped piece of paper in pale blue and white off the floor. It doesn’t take him long to scan it, even less to turn accusing eyes on her. She catches on a second later. “That’s not what you - “
“It’s a plane ticket. What else could I possibly think it is?” Up until now he’s been Mr. Supportive Boyfriend, not once even thinking about raising his voice, let alone yelling, in the past four days. And now he’s done with that because there’s a plane ticket and his girlfriend who keeps disappearing on these random errands that she doesn’t want to talk about, and who also keeps locking him out of their room. Clearly trying to be helpful is in fact helping nothing at all. “New York?”
She looks down, toying with the cap of the lipstick that had fallen out as well, moving it on and off with a clicking noise that he’s fairly sure is going to drive him insane. “It seemed like a good place to disappear,” serves as her answer.
The ticket is round trip, he notes, with some amount of relief. Two weeks. It’s not running, it’s just a temporary escape. “You know this isn’t a - “
“Good idea,” Izzie finishes for him. He nods, and he thinks this might be the first time she’s really looked at him with clear eyes since the day they found out. She doesn’t look confused or scared or empty anymore. She looks like Izzie, the woman who believes in things like hope and fate and luck. “I need this, Alex. And I know it doesn’t make any sense and it’s not what I should be doing but you said yourself it’s still early. I just need some time to clear my head.”
He nods again. It’s all he really can do. It’s not like he can tell her not to go, it’s not even like he should. He just wishes he was less concerned about how easily she could convert that ticket to one way.
---
It takes a full day of strained silence for her to even acknowledge it. She abandons her coffee mug on the kitchen counter, in favor of sliding her hands over his own, unmoving, leaning in so he has no choice as to what he’s looking at. Her eyes have that glint to him; he used to want it back, he used to think he’d give anything to see that again, now he’s just worried she’s going to go and do something stupid.
Alex isn’t a worrier.
“You know I’m not leaving for good.” She reminds him, and he watches full pink lips move and tries to believe the sounds coming from between them. “It’s not ‘goodbye’. It’s ‘see you later’.”
“It’s gambling.” He says, boiling it down to the simplest thing he can think of. It’s holding a pair of sevens and going all in, hoping that the other person will either chicken out or have something lower.
“It’s taking a chance.” She shakes her head, presses those lips together, and a strand of her blonde hair grazes his cheek. “There is still so much I want to do with my life. And if I don’t have - “ he was probably going to say something uncharacteristic, something like ‘don’t talk like that’ or ‘you’ll be okay’, some lie with no grounding in reality, and he’s never really understood that urge she’s always seemed to have with patients until right now. “I mean, we’re doctors, be realistic here. It’s not about how long you live it’s about how you live; right now I just want to live what I have. Whether that’s a few months or a few years.”
Selfishness dictates that he’s going to ask why she can’t do that here if he doesn’t bite his tongue, so he does, and tries to access that place in time where he wouldn’t have needed to have her in sights just to feel like he was okay, like they were okay.
“I’ll be back, I swear,” she breathes, right before she uses those lips to close the distance between them.
---
She wakes him up at some ridiculously early time the next day that he has off, some Monday or maybe a Tuesday, the days have all begun to blur, and she’s still off work and her bags sit packed by the door in their bedroom, waiting.
“The sun isn’t even out.” He groans, rolling into the pillows. The bed shifts, and she’s right in his personal space, but sitting up and tugging at his shoulder.
“The sun is out, if you would bother opening your eyes.” She says, giving up more or less on the tugging and instead settling for tracing patterns along his arm. “I watched it rise.”
That gets him awake. “You watched the sunrise?” Alex squints at the clock, returns with a number a second later. “Why?”
She shrugs. “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen one.” It’s random, but he’s starting to expect that from her lately. Her hands move down and she shifts a little, so that she’s straddling his hips as she grins down at him.
“Are you feeling okay?” He asks. It’s perhaps the strangest wake up call he’s received in the past few months, and he just has to ask.
Izzie laughs at that. “Never better,” she tells him, leaning down to kiss him, as he lets his hands come up underneath the hem of her thin t-shirt and pull up. She moans into his mouth, when his warm fingers hit her cool skin, and he decides that he might as well have as much of her as he can while that’s still an option.
---
New York comes three days afterwards.
