the stuffed bunny conundrum {ensemble}
Title: The Stuffed Bunny Conundrum
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Mainly Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, a little bit of Owen/Cristina. It's light on the MerDer, guys, sorry. They just didn't really fit in with my plan.
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,959
Author's Note: Written in less than 24 hours. Because I like writing holiday fic. Parts of this (aka let's hold Passover Seder on the wrong day) is based on my own rather ridiculous experiences.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 5. This is a story about stuffed bunnies, Easter egg dye, Passover Seders, new apartments, phone calls that go unanswered and those that don't, and, most importantly, family.
“Aw, well isn’t that cute.”
Izzie’s eyes flutter open at the semi-unfamiliar voice that greets her, rousing her from sleep. Light seeps in through the half closed blinds over the window in her room, and she knows without looking at the clock that it’s just after six o’clock in the morning. Shift change.
Her nurse for this morning is that middle-aged woman from somewhere in the South, who she never quite bothered to remember the name of. It’s Susie something, or maybe Maryann. Something traditional. She squints at the woman’s name tag from across the room when she isn’t looking, trying to make sense of a jumble of small black lettering. It definitely begins with an ‘m’, she decides, and it isn’t until the woman moves to pick up her chart that she sees it’s Myrtle. So, maybe not traditional.
Then again, neither was her greeting, which is what brings her back to the topic at hand. “Isn’t what cute?” It certainly isn’t her, she knows that much. Her hair’s probably a mess and she hasn’t actually been out in the sun in a few weeks so she can’t be anything but pale. Izzie’s only saving grace is the bag full of clothes that sits on the chair pushed up next to her bed, stuff that Alex had pulled from her closet and various drawers, doing a remarkably good job at choosing based on comfort rather than anything else.
Myrtle makes a grab for something outside of her sight line, and Izzie doesn’t bother turning her head to follow the movement, since at the moment her head hurts far too much to do that. Two seconds later Myrtle has propped a stuffed white bunny next to her, turning the head so that it’s facing her. It’s got those semi-realistic eyes, the ones that aren’t just pure black, but white with a circle of blue followed by a solid circle of black in the middle, and she’s drugged up just enough that she considers the fact that they seem to be staring at her. She shakes that off fairly quickly, instead letting her fingers coming up to run across the soft fur of it’s chest, touching the tip of one of the ears that’s flopped over, pink in the middle. She hasn’t had one of these since she was a kid.
“Looks like the Easter Bunny left you a get well present,” Myrtle remarks, and Izzie thinks that perhaps the other woman is better suited for peds, for obvious reasons.
Even though she sort of already knows the answer she’ll receive, Izzie asks, “Do you know who left this here?”
“No idea, honey,” Myrtle tells her, “but I think whoever did got what they wanted.”
She frowns, not sure what to make of that comment. “What do you mean?”
“You’re smiling.” Myrtle points out, with a smile of her own. Izzie hadn’t even noticed. “It’s good to have people trying to keep your spirits up. God knows we could all use that every now and then.”
“Yeah,” Izzie agrees, shifting her gaze back to the bunny as Myrtle left without a goodbye. It isn’t needed; she’ll be back a few more times before she gets off shift anyways. Maybe by then Izzie will have an answer to her first question.
---
Lexie watches Mark, half-asleep, stumble out of the bedroom and head down the hall, with a shake of her head, almost missing the bowl full of pancake batter with the spoon she was using to mix it. She counted to five and when she hadn’t seen him come back she called out, “It’s to the left of the bedroom. Not the right.”
She hears shuffling footsteps and then gets another glimpse of him through the doorway as he backtracks. There’s a muttered, “it was the other way around at the hotel” before the bathroom door closes, and she lets a giggle slip out. Three days in the new apartment that she’d all but forced him to get and he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of its layout, at least not this early in the morning. Which, perhaps, is why it’s a good thing that she’s a morning person.
The shower turns on a minute later, and Lexie decides that the time it’s going to take her to cook these versus the time it’s going to take him in the shower is drastically off, so she grabs the metal bowl and sticks it in the refrigerator, figuring it can wait a little longer. She has other ideas now.
