[ga] fic | Guide Me When I Fall [I Fall On Tragedy]
Title | Guide Me When I Fall [I Fall On Tragedy]
Fandom | Grey’s Anatomy
Characters/Pairings | Izzie Stevens and Mark Sloan [implied ex Izzie/Alex and Mark/Lexie]
Word Count | 3600
Rating | PG-13
Summary | The decision to attend the funeral had been made on a whim...
AN | Partial submission for the shonda_land big bang challenge
Soundtrack | Here we are, underneath a million leaves...
[img src]
wild light, glowing bright
to guide me when i fall
i fall on tragedy
The rain that had been her constant companion for the past ninety miles seems to intensify as the Welcome to Seattle signs loom and then fade in her rear-view mirror, though she’s sure the thoughts are little more than by-products of a long ago conditioned response. The seat beneath her remains solid, like the steering wheel between her fingertips and the slow guitar bleeding from the speakers. She keeps the windows rolled resolutely up for fear she’ll dissolve through the gaps and disappear completely.
She reflects now on how the news had filtered through the hospital grapevine in a manner so achingly familiar she could almost have been back there herself; a rush of words and side-long glances that had morphed and twisted to the point that only the barest of bones were still true by the time they reached her.
There’s been an explosion.
They’ve disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again; all Bermuda triangle-like.
There were no survivors.
They’ve all survived…
Fact and morbid fabrication; impossibly intertwined.
In the end she’d phoned Meredith. Through a smeared blur of nausea and tears and blood numbing panic she’d left seven voice-mail messages of varying clarity before locking herself in a supply closest and blindly dialling a number she’s never quite managed to forget.
Alex…
He’d answered on the second ring; had trotted out a string of perfunctory words, short and clipped, that had started and ended with the information about Lexie’s death. She remembers that part specifically, that he’d said those syllables twice; as though he didn’t think she’d believe him if he didn’t repeat the news.
As though he didn’t quite believe it yet himself.
She lets the numbing rhythm of the windscreen wipers soothe her frayed nerves as Seattle blurs out on the other side of the glass every second beat. The decision to attend the funeral had been made on a whim she’d told her colleagues as she’d bundled out of the hospital that morning. It is a lie; she’d known the moment she’d heard Alex stumble over the truth that she’d be there in the end, no matter what.
The realisation that they, them, not us anymore, still had that depth of hold over her was harder to reconcile. Time has changed very little, it would seem; except for all the things that matter most.
The parking lot at the funeral home is three quarters to full as she pulls her car into an empty slot by the exit; and already she’s planning her getaway. There’s a small crowd milling at the building’s entrance, evidence enough that she’s not late; at least, not this time, and not yet. She waits for them to make their way inside before gathering the steel required to open her door and swing her legs out into the wet; foregoes her umbrella in favour of the feel of the rain on her lips, on her eyelids, as the points of her low heels against the asphalt announce her unsteady arrival.
She slides onto a seat in the very back row; quickly counts off the achingly familiar heads in front of her before digging through her purse for a pre-emptive Kleenex. She is nowhere near as immune to death and destruction as she lays claim to.
There’s a balding celebrant out front in a starched suit reading to a script from his spot beside a rose-adorned coffin. She lets the words he says roll loosely across the crowded expanse between them and almost forgets to breathe for whole sentences at a time. She recalls a conversation about odds, and, more specifically, about how to screw them. She thinks, madly, that death by plane crash is pretty freaking unlikely, all things considered.
This time, the odds screwed them.
Mark Sloan appears in the aisle on her right mid-way through the photo montage, and his sharp intake of breath has her reaching for his elbow before she’s had time to consider the potential consequences. She encourages him down onto the seat beside her quietly, a desperate attempt to limit the fuss she’s almost certain he’d been about to create. Her thumb catches on an ID band still stuck in place around his left wrist; hospital issue.
Seattle Grace Mercy West.
And she’ll never get used to that.
His knees bounce incessantly, but they’re all out of rhythm with each other, like maybe the left side of his brain stopped communicating with the right somewhere above the hills between here and Boise. She lays the palm of her hand flat against his thigh to quell the movement and he’s immediately rigid beneath her touch. She thinks maybe that’s worse but leaves her hand where it is nonetheless as Lexie’s wide grin, set to unfathomable lyrics she’ll never be able to hear again without ice developing in her veins, beams out at them from the grainy projector screen.
