[ga] fic | Under Rubble from the Past
Title | Under Rubble from the Past
Fandom | Grey’s Anatomy
Characters | Izzie/Alex (+ Cristina)
Word Count | 3100
Rating | R
Summary | Izzie reads the real estate guide and makes an impromptu road trip... [set mid season nine]
Author’s Note | For leobrat via fandomaid’s Superstorm Sandy fundraiser. Fifteen hundred words of this is for fandomaid, the rest is pure leobrat because she is one of my most favourite people in the whole entire wide world. All the chocolate martinis for you, bb girl! I hope you like this ♥
She doesn’t recognise the car in the driveway when she slows her own to a crawl and lets gravity drag her down the slight incline and just past the house. There are lights on in the kitchen, another, a lamp perhaps, in the den, and she smiles at memories that will always take pride of place in her soul.
Dancing and drinking and fighting and laughing.
Inappropriate sex and board games and bad movies at three am.
Not necessarily in that order.
Alex...
She doesn’t do regrets anymore. If life has taught her one thing, it’s that the notion is the most futile of exercises.
(But life has taught her more than just one thing...
And she regrets, every day and a thousand times over, what happened between her and Alex.)
She’d been expecting the For Sale sign that has been hammered into the front lawn. It’s the neon SOLD splashed across it at an angle that sends inexplicable shivers down her spine. The end of an era, she thinks; blinks and finds the words blur out behind saltwater tears that had been inevitable from the moment she’d first climbed into her car that morning.
Over the course of the past year Meredith has messaged her random photos of the new house being built. She recalls, vividly, the almost physical reaction she’d had to the most recent lot. Sitting at home, alone, a single wine-glass upturned on the sink and a medical journal opened on the couch beside her, the images had been hard to look at. Beneath a slightly out of focus shot of her new kitchen, Meredith had typed, You’ll have to come show us how to use it.
Smiley face.
She hadn’t replied at the time. Didn’t know how to without falling apart completely.
Three days later she’d addressed a ‘congratulations’ card and slid it into the post box at the end of her street.
(And she won’t be the last to ask Hallmark do her talking for her.)
The engine is cooling and her boots are tripping slightly, up and over the curb, onto the sidewalk, before she can register that she’s even moved.
This had not been a part of the carefully mapped out plan.
(Drive there. Check.
Have a look. Check.
Maybe cry a little from the driver’s seat of her car. Check.
Drive home again...)
There is no room in her life now for sentimentality. It won’t change anything, what’s happened can never be un-done, no matter how much she may want for it to be, and the new existence she’s carefully carved for herself is not so bad...
All things considered.
(And there are a lot of things to consider, if she really lets herself think about it.
Mostly, though, she tries not to go there.)
She’s ended up roughly a year behind her intern cohort. And the hospital she’s completing her residency at has been so incredibly supportive, she can’t begin to fathom what she’d have done without them. She has friends again, she has colleagues, she has respect
Hell, she even has a cat.
(Officially, the cat’s name is Monty. But the claws and the teeth and the fight first, ask questions later nature means she mostly just calls him Yang.
True story.
And not one she’s ever likely to share.)
She drags her scarf a little closer, up and under her chin. Hides her lips beneath the soft fabric and exhales in a bid to warm up. Her hair is pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck and she quickly releases it, gives her head a shake to loosen the curls and cover her ears.
She counts cracks in the pavement at her feet: seventeen. She watches the stuttering streetlight above her head flicker and flutter for a full, carefully counted out minute. She engages in a string of internal dialogue that mostly consists of get back in the freaking car, you idiot.
But she can’t quite bring herself to do it.
The fact that she doesn’t recognise the vehicle in the driveway suggests the new owners have already moved in and removing the For Sale/SOLD sign from the front lawn is going to be the subject of some kind of housewarming ceremony on the weekend.
This is the story that she conjures.
She imagines a family. Kids. Plural. Bikes in the shed out back and crayon scratches on the walls. She laughs then, suddenly, and thinks about Meredith’s childhood, about the stories she’s heard.
The poor house won’t know what’s hit it.
She’s standing at the front door then. And, again, time seems to have moved without her being cognizant of it. Like she’s being teleported from place to place to place to place and has no control over what happens in the interim.
If getting out of the car had been testing the rules she’d set pre-trip, then this is well and truly smashing them to shards.