He drives her to the airport, managing to avoid any last minute pleading with her to just stay, that there will be time for things like this eventually (no guarantees - but nothing in life really is). Rain beats down on the windshield and she smiles about sunny days and pleasant forecasts in New York. “I won’t miss the weather,” she exhales, and her breath against the window turns to steam.
“You have everything?” Alex asks, seconds after her boarding call. His hand is on her arm, and he’s having a really fun time trying to convince himself to let go.
“Yeah,” she replies, looking down at his hand on her and then back up at him, a silent question. He breathes, releases her, and she nods. They’re really going to do this. She’s really going to do this. She turns to him, hands on either side of his face, determination in her eyes that he mistakes as a sign that she’s about to re-list all the reasons that she’s about to get on that plane. Instead, the words he finds falling from her lips are of a very different variety. “I love you,” she says, like a promise, holds his gaze.
He can’t do anything but stare and feel this stupid smile try to creep onto his face. She nods, something like a job well done in her own smile, and then she’s off, heading towards the gate, the admission her version of goodbye, the absence of the actual word completely intentional. It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later.
Let me go, echoes in the air, in his head, and he tries to ignore the gut feeling that this is the last he’ll see of her.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Izzie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,602
Prompt: #66 - Sick for 100_situations
Author's Note: This can either be depressing or uplifting. Pick your poison.
Summary: Post 5.15. Vague spec. Sometimes he thinks, really, this should be something he just laughs off by now. First his mother, then Rebecca, now her.
There’s a grieving period.
It lasts exactly four days, from the moment they find out right up until the moment when the plane ticket falls out of her purse and onto the wooden floor without a sound, just the way she planned to leave.
This is Wednesday.
---
Sunday morning he wakes up to an empty bed, not for the first time, definitely not for the last. The clock reads seven, no alarm, and it’s their day off so he reasons that she’s in the shower or downstairs eating breakfast.
“I haven’t seen her all morning.” Meredith tells him, over her cup of coffee, as Derek gives her a quick kiss on the cheek as he heads out - something about a patient he hadn’t known about until last minute.
Sadie’s observing them with carefully lowered eyebrows, like she knows something and they both catch on to that at about the same time. She shrugs out, “She said something about errands. Left about an hour ago.”
Meredith presses this for him. “Did she say when she’d be back?”
“No.” She wets her lips, runs a hand through messy blonde curls. “She did seem a little…off though.”
He turns his gaze to Meredith again, and it’s not that he’s worried it’s just that he’s only half-awake (that’s what he’ll claim anyway). She looks at Sadie, then back at him, and screws up her face into something that’s at least half reassuring. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
And then Derek’s car pulled back into the driveway almost six hours later. With Izzie in it.
She bypasses the living room, him, and everyone else and he takes one look at Derek’s somber expression before darting upstairs only to find the bedroom door locked and him on the wrong side of it.
“Iz,” he says, against the door, when he’s tired of knocking and twisting the knob futilely. “Just let me in.”
She doesn’t, and he drops to the floor, along the wall, and waits there.
Derek’s voice from downstairs is a soft murmur, interrupted every now and then by Meredith trying to straddle the line between whispering and yelling, mostly ending up on the side of the latter; he hears a lot of “why” and “how” from her. Sadie says something about “potentially life-threatening” and he lets his head roll back with a soft thunk against the wall.
He sits there for some ridiculous amount of time before Meredith finds him, following his example and folding herself against the wall. She doesn’t say anything and he listens to her breathe, before she puts a hand on his arm and then her head on his shoulder.
Izzie’s door never opens and he sleeps in that same spot that night.
---
Sometimes he thinks, really, this should be something he just laughs off by now. First, his mother, then Rebecca, now Izzie.
It makes him feel like a curse. Like it’s his fault. Like there’s something that either draws them to him, or that he causes to happen within them.
It’s stupid and unreasonable and illogical, but he can’t help thinking like that on days like these.
He should be laughing but tears sting his eyes, and it’s already taking all the energy he has left in him to stop them from becoming anything but a minor annoyance, to stop them from falling.
---
In the morning he tries the door, turning it too hard, to match his expectations. He doesn’t expect it to be open but the door gives easily, almost slamming into the wall until he catches it and stops it.
She isn’t asleep. Instead she’s cross-legged on the bed, watching him watch her.
“Iz,” he exhales, because that’s where this always starts, her name said like a prayer.
