the stuffed bunny conundrum {ensemble} (part 2)
Lexie isn’t even out of the car the whole way before she sees her younger sister rushing out of her father’s house, looking a little worse for the wear, at least since the last time Lexie had seen her.
“Molly?” She asks, letting the door snap back out of her hands and make contact with the door frame, a loud slam. “Is everything okay?”
“No, no, everything is not okay.” Molly meets her halfway up the walk, running a hand through hair that’s shorter than before. There’s a stain on her pale purple sweater. “Why didn’t you tell me he was drinking like this?”
“I didn’t…” Lexie checks her watch, finding that it’s not even noon yet. “He’s not drunk already, right? He can’t be.”
“Oh he is. Ranting and yelling and…he keeps talking about mom, constantly, making these stupid comments about that hospital and Meredith Grey.” Molly shakes her head. “I can’t have Laura around that.”
“I’ll,” she starts, torn between wishing that she hadn’t come at all and maybe wishing that she had brought Mark along with her. She could use the back up. Of course, that would probably only cause more problems. “I’ll try and calm him down. But I’ll probably make it worse. I haven’t really talked to him since I moved out.”
“I’m sorry I blamed you for that, by the way. I don’t think I could deal with this either.”
She pulls her sister into a hug, realizing just how much she’d missed her. She can feel a tear fall onto the shoulder of her sister, and she sighs, holding on tighter.
---
“I don’t cook. I don’t know why you expected me to start today.” Her mother’s cooking, along with her aunt, and there’s this other woman that keeps coming and going, and Cristina’s not completely sure if she’s related to her or not, but she doesn’t really feel like asking. Or cooking. Even if she could. So she’s kind of leaning on the counter, acting like a petulant teenager, in some kind of retaliation to the way her mother keeps on bothering her about everything under the sun, especially regarding any relationships that she may or may not have had.
“You can at least chop vegetables. We at least know you can do that, from all the slicing and dicing you must do as a surgeon.”
Cristina glares, as her mother holds out the cutting board and the knife. If that isn’t the most pathetic attempt at trying to be interested in her job, then she doesn’t know what is. “Subtle,” she mutters, under her breath, grabbing the proffered items from her mother’s hands. “Where’s Saul?”
“Some emergency. Always busy.” Cristina takes to the vegetables in front of her with enough force to make a sharp thud every time the knife slid through and came in contact with the white plastic cutting board. “How do you manage since Preston if you can’t cook?”
She lets that go too, in the interest of leaving old skeletons in the closet right where they remained. “That’s not really my biggest concern.”
Her mother looks her up and down, carefully, like she’s picking out the perfect piece of meat at the grocery store, before she says, “Obviously.”
“What now?” Cristina asks, exasperatedly.
“You’ve lost weight since the last time I saw you.” If she was a different person, and this was a different family, then that would be a good thing. Not so much here. “And you didn’t need to.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Of course you have.” Her mother isn’t looking at her anymore, more focused on whatever is in the pot on the stove. “Just like Saul.”
If nothing else, Cristina decides, at least the conversation is cyclical. Eventually she’ll figure out a way to turn it around in her favor. Hopefully soon.
---
Derek ignores the fiddling with the doorknob that he can hear all the way into the living room, before getting up as several quick knocks sound.
“Forget your keys?” He starts, before he’s even got the door open. Anything else he was going to say dies on his lips, as he steps aside to let Mark inside. “You know normally people call before they just show up.”
“I didn’t know I was coming over.” He replies, taking the paper bag in his hand and going into the kitchen with it. “Meredith here?”
“No. She left a little while ago. I think she was going to go visit Izzie at the hospital.” He watches Mark keep on walking, going to fish around in the liquor cabinet. “What’s in the bag?”
Mark closes the door to it, and walks back into the kitchen, pulling a bottle out of the bag. “The scotch that you don’t have.”
“It’s not even two in the afternoon, and you’re already having that bad of a day?” Derek asks, noting that he isn’t pulling down glasses to go with it.
“No. Not yet. That’s a thank you gift for helping us move the other day. Or possibly a last resort.” He frowns, perhaps just realizing how much rambling he’s doing, and just how much Lexie’s rubbed off on him. That seems to bring him to his next point. “She’s gone to visit her dad or something, and I paced around for awhile and discovered that the cable doesn’t get hooked up for a few more days, and that maybe I’ve forgotten how to be alone in a huge apartment for long periods of time.”
Derek takes this in for a moment, letting a grin break out on his face. “And you used to say that I’d gone soft.”
“Shut up.” He doesn’t pour the scotch but he does grab a beer out of the refrigerator, he adds, “I don’t like this.”
“Not being able to be alone?” Mark’s nod serves as an answer. “You’ll get used to it eventually. In fact, you’ll be begging for it eventually.”
“I think I’m just bored.” They both take their seats on the couch that Derek had previously been occupying prior to Mark’s appearance. “I spent an hour unpacking the rest of the kitchen. And I probably did it wrong, not that she’ll say anything about it. But that’s just…far too domestic for me.”
