send your lifeboats out for me {alex; alex/izzie}
Title: Send Your Lifeboats Out For Me
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Izzie, Meredith, Cristina, Lexie | Alex/Izzie.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,043
Prompt: #20 - Laughter for lover100
Author's Note: This relies on knowledge of 2.16/17 which is the bomb episode.
Summary: Post S5 finale. Alex has gotten to the point where he no longer pauses to think, to come up with his smart-ass comments or his make sure his game face is in place, he just moves on autopilot.
Life for him is a serious of scheduled events, times and dates and places, room numbers and addresses, scrawl on a clipboard, detailing vitals and tests to be taken, or the occasional note from Meredith slipped into his locker, directions to the funeral home, later to the burial.
Alex has gotten to the point where he no longer pauses to think, to come up with his smart-ass comments or his make sure his game face is in place, he just moves on autopilot.
Today, he moves through rooms like the hospital is one big, winding maze that he hasn’t found his way out of yet.
“Is she okay?” He pokes his head into Izzie’s hospital room, finding Cristina leaned against the wall just outside of the bathroom, her arms crossed and her dress hanging limply on her.
“She’s fine, so stop hovering.” Cristina says, annoyed tone the result of the sheer number of times he’s asked that exact same question of the both of them in the past two hours. He’s on no sleep and he’s paranoid, but so is everyone else so he figures it balances out. Still, he lingers in the doorway until she says, “I’ve got her, okay? Besides, it’s girl stuff. You don’t want to be around.”
There’s a remark he could make, something along the lines of questioning what she would even know about girl stuff -- the type of comment generally accompanied by an eyebrow raise, and followed up by a death threat or something being thrown at him -- but he only thinks of it halfway down the hall, and at that point it’s anticlimactic.
Two left turns later, he beats the ding of the elevator by five seconds, and stands so damn close to it that Lexie nearly tumbles out of it into him.
“Sorry,” she says, a flurry of hands that push off of nothing but air and flushed cheeks. Her shirt is a bright, glaring red, still in street clothes, and it’s a jarring break from the parade of black, accented with blue hospital scrubs because some people still have to work. She repeats, “I’m sorry.”
A lot of people are saying sorry for a lot of unreasonable and mostly irrelevant things, and he’s just plain out of things to say to them, so he just nods and sort of grunts as he steps towards the elevator.
Lexie turns back to him, stopping so fast that her right foot seems to jerk an extra inch on the linoleum, accidental step forward made purely through momentum. “Do you know where Mark is?”
He lets his shrug be his answer, and the doors close before he would’ve even got a word out even if he tried. He doesn’t know anyway; he’s keeping track of enough people as is, enough things and places he needs to be and people he needs to check in with or on.
Meredith’s in the locker room, pulling her dress over her head, when he gets there, and he catches the briefest glance of bare leg and black underwear before she’s pulled the black sheath down by the hem, to let it hit just at her knee. If she thinks he saw anything, she doesn’t appear to care.
“You - “ he starts, and maybe he was going to tell her she looked nice, or maybe there was something he was going to ask her, but whatever it was it dies on his lips and he’s at a point of not caring all that much. Tomorrow is a day for breathing; today is a day for moving.
“Me,” she replies, even so, and there’s a moment of significant eye contact where it’s reaffirmed that, yes, her head is spinning too, and no, he’s not the only one trying to act like nothing in the world is wrong. They’re just doing it quieter than usual. She raises a bare arm up and off to the side, and he watches the side of her dress gape, shiny silver zipper lying just above her hip. “Can you zip this up? I tried, but I think it got off track.”
He moves towards her, knuckles grazing bare skin, nimble fingers wiggling and pulling it into submission. Meredith only sighs against his touch, something heavy and tired, and it echoes faintly of himself.
“How’s Izzie?”
“Cristina’s got her,” he says, voice dull, but he managed to sound a little more convinced about that fact than he did when Cristina was repeating it to him. “Derek?”