”Lights will guide you home; and ignite your bones…”
She stands when she’s instructed, drags a catatonic Mark to his feet alongside her when she can and even manages a genuine smile as the eulogies fall to bittersweet reminiscing. She steals deliberate sidelong glances to her left at times she thinks he’s least likely to notice; eventually stares at him solidly for several beats before realising he’s unlikely to notice anything at all right now.
It’s a feeling she knows all too well.
As the service draws to a close she readies for a quick departure; tells herself it’s only because she doesn’t want to create a fuss, to detract from a day that should be all about Lexie by hanging around and causing chaos.
This is what she tells herself.
This is what she tells Mark Sloan.
“You can’t leave me here...” comes his plaintive reply.
“But…” But nothing. She lacks the air in her lungs required to finish the protest.
There’s to be a burial; private. She’d thought about going but was no longer certain on which side of that particular line she now stood. She drives them to the cemetery nonetheless.
Her hands are steady on his shoulders as she uses them to guide their way through the staggered rows of marble and stone. The rain has eased and she can’t help but feel disappointed; like maybe this is a journey that should be done under a heavy cloak of grey cloud and drizzle.
She stops his forward momentum with a light squeeze and drops her hands to her sides, almost at a loss for what to do with them now as she resists the urge to fall to her knees in the grass like she usually would.
“What are we doing here?” His words; barely whispered.
She lets her fingers wander over the carved letters that make up the name on the headstone, the shape of them, grooved, and familiar all the way to her bones.
George O’Malley
“We’re making sure he knows,” are the words she offers by way of an answer. “We’re making sure he knows to go find her. To look after her…”
It’s not until they’re picking their way back to her car that she dares to ask about the presence of the patient ID around his wrist. She snags her fingers in his and drags both their hands to pointed eye-level before half-jokingly wondering aloud if she’s spent the better part of the afternoon harbouring a fugitive.
He shakes himself free lightly and with a quick shrug.
“Sort of...”
Her eyebrows rise in unison, a silent invitation for him to continue his explanation.
“Well, I was going to be discharged, I guess. But there’s this ophthalmologist, Julia, and...” He trails off, tips his face skyward as the light rain returns to paint the cemetery in high gloss. She hears him sigh, a sound of barely concealed resignation more than anything else, before finishing; “It’s complicated.”
She’s nodding her agreement slowly despite the fact that he’s not looking in her direction. “It always is around these parts.”
Back in the car, she hesitates before starting the ignition; stalls. She can’t begin to fathom an appropriate destination and with dusk closing in, the silence of the near empty cemetery seems like her best hope for refuge.
“She doesn’t get it,” he says suddenly, and apropos of nothing really. “Julia.” Though, ambiguous as his statement may have been, the clarification is not strictly necessary.
“Get what?”
Her fingers are in her lap now, key-chains tangled around the tips. There’s a pause following her question, so long and silent and heavy she wonders if maybe he didn’t hear her at all. The windows start to fog over, giving the appearance of disappearance.
“Me and Lexie…”
City traffic seems to bleed apart as they make their way from east to west. Traffic lights blink, yellow to red to green, and lanes empty out, as though choreographed to do just that. Mark has his hands wrapped, lifeline-like, around the seatbelt crossing his chest; and his eyes are closed, leaking silent salt-water tears. She feels ill at the sight of them, light-headed and wrung out.
She signals and pulls the car into the lot, waits for the valet to approach before rolling her window to halfway and asking him to give her a minute, thank you. He nods slowly and backs away and a fleeting glance in her rear-view mirror paints a woeful tale. Apparently Mark is not the only one crying.
“Why are we here?”
The sudden confusion in his voice is justified, they’d not discussed a destination and this one is surely surprising to say the least. But she shrugs back her answer as though it should be obvious, a quick up and down of her shoulders, wide grin to match.
“Why not?”
Because, yeah. Why not?
The late afternoon queue is non-existent as they make their way through the turnstiles and into the overly bright gift-shop at the base of the Space Needle, and it’s unsurprising really, given the weather. Pewter clouds had blanked out the top of the tower entirely when she’d craned her vision sky-ward; she didn’t have to give voice to the myriad reasons why that was half the appeal of this visit.
The air at the top seems thicker, harder to drag into overworked lungs. They part without comment, left and right, and she makes the decision to give him all the time he needs even as she knows from experience there will not be enough time in the world.