Derek considers that over the rim of the beer in his hand, before nodding his head. “You’ll get used to that too.”
---
“Okay, if you’re in here and Alex isn’t, then where is he?” Meredith asks, carrying a bag in her hand, and a smile on her face.
“He just left a few minutes ago; I don’t know where to. He’s been here since seven this morning, so I’m not about to complain.” She frowns. “I think that came out wrong.”
“It’s okay,” Meredith replies, settling into the chair that George had occupied only hours ago. “Maybe he went home to get some sleep. He needs it.”
Izzie giggles, almost on accident, and Meredith gives her a slightly confused look. On the outside, the comment is really not funny, at least until you take into account what Alex had told her earlier about the reasons for his lack of sleep.
“Why are we laughing about our newfound insomniac boyfriend?” Meredith asks, like she’s really concerned about Izzie’s mental state.
“You don’t want to know.” Except Meredith’s giving her a look that says that she really kind of does. Izzie allows herself a moment to get her laughter under control and then says, in her clearest, most serious voice that she can manage, “Apparently you and Derek made enough noise to keep him up last night.”
“That’s not possible,” Meredith says, almost immediately.
“Oh yeah it is.” Somehow a syllable or two ends up tacked on to her ‘yeah’, and Meredith raises an eyebrow at the rather enthusiastic response. “Speaking from first hand knowledge here.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Meredith amends. “I mean I saw him come in the door at like two-thirty last night. Derek was asleep way before that.”
This sparks her curiosity. “What was he doing out at two-thirty?”
Meredith shrugs. “He said something about a really needy patient. I don’t know.” She nods to something suddenly, and Izzie looks down to find her gaze on that bunny. “Where did that come from?”
“At this point,” Izzie starts, picking it up and turning it to face her, looking at it closer, like it could tell her the answers she’d spent the better part of the day looking for. “I was hoping you left it.”
“Sorry,” is all Meredith says.
“It’s okay.” She sets the bunny down again, her hand remaining on its back. “I’ll figure it out eventually.” Meredith shifts in the chair, and Izzie lets her gaze drift over to the bag that Meredith had set down on the small table next to her. “What’s in the bag?”
As if just remembering it, Meredith picks it back up again and hands it to her. “Thought you could use some real food.”
“Thank God,” Izzie says, with a contented sigh, as she breathes in the scent of something that’s not crappy hospital food.
---
It’s six in the evening by the time Lexie finds herself standing in the frozen foods aisle of the grocery store, having fled her father half an hour ago, finally unable to take him anymore, phone clutched tight in her hand. She dials a number she only half remembers, hangs up twice, and then follows through until someone picks up the third time. “Hello?”
Lexie feels something like regret course through her, but she can’t really focus on that when she’s trying to focus on getting to a point where the room doesn’t feel like it’s spinning around her. “Meredith. Hi. I’m sorry, I just…I’m sorry.”
“Lexie?” Meredith asks, and Lexie suddenly realizes that this is probably the first time she’s ever actually called Meredith on her cell phone, and maybe Meredith doesn’t even know who this is for sure. It’s a depressing thought, but sadly not the most depressing one that she’s had today. “Wait, was that you the first two times?”
“Yeah, sorry.” She doesn’t know why she keeps apologizing, she just does. She should really stop that. “I’m drunk.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t what she should be saying either. “And I just left my - our - dad’s house, and he’s drunk too except he’s making all of these comments and,” she sighs, wondering where the point she was trying to make went, “whatever he did to you, leaving and cutting himself out of your life, blaming you for my mom’s…” she takes a shaky breath, tries again, “my mom’s death, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it.”
There’s a rather lengthy pause on the other end of the line and Lexie almost wonders if she’s just been hung up on, before Meredith says, “You shouldn’t be apologizing for him.”
“No, no, no, I really, really should.” She blinks, hard, unsure if she’s blinking away unshed tears or the doubles she’s starting to see. “So I’m sorry.”
And then she hangs up, and tries to catch her breath in the lonely aisle.
---
“Come on Meredith,” Cristina pleads with her cell phone, listening to each ring go unanswered, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. She’d excused herself from dinner, after deciding that she couldn’t sit her any longer with her mother and her comments, and Saul providing no relief at all, and all of her other relatives either chattering amongst themselves and ignoring her or bothering her about the exact same things her mother was. “Come on, pick up, dammit.”
The call goes to voice mail. Again. This being the fourth time, Cristina decides against trying again, instead flipping through her contact list, vetoing calling each person down the line for various reasons. Until she comes to one in particular.
Almost regretfully she presses the call button and waits for the line to connect and the incessant ringing to start again, hoping that this time someone picks up. Before she starts getting desperate. Before she just starts driving back to Seattle, and says to hell with her mother. She needs a reality check.