She drops her arm back down, turns towards the mirror to get a look at herself, her frown upon doing so reflected back at both of them. “He said there’s traffic. He’ll be here soon.”
“Do you…” he starts, again, this time to ask if she needs anything, and this time she has an answer before she even really has the question.
“No.” Meredith nods her head in the direction of the door. “Go. Her and Cristina are probably driving each other crazy.”
Wordlessly, he does so. He checks his watch on the elevator back down, finds they’ve got an hour to spare before they have to be at the funeral, calculates the drive he’ll be making, Izzie and Cristina with him. Alex knows it’s a car ride that will feel longer than it actually is, between Izzie who still isn’t one hundred percent, maybe not even seventy, Cristina who is choosing not to address the fact that anything at all actually happened, and himself.
He doesn’t run into anybody at the elevator this time, and repeats the same pattern of turns that lead him back to Izzie’s room.
Cristina brushes by him before he’s even through the door.
“I’ll be right back,” she tells him, and doesn’t break stride, which leaves him with Izzie, sitting on her bed in her dress, one Meredith had dug out of storage. He’s unclear if it’s Izzie’s or something older of Meredith’s, but he guesses it doesn’t much matter. It’s a funeral - it’s George’s funeral - and, like the prom dress that came before it, it won’t be worn again.
“Hey,” he says, after a beat in which Izzie doesn’t appear to even notice his presence, focused on her shoes that sit on the floor rather than on her feet. She looks up at him, then, her face a solid, lineless mask, and he asks the same damn question he always does. “Are you okay?”
The “yeah” she gives is unconvincing, and he grabs the clothes she changed out of and puts them in the bag that sits in the chair he slept in last night, laundry to take home and do later. It keeps his hands occupied and it keeps him from letting his gaze linger too long; he knows she hates that, hates being gawked at (not him) or worried over (him, them).
He doesn’t quite expect the “no” that follows her previous statement, and that gets him to turn back to her.
“What?” Alex asks, like he isn’t sure that he’s not hearing things, and, really, he isn’t. He can hear the people outside in the nurses’ station, the patient in the next room over, and everyone else who walks through the halls and gets at least twenty feet away from that open door.
“I said no.” Her tongue flicks over chapped lips; she reaches for the tube of chapstick that sits on her bedside table. “I said I’m not okay.”
And, well, at least someone’s decided to be honest today.
“Oh,” is all he can say for a moment, while he tries to figure out how he’s supposed to deal with that, instinctually tries first to remember bedside manner before it even occurs to him that this is Izzie, not a patient or a grieving family member. This is Izzie, this is his wife, this is the person he’s chosen to be with, and if she can be honest with him, then it’s only fair that he reciprocates. “Do you need to lie down?”
“No,” she dismisses, “not physically. I just…” she takes a deep breath, and he watches her chest deflate as she lets it out. “It’s stupid. Nevermind.”
He crosses the room and ends up next to her on the edge of the bed. Her hands are resting on her thighs, palms down, and he hesitates for a moment before he slips one of his own over hers, his thumb rubbing soft circles over the back of her hand. “Iz.”
She already isn’t looking at him, so there’s no averting of her eyes or ducking of her head, but her shoulders hunch and she turns her gaze to the clock on the wall. Her voice sounds brittle, more so than he’s ever thought before when she says, “I’m scared.”
There’s a muscle in his jaw that twitches with the effort it takes not to outright laugh at the notion. It’s not that there’s anything particularly funny about that sentiment, it’s just the fact that these past few weeks are the only ones in recent memory that he can truly say that he’s felt scared. A lot. The gnawing kind that doesn’t let him sleep at night and has kept him hunched in hospital chairs or pacing outside of her door. So by now, for him, the idea of being scared has just lost all meaning - it’s merely a way of life, for the time being. He always feels it; he can’t see how she doesn’t feel it too.