She resists the urge to look over the edge, to seek out landmarks through the cloud and search for distant signs of life; and death. Instead, she sinks down onto a bench-seat and tugs the soft collar of her coat up around her ears to cut out the worst of the chill; that which hasn’t already settled, marrow-deep in her bones. Coldplay lyrics continue to loop through her consciousness and she doesn’t know if it was Lexie’s favourite or simply a decision made by an overwrought family member, Meredith, in the heat of the moment, but the haunting song choice has shifted something inside her that she’s not sure will ever right itself again. She feels off course, even more so than is typical, and as the bubble of hysteria in her gut rumbles up and spills over her lips she thinks she finally stumbles over the reason why.
She is alive. So many people are dead and she is still alive.
“Stevens?”
Her laughter, inappropriate but not entirely unexpected, fails to drown out his voice, but thinking up a response is futile; she’d need air in her lungs to deliver it after all.
“Izzie, are you okay?”
His hands hover, just out of reach; as though touching her might break something. Something else. Like he is not already completely shattered himself.
They’re shoulder to shoulder when she finally gathers herself back in, the weight of him beside her, heavy and sure in a manner that is slowly beginning to feel almost comfortable.
“Meredith did a pericardiocentesis on me with the tube from a bottle of sanitiser.”
She holds her breath as his point registers loud and clear. Death is arbitrary. Like life…
“You know, I did the same kind of thing to Alex once. I…” He trails off mid-statement as she nods back that she does. She does know that.
He’s staring at his hands like they’re foreign objects, curious, like maybe they belong to someone else.
“He screamed.”
She swallows; wants to tell him to shut up, wants to clamp her hands over her ears and drown his words out by shrieking nonsense into the ether. And I will tryyyy to fix you…
“He screamed, and Lexie screamed, and I think I screamed at them both. He needed to be quiet but I was shoving a scalpel through his ribs and he was screaming and Lexie, she stuffed his mouth with gauze to shut him up, and she told him that she loved him, and…” He ends the monologue with a low moan that rattles the air that separates them.
“That’s how it goes, isn’t it? Death-bed confessions of love and absolution.”
She blinks and what little view there is disappears out completely. That is how it goes, and she has a nullified marriage certificate to prove it.
“It’s what you do. It’s what… I did the same thing. Out in the middle of fucking nowhere and we both knew she was good as gone already and… I think I’m going to be sick.”
She knows the feeling intimately.
“You should tell him, you know…”
She answers; the obligatory “tell who what?”, even though she knows. And he knows that she knows. It’s a dance they’ve been doing all afternoon and practice does indeed make perfect.
“Karev, you should…” He shrugs, like the end of the sentence is obvious; which it is. “You should try to fix that.”
And he only just misses the beat of the looping lyrics in her head.
They’re back in the elevator and descending rapidly when he says he’ll buy her a coffee. She shrugs and smiles slowly; tells him if he makes it a gin and tonic then she’s in.
At a bar that most definitely isn’t Joe’s, he orders for them both while she’s in the bathroom. The mirror behind the sink is soap scum stained and smeared. She stares at her own reflection and tries to catalogue the parts of herself that she still recognises. Blonde curls and brown eyes and that’s about it.
She takes a deep breath, all the way to her toes, before pushing back through the door and into the sparsely occupied interior of the bar. He has snagged them a dimly lit booth along one side and she takes the moment of solitude she’s been gifted to watch as he stares absently at the glass between his fingertips. She can’t begin to read his thoughts and is more than grateful for the fact.
She pushes her handbag along the seat ahead of her and notices him startle visibly at her arrival. She doesn’t comment and he doesn’t offer an explanation.
“I’m guessing there’s probably a small army of Seattle Grace employees out searching for you…” she says around a sip of her drink. He slides his phone across the table towards her, twenty eight missed calls.
“Just turned it on.”
“You going to listen to them?”
His thumb held down against the off button is the only answer he gives.
“Meredith told me once that you and Dr. Torres had a baby,” she says, the memory of the phone call sparked by the knowledge that she should really tell someone where she is. And, more importantly, who she’s with.
“Sofia.” He nods and smiles easily. The first genuine grin she’s seen all afternoon, “Sofia…”
“Congratulations.”
He fumbles with his wallet for several beats before sliding an image across the table towards her, follows the path his cell phone had taken minutes earlier.
She collects the photo carefully, “She looks like Callie,” she says; finishes with, “Luckily.”