The call picks up on only the second ring, and she breathes a sigh of relief, as Owen says, “Cristina?”
It only sets in that this has the potential to be awkward when she realizes they haven’t done a whole lot of talking in the past month or so, which is mostly her own fault. Maintaining distance from him had been surprisingly easy, but she still thought about him a lot, specifically at night. “Hey. I’m in California. And Meredith won’t pick up, so I need someone to talk to.”
There isn’t nearly the same amount of hesitation in his voice that she expected. Instead he just says, “Okay,” like he can take whatever she’s got, and maybe it’s there that she knows she called the right number.
---
When Mark gets home the sky’s turned inky black, save for the moon, and the living room is silent. The whole apartment would be if it weren’t for the clinking he can hear, metal against glass. He pauses, going towards the kitchen and finding Lexie there. Four glasses filled with various colored liquids sit on the countertop, red, blue, yellow, green, and there’s a line of eggs sitting on some paper towels. Lexie’s stirring something in one of the glasses, and he says, “You know that stuff stains.”
“We had sex on the counter, and you’re suddenly concerned about egg dye?” She asks, not looking at him, focused on her colorful glasses.
“They’re new, that’s all.” He replies, coming over to her, and slipping his arms around her waist from behind, watching her diligent movements. “Have fun at your father’s?” She tenses in his arms, and it doesn’t take more than a second to figure out that was definitely the wrong question to ask. He can smell a hint of alcohol on her now, and he doesn’t even want to know how the hell she got home in one piece. “Want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head no, setting one of the eggs on a spoon and dunking it into the green dye, watching it turn a pale green as it sinks below the surface. Then she starts talking. “He’s a mess. A drunken, horrible mess, and I know Molly claims that she doesn’t blame me but the way she kept looking at me, I almost don’t believe her. And I almost don’t blame her. I couldn’t spend the night there if my life depended on it; I don’t even feel safe there.”
He figures, probably quite accurately, that she isn’t looking for the ‘I’m sorry’ that rises to his lips. Instead he goes with, “I should’ve gone with you.”
“No. You shouldn’t have.” She shakes her head, but relaxes a bit against him, leaning back ever so slightly. “It wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.”
He rests his chin on her shoulder, breathing her in, and she continues dropping eggs into the glasses, turning them around every now and then.
“I don’t miss him, you know. Not really.” Her hand stills, fingers coiled around the spoon that’s still resting in the egg dye. There’s a broken, shaky quality to her voice when she says, “But I do miss my mom.”
And that’s when Mark gets why she’s dyeing Easter eggs now. “You used to do this with your mom.”
“I used to do this with my mom.” She confirms. “Every year.”
He takes the spoon from her hand, letting go of her, and taking over stirring duties on that particular glass. “I never did this, until I started staying with Derek’s family all the time.” He makes sure they make eye contact as he says that. “My parents were never around for it, but Derek’s mother was always into the holidays.”
She frowns at him, and then something else crosses her features, and she nods, almost in understanding. “We make our own traditions right?”
“Something like that,” he says, with a nod, and maybe he can see her start to smile.
---
Alex finally shows back up sometime around eight-thirty, and Izzie’s waiting for him, that bunny clutched in her hands. She’s had some time to think, a lot of time to think actually, since Meredith left, and it’s left her with an answer that she’s almost positive is the right one.
“What?” He asks, with a frown, settling back into his usual chair, throwing his jacket over the back of it. When she doesn’t answer at first, he asks, “Have you gone mute?”
“You were here last night.” She starts, watching his face very carefully for a reaction, even to such a vague statement.
“Yeah, we all were.” Alex replies, his brows knitting together. “Some of us have to work you know.”
She lets that go, too focused on other things. “No. You were here until two-thirty, not in bed listening to Meredith and Derek’s all night sex marathon like you claimed to be, at least that’s what Meredith told me. And I was wondering why you would be lying to me until I realized it.” She pauses, still doesn’t get a reaction. “You left the bunny.”
Now he sighs, more like groans, and doesn’t even pretend to look at her. Still, he confirms, “I left the bunny.”
She knew it. “Why did you lie?”
“Because I do not leave stuffed animals for people.” He tells her, which she could’ve figured out on her own. It’s why she’d initially dismissed him entirely.
“And yet you did.”
“Blame it on you being too festive, and it rubbing off on me.”
“You’re embarrassed aren’t you?” She shouldn’t be getting this much joy out of his pain, but it might just be the funniest thing she’s seen in weeks. “You’re embarrassed because you did something nice that somehow only made sense to you at about two this morning, aren’t you?”
He eventually gives up trying to find a spot on the wall that feels comfortable to stare at and lets his head fall onto the mattress, just to the right of her hip. She lets herself laugh, bringing a hand up to run through his short hair. “I know,” she tells him, with a shake of her head, “being nice is hard.”
Alex mumbles something to that effect, muffled by the blankets, and she smiles, knowing that this is far too good to ever let him live down.