Still, he’s thinking up a reply, anything to say to that that won’t make him come off like a total asshole, when she saves him and continues, “I’m scared that we’re going to get there and I’m going to just…burst out laughing. Because I laugh at funerals, and I never told him that I laugh at funerals, I never told anyone, and everyone’s going to look at me like the poor girl with the cancer, who killed her fiancé, has finally gone and lost it.”
His hand comes up to cradle her cheek, forcing her to face him, and of all things to be scared of it’s ironic that this is what’s pushing her over the edge. This is what she’s chosen to focus on. “You told me,” he reminds her, and he swears he can hear the ‘it’s not enough’ that he almost expects to accompany it. But he doesn’t.
“I told you,” she reaffirms, but the thought doesn’t seem to do much in the way of calming her down. “I laugh at funerals.”
“And I don’t go to funerals,” he replies, finishing a conversation from years ago, commiseration in a supply closet, except now the funeral isn’t hypothetical and they aren’t just two horny doctors with nothing better to do. It’s too much like the plot of a bad movie, one with a voiceover about how everything comes full circle, as a metaphor for life, for his tastes, but it’s the truth and she starts to nod a little, like some of this is actually making sense to her.
She isn’t really asking when she says, “But we’re going to this one.”
“We’re going to this one,” he confirms.
“Breaking the habit.”
“Something like that,” and it’s the most honest, the most real, that he’s been all day, maybe all week. “You’ll force me to go, and I’ll make sure you don’t laugh. I’ll pinch you or…I’ll tell you that stupid urban legend about the girl and the dog, you know the one that licks her hand.”
“Oh god, why would you remind me of that? I hate that story.”
“But it definitely won’t make you laugh.”
“Might make me hate you.”
“You love me,” he leans in to kiss her, nothing more than a quick peck on the lips, but there’s a small smile on her face when he pulls back, “and you know it.”
Her tone is wry, and, fleetingly, he wonders if he’s gotten her to stop thinking about what’s to come, just for a bit, “Sounds like someone’s a little overconfident.”
Alex raises an eyebrow. “And you’re just now noticing that?”
He feels a little more like himself for the rest of the day; more than that he feels a little more like they’ll be okay.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex, Izzie, Meredith, Cristina, Lexie | Alex/Izzie.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,043
Prompt: #20 - Laughter for lover100
Author's Note: This relies on knowledge of 2.16/17 which is the bomb episode.
Summary: Post S5 finale. Alex has gotten to the point where he no longer pauses to think, to come up with his smart-ass comments or his make sure his game face is in place, he just moves on autopilot.
Life for him is a serious of scheduled events, times and dates and places, room numbers and addresses, scrawl on a clipboard, detailing vitals and tests to be taken, or the occasional note from Meredith slipped into his locker, directions to the funeral home, later to the burial.
Alex has gotten to the point where he no longer pauses to think, to come up with his smart-ass comments or his make sure his game face is in place, he just moves on autopilot.
Today, he moves through rooms like the hospital is one big, winding maze that he hasn’t found his way out of yet.
“Is she okay?” He pokes his head into Izzie’s hospital room, finding Cristina leaned against the wall just outside of the bathroom, her arms crossed and her dress hanging limply on her.
“She’s fine, so stop hovering.” Cristina says, annoyed tone the result of the sheer number of times he’s asked that exact same question of the both of them in the past two hours. He’s on no sleep and he’s paranoid, but so is everyone else so he figures it balances out. Still, he lingers in the doorway until she says, “I’ve got her, okay? Besides, it’s girl stuff. You don’t want to be around.”
There’s a remark he could make, something along the lines of questioning what she would even know about girl stuff -- the type of comment generally accompanied by an eyebrow raise, and followed up by a death threat or something being thrown at him -- but he only thinks of it halfway down the hall, and at that point it’s anticlimactic.
Two left turns later, he beats the ding of the elevator by five seconds, and stands so damn close to it that Lexie nearly tumbles out of it into him.
“Sorry,” she says, a flurry of hands that push off of nothing but air and flushed cheeks. Her shirt is a bright, glaring red, still in street clothes, and it’s a jarring break from the parade of black, accented with blue hospital scrubs because some people still have to work. She repeats, “I’m sorry.”