The blind is drawn she notes as her hand knocks against the smudged glass of the front door. And it’s easier to think of the action as something carried out by a third party, her hand. She doesn’t need to do this, she shouldn’t be doing this.
She’s not.
Her hand is.
Oh...
Alex opens the door.
(Oh....)
His shock, she thinks, probably mirrors hers.
“I’m sorry,” she says, apologising on automatic pilot as her head struggles to catch up with her heart and her lungs. “I wasn’t- I mean...” She steps back quickly. He still hasn’t moved.
Maybe, her fleeting thoughts scream at her, bam, bam, bam, maybe he can’t.
A figure appears over his shoulder, but her eyes won’t shift away from his for long enough to work out who it might be.
“Karev, shut the freaking door. It’s freezing.”
Fight first, ask questions later.
Yang.
Cristina...
Oh.
“Alex, what the-”
A mess of black curls and furrowed brows appears over his shoulder suddenly, and the words sort of fizzle out until the only sounds that register are the television, turned down low in another room, and the marching band thud of her own pulse in her ears.
“I was just going” she hears herself say. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”
“What are you doing here?”
Cristina’s tone is equal parts accusing and defensive. (A blend she remembers well.)
“Like I said,” she stands up a little straighter and shifts her shoulders back an inch or two with deliberate effort, “I was just going. There’s been a misunderstanding and I’m sorry to have bothered you both.”
She’s halfway back down the path before:
“Wait.”
She carefully paces out three more steps before she obeys. Slows to a stop but doesn’t concede defeat completely by turning around.
“What sort of ‘misunderstanding’?”
The tone has softened, seems genuinely curious now as opposed to the distaste it had been dripping with not seconds ago. She wraps her arms around herself, like maybe she’s actually cold and not just using the motion as a desperate attempt to stop herself from falling to pieces on the concrete. Then she turns back to face them.
Alex still hasn’t moved. Cristina keeps shifting her gaze between the two of them, and, at first, it’s like she’s waiting for some kind of implosion to occur and can’t quite decide who’ll put on the more entertaining show.
But then her hand moves to Alex’s arm, just above his elbow, and it sort of sits there, oddly. Some Cristina Yang version of moral support maybe? And the notion that she might actually, genuinely care about what’s happening right here, right in this moment, is almost beyond comprehension.
“I, um,” She forces herself to shift her own line of sight. To stop staring at Alex and the way it appears he’s almost frozen in spot against the door frame, and to attempt eye contact with Cristina instead. “I knew the house had sold- well, no, I knew it was for sale. I just... I don’t really know to be honest.”
She shrugs and hopes it looks miles more casual than she currently feels; shifts her gaze back to Alex then, urgent all of a sudden for him to believe her.
“I really am sorry.”
(Four little words.
And it’s harder than you might think.)
Her fingers are on her car door handle when she registers movement in the shadows, and she only just manages to mask the skip of fear she makes, uses the unintentional momentum to lean against her window casually.
Like... nothing to see here.
“Sorry,” he says, blinking owlishly at her from where he’s standing beneath the fluttering streetlight she’d been staring at what feels like hours ago now.
She nods back, the false bravado she’d channelled just moments before, all but up and vanished.
The silence that settles, she’d like to say it’s comfortable, familiar.
(It is far from being either of those things).
“Alex,” she says, breaking it at the same time he exhales, breathes out her name, “Izz..”
And she finally finds the comfort and familiarity she’d been craving.
His feet shuffle against the surface of the road, and he drops his eyes to his toes. She uses the privacy this move affords to look at him properly. Lets herself absorb as much of him as she can while he’s not looking, because she knows (she knows) she has no right to the pieces she takes and she can’t (she can’t) have him catch her in the act.
He shuffles again, shifts, and she takes it as her cue; time’s up. She switches to fiddling with a tassel on her scarf instead. Too scared to speak.
To break the spell.
“Do you want to come inside?”
And her carefully constructed world drops out from beneath her feet.
He turns before she can stammer out a reply. And she wonders how much of the movement is shrouded in a fear that she’ll say no and a need not to be around for the moment that it happens.
Self-preservation. It always had been his fiercest quality.
They’re halfway back to the front door when he pauses, turns, cocks his head in the direction of the sold sign to their left.
“I bought it,” he says, grin sudden and wide and she feels the muscles around her own mouth shift, a mirror.
“Seriously?”
He nods and the grin doesn’t really go away. She’d forgotten how infectious it could be, rare though it typically was.