He snorts; half-hearted indignation. She runs her fingers across the baby’s black spikes of hair before handing it back.
“She’s gorgeous.” Redundant but true.
She volunteers to buy the next round and uses the time alone to tap out a quick message to Meredith. Mark is with me. He’s okay. I’ll call you later. The bare bones of the story, she hopes it’s enough for now.
“Are you working at the moment?”
There are rapidly melting ice cubes in the base of her tumbler and she swirls them around hypnotically as she answers.
“I’m finishing my residency, I ended up repeating a year but I figure that’s okay in the grand scheme of things…”
He nods; his eyes wide. She knows it was not the answer he’d been expecting. She can scarcely believe it’s true herself most of the time.
“Specialty?”
“I keep changing my mind between trauma, paeds., and plastics. The rate I’m going I’ll need the extra year just to make a decision.”
“Trauma, paeds., and plastics? I can see the similarities there, no wonder it’s a hard decision.” He doesn’t bother to hide the sarcasm and she grins and shrugs in response because, well, she knows.
“Jackson’s leaving,” he says casually, and her blood runs cold because she knows where this is going. “I’ll need a new resident…”
He trails off and she’s grateful. The ice in her glass has melted completely now and she downs the resultant water quickly for something to do.
“Stevens?”
She forces her gaze up to meet his, finds herself blinking back inexplicable tears; again.
“I don’t… I… I think it’s too late,” she finally finishes. “Too much time has passed, too many things are different.”
Too many things are exactly the same.
Back in the car, the atmosphere is thicker somehow. She wants to take back everything she said and throw herself at his feet; beg and plead for the position he’d offered with every last syllable she knows. She indicates to change lanes instead. Checks the rear-view mirror and keeps a close watch on her speedometer and forces herself to think about nothing but the traffic and the smooth black-top disappearing beneath her headlights.
The distance to Meredith’s house is eaten up by the silence. They’re half an hour away and then they’re turning into her street and it feels like all she’s done is blink half a dozen times. She pulls the car up to the curb and cuts the ignition automatically, even though she knows she can’t get out of the car.
If she gets out of the car, she may never get back in it.
There are several others parked in the street; two more in the driveway that she can see from where she sits. Mark makes no move to unclip his seat-belt; his hands are still curled lightly in his lap. She leans back against the head-rest and closes her eyes against the streetlights. She can hear him breathing heavily beside her and she knows everything they’ve spent the afternoon avoiding is slowly crashing down around their ankles.
“The offer still stands.”
His words cut the silence, knife-like.
“I can talk to Hunt.” He pauses then before adding, “If you want.”
A light flicks on at the front of the house. It bathes the overgrown yard in a yellow glow and when the door opens not seconds later, she recognises Cristina as she steps out onto the porch. She holds her breath, panicked, before realising she’s simply stepped out to take a call, her cell-phone pressed to her right ear as she gesticulates wildly with the opposite hand.
Mark is still strapped into the seat beside her. He’s made no move to get out and she’s half convinced she’ll be taking him with her back down the coast.
“Thank you,” he says finally. “Today, I thought…” He swallows roughly; clears his throat before skipping ahead to the end. “Anyway, thanks.”
“That’s okay.”
She hears his seat-belt retract then, and when his door opens, cold night air floods the interior. She shivers involuntarily against the sudden chill and watches Mark’s exhale fog the space in front of his face.
“Are you coming in?”
The cold air sticks in her lungs. Sharp; shattered glass.
She shakes her head. Whispers; “I can’t.”
The park lights are still on, illuminating the rain-damp road ahead. Mark is mostly out of the vehicle when the silhouette appears and he pauses at the same moment all the blood in her veins seems to evaporate.
She can hear him speaking and he moves again, steps out into the street. His rumbling baritone echoes through her skull; she knows he is not speaking to her.
The shrill ring of her cell-phone startles her back to functioning and she fumbles clumsily through her bag, a desperate attempt to stall the inevitable.
“Izzie?” Meredith… The words continue without pause. “I told him to tell you to come in. That you wouldn’t unless it came from him. But I don’t trust him to do it right. To make you listen.” The sentences are almost stuttering out between sobs and she shuts her eyes against the barrage; forgets to breathe.
Breathes to forget.
The staccato sentences on the other end of the phone trail off, are replaced with a whispered stream, ”Please, please, please…” She presses the heel of her free hand against her forehead. Realises; this stopped being about her years ago.
