Fic: Alphabet Meme - I is for Intertwined (A Requiem for the Rain Clouds)
Title: I is for Intertwined... (A Requiem for the Rain Clouds)
Characters/Pairing: Alex/Izzie and Alex Mer friendship.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3500
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and all the characters, settings, and events thereof, are properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for profit, it constitutes fair use. Referral to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
They clasped hands and made promises they didn't know how to keep. They exchanged gazes, wide eyed and giddy and toasted to a future they didn't know how to live. And in the end it all came to nothing. Like it always had. Like it seemed it always would.
His adamant fury kept her heart beating and his raging terror kept her lungs filling and the steady push and pull of the machinery she had steadfastly refused to accept kept his sanity intact for just a little while longer. And still, in the end, it all came to nothing.
Because she is dead. And he is alone, and he forgets which state he is in (and because she is dead and because you are alone, the name of the state no longer matters).
They lasted seventeen months. Post crash carts and intubation trays and requests left unheeded, they lasted another seventeen months.
And it was more than he ever expected, more than he had ever deemed himself worthy.
She never forgave him, he doesn't think, not for betraying her in the biggest way possible, even though, in the end, he was right. And maybe she never forgave him for that either. His desperate request, upheld despite signatured, legalised documentation, had saved her life and, later, she always said she was 'fine' with it, but it was one of those 'fines', loaded and just the wrong side of truthful. But he didn't care. He'd do it again, after all, seventeen months was practically a lifetime.
And in the fallout he transfers east, whether to the sun or away from the rain he can never quite tell. It is her decision as much as it is his realisation. Under normal circumstances, circumstances that don't give consideration to five percent survival rates and fairytale weddings dropped into desperate laps, she would never have said yes, he knows this like he knows the colour of her eyes and the touch of her skin and the erratic beat of his own heart.
Not in a million years. And sometimes he wonders what it was all about. Was it love?
But he knows what it was. It was a part he played, a role. Just for a little while, a fleeting moment, enough to give him a glimpse of what could have been. Had the stars aligned just a little more fully, had the gods smiled upon him just a little more convincingly, he could have had all that.
He could have had all that and more. But it is done now. Stolen vows recited and recanted. Final curtain drawn, red and heavy.
He'd never been taught how to be that person, the one that defied the odds and you can only wing something like that for so long before the cracks appear, before the facade chips away, before the truth wins. Final bow.
The end.
And so he transfers east (and when it's stormy you think only of her; and of rain clouds).
He should be asleep but isn't and when the phone rings he has a sudden, choking desire for a cigarette even though the last time he smoked it was still the nineties and his hair hung in his eyes and a different girl screamed his name every other weekend while his father beat the shit out of his mother in another room.
Another place.
Some other time.
“Karev.”
“Alex?”
“That's what I said.”
“Alex?”
“Did we not already cover that? Who is this? Grey?”
“Alex...”
“Christ, Grey. It's four am here, what's going on?”
“Alex, it's Izzie...”
And the first undulating hiss of fear steals his breath.
“Izzie? Is she okay? Is she...”
He trails off, fumbling for a light switch, a match, a cigarette lighter.
Anything to alleviate the suffocating darkness.
“No, it's not the cancer... the cancer's still gone...”
And he would sigh with relief if he wasn't so Goddamn sure that her next words were going to ice his veins.
“There was an accident...”
And there it was.
Ice.
He doesn't speak.
He can't speak.
“There was an accident, she went to see her Mom, the other driver was drunk and... Alex... there was an accident...”
There is no need to ask for outcomes and odds. The four am phone call provides all the information he could ever need.
He doesn't recognise that he isn't breathing until his cell phone hits the floor. And it no longer matters that the lights are out because, from now on in, the lights will always be out.
Might as well get used to it.
And he thinks he truly might have loved her once.
He buys cigarettes from a dusty twenty four hour convenience store in a part of the city he's never visited before. His shirt sticks to his back and the naked bulb above his head hums a ceaseless tune and the oily teenager behind the counter doesn't even look at him, much less attempt a conversation, which suits him just fine. It's warm out, but isn't it always and he thinks he should walk to the beach but he moved here months ago and he's not been there once yet so he wonders, idly, why he should start now.
And besides, if he walks to the waters edge he can't be sure he won't just keep on going. Oblivion?
Reconciliation.
But he's never been the type for martyr-dom so he leaves without looking and sleeps in his car. Finds a spot far enough away from the ocean that he can't hear the waves and far enough away from the bars that he can't hear the people and far enough away from everything else that it's remotely possible he's not even here at all anymore. Except he is, so he stares at a scuff mark on the roof of his Jeep until his eyes blur and his heart stops racing (because you know she was everything to you, everything you could ever have imagined and now she is gone, and you... you are nothing again).