“Seriously.”
“And Cristina?”
She braces herself for the answer because, if they’ve bought it together, her mind might actually explode.
(Hell, whole planets may collide overhead.
All post-apocalyptic-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-like.)
“Her rent pays the mortgage,” he says with a shrug, as though it’s obvious, spinning on his heel and heading back towards the still open front door.
“Oh... okay.” And even that scenario is odd enough. And really only serves to underline that while so much has remained resolutely the same over the years, there’s still plenty that has been irrevocably changed as well.
Alex and Cristina as roommates? That’s definitely a change.
She perches on the edge of the couch. It’s new she notes, and she’s not sure it really goes with the dated nature of the rest of the room, but she can imagine Alex picking it out himself and suddenly it seems absolutely perfect.
He brings her a beer to match the half empty ones he and Cristina have already started, and she smiles and says thanks and tries not to appear as robotic as she feels.
Cristina raises her eyebrows at her over the rim of her own bottle as she tips it back and swallows, the motion pointed, like maybe she’s saying it’s her move, the next one.
“Soooo...” She drags the word out and when the silence that had fallen remains she quickly fills it by twisting the top off her drink and bringing it to her lips.
The television continues to provide the somewhat muted soundtrack, and she’s awestruck to finally look up and notice that they’d been watching Ellis Grey’s old surgery tapes.
(Again.)
It’s her turn to raise her eyebrows.
“Seriously?” she says.
“Hey,” Cristina defends, pointing the remote at the television and nudging the volume up a level or two, “This one’s a classic.”
Alex has taken up a spot at the opposite end of the couch. They’re as close, physically, as they’ve been to one another in years. (The several feet of distance could not feel more insurmountable.)
He drinks his beer and steals sideways glances at her every now and then, and she tries to time her own in his direction to fall into the gaps, lest they accidentally lock eyes and have to make an acknowledgment of sorts.
Ellis is preparing to close before he speaks.
“Do you like the new couch?” he says, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“No,” Cristina says before she can even begin to formulate a response.
“I wasn’t asking you. Besides, you’ve made your thoughts more than clear already.” He pulls a face at her before turning to roll his eyes conspiratorially at Izzie, the motion, almost automatic.
Most definitely shocking.
For the both of them.
She shakes it off and smiles back, determined not to lose the moment to awkward silence and withdrawal.
“Whatever,” Cristina says, “it’s gross. And freaking uncomfortable. I don’t know what was wrong with the old one-”
“You do know that Meredith and McDreamy did the McNasty on it more times than we could ever hope to count, right?”
“Of course,” Cristina bites back, dumping her empty beer bottle onto the coffee table with a dull thud, “Don’t pretend like you never christened it-” She pauses and Izzie knows, suddenly, exactly what’s coming next.
“Don’t pretend like the two of you never christened it.” And, bam. There it is.
Despite the split second to prepare for the inevitability, she still manages to choke on a hastily slurped mouthful of beer.
“Whatever,” says Alex, the word mostly mumbled under his breath. “It was gross and now it’s gone and if you don’t like it you can move out.”
Five more minutes pass, the silence interrupted only by the sound of Ellis Grey barking instructions at cowering interns, before Cristina stands abruptly and declares she’s going to bed. Only she doesn’t quite put it like that.
“Obviously you two have things to discuss,” she says dryly, making a show of collecting the empty bottles from the coffee table between them, “There are condoms in the bathroom cupboard and if you keep me awake all night I swear to God-”
Alex throws his shoe at her head.
As Cristina beats a hasty retreat, muttering under her breath all the while about assault charges and domestic abuse, she rehearses a smile and tries to conjure a goodbye that won’t sound like any they’ve shared in the past.
“I should probably make a move, too,” she says, keeping it light, like she just lives down the road and they’ll see each other on the weekend. Or tomorrow in the tunnels. Later tonight at the top of the stairs.
“Thanks for the beer.”
There’s lump in her throat and she’s starting to panic that her loose edges are unravelling faster than she can knit them back together.
“Izz…”
She’s standing now, twisting her scarf back into place and fishing her keys from where she’d dumped them into her cavernous handbag earlier. She stops though, when he speaks. She stops moving for a beat and shuts her eyes and lets the sound of her name on his tongue fill her up completely.
Izz…
She’s crying. There’s no point denying it anymore.