Wonders, briefly, if it ever really was…
Fandom | Grey’s Anatomy
Characters/Pairings | Izzie Stevens and Mark Sloan [implied ex Izzie/Alex and Mark/Lexie]
Word Count | 3600
Rating | PG-13
Summary | The decision to attend the funeral had been made on a whim...
AN | Partial submission for the shonda_land big bang challenge
Soundtrack | Here we are, underneath a million leaves...
[img src]
wild light, glowing bright
to guide me when i fall
i fall on tragedy
The rain that had been her constant companion for the past ninety miles seems to intensify as the Welcome to Seattle signs loom and then fade in her rear-view mirror, though she’s sure the thoughts are little more than by-products of a long ago conditioned response. The seat beneath her remains solid, like the steering wheel between her fingertips and the slow guitar bleeding from the speakers. She keeps the windows rolled resolutely up for fear she’ll dissolve through the gaps and disappear completely.
She reflects now on how the news had filtered through the hospital grapevine in a manner so achingly familiar she could almost have been back there herself; a rush of words and side-long glances that had morphed and twisted to the point that only the barest of bones were still true by the time they reached her.
There’s been an explosion.
They’ve disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again; all Bermuda triangle-like.
There were no survivors.
They’ve all survived…
Fact and morbid fabrication; impossibly intertwined.
In the end she’d phoned Meredith. Through a smeared blur of nausea and tears and blood numbing panic she’d left seven voice-mail messages of varying clarity before locking herself in a supply closest and blindly dialling a number she’s never quite managed to forget.
Alex…
He’d answered on the second ring; had trotted out a string of perfunctory words, short and clipped, that had started and ended with the information about Lexie’s death. She remembers that part specifically, that he’d said those syllables twice; as though he didn’t think she’d believe him if he didn’t repeat the news.
As though he didn’t quite believe it yet himself.
She lets the numbing rhythm of the windscreen wipers soothe her frayed nerves as Seattle blurs out on the other side of the glass every second beat. The decision to attend the funeral had been made on a whim she’d told her colleagues as she’d bundled out of the hospital that morning. It is a lie; she’d known the moment she’d heard Alex stumble over the truth that she’d be there in the end, no matter what.
The realisation that they, them, not us anymore, still had that depth of hold over her was harder to reconcile. Time has changed very little, it would seem; except for all the things that matter most.
The parking lot at the funeral home is three quarters to full as she pulls her car into an empty slot by the exit; and already she’s planning her getaway. There’s a small crowd milling at the building’s entrance, evidence enough that she’s not late; at least, not this time, and not yet. She waits for them to make their way inside before gathering the steel required to open her door and swing her legs out into the wet; foregoes her umbrella in favour of the feel of the rain on her lips, on her eyelids, as the points of her low heels against the asphalt announce her unsteady arrival.
She slides onto a seat in the very back row; quickly counts off the achingly familiar heads in front of her before digging through her purse for a pre-emptive Kleenex. She is nowhere near as immune to death and destruction as she lays claim to.
There’s a balding celebrant out front in a starched suit reading to a script from his spot beside a rose-adorned coffin. She lets the words he says roll loosely across the crowded expanse between them and almost forgets to breathe for whole sentences at a time. She recalls a conversation about odds, and, more specifically, about how to screw them. She thinks, madly, that death by plane crash is pretty freaking unlikely, all things considered.
This time, the odds screwed them.
Mark Sloan appears in the aisle on her right mid-way through the photo montage, and his sharp intake of breath has her reaching for his elbow before she’s had time to consider the potential consequences. She encourages him down onto the seat beside her quietly, a desperate attempt to limit the fuss she’s almost certain he’d been about to create. Her thumb catches on an ID band still stuck in place around his left wrist; hospital issue.
Seattle Grace Mercy West.
And she’ll never get used to that.
His knees bounce incessantly, but they’re all out of rhythm with each other, like maybe the left side of his brain stopped communicating with the right somewhere above the hills between here and Boise. She lays the palm of her hand flat against his thigh to quell the movement and he’s immediately rigid beneath her touch. She thinks maybe that’s worse but leaves her hand where it is nonetheless as Lexie’s wide grin, set to unfathomable lyrics she’ll never be able to hear again without ice developing in her veins, beams out at them from the grainy projector screen.