By the time she gets in there, the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink is covered in a layer of steam from the shower, and she smiles, closing the door very quietly behind her. This was much more fun if it was a surprise. She steps out of her clothes, which amounted to the t-shirt she’d pulled on over her bra and panties this morning, and bites her lip as she pulls aside the shower curtain. His back is facing her, but he turns, sensing the sudden draft of cold air, and jumps a little when he sees her. He doesn’t look so startled a moment later, as another, much more fun, look crosses his features. “I thought you were making breakfast.”
She shrugs her shoulders, stepping inside, and closing the curtain behind her. “It can wait.” She takes a step closer to him, under the spray, and he pulls her hips against his with a wicked grin that tells her they’re both on the same page. As if there was any doubt. “Besides, you were the one talking about christening the new apartment in every room or whatever. I thought the shower would’ve been the first thing you would’ve thought of.”
He runs a hand in front of his eyes, wiping away the shampoo that’s dripped down his forehead, before he leans down and presses his lips to hers, his hand coming to tangle in her hair that’s just damp from a combination of the spray and the steam. He’s moved down to her throat, her neck, as he says, “Bed. Couch. Kitchen counter. Then shower.”
Lexie laughs, biting back any noises he might be almost causing to slip through her lips. “You have a list now?”
“Want to find out what else is on it?” He asks, his eyes on her once again as the hand that doesn’t have her by the hips finds her breasts. She can feel him against her, warm and needy.
“Later,” she tells him, her hand traveling down between them and wrapping around his length with a devilish smile to match his own, one that only grows as she watches him tip his head back. “Have to cross this off the list first.”
---
“Wait a minute,” Meredith shoves the blankets off of her, her arm coming back at an odd angle and very nearly resulting in her elbowing Derek in the nose. Mere centimeters save him. “You’re where?”
“California,” Cristina groans, voice muffled by something.
Meredith checks the clock, checks the date, and still can’t quite make any sense out of what her best friend was telling her. “It’s six-thirty in the morning on a Sunday.” She pauses. “That we have off.” Another pause, because she can’t quite remember why they have it off. Because it’s Sunday and…oh yeah. “It’s Easter.”
“My mother made me.” Is the only response she receives, which she guesses must be shorthand for saying that Cristina’s mother made her drive down to California for Easter. Which makes less sense, the more Meredith thinks on it.
“But you’re Jewish.” She says.
“Does Derek know he’s marrying a genius?” Cristina’s response is both childish and bitchy, which is probably the only kind of response you can really get this early in the morning when both parties should really probably be asleep. “It’s Passover, Meredith.”
She isn’t going to lie; she feels more than a little dense for managing to completely forget that. Not that Cristina ever brought it up. She wasn’t much for holidays, which is what made this whole thing feel even stranger. “Doesn’t that last for a week?”
“My mother likes to do the Seder on Easter. I think she thinks she’s sticking it to someone.” Cristina’s voice gets even more muffled, probably by a pillow Meredith decides. “Why did I let her convince me to come down here?”
“Because your mother is really good with guilt trips.” Meredith frowns. “Kind of like my mother, actually. Just not really…for the same reasons.”
“And without the overly detailed diaries,” Cristina adds.
If Cristina was in the room, she’d be getting glared at. “The only reason I’m not making an equally nasty comment is because you’re being tortured by family.”
“Thank you.” Cristina tells her, a sign that she must be really off her game. She isn’t exactly so much with the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ parts of life. “You think she’d notice if I left?”
“Probably,” Meredith says, slipping on her sweatpants and walking out of the bedroom when she hears Derek groan and shift, feeling no need to wake him with her early morning phone calls. The door to Alex’s room down the hall is wide open and empty, she notices, as she goes downstairs, reminded of the fact that she may be off but she still had to drive out to the hospital at some point in the day. “I think you’re stuck.”
“Damn.”
---
She gets awakened for the second time in less than an hour by the soft thud that her bag makes as it drops onto the floor and someone sits down in the chair it formerly occupied. A warm hand makes a grab for hers, and she knows who it is instantaneously.
“You’re here early,” she says, mustering up a smile for him. Alex looks mildly surprised that she’s awake. “You guys have today off right?”