She lifts a finger to silence him and smiles giddily through her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says, laughing. “I’m sorry for rocking up unannounced like that.”
His fingers are laced together, his knuckles, white.
“I mean, I’m not sorry sorry, because it was great to see you both again, totally weird, but also, really, really great, but, I am sorry if I’ve upset you or if-”
He halts her ramble in the best way he knows how.
Their teeth keep smashing together at first. Like their rhythm is all off and they’re back to being nervous teenagers behind the basketball courts or something.
She uses one hand to drag the scarf she’d just re-tied back off again; the other is behind his head, cupping his cheek, dragging through the hair at the nape of his neck.
(His hands are unzipping her pants.)
She pulls apart from him for just long enough to drag his t-shirt over his head and when it’s gone he drops his face to beneath her chin, uses his tongue against her throat and she works at removing her own top. Can’t seem to get the material that separates them gone fast enough, but then, suddenly, it is. And they’re skin to skin for the first time in years and she’s not sure if she’s still crying but she’s most definitely sure she’s wet through to her hollowed out core.
“Alex,” she says, breathless whisper into the air above his head.
“Shhhh,” he rumbles back, reaching one hand up into her hair as the other one ventures further south.
He drags her backwards and down. Down onto the new couch.
The leather creaks beneath their combined weight, and she thinks, fleetingly, that Cristina is going to be pissed in the morning.
But his fingers are inside her then, fucking, and she’s no longer capable of coherent thought at all.
He’s still got his jeans on, and she grinds against his hand, head thrown back loosely, before shifting deliberately, rolling to make it easier to unzip his pants and get them off. He’s rock hard beneath her fingertips, her hand around his cock and her tongue between his teeth, as familiar to her as breathing.
They fall into familiar patterns, one head turns a little to the left, another knee rests just so against a hip.
Like clockwork.
And they always were so good at this part.
They’re twisted into each other on the couch afterwards, still mostly naked but sleepily silent and sated, when a noise above them startles her into a shriek.
Bare feet pad across the carpet as Cristina, in her pyjamas, comes into view.
“Oh, good,” she says benignly, all casual nonchalance, “you’re finally finished. I think I left my book down here…”
She’s almost back to the doorway when she calls over her shoulder:
“Oh, also? Mere says to say hi.”
Fandom | Grey’s Anatomy
Characters | Izzie/Alex (+ Cristina)
Word Count | 3100
Rating | R
Summary | Izzie reads the real estate guide and makes an impromptu road trip... [set mid season nine]
Author’s Note | For leobrat via fandomaid’s Superstorm Sandy fundraiser. Fifteen hundred words of this is for fandomaid, the rest is pure leobrat because she is one of my most favourite people in the whole entire wide world. All the chocolate martinis for you, bb girl! I hope you like this ♥
She doesn’t recognise the car in the driveway when she slows her own to a crawl and lets gravity drag her down the slight incline and just past the house. There are lights on in the kitchen, another, a lamp perhaps, in the den, and she smiles at memories that will always take pride of place in her soul.
Dancing and drinking and fighting and laughing.
Inappropriate sex and board games and bad movies at three am.
Not necessarily in that order.
Alex...
She doesn’t do regrets anymore. If life has taught her one thing, it’s that the notion is the most futile of exercises.
(But life has taught her more than just one thing...
And she regrets, every day and a thousand times over, what happened between her and Alex.)
She’d been expecting the For Sale sign that has been hammered into the front lawn. It’s the neon SOLD splashed across it at an angle that sends inexplicable shivers down her spine. The end of an era, she thinks; blinks and finds the words blur out behind saltwater tears that had been inevitable from the moment she’d first climbed into her car that morning.
Over the course of the past year Meredith has messaged her random photos of the new house being built. She recalls, vividly, the almost physical reaction she’d had to the most recent lot. Sitting at home, alone, a single wine-glass upturned on the sink and a medical journal opened on the couch beside her, the images had been hard to look at. Beneath a slightly out of focus shot of her new kitchen, Meredith had typed, You’ll have to come show us how to use it.
Smiley face.
She hadn’t replied at the time. Didn’t know how to without falling apart completely.
Three days later she’d addressed a ‘congratulations’ card and slid it into the post box at the end of her street.
(And she won’t be the last to ask Hallmark do her talking for her.)
The engine is cooling and her boots are tripping slightly, up and over the curb, onto the sidewalk, before she can register that she’s even moved.