The trip west takes longer than it ever should but is still over all too quickly. Endlessly black asphalt disappears beneath the hood as head lights give way to sunlight; sunlight gives way to midnight.
He stares at the empty faces of the drivers in the cars that he passes, the cars that pass him. He wonders if any of them have been drinking, if any of them are drunk, if they'll run him off the road and into the oblivion he thinks he may already be headed towards.
He stops only when the gas light blinks on and, once, at a roadside marker. A white cross covered in roses, long since dried and bleached of colour, it wasn't her, it could never have been her, but it might as well have been and so he drops to his knees in the dust and pebbled glass and manages, only just, to keep it all together enough that he doesn't seem to miss the pieces of himself that he leaves right there on the side of the road. He thinks it probably won't matter anyway, that he won't need them anymore. Those pieces? They'd been hers for a long time. Maybe even forever.
He drives through Iowa without breathing. Rolls the windows up tight and refuses to look at anything other than the strip of endless black in front of him because he knows that if he stops, if he stops here, he'll never get going again.
It doesn't rain until he reaches Seattle, aged and weary. Dried sweat and stale cigarette smoke and something else, something raw and untouched (and you know she'd tell you to pull yourself together, but she's dead and she can't so you don't think you'll bother).
He drives by Meredith's old house despite knowing that none of them live there anymore. She and Derek have their castle on the hill, O'Malley's been in a box in the ground for more months than Alex can bring himself to count and now Izzie, she is there too.
He keeps on driving.
His head is pounding in time with his heart beat and the combined effect is enough to make him want to vomit in the gutter. He watches the streetlight outside Joe's flicker in and out with a morbid fascination, tells himself that when it dims to black for the seventh time he'll go in, the eleventh time, the seventeenth, when it burns out completely, finally. He knows they are in there because he watches them walk in. They don't see him and they are huddled together in a group, like one of those high school cliques that he hated with a passion all those years (and lifetimes) ago and it is all he can do not to turn away and leave right then and there. But he was a part of that group once, or something that kind of resembled it anyway, and he can't begrudge them the solidarity of their strength in numbers mentality, especially not now. There is a cigarette dangling from his fingertips, ashy and warm. Comforting. There never seems to be enough air in his lungs to actually smoke the damn things, but he lights them all the same, halfheartedly puffs once or twice, waits 'til they burn to a stub then lights the next one from what remains of the embers of the first.
Rinse and repeat.
And as he pushes the heavy door open, Joe's looks the same but kinda different as well. Quieter, infinitely sadder, as though even the walls know, and they probably do. But it's okay because he is different too (you used to meet her here and her presence is still tangible, cloying at the woodwork; you'd cry if you could, if crying was something you were still capable of).
Callie Torres spots him first and he watches as she leans across the table to whisper his arrival to the others. Eyes turn to him, one pair at a time. Their combined weight is immense.
He didn't go to the funeral. Their disgust and condemnation is clear.
But he knows as well as they do that she would never have expected him to be there. And he is nothing if not predictable. She died in his arms once, literally. She would never have expected him to be there.
He has never been a man of many words, actions speak louder and all that crap. This occasion is no exception and as he takes a seat by the bar and catches Joe's eye, tries not to flinch at the surprise hidden there, he waits for the inevitable. When compared to everything else, the inevitable here will be nothing more than a glancing blow. It'll sting for a while no doubt, everything does, even when you pretend it doesn't, but it won't last.
Unless it does.
Because some of them know him like she did. And he can pretend all he likes, but they know what her absence has the power to do to him. It is bad for them, her death. Devastating and inconceivable. But for him it is so very much more. And so very much worse. They know that.
For him it is the end (and you know that it sounds fatalistic and overly dramatic and that she'd hate that she has that kind of power but it is the truth, she was your one chance and it was one more than you thought you'd ever have).
Joe starts in his direction and the pounding in his chest creeps up another notch as he shakes his head no. His hands tremble and his breathing hitches and he needs to get the hell out. Now.
There is soft laughter as he leaves. He feels the melody inch it's way up his spine, intimately familiar, and settle somewhere between his shoulder blades.
“You know I love you, don't you?”
Her eyes are a bright, tequila haze; her lips, cherry red and pouty, it's all he can do not to slam her up against the bar and have her right here.
With an audience. She grins because she knows what he is thinking (and she always did know what you were thinking).
“You know you're drunk, don't you?”
He throws her words back at her. Evade and escape.