“Yeah,” he replies, leaning back against the chair. “And it’s not that early. I never really went to bed.” Izzie frowns, about two seconds away from launching into a lecture about how his lack of sleep doesn’t really affect whether or not she gets better, but he silences her with a different explanation. “Mer and Shepherd are trying to be on theme by doing it like bunnies I think.”
This time the smile isn’t so strained, and neither is her laugh. “It’s the whole newly engaged thing. Kind of like the newlyweds thing.”
“Great, something to look forward to,” he says, with a roll of his eyes, and she laughs again before she remembers the other occupant of her bed.
She picks up the bunny with the hand he’s not currently holding, showing it to him, as she asks, “Do you know where this came from?”
He raises an eyebrow. “A tacky gift shop?”
It’s her turn to roll her eyes. “Shut up. I think it’s cute.” She sets it back down next to her. “It was here when I woke up. I don’t know who left it - there’s no name or anything.”
“Maybe you have a stalker.” He replies, nonchalantly.
“I think you mean secret admirer.”
“Call it what you want. It’s the same thing.”
“It is not,” she insists, puzzled for the moment. “Maybe George?”
Alex seems to consider that for a moment, cocking his head to the right in a way that is most likely purely for show. “Yeah, it seems girly enough.”
“Are you quite done?”
“Yeah.” There’s a pause, while she fixes him with a look that shows she doesn’t quite believe him. “Probably not.”
---
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t bring your boyfriend.”
Cristina sends yet another glare in a very, very long string of them this morning her mother’s way. She should just leave it there and stop trying to fake civil. It clearly isn’t working anyway. “I told you. There is no boyfriend. I don’t know why you keep insisting that I have one.”
“There was a man, in the background, when we talked last month.” Cristina lets her head hit the back of the chair, a heavy sigh escaping, one that she doesn’t even bother to cover up. Of course her mother would remember that. She probably takes notes during their conversations too.
“Yes. Emphasis on was. There was a man. Okay?” But she knows even as she asks the question that it is not going to be okay, and it is not going to be nearly enough to end this conversation. It’s early and her mother is, unfortunately, a morning person.
“Why did you break up?” Her mother fixes her with that look that promises that she is definitely not getting out of this conversation. “Did you scare him off? You know if you weren’t so cold and distant all the time - “
Cristina sits bolt upright at that, stopping her mother before she can finish that thought. “No, this was not about me this time. This was about him.” It’s not really the most accurate explanation, but it wasn’t like she could just tell her mother that she woke up to him strangling her in the middle of the night during one of his PTSD episodes, and so she had to choose between breaking up with him and never sleeping again. It might be worth it to see the look on her mother’s face, but not worth it for the amount of dwelling it’ll cause on her part later on. She’d rather just try to forget.
“That’s what you always say,” her mother still chides.
“Well, believe me when I say I’m saving you the gory details.” Cristina says, hoping that will maybe turn her off of the topic. It might just have made her more curious, judging by the expression that comes across her features. In hope of avoiding the inevitable follow up questions, she just keeps on going. “And how come you never bring up my career? How come it’s always men with you? There are more important things than who I’m dating.”
Her mother pulls her lips into a pout, arms crossed, and Cristina can almost mouth the next words that come out of her mouth. “I just want you to be happy, Cristina.”
“My job is what makes me happy right now, alright? So that’s what you should be asking about if you’re so concerned about it.”
There’s a shake of the head, as her mother continues on the same path of many overused phrases that she keeps in her repertoire, seemingly specifically to drive Cristina crazy. “I don’t know what I ever did to raise such a…”
Cristina blocks the sound of her voice out at this point, thinking Meredith was completely right about the guilt trip and wishing she had never answered her mother’s phone call in the first place.
---
“Where are you going?”
Lexie looks up from digging through her purse on the coffee table, pulling various things out of it and setting them down, searching for the object that’s so far eluded her. “What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”
“Shoes.” Mark replies, simply, glancing down at the heeled sandals that she’s strapped on. “And don’t tell me you’re running out to the grocery store in those. No one’s that masochistic.” It looks like there’s something he’d like to add to that sentence, but he bites it back in the interest of what he probably sees as self-preservation. She could pretty much supply ‘except for Addison’ for him, but she prefers not to.