This had not been a part of the carefully mapped out plan.
(Drive there. Check.
Have a look. Check.
Maybe cry a little from the driver’s seat of her car. Check.
Drive home again...)
There is no room in her life now for sentimentality. It won’t change anything, what’s happened can never be un-done, no matter how much she may want for it to be, and the new existence she’s carefully carved for herself is not so bad...
All things considered.
(And there are a lot of things to consider, if she really lets herself think about it.
Mostly, though, she tries not to go there.)
She’s ended up roughly a year behind her intern cohort. And the hospital she’s completing her residency at has been so incredibly supportive, she can’t begin to fathom what she’d have done without them. She has friends again, she has colleagues, she has respect
Hell, she even has a cat.
(Officially, the cat’s name is Monty. But the claws and the teeth and the fight first, ask questions later nature means she mostly just calls him Yang.
True story.
And not one she’s ever likely to share.)
She drags her scarf a little closer, up and under her chin. Hides her lips beneath the soft fabric and exhales in a bid to warm up. Her hair is pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck and she quickly releases it, gives her head a shake to loosen the curls and cover her ears.
She counts cracks in the pavement at her feet: seventeen. She watches the stuttering streetlight above her head flicker and flutter for a full, carefully counted out minute. She engages in a string of internal dialogue that mostly consists of get back in the freaking car, you idiot.
But she can’t quite bring herself to do it.
The fact that she doesn’t recognise the vehicle in the driveway suggests the new owners have already moved in and removing the For Sale/SOLD sign from the front lawn is going to be the subject of some kind of housewarming ceremony on the weekend.
This is the story that she conjures.
She imagines a family. Kids. Plural. Bikes in the shed out back and crayon scratches on the walls. She laughs then, suddenly, and thinks about Meredith’s childhood, about the stories she’s heard.
The poor house won’t know what’s hit it.
She’s standing at the front door then. And, again, time seems to have moved without her being cognizant of it. Like she’s being teleported from place to place to place to place and has no control over what happens in the interim.
If getting out of the car had been testing the rules she’d set pre-trip, then this is well and truly smashing them to shards.
The blind is drawn she notes as her hand knocks against the smudged glass of the front door. And it’s easier to think of the action as something carried out by a third party, her hand. She doesn’t need to do this, she shouldn’t be doing this.
She’s not.
Her hand is.
Oh...
Alex opens the door.
(Oh....)
His shock, she thinks, probably mirrors hers.
“I’m sorry,” she says, apologising on automatic pilot as her head struggles to catch up with her heart and her lungs. “I wasn’t- I mean...” She steps back quickly. He still hasn’t moved.
Maybe, her fleeting thoughts scream at her, bam, bam, bam, maybe he can’t.
A figure appears over his shoulder, but her eyes won’t shift away from his for long enough to work out who it might be.
“Karev, shut the freaking door. It’s freezing.”
Fight first, ask questions later.
Yang.
Cristina...
Oh.
“Alex, what the-”
A mess of black curls and furrowed brows appears over his shoulder suddenly, and the words sort of fizzle out until the only sounds that register are the television, turned down low in another room, and the marching band thud of her own pulse in her ears.
“I was just going” she hears herself say. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”
“What are you doing here?”
Cristina’s tone is equal parts accusing and defensive. (A blend she remembers well.)
“Like I said,” she stands up a little straighter and shifts her shoulders back an inch or two with deliberate effort, “I was just going. There’s been a misunderstanding and I’m sorry to have bothered you both.”
She’s halfway back down the path before:
“Wait.”
She carefully paces out three more steps before she obeys. Slows to a stop but doesn’t concede defeat completely by turning around.
“What sort of ‘misunderstanding’?”
The tone has softened, seems genuinely curious now as opposed to the distaste it had been dripping with not seconds ago. She wraps her arms around herself, like maybe she’s actually cold and not just using the motion as a desperate attempt to stop herself from falling to pieces on the concrete. Then she turns back to face them.
Alex still hasn’t moved. Cristina keeps shifting her gaze between the two of them, and, at first, it’s like she’s waiting for some kind of implosion to occur and can’t quite decide who’ll put on the more entertaining show.
But then her hand moves to Alex’s arm, just above his elbow, and it sort of sits there, oddly. Some Cristina Yang version of moral support maybe? And the notion that she might actually, genuinely care about what’s happening right here, right in this moment, is almost beyond comprehension.