”Lights will guide you home; and ignite your bones…”
She stands when she’s instructed, drags a catatonic Mark to his feet alongside her when she can and even manages a genuine smile as the eulogies fall to bittersweet reminiscing. She steals deliberate sidelong glances to her left at times she thinks he’s least likely to notice; eventually stares at him solidly for several beats before realising he’s unlikely to notice anything at all right now.
It’s a feeling she knows all too well.
As the service draws to a close she readies for a quick departure; tells herself it’s only because she doesn’t want to create a fuss, to detract from a day that should be all about Lexie by hanging around and causing chaos.
This is what she tells herself.
This is what she tells Mark Sloan.
“You can’t leave me here...” comes his plaintive reply.
“But…” But nothing. She lacks the air in her lungs required to finish the protest.
There’s to be a burial; private. She’d thought about going but was no longer certain on which side of that particular line she now stood. She drives them to the cemetery nonetheless.
Her hands are steady on his shoulders as she uses them to guide their way through the staggered rows of marble and stone. The rain has eased and she can’t help but feel disappointed; like maybe this is a journey that should be done under a heavy cloak of grey cloud and drizzle.
She stops his forward momentum with a light squeeze and drops her hands to her sides, almost at a loss for what to do with them now as she resists the urge to fall to her knees in the grass like she usually would.
“What are we doing here?” His words; barely whispered.
She lets her fingers wander over the carved letters that make up the name on the headstone, the shape of them, grooved, and familiar all the way to her bones.
George O’Malley
“We’re making sure he knows,” are the words she offers by way of an answer. “We’re making sure he knows to go find her. To look after her…”
It’s not until they’re picking their way back to her car that she dares to ask about the presence of the patient ID around his wrist. She snags her fingers in his and drags both their hands to pointed eye-level before half-jokingly wondering aloud if she’s spent the better part of the afternoon harbouring a fugitive.
He shakes himself free lightly and with a quick shrug.
“Sort of...”
Her eyebrows rise in unison, a silent invitation for him to continue his explanation.
“Well, I was going to be discharged, I guess. But there’s this ophthalmologist, Julia, and...” He trails off, tips his face skyward as the light rain returns to paint the cemetery in high gloss. She hears him sigh, a sound of barely concealed resignation more than anything else, before finishing; “It’s complicated.”
She’s nodding her agreement slowly despite the fact that he’s not looking in her direction. “It always is around these parts.”
Back in the car, she hesitates before starting the ignition; stalls. She can’t begin to fathom an appropriate destination and with dusk closing in, the silence of the near empty cemetery seems like her best hope for refuge.
“She doesn’t get it,” he says suddenly, and apropos of nothing really. “Julia.” Though, ambiguous as his statement may have been, the clarification is not strictly necessary.
“Get what?”
Her fingers are in her lap now, key-chains tangled around the tips. There’s a pause following her question, so long and silent and heavy she wonders if maybe he didn’t hear her at all. The windows start to fog over, giving the appearance of disappearance.
“Me and Lexie…”
City traffic seems to bleed apart as they make their way from east to west. Traffic lights blink, yellow to red to green, and lanes empty out, as though choreographed to do just that. Mark has his hands wrapped, lifeline-like, around the seatbelt crossing his chest; and his eyes are closed, leaking silent salt-water tears. She feels ill at the sight of them, light-headed and wrung out.
She signals and pulls the car into the lot, waits for the valet to approach before rolling her window to halfway and asking him to give her a minute, thank you. He nods slowly and backs away and a fleeting glance in her rear-view mirror paints a woeful tale. Apparently Mark is not the only one crying.
“Why are we here?”
The sudden confusion in his voice is justified, they’d not discussed a destination and this one is surely surprising to say the least. But she shrugs back her answer as though it should be obvious, a quick up and down of her shoulders, wide grin to match.
“Why not?”
Because, yeah. Why not?
The late afternoon queue is non-existent as they make their way through the turnstiles and into the overly bright gift-shop at the base of the Space Needle, and it’s unsurprising really, given the weather. Pewter clouds had blanked out the top of the tower entirely when she’d craned her vision sky-ward; she didn’t have to give voice to the myriad reasons why that was half the appeal of this visit.
The air at the top seems thicker, harder to drag into overworked lungs. They part without comment, left and right, and she makes the decision to give him all the time he needs even as she knows from experience there will not be enough time in the world.