“My sister’s in town, staying at our father’s, and I figured I’d go visit for awhile.” She can see him freeze out of the corner of her eye, but waits until she finally snares her keys, specifically the ones to her dad’s house, out of the pocket they were hiding in. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to come.”
“I can if you want.” Her look stops him before he even thinks about amending that to a very uncharacteristic, very forced, ‘I want to come, for you’ but it’s close.
“They probably don’t even know you exist; it would just be awkward.” She shakes her head. “My dad probably still thinks I’m sleeping with Alex.”
“Wait, he met Karev?” She fixes her gaze on him and finds him frowning.
“Alex drove me home one night and…went to the liquor store for my dad in the interest of making sure he didn’t end up in a car accident.” Just thinking about that gave her a headache, and she blinked the memory away. “Can we not talk about this right now?”
“You’re ashamed of me,” he decides, jokingly, considering the way he crosses his arms and gives her this hurt look that is just so beyond fake. “That’s what it is.”
She laughs as she stands, pulling her purse over her shoulder. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m ashamed of the fact that I’m dating the top plastic surgeon on the West Coast.”
“East Coast,” he interrupts, “I’m third on the West. But I’ll get there.”
“Right. Third top plastic surgeon on the West Coast. So shameful.” She rolls her eyes. “This way I can have mostly unpleasant bonding time with my father, play with my niece, see my sister, and you can have some time to yourself, which I’m sure you’re dying for at this point.”
“No, I rather enjoyed your presence in the shower this morning.” He tells her. That’s so not what she was referring to. “It’s not as fun solo.”
“I’m sure it isn’t.” She goes to the door, but backs up, going to kiss him goodbye first. It’s not habit yet; she’s surprised it’s getting there at all. It doesn’t feel like it’s something he’d do, but it is, strangely enough. “I’ll be back in awhile.”
She closes the door before she gets a response.
---
“Hey.”
George is in the doorway, a quick glance Alex’s way, only to find that he hadn’t even reacted to George’s greeting, before he steps inside. Alex keeps right on reading the day-old newspaper, straight through the hug George comes over to give her, and George doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about being ignored. In fact, it’s probably better that way.
A minute later, when the room’s dead silent and George is occupying himself by removing the stuff that’s on top of the other chair before dragging it across the room, toward the other side of the bed, Alex folds the newspaper back into the quarters it was previously in, and says, “I’m going to go get coffee.”
There’s an audible sigh from next to her as he leaves, and she raises her eyebrows at George with raised eyebrows. “Since when are you scared of him?”
“I’m not.” George frowns, even as he glances back at the door. “It’s just…don’t you think it’s a little awkward?”
“Only if we’re still in high school.” She picks her knitting back up, from where she’d abandoned it when he walked in. Another scarf, this one a pastel yellow, is on the agenda today. If this keeps up she could pretty much start her own line of them. “Do you want to know what I do think?”
“It can’t be any worse than anything I’m considering.” He tells her.
She sits up a little more, leaning towards him a little. “I think he just knows that you think it’s awkward, so he’s playing off of that. He’s just doing it to mess with you. And you’re letting him.”
“I don’t think ‘let’ is the right word exactly,” George replies, but from the way he’s looking at his hands in his lap she can tell that some, if not most of it, is making sense to him. She could look into being a shrink maybe, if the knitting business didn’t take off, she thinks with a laugh that she bites back.
There’s more that she could say, more ways that she could argue this, but she decides to save it for another time, in the interest of her more pressing question. This time she hands the bunny to him. “Did you leave this here?”
George gives the bunny quizzical look, one that makes her smile to herself and shake her head. “It wasn’t me.”
“You’re kidding right?” He looks at her, off her tone, and she lets her head fall back against the pillow. “It did not just walk in here.”
“You’re really, really bored, aren’t you?” He observes, accurately at that.
“Yes,” she admits, almost stabbing her finger with one of the needles. “And ridiculously curious now that no one’s owning up to bringing it in here.”
“Maybe the hospital just puts them in everyone’s room.” She looks at him, frowning, giving him a moment to think about just how ridiculous that sounds. They work here. They would know. And besides, Myrtle had seemed surprised too, so it couldn’t just be a nurse thing. “Or maybe not.”