A lot of people are saying sorry for a lot of unreasonable and mostly irrelevant things, and he’s just plain out of things to say to them, so he just nods and sort of grunts as he steps towards the elevator.
Lexie turns back to him, stopping so fast that her right foot seems to jerk an extra inch on the linoleum, accidental step forward made purely through momentum. “Do you know where Mark is?”
He lets his shrug be his answer, and the doors close before he would’ve even got a word out even if he tried. He doesn’t know anyway; he’s keeping track of enough people as is, enough things and places he needs to be and people he needs to check in with or on.
Meredith’s in the locker room, pulling her dress over her head, when he gets there, and he catches the briefest glance of bare leg and black underwear before she’s pulled the black sheath down by the hem, to let it hit just at her knee. If she thinks he saw anything, she doesn’t appear to care.
“You - “ he starts, and maybe he was going to tell her she looked nice, or maybe there was something he was going to ask her, but whatever it was it dies on his lips and he’s at a point of not caring all that much. Tomorrow is a day for breathing; today is a day for moving.
“Me,” she replies, even so, and there’s a moment of significant eye contact where it’s reaffirmed that, yes, her head is spinning too, and no, he’s not the only one trying to act like nothing in the world is wrong. They’re just doing it quieter than usual. She raises a bare arm up and off to the side, and he watches the side of her dress gape, shiny silver zipper lying just above her hip. “Can you zip this up? I tried, but I think it got off track.”
He moves towards her, knuckles grazing bare skin, nimble fingers wiggling and pulling it into submission. Meredith only sighs against his touch, something heavy and tired, and it echoes faintly of himself.
“How’s Izzie?”
“Cristina’s got her,” he says, voice dull, but he managed to sound a little more convinced about that fact than he did when Cristina was repeating it to him. “Derek?”
She drops her arm back down, turns towards the mirror to get a look at herself, her frown upon doing so reflected back at both of them. “He said there’s traffic. He’ll be here soon.”
“Do you…” he starts, again, this time to ask if she needs anything, and this time she has an answer before she even really has the question.
“No.” Meredith nods her head in the direction of the door. “Go. Her and Cristina are probably driving each other crazy.”
Wordlessly, he does so. He checks his watch on the elevator back down, finds they’ve got an hour to spare before they have to be at the funeral, calculates the drive he’ll be making, Izzie and Cristina with him. Alex knows it’s a car ride that will feel longer than it actually is, between Izzie who still isn’t one hundred percent, maybe not even seventy, Cristina who is choosing not to address the fact that anything at all actually happened, and himself.
He doesn’t run into anybody at the elevator this time, and repeats the same pattern of turns that lead him back to Izzie’s room.
Cristina brushes by him before he’s even through the door.
“I’ll be right back,” she tells him, and doesn’t break stride, which leaves him with Izzie, sitting on her bed in her dress, one Meredith had dug out of storage. He’s unclear if it’s Izzie’s or something older of Meredith’s, but he guesses it doesn’t much matter. It’s a funeral - it’s George’s funeral - and, like the prom dress that came before it, it won’t be worn again.
“Hey,” he says, after a beat in which Izzie doesn’t appear to even notice his presence, focused on her shoes that sit on the floor rather than on her feet. She looks up at him, then, her face a solid, lineless mask, and he asks the same damn question he always does. “Are you okay?”
The “yeah” she gives is unconvincing, and he grabs the clothes she changed out of and puts them in the bag that sits in the chair he slept in last night, laundry to take home and do later. It keeps his hands occupied and it keeps him from letting his gaze linger too long; he knows she hates that, hates being gawked at (not him) or worried over (him, them).
He doesn’t quite expect the “no” that follows her previous statement, and that gets him to turn back to her.
“What?” Alex asks, like he isn’t sure that he’s not hearing things, and, really, he isn’t. He can hear the people outside in the nurses’ station, the patient in the next room over, and everyone else who walks through the halls and gets at least twenty feet away from that open door.