Her teeth bite into her bottom lip, draining the color from it, and she asks, “Are you still so sure you’re not going anywhere?”
Alex’s answer is the way he falls to the bed beside her, his hands on her arms as he presses a kiss to her forehead, to her damp cheek. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, against her skin, and she makes a noise that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “And I do love you.”
He says it again because he feels like he needs to, and because he can’t stop himself from thinking it, from thinking in the form of last times and finalities. He still doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, and he knows this feeling of desperation will dissipate once he does, but for now he’s going to say it.
She nods against him, their foreheads resting against each other. He doesn’t let himself focus in on the fact that she still hasn’t said it back.
---
There’s suddenly all these plans to make. Hospital visits and potential procedures, tests, and Derek explains them all rather patiently, or tries to, but they’re not two minutes in before Izzie gets up off the couch and walks out the door. There’s a long moment while they listen to the car door slam shut before she floors it down the street.
“Just explain it to me.” Alex says, when all he can hear is the wind whipping outside the windows and a ringing in his ears, tense breathing around him.
Derek looks like he’s about to start spewing some speech about how he really should be speaking to the patient first, the same speech that he’s both heard and given, but Meredith nudges him purposefully. “We’re all doctors here,” she reminds him.
By the time Derek’s finished rattling off everything Alex knows two things: they’re all doctors, and they’re all mostly helpless - it’s left up to luck and chance.
---
When Izzie comes back she locks him out again. It’s becoming habit, apparently, but he only has to knock three times before she opens it this time.
“Do you want to talk?” He asks, which is code for ‘do you want to hear what you’re about to have to go through’. He’s hoping maybe she’ll be more open to hearing it from him, but then again maybe not. He isn’t ever very sure whether he makes things worse or better, he just keeps hoping for the latter.
“Not really,” she replies, going back inside their bedroom but leaving the door open. He follows, closing it quietly behind him, and leaning back against it.
Alex racks his brain for something positive to say among all the negative he’s heard today and somehow comes up with, “He said you caught it early, that that gives you a better chance and more time to work with.”
She nods. Then, “I think I’m going to get some sleep. I didn’t get much last night.”
He’s aware. It’s hard not to be when she’s tossing and turning every five minutes, can’t stay still, and every sound she makes wakes him up once more.
“Alright,” he replies, watching her lie down on her side, curl into herself. It takes a lot to force himself to go back downstairs, but he gets it. She needs her space just as much as anyone else.
He just doesn’t know when he became the overbearing one of the two.
---
He gets home late on Wednesday. His shift isn’t over until almost ten and he bypasses the bar in favor of heading home. The Chief gave Izzie the rest of the week off, claiming something about how she needed time to process and figure out what she was going to do. He wasn’t sure it was a half bad idea - that was until he came home to found her gone, again.
This disappearing act was becoming about as much habit as locking him out was, and neither were very comforting from his angle.
“Hey,” he says, from the doorway and she startles a little, knocking her purse off the hook she’d just hung it on. It falls to the ground, on the clasp, its contents cascading to the floor.
They both kneel to pick up the stuff at the same time and that’s when he sees it. “You scared me,” she starts, but he only half hears her, plucking a rectangle shaped piece of paper in pale blue and white off the floor. It doesn’t take him long to scan it, even less to turn accusing eyes on her. She catches on a second later. “That’s not what you - “
“It’s a plane ticket. What else could I possibly think it is?” Up until now he’s been Mr. Supportive Boyfriend, not once even thinking about raising his voice, let alone yelling, in the past four days. And now he’s done with that because there’s a plane ticket and his girlfriend who keeps disappearing on these random errands that she doesn’t want to talk about, and who also keeps locking him out of their room. Clearly trying to be helpful is in fact helping nothing at all. “New York?”
She looks down, toying with the cap of the lipstick that had fallen out as well, moving it on and off with a clicking noise that he’s fairly sure is going to drive him insane. “It seemed like a good place to disappear,” serves as her answer.
The ticket is round trip, he notes, with some amount of relief. Two weeks. It’s not running, it’s just a temporary escape. “You know this isn’t a - “
“Good idea,” Izzie finishes for him. He nods, and he thinks this might be the first time she’s really looked at him with clear eyes since the day they found out. She doesn’t look confused or scared or empty anymore. She looks like Izzie, the woman who believes in things like hope and fate and luck. “I need this, Alex. And I know it doesn’t make any sense and it’s not what I should be doing but you said yourself it’s still early. I just need some time to clear my head.”