---
Part 2
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Mainly Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, a little bit of Owen/Cristina. It's light on the MerDer, guys, sorry. They just didn't really fit in with my plan.
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,959
Author's Note: Written in less than 24 hours. Because I like writing holiday fic. Parts of this (aka let's hold Passover Seder on the wrong day) is based on my own rather ridiculous experiences.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 5. This is a story about stuffed bunnies, Easter egg dye, Passover Seders, new apartments, phone calls that go unanswered and those that don't, and, most importantly, family.
“Aw, well isn’t that cute.”
Izzie’s eyes flutter open at the semi-unfamiliar voice that greets her, rousing her from sleep. Light seeps in through the half closed blinds over the window in her room, and she knows without looking at the clock that it’s just after six o’clock in the morning. Shift change.
Her nurse for this morning is that middle-aged woman from somewhere in the South, who she never quite bothered to remember the name of. It’s Susie something, or maybe Maryann. Something traditional. She squints at the woman’s name tag from across the room when she isn’t looking, trying to make sense of a jumble of small black lettering. It definitely begins with an ‘m’, she decides, and it isn’t until the woman moves to pick up her chart that she sees it’s Myrtle. So, maybe not traditional.
Then again, neither was her greeting, which is what brings her back to the topic at hand. “Isn’t what cute?” It certainly isn’t her, she knows that much. Her hair’s probably a mess and she hasn’t actually been out in the sun in a few weeks so she can’t be anything but pale. Izzie’s only saving grace is the bag full of clothes that sits on the chair pushed up next to her bed, stuff that Alex had pulled from her closet and various drawers, doing a remarkably good job at choosing based on comfort rather than anything else.
Myrtle makes a grab for something outside of her sight line, and Izzie doesn’t bother turning her head to follow the movement, since at the moment her head hurts far too much to do that. Two seconds later Myrtle has propped a stuffed white bunny next to her, turning the head so that it’s facing her. It’s got those semi-realistic eyes, the ones that aren’t just pure black, but white with a circle of blue followed by a solid circle of black in the middle, and she’s drugged up just enough that she considers the fact that they seem to be staring at her. She shakes that off fairly quickly, instead letting her fingers coming up to run across the soft fur of it’s chest, touching the tip of one of the ears that’s flopped over, pink in the middle. She hasn’t had one of these since she was a kid.
“Looks like the Easter Bunny left you a get well present,” Myrtle remarks, and Izzie thinks that perhaps the other woman is better suited for peds, for obvious reasons.
Even though she sort of already knows the answer she’ll receive, Izzie asks, “Do you know who left this here?”
“No idea, honey,” Myrtle tells her, “but I think whoever did got what they wanted.”
She frowns, not sure what to make of that comment. “What do you mean?”
“You’re smiling.” Myrtle points out, with a smile of her own. Izzie hadn’t even noticed. “It’s good to have people trying to keep your spirits up. God knows we could all use that every now and then.”
“Yeah,” Izzie agrees, shifting her gaze back to the bunny as Myrtle left without a goodbye. It isn’t needed; she’ll be back a few more times before she gets off shift anyways. Maybe by then Izzie will have an answer to her first question.
---
Lexie watches Mark, half-asleep, stumble out of the bedroom and head down the hall, with a shake of her head, almost missing the bowl full of pancake batter with the spoon she was using to mix it. She counted to five and when she hadn’t seen him come back she called out, “It’s to the left of the bedroom. Not the right.”
She hears shuffling footsteps and then gets another glimpse of him through the doorway as he backtracks. There’s a muttered, “it was the other way around at the hotel” before the bathroom door closes, and she lets a giggle slip out. Three days in the new apartment that she’d all but forced him to get and he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of its layout, at least not this early in the morning. Which, perhaps, is why it’s a good thing that she’s a morning person.
The shower turns on a minute later, and Lexie decides that the time it’s going to take her to cook these versus the time it’s going to take him in the shower is drastically off, so she grabs the metal bowl and sticks it in the refrigerator, figuring it can wait a little longer. She has other ideas now.