She resists the urge to look over the edge, to seek out landmarks through the cloud and search for distant signs of life; and death. Instead, she sinks down onto a bench-seat and tugs the soft collar of her coat up around her ears to cut out the worst of the chill; that which hasn’t already settled, marrow-deep in her bones. Coldplay lyrics continue to loop through her consciousness and she doesn’t know if it was Lexie’s favourite or simply a decision made by an overwrought family member, Meredith, in the heat of the moment, but the haunting song choice has shifted something inside her that she’s not sure will ever right itself again. She feels off course, even more so than is typical, and as the bubble of hysteria in her gut rumbles up and spills over her lips she thinks she finally stumbles over the reason why.
She is alive. So many people are dead and she is still alive.
“Stevens?”
Her laughter, inappropriate but not entirely unexpected, fails to drown out his voice, but thinking up a response is futile; she’d need air in her lungs to deliver it after all.
“Izzie, are you okay?”
His hands hover, just out of reach; as though touching her might break something. Something else. Like he is not already completely shattered himself.
They’re shoulder to shoulder when she finally gathers herself back in, the weight of him beside her, heavy and sure in a manner that is slowly beginning to feel almost comfortable.
“Meredith did a pericardiocentesis on me with the tube from a bottle of sanitiser.”
She holds her breath as his point registers loud and clear. Death is arbitrary. Like life…
“You know, I did the same kind of thing to Alex once. I…” He trails off mid-statement as she nods back that she does. She does know that.
He’s staring at his hands like they’re foreign objects, curious, like maybe they belong to someone else.
“He screamed.”
She swallows; wants to tell him to shut up, wants to clamp her hands over her ears and drown his words out by shrieking nonsense into the ether. And I will tryyyy to fix you…
“He screamed, and Lexie screamed, and I think I screamed at them both. He needed to be quiet but I was shoving a scalpel through his ribs and he was screaming and Lexie, she stuffed his mouth with gauze to shut him up, and she told him that she loved him, and…” He ends the monologue with a low moan that rattles the air that separates them.
“That’s how it goes, isn’t it? Death-bed confessions of love and absolution.”
She blinks and what little view there is disappears out completely. That is how it goes, and she has a nullified marriage certificate to prove it.
“It’s what you do. It’s what… I did the same thing. Out in the middle of fucking nowhere and we both knew she was good as gone already and… I think I’m going to be sick.”
She knows the feeling intimately.
“You should tell him, you know…”
She answers; the obligatory “tell who what?”, even though she knows. And he knows that she knows. It’s a dance they’ve been doing all afternoon and practice does indeed make perfect.
“Karev, you should…” He shrugs, like the end of the sentence is obvious; which it is. “You should try to fix that.”
And he only just misses the beat of the looping lyrics in her head.
They’re back in the elevator and descending rapidly when he says he’ll buy her a coffee. She shrugs and smiles slowly; tells him if he makes it a gin and tonic then she’s in.
At a bar that most definitely isn’t Joe’s, he orders for them both while she’s in the bathroom. The mirror behind the sink is soap scum stained and smeared. She stares at her own reflection and tries to catalogue the parts of herself that she still recognises. Blonde curls and brown eyes and that’s about it.
She takes a deep breath, all the way to her toes, before pushing back through the door and into the sparsely occupied interior of the bar. He has snagged them a dimly lit booth along one side and she takes the moment of solitude she’s been gifted to watch as he stares absently at the glass between his fingertips. She can’t begin to read his thoughts and is more than grateful for the fact.
She pushes her handbag along the seat ahead of her and notices him startle visibly at her arrival. She doesn’t comment and he doesn’t offer an explanation.
“I’m guessing there’s probably a small army of Seattle Grace employees out searching for you…” she says around a sip of her drink. He slides his phone across the table towards her, twenty eight missed calls.
“Just turned it on.”
“You going to listen to them?”
His thumb held down against the off button is the only answer he gives.
“Meredith told me once that you and Dr. Torres had a baby,” she says, the memory of the phone call sparked by the knowledge that she should really tell someone where she is. And, more importantly, who she’s with.
“Sofia.” He nods and smiles easily. The first genuine grin she’s seen all afternoon, “Sofia…”
“Congratulations.”
He fumbles with his wallet for several beats before sliding an image across the table towards her, follows the path his cell phone had taken minutes earlier.
She collects the photo carefully, “She looks like Callie,” she says; finishes with, “Luckily.”
He snorts; half-hearted indignation. She runs her fingers across the baby’s black spikes of hair before handing it back.