“I said no.” Her tongue flicks over chapped lips; she reaches for the tube of chapstick that sits on her bedside table. “I said I’m not okay.”
And, well, at least someone’s decided to be honest today.
“Oh,” is all he can say for a moment, while he tries to figure out how he’s supposed to deal with that, instinctually tries first to remember bedside manner before it even occurs to him that this is Izzie, not a patient or a grieving family member. This is Izzie, this is his wife, this is the person he’s chosen to be with, and if she can be honest with him, then it’s only fair that he reciprocates. “Do you need to lie down?”
“No,” she dismisses, “not physically. I just…” she takes a deep breath, and he watches her chest deflate as she lets it out. “It’s stupid. Nevermind.”
He crosses the room and ends up next to her on the edge of the bed. Her hands are resting on her thighs, palms down, and he hesitates for a moment before he slips one of his own over hers, his thumb rubbing soft circles over the back of her hand. “Iz.”
She already isn’t looking at him, so there’s no averting of her eyes or ducking of her head, but her shoulders hunch and she turns her gaze to the clock on the wall. Her voice sounds brittle, more so than he’s ever thought before when she says, “I’m scared.”
There’s a muscle in his jaw that twitches with the effort it takes not to outright laugh at the notion. It’s not that there’s anything particularly funny about that sentiment, it’s just the fact that these past few weeks are the only ones in recent memory that he can truly say that he’s felt scared. A lot. The gnawing kind that doesn’t let him sleep at night and has kept him hunched in hospital chairs or pacing outside of her door. So by now, for him, the idea of being scared has just lost all meaning - it’s merely a way of life, for the time being. He always feels it; he can’t see how she doesn’t feel it too.
Still, he’s thinking up a reply, anything to say to that that won’t make him come off like a total asshole, when she saves him and continues, “I’m scared that we’re going to get there and I’m going to just…burst out laughing. Because I laugh at funerals, and I never told him that I laugh at funerals, I never told anyone, and everyone’s going to look at me like the poor girl with the cancer, who killed her fiancé, has finally gone and lost it.”
His hand comes up to cradle her cheek, forcing her to face him, and of all things to be scared of it’s ironic that this is what’s pushing her over the edge. This is what she’s chosen to focus on. “You told me,” he reminds her, and he swears he can hear the ‘it’s not enough’ that he almost expects to accompany it. But he doesn’t.
“I told you,” she reaffirms, but the thought doesn’t seem to do much in the way of calming her down. “I laugh at funerals.”
“And I don’t go to funerals,” he replies, finishing a conversation from years ago, commiseration in a supply closet, except now the funeral isn’t hypothetical and they aren’t just two horny doctors with nothing better to do. It’s too much like the plot of a bad movie, one with a voiceover about how everything comes full circle, as a metaphor for life, for his tastes, but it’s the truth and she starts to nod a little, like some of this is actually making sense to her.
She isn’t really asking when she says, “But we’re going to this one.”
“We’re going to this one,” he confirms.
“Breaking the habit.”
“Something like that,” and it’s the most honest, the most real, that he’s been all day, maybe all week. “You’ll force me to go, and I’ll make sure you don’t laugh. I’ll pinch you or…I’ll tell you that stupid urban legend about the girl and the dog, you know the one that licks her hand.”
“Oh god, why would you remind me of that? I hate that story.”
“But it definitely won’t make you laugh.”
“Might make me hate you.”
“You love me,” he leans in to kiss her, nothing more than a quick peck on the lips, but there’s a small smile on her face when he pulls back, “and you know it.”
Her tone is wry, and, fleetingly, he wonders if he’s gotten her to stop thinking about what’s to come, just for a bit, “Sounds like someone’s a little overconfident.”
Alex raises an eyebrow. “And you’re just now noticing that?”
He feels a little more like himself for the rest of the day; more than that he feels a little more like they’ll be okay.