By the time she gets in there, the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink is covered in a layer of steam from the shower, and she smiles, closing the door very quietly behind her. This was much more fun if it was a surprise. She steps out of her clothes, which amounted to the t-shirt she’d pulled on over her bra and panties this morning, and bites her lip as she pulls aside the shower curtain. His back is facing her, but he turns, sensing the sudden draft of cold air, and jumps a little when he sees her. He doesn’t look so startled a moment later, as another, much more fun, look crosses his features. “I thought you were making breakfast.”
She shrugs her shoulders, stepping inside, and closing the curtain behind her. “It can wait.” She takes a step closer to him, under the spray, and he pulls her hips against his with a wicked grin that tells her they’re both on the same page. As if there was any doubt. “Besides, you were the one talking about christening the new apartment in every room or whatever. I thought the shower would’ve been the first thing you would’ve thought of.”
He runs a hand in front of his eyes, wiping away the shampoo that’s dripped down his forehead, before he leans down and presses his lips to hers, his hand coming to tangle in her hair that’s just damp from a combination of the spray and the steam. He’s moved down to her throat, her neck, as he says, “Bed. Couch. Kitchen counter. Then shower.”
Lexie laughs, biting back any noises he might be almost causing to slip through her lips. “You have a list now?”
“Want to find out what else is on it?” He asks, his eyes on her once again as the hand that doesn’t have her by the hips finds her breasts. She can feel him against her, warm and needy.
“Later,” she tells him, her hand traveling down between them and wrapping around his length with a devilish smile to match his own, one that only grows as she watches him tip his head back. “Have to cross this off the list first.”
---
“Wait a minute,” Meredith shoves the blankets off of her, her arm coming back at an odd angle and very nearly resulting in her elbowing Derek in the nose. Mere centimeters save him. “You’re where?”
“California,” Cristina groans, voice muffled by something.
Meredith checks the clock, checks the date, and still can’t quite make any sense out of what her best friend was telling her. “It’s six-thirty in the morning on a Sunday.” She pauses. “That we have off.” Another pause, because she can’t quite remember why they have it off. Because it’s Sunday and…oh yeah. “It’s Easter.”
“My mother made me.” Is the only response she receives, which she guesses must be shorthand for saying that Cristina’s mother made her drive down to California for Easter. Which makes less sense, the more Meredith thinks on it.
“But you’re Jewish.” She says.
“Does Derek know he’s marrying a genius?” Cristina’s response is both childish and bitchy, which is probably the only kind of response you can really get this early in the morning when both parties should really probably be asleep. “It’s Passover, Meredith.”
She isn’t going to lie; she feels more than a little dense for managing to completely forget that. Not that Cristina ever brought it up. She wasn’t much for holidays, which is what made this whole thing feel even stranger. “Doesn’t that last for a week?”
“My mother likes to do the Seder on Easter. I think she thinks she’s sticking it to someone.” Cristina’s voice gets even more muffled, probably by a pillow Meredith decides. “Why did I let her convince me to come down here?”
“Because your mother is really good with guilt trips.” Meredith frowns. “Kind of like my mother, actually. Just not really…for the same reasons.”
“And without the overly detailed diaries,” Cristina adds.
If Cristina was in the room, she’d be getting glared at. “The only reason I’m not making an equally nasty comment is because you’re being tortured by family.”
“Thank you.” Cristina tells her, a sign that she must be really off her game. She isn’t exactly so much with the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ parts of life. “You think she’d notice if I left?”
“Probably,” Meredith says, slipping on her sweatpants and walking out of the bedroom when she hears Derek groan and shift, feeling no need to wake him with her early morning phone calls. The door to Alex’s room down the hall is wide open and empty, she notices, as she goes downstairs, reminded of the fact that she may be off but she still had to drive out to the hospital at some point in the day. “I think you’re stuck.”
“Damn.”
---
She gets awakened for the second time in less than an hour by the soft thud that her bag makes as it drops onto the floor and someone sits down in the chair it formerly occupied. A warm hand makes a grab for hers, and she knows who it is instantaneously.
“You’re here early,” she says, mustering up a smile for him. Alex looks mildly surprised that she’s awake. “You guys have today off right?”