“I, um,” She forces herself to shift her own line of sight. To stop staring at Alex and the way it appears he’s almost frozen in spot against the door frame, and to attempt eye contact with Cristina instead. “I knew the house had sold- well, no, I knew it was for sale. I just... I don’t really know to be honest.”
She shrugs and hopes it looks miles more casual than she currently feels; shifts her gaze back to Alex then, urgent all of a sudden for him to believe her.
“I really am sorry.”
(Four little words.
And it’s harder than you might think.)
Her fingers are on her car door handle when she registers movement in the shadows, and she only just manages to mask the skip of fear she makes, uses the unintentional momentum to lean against her window casually.
Like... nothing to see here.
“Sorry,” he says, blinking owlishly at her from where he’s standing beneath the fluttering streetlight she’d been staring at what feels like hours ago now.
She nods back, the false bravado she’d channelled just moments before, all but up and vanished.
The silence that settles, she’d like to say it’s comfortable, familiar.
(It is far from being either of those things).
“Alex,” she says, breaking it at the same time he exhales, breathes out her name, “Izz..”
And she finally finds the comfort and familiarity she’d been craving.
His feet shuffle against the surface of the road, and he drops his eyes to his toes. She uses the privacy this move affords to look at him properly. Lets herself absorb as much of him as she can while he’s not looking, because she knows (she knows) she has no right to the pieces she takes and she can’t (she can’t) have him catch her in the act.
He shuffles again, shifts, and she takes it as her cue; time’s up. She switches to fiddling with a tassel on her scarf instead. Too scared to speak.
To break the spell.
“Do you want to come inside?”
And her carefully constructed world drops out from beneath her feet.
He turns before she can stammer out a reply. And she wonders how much of the movement is shrouded in a fear that she’ll say no and a need not to be around for the moment that it happens.
Self-preservation. It always had been his fiercest quality.
They’re halfway back to the front door when he pauses, turns, cocks his head in the direction of the sold sign to their left.
“I bought it,” he says, grin sudden and wide and she feels the muscles around her own mouth shift, a mirror.
“Seriously?”
He nods and the grin doesn’t really go away. She’d forgotten how infectious it could be, rare though it typically was.
“Seriously.”
“And Cristina?”
She braces herself for the answer because, if they’ve bought it together, her mind might actually explode.
(Hell, whole planets may collide overhead.
All post-apocalyptic-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-like.)
“Her rent pays the mortgage,” he says with a shrug, as though it’s obvious, spinning on his heel and heading back towards the still open front door.
“Oh... okay.” And even that scenario is odd enough. And really only serves to underline that while so much has remained resolutely the same over the years, there’s still plenty that has been irrevocably changed as well.
Alex and Cristina as roommates? That’s definitely a change.
She perches on the edge of the couch. It’s new she notes, and she’s not sure it really goes with the dated nature of the rest of the room, but she can imagine Alex picking it out himself and suddenly it seems absolutely perfect.
He brings her a beer to match the half empty ones he and Cristina have already started, and she smiles and says thanks and tries not to appear as robotic as she feels.
Cristina raises her eyebrows at her over the rim of her own bottle as she tips it back and swallows, the motion pointed, like maybe she’s saying it’s her move, the next one.
“Soooo...” She drags the word out and when the silence that had fallen remains she quickly fills it by twisting the top off her drink and bringing it to her lips.
The television continues to provide the somewhat muted soundtrack, and she’s awestruck to finally look up and notice that they’d been watching Ellis Grey’s old surgery tapes.
(Again.)
It’s her turn to raise her eyebrows.
“Seriously?” she says.
“Hey,” Cristina defends, pointing the remote at the television and nudging the volume up a level or two, “This one’s a classic.”
Alex has taken up a spot at the opposite end of the couch. They’re as close, physically, as they’ve been to one another in years. (The several feet of distance could not feel more insurmountable.)
He drinks his beer and steals sideways glances at her every now and then, and she tries to time her own in his direction to fall into the gaps, lest they accidentally lock eyes and have to make an acknowledgment of sorts.
Ellis is preparing to close before he speaks.
“Do you like the new couch?” he says, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“No,” Cristina says before she can even begin to formulate a response.
“I wasn’t asking you. Besides, you’ve made your thoughts more than clear already.” He pulls a face at her before turning to roll his eyes conspiratorially at Izzie, the motion, almost automatic.