“She’s gorgeous.” Redundant but true.
She volunteers to buy the next round and uses the time alone to tap out a quick message to Meredith. Mark is with me. He’s okay. I’ll call you later. The bare bones of the story, she hopes it’s enough for now.
“Are you working at the moment?”
There are rapidly melting ice cubes in the base of her tumbler and she swirls them around hypnotically as she answers.
“I’m finishing my residency, I ended up repeating a year but I figure that’s okay in the grand scheme of things…”
He nods; his eyes wide. She knows it was not the answer he’d been expecting. She can scarcely believe it’s true herself most of the time.
“Specialty?”
“I keep changing my mind between trauma, paeds., and plastics. The rate I’m going I’ll need the extra year just to make a decision.”
“Trauma, paeds., and plastics? I can see the similarities there, no wonder it’s a hard decision.” He doesn’t bother to hide the sarcasm and she grins and shrugs in response because, well, she knows.
“Jackson’s leaving,” he says casually, and her blood runs cold because she knows where this is going. “I’ll need a new resident…”
He trails off and she’s grateful. The ice in her glass has melted completely now and she downs the resultant water quickly for something to do.
“Stevens?”
She forces her gaze up to meet his, finds herself blinking back inexplicable tears; again.
“I don’t… I… I think it’s too late,” she finally finishes. “Too much time has passed, too many things are different.”
Too many things are exactly the same.
Back in the car, the atmosphere is thicker somehow. She wants to take back everything she said and throw herself at his feet; beg and plead for the position he’d offered with every last syllable she knows. She indicates to change lanes instead. Checks the rear-view mirror and keeps a close watch on her speedometer and forces herself to think about nothing but the traffic and the smooth black-top disappearing beneath her headlights.
The distance to Meredith’s house is eaten up by the silence. They’re half an hour away and then they’re turning into her street and it feels like all she’s done is blink half a dozen times. She pulls the car up to the curb and cuts the ignition automatically, even though she knows she can’t get out of the car.
If she gets out of the car, she may never get back in it.
There are several others parked in the street; two more in the driveway that she can see from where she sits. Mark makes no move to unclip his seat-belt; his hands are still curled lightly in his lap. She leans back against the head-rest and closes her eyes against the streetlights. She can hear him breathing heavily beside her and she knows everything they’ve spent the afternoon avoiding is slowly crashing down around their ankles.
“The offer still stands.”
His words cut the silence, knife-like.
“I can talk to Hunt.” He pauses then before adding, “If you want.”
A light flicks on at the front of the house. It bathes the overgrown yard in a yellow glow and when the door opens not seconds later, she recognises Cristina as she steps out onto the porch. She holds her breath, panicked, before realising she’s simply stepped out to take a call, her cell-phone pressed to her right ear as she gesticulates wildly with the opposite hand.
Mark is still strapped into the seat beside her. He’s made no move to get out and she’s half convinced she’ll be taking him with her back down the coast.
“Thank you,” he says finally. “Today, I thought…” He swallows roughly; clears his throat before skipping ahead to the end. “Anyway, thanks.”
“That’s okay.”
She hears his seat-belt retract then, and when his door opens, cold night air floods the interior. She shivers involuntarily against the sudden chill and watches Mark’s exhale fog the space in front of his face.
“Are you coming in?”
The cold air sticks in her lungs. Sharp; shattered glass.
She shakes her head. Whispers; “I can’t.”
The park lights are still on, illuminating the rain-damp road ahead. Mark is mostly out of the vehicle when the silhouette appears and he pauses at the same moment all the blood in her veins seems to evaporate.
She can hear him speaking and he moves again, steps out into the street. His rumbling baritone echoes through her skull; she knows he is not speaking to her.
The shrill ring of her cell-phone startles her back to functioning and she fumbles clumsily through her bag, a desperate attempt to stall the inevitable.
“Izzie?” Meredith… The words continue without pause. “I told him to tell you to come in. That you wouldn’t unless it came from him. But I don’t trust him to do it right. To make you listen.” The sentences are almost stuttering out between sobs and she shuts her eyes against the barrage; forgets to breathe.
Breathes to forget.
The staccato sentences on the other end of the phone trail off, are replaced with a whispered stream, ”Please, please, please…” She presses the heel of her free hand against her forehead. Realises; this stopped being about her years ago.
Wonders, briefly, if it ever really was…