“Yeah,” he replies, leaning back against the chair. “And it’s not that early. I never really went to bed.” Izzie frowns, about two seconds away from launching into a lecture about how his lack of sleep doesn’t really affect whether or not she gets better, but he silences her with a different explanation. “Mer and Shepherd are trying to be on theme by doing it like bunnies I think.”
This time the smile isn’t so strained, and neither is her laugh. “It’s the whole newly engaged thing. Kind of like the newlyweds thing.”
“Great, something to look forward to,” he says, with a roll of his eyes, and she laughs again before she remembers the other occupant of her bed.
She picks up the bunny with the hand he’s not currently holding, showing it to him, as she asks, “Do you know where this came from?”
He raises an eyebrow. “A tacky gift shop?”
It’s her turn to roll her eyes. “Shut up. I think it’s cute.” She sets it back down next to her. “It was here when I woke up. I don’t know who left it - there’s no name or anything.”
“Maybe you have a stalker.” He replies, nonchalantly.
“I think you mean secret admirer.”
“Call it what you want. It’s the same thing.”
“It is not,” she insists, puzzled for the moment. “Maybe George?”
Alex seems to consider that for a moment, cocking his head to the right in a way that is most likely purely for show. “Yeah, it seems girly enough.”
“Are you quite done?”
“Yeah.” There’s a pause, while she fixes him with a look that shows she doesn’t quite believe him. “Probably not.”
---
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t bring your boyfriend.”
Cristina sends yet another glare in a very, very long string of them this morning her mother’s way. She should just leave it there and stop trying to fake civil. It clearly isn’t working anyway. “I told you. There is no boyfriend. I don’t know why you keep insisting that I have one.”
“There was a man, in the background, when we talked last month.” Cristina lets her head hit the back of the chair, a heavy sigh escaping, one that she doesn’t even bother to cover up. Of course her mother would remember that. She probably takes notes during their conversations too.
“Yes. Emphasis on was. There was a man. Okay?” But she knows even as she asks the question that it is not going to be okay, and it is not going to be nearly enough to end this conversation. It’s early and her mother is, unfortunately, a morning person.
“Why did you break up?” Her mother fixes her with that look that promises that she is definitely not getting out of this conversation. “Did you scare him off? You know if you weren’t so cold and distant all the time - “
Cristina sits bolt upright at that, stopping her mother before she can finish that thought. “No, this was not about me this time. This was about him.” It’s not really the most accurate explanation, but it wasn’t like she could just tell her mother that she woke up to him strangling her in the middle of the night during one of his PTSD episodes, and so she had to choose between breaking up with him and never sleeping again. It might be worth it to see the look on her mother’s face, but not worth it for the amount of dwelling it’ll cause on her part later on. She’d rather just try to forget.
“That’s what you always say,” her mother still chides.
“Well, believe me when I say I’m saving you the gory details.” Cristina says, hoping that will maybe turn her off of the topic. It might just have made her more curious, judging by the expression that comes across her features. In hope of avoiding the inevitable follow up questions, she just keeps on going. “And how come you never bring up my career? How come it’s always men with you? There are more important things than who I’m dating.”
Her mother pulls her lips into a pout, arms crossed, and Cristina can almost mouth the next words that come out of her mouth. “I just want you to be happy, Cristina.”
“My job is what makes me happy right now, alright? So that’s what you should be asking about if you’re so concerned about it.”
There’s a shake of the head, as her mother continues on the same path of many overused phrases that she keeps in her repertoire, seemingly specifically to drive Cristina crazy. “I don’t know what I ever did to raise such a…”
Cristina blocks the sound of her voice out at this point, thinking Meredith was completely right about the guilt trip and wishing she had never answered her mother’s phone call in the first place.
---
“Where are you going?”
Lexie looks up from digging through her purse on the coffee table, pulling various things out of it and setting them down, searching for the object that’s so far eluded her. “What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”
“Shoes.” Mark replies, simply, glancing down at the heeled sandals that she’s strapped on. “And don’t tell me you’re running out to the grocery store in those. No one’s that masochistic.” It looks like there’s something he’d like to add to that sentence, but he bites it back in the interest of what he probably sees as self-preservation. She could pretty much supply ‘except for Addison’ for him, but she prefers not to.