Most definitely shocking.
For the both of them.
She shakes it off and smiles back, determined not to lose the moment to awkward silence and withdrawal.
“Whatever,” Cristina says, “it’s gross. And freaking uncomfortable. I don’t know what was wrong with the old one-”
“You do know that Meredith and McDreamy did the McNasty on it more times than we could ever hope to count, right?”
“Of course,” Cristina bites back, dumping her empty beer bottle onto the coffee table with a dull thud, “Don’t pretend like you never christened it-” She pauses and Izzie knows, suddenly, exactly what’s coming next.
“Don’t pretend like the two of you never christened it.” And, bam. There it is.
Despite the split second to prepare for the inevitability, she still manages to choke on a hastily slurped mouthful of beer.
“Whatever,” says Alex, the word mostly mumbled under his breath. “It was gross and now it’s gone and if you don’t like it you can move out.”
Five more minutes pass, the silence interrupted only by the sound of Ellis Grey barking instructions at cowering interns, before Cristina stands abruptly and declares she’s going to bed. Only she doesn’t quite put it like that.
“Obviously you two have things to discuss,” she says dryly, making a show of collecting the empty bottles from the coffee table between them, “There are condoms in the bathroom cupboard and if you keep me awake all night I swear to God-”
Alex throws his shoe at her head.
As Cristina beats a hasty retreat, muttering under her breath all the while about assault charges and domestic abuse, she rehearses a smile and tries to conjure a goodbye that won’t sound like any they’ve shared in the past.
“I should probably make a move, too,” she says, keeping it light, like she just lives down the road and they’ll see each other on the weekend. Or tomorrow in the tunnels. Later tonight at the top of the stairs.
“Thanks for the beer.”
There’s lump in her throat and she’s starting to panic that her loose edges are unravelling faster than she can knit them back together.
“Izz…”
She’s standing now, twisting her scarf back into place and fishing her keys from where she’d dumped them into her cavernous handbag earlier. She stops though, when he speaks. She stops moving for a beat and shuts her eyes and lets the sound of her name on his tongue fill her up completely.
Izz…
She’s crying. There’s no point denying it anymore.
She lifts a finger to silence him and smiles giddily through her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says, laughing. “I’m sorry for rocking up unannounced like that.”
His fingers are laced together, his knuckles, white.
“I mean, I’m not sorry sorry, because it was great to see you both again, totally weird, but also, really, really great, but, I am sorry if I’ve upset you or if-”
He halts her ramble in the best way he knows how.
Their teeth keep smashing together at first. Like their rhythm is all off and they’re back to being nervous teenagers behind the basketball courts or something.
She uses one hand to drag the scarf she’d just re-tied back off again; the other is behind his head, cupping his cheek, dragging through the hair at the nape of his neck.
(His hands are unzipping her pants.)
She pulls apart from him for just long enough to drag his t-shirt over his head and when it’s gone he drops his face to beneath her chin, uses his tongue against her throat and she works at removing her own top. Can’t seem to get the material that separates them gone fast enough, but then, suddenly, it is. And they’re skin to skin for the first time in years and she’s not sure if she’s still crying but she’s most definitely sure she’s wet through to her hollowed out core.
“Alex,” she says, breathless whisper into the air above his head.
“Shhhh,” he rumbles back, reaching one hand up into her hair as the other one ventures further south.
He drags her backwards and down. Down onto the new couch.
The leather creaks beneath their combined weight, and she thinks, fleetingly, that Cristina is going to be pissed in the morning.
But his fingers are inside her then, fucking, and she’s no longer capable of coherent thought at all.
He’s still got his jeans on, and she grinds against his hand, head thrown back loosely, before shifting deliberately, rolling to make it easier to unzip his pants and get them off. He’s rock hard beneath her fingertips, her hand around his cock and her tongue between his teeth, as familiar to her as breathing.
They fall into familiar patterns, one head turns a little to the left, another knee rests just so against a hip.
Like clockwork.
And they always were so good at this part.
They’re twisted into each other on the couch afterwards, still mostly naked but sleepily silent and sated, when a noise above them startles her into a shriek.
Bare feet pad across the carpet as Cristina, in her pyjamas, comes into view.
“Oh, good,” she says benignly, all casual nonchalance, “you’re finally finished. I think I left my book down here…”
She’s almost back to the doorway when she calls over her shoulder:
“Oh, also? Mere says to say hi.”