He nods again. It’s all he really can do. It’s not like he can tell her not to go, it’s not even like he should. He just wishes he was less concerned about how easily she could convert that ticket to one way.
---
It takes a full day of strained silence for her to even acknowledge it. She abandons her coffee mug on the kitchen counter, in favor of sliding her hands over his own, unmoving, leaning in so he has no choice as to what he’s looking at. Her eyes have that glint to him; he used to want it back, he used to think he’d give anything to see that again, now he’s just worried she’s going to go and do something stupid.
Alex isn’t a worrier.
“You know I’m not leaving for good.” She reminds him, and he watches full pink lips move and tries to believe the sounds coming from between them. “It’s not ‘goodbye’. It’s ‘see you later’.”
“It’s gambling.” He says, boiling it down to the simplest thing he can think of. It’s holding a pair of sevens and going all in, hoping that the other person will either chicken out or have something lower.
“It’s taking a chance.” She shakes her head, presses those lips together, and a strand of her blonde hair grazes his cheek. “There is still so much I want to do with my life. And if I don’t have - “ he was probably going to say something uncharacteristic, something like ‘don’t talk like that’ or ‘you’ll be okay’, some lie with no grounding in reality, and he’s never really understood that urge she’s always seemed to have with patients until right now. “I mean, we’re doctors, be realistic here. It’s not about how long you live it’s about how you live; right now I just want to live what I have. Whether that’s a few months or a few years.”
Selfishness dictates that he’s going to ask why she can’t do that here if he doesn’t bite his tongue, so he does, and tries to access that place in time where he wouldn’t have needed to have her in sights just to feel like he was okay, like they were okay.
“I’ll be back, I swear,” she breathes, right before she uses those lips to close the distance between them.
---
She wakes him up at some ridiculously early time the next day that he has off, some Monday or maybe a Tuesday, the days have all begun to blur, and she’s still off work and her bags sit packed by the door in their bedroom, waiting.
“The sun isn’t even out.” He groans, rolling into the pillows. The bed shifts, and she’s right in his personal space, but sitting up and tugging at his shoulder.
“The sun is out, if you would bother opening your eyes.” She says, giving up more or less on the tugging and instead settling for tracing patterns along his arm. “I watched it rise.”
That gets him awake. “You watched the sunrise?” Alex squints at the clock, returns with a number a second later. “Why?”
She shrugs. “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen one.” It’s random, but he’s starting to expect that from her lately. Her hands move down and she shifts a little, so that she’s straddling his hips as she grins down at him.
“Are you feeling okay?” He asks. It’s perhaps the strangest wake up call he’s received in the past few months, and he just has to ask.
Izzie laughs at that. “Never better,” she tells him, leaning down to kiss him, as he lets his hands come up underneath the hem of her thin t-shirt and pull up. She moans into his mouth, when his warm fingers hit her cool skin, and he decides that he might as well have as much of her as he can while that’s still an option.
---
New York comes three days afterwards.
He drives her to the airport, managing to avoid any last minute pleading with her to just stay, that there will be time for things like this eventually (no guarantees - but nothing in life really is). Rain beats down on the windshield and she smiles about sunny days and pleasant forecasts in New York. “I won’t miss the weather,” she exhales, and her breath against the window turns to steam.
“You have everything?” Alex asks, seconds after her boarding call. His hand is on her arm, and he’s having a really fun time trying to convince himself to let go.
“Yeah,” she replies, looking down at his hand on her and then back up at him, a silent question. He breathes, releases her, and she nods. They’re really going to do this. She’s really going to do this. She turns to him, hands on either side of his face, determination in her eyes that he mistakes as a sign that she’s about to re-list all the reasons that she’s about to get on that plane. Instead, the words he finds falling from her lips are of a very different variety. “I love you,” she says, like a promise, holds his gaze.
He can’t do anything but stare and feel this stupid smile try to creep onto his face. She nods, something like a job well done in her own smile, and then she’s off, heading towards the gate, the admission her version of goodbye, the absence of the actual word completely intentional. It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later.
Let me go, echoes in the air, in his head, and he tries to ignore the gut feeling that this is the last he’ll see of her.