“My sister’s in town, staying at our father’s, and I figured I’d go visit for awhile.” She can see him freeze out of the corner of her eye, but waits until she finally snares her keys, specifically the ones to her dad’s house, out of the pocket they were hiding in. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to come.”
“I can if you want.” Her look stops him before he even thinks about amending that to a very uncharacteristic, very forced, ‘I want to come, for you’ but it’s close.
“They probably don’t even know you exist; it would just be awkward.” She shakes her head. “My dad probably still thinks I’m sleeping with Alex.”
“Wait, he met Karev?” She fixes her gaze on him and finds him frowning.
“Alex drove me home one night and…went to the liquor store for my dad in the interest of making sure he didn’t end up in a car accident.” Just thinking about that gave her a headache, and she blinked the memory away. “Can we not talk about this right now?”
“You’re ashamed of me,” he decides, jokingly, considering the way he crosses his arms and gives her this hurt look that is just so beyond fake. “That’s what it is.”
She laughs as she stands, pulling her purse over her shoulder. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m ashamed of the fact that I’m dating the top plastic surgeon on the West Coast.”
“East Coast,” he interrupts, “I’m third on the West. But I’ll get there.”
“Right. Third top plastic surgeon on the West Coast. So shameful.” She rolls her eyes. “This way I can have mostly unpleasant bonding time with my father, play with my niece, see my sister, and you can have some time to yourself, which I’m sure you’re dying for at this point.”
“No, I rather enjoyed your presence in the shower this morning.” He tells her. That’s so not what she was referring to. “It’s not as fun solo.”
“I’m sure it isn’t.” She goes to the door, but backs up, going to kiss him goodbye first. It’s not habit yet; she’s surprised it’s getting there at all. It doesn’t feel like it’s something he’d do, but it is, strangely enough. “I’ll be back in awhile.”
She closes the door before she gets a response.
---
“Hey.”
George is in the doorway, a quick glance Alex’s way, only to find that he hadn’t even reacted to George’s greeting, before he steps inside. Alex keeps right on reading the day-old newspaper, straight through the hug George comes over to give her, and George doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about being ignored. In fact, it’s probably better that way.
A minute later, when the room’s dead silent and George is occupying himself by removing the stuff that’s on top of the other chair before dragging it across the room, toward the other side of the bed, Alex folds the newspaper back into the quarters it was previously in, and says, “I’m going to go get coffee.”
There’s an audible sigh from next to her as he leaves, and she raises her eyebrows at George with raised eyebrows. “Since when are you scared of him?”
“I’m not.” George frowns, even as he glances back at the door. “It’s just…don’t you think it’s a little awkward?”
“Only if we’re still in high school.” She picks her knitting back up, from where she’d abandoned it when he walked in. Another scarf, this one a pastel yellow, is on the agenda today. If this keeps up she could pretty much start her own line of them. “Do you want to know what I do think?”
“It can’t be any worse than anything I’m considering.” He tells her.
She sits up a little more, leaning towards him a little. “I think he just knows that you think it’s awkward, so he’s playing off of that. He’s just doing it to mess with you. And you’re letting him.”
“I don’t think ‘let’ is the right word exactly,” George replies, but from the way he’s looking at his hands in his lap she can tell that some, if not most of it, is making sense to him. She could look into being a shrink maybe, if the knitting business didn’t take off, she thinks with a laugh that she bites back.
There’s more that she could say, more ways that she could argue this, but she decides to save it for another time, in the interest of her more pressing question. This time she hands the bunny to him. “Did you leave this here?”
George gives the bunny quizzical look, one that makes her smile to herself and shake her head. “It wasn’t me.”
“You’re kidding right?” He looks at her, off her tone, and she lets her head fall back against the pillow. “It did not just walk in here.”
“You’re really, really bored, aren’t you?” He observes, accurately at that.
“Yes,” she admits, almost stabbing her finger with one of the needles. “And ridiculously curious now that no one’s owning up to bringing it in here.”
“Maybe the hospital just puts them in everyone’s room.” She looks at him, frowning, giving him a moment to think about just how ridiculous that sounds. They work here. They would know. And besides, Myrtle had seemed surprised too, so it couldn’t just be a nurse thing. “Or maybe not.”
---
Part 2