“Doesn't mean I don't know that I love you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You say that now. Wait 'til I'm seventy and I've gotta pop a pill twenty minutes before you wanna have your way with me... see if you still love me then...”
She laughs, head thrown back, loud and hard. Their audience watches. They are an eye catching duo, if there is nothing else real about them, they are certainly that.
“You really think we'll still be married when you're seventy?”
She is pensive suddenly, thoughtful. Worried?
“Not a chance.”
She grins and there is lipstick on her teeth. He eats it off as their audience turns their backs.
He contemplates getting a hotel for the night, something cheap and as far from the hospital as he can manage.
He ends up in an on call room. Sleeps deep and dreamless and makes sure he is gone again before the hospital comes to life the next morning.
She is buried near the trailer park that raised her. The cemetery is small and unobtrusive and nothing like she ever was. It takes him forty five minutes just to find the place.
He forgets flowers and contemplates stealing some from another site. In the end he plucks a daisy from a tuft of lawn and sits, cross legged, on the freshly dug mound in front of her name.
Isobel Stevens
Loved and loving daughter
Remembered forever
As though that is all she ever was. All she had ever been. He retches but can't vomit. Sinks instead into the soft dirt beneath him. Sinks so low he wonders if he'll hit wood. And bones. Almost wants to.
He detaches the petals, one by one. Discarding them by his knees.
“She loves me, she loves me not...”
And usually he's not one for speaking to stone slabs but nothing about him and her was ever usual and so he makes an exception.
“I miss you.”
(and you always waited for rain with a fervored determination that completely confused you; but she was in the rain and you know that now)
“I used to wonder what would've happened if we'd done it all properly. Waited 'til you weren't sick anymore, 'til it didn't matter so much... but I know if we'd waited it never would've happened. And I don't regret it. I don't regret one single thing. Well, except for maybe the end... but that was inevitable, we both know that... right, Iz?”
He waits for an answer that never comes.
That will never come.
White petals strewn across dark earth.
He wants to tell her that he loved her, loves her, will never stop loving her. Not because of anything she did or didn't do, she is not to blame for that. She was herself and he loved her, there can be no blame laid for that. He wants to remind her that they have test tube babies in a lab somewhere and that he really wishes he knew whether they were blonde and bright like her or brown and broody like him, but he's kind of glad he doesn't know too. He wants to tell her that the pink dress she wore on prom night was the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, that she was the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, but he knows she wore that dress for someone else and he would cut it to shreds if he could find it now.
“She loves me... she loves me not...”
He wants to tell her that he likes his new job, that he can breathe there. That she would love the kids he deals with, that he is good, maybe even great, with but that he could sure use her help with the parents. He wants to tell her about the hideous yellow wallpaper in his bathroom that he can't bring himself to get rid of because he always kinda hoped that she'd come and help him redecorate and about the skinny ginger kitten that adopted him and mews pitifully at his bedroom window until he relents and opens it just enough. He wants to tell her six months worth of stories in one breath, to hear her laugh and cry and go crazy and tell him all her stories in return.
“She loves me... she loves me not...”
But there are no more petals left so he tosses the stalk into the wind and buries his face in his hands and fights the urge to scream and dig and all manner of other unspeakable things.
“Your mother would love me...”
“Oh really? What makes you think that?”
Her panties are on the floor and he's set about making sure her bra follows suit.
“All mothers love me...”
“But what does your mother think of me?”
“My mother wants to play doctors and nurses with you so you are never ever allowed to see her... ever, ever again...”
He picks her up, hands sweaty, slippery and they both drop onto her bed, naked... almost.
“You still have your socks on...”
“My feet are cold...”
“Iz... you still have your socks on...”
“We're married now. There are rules... I don't have to take my socks off when we have sex anymore...”
He laughs into her hair, what there is of it. It's growing back... slowly, softly.
“I'm having sex with freakin' Sinead O'Connor and she has socks on... great...”
She slaps at him playfully, bites down on his lip and growls into his mouth.
“You did not just call me Sinead O'Connor...”
He rolls so that she is underneath him, blue eyes bright, glassy. Breath coming in soft pants.
“Shut up...” he whispers, thickly, “... just shut up and kiss me...”
The air moves behind him and despite the lack of decent sunshine a shadow is cast across her headstone. An angular silhouette he would know anywhere. Neither of them speak, he doesn't even breathe. And her presence only makes it all the more real somehow. Fingers settle, feather light, on his shoulder, he flinches and swipes a hand, shaking and earth stained, across his face and through tears he didn't (couldn't) know existed.
He owes her an explanation, he thinks he owes her something. He hasn't spoken to her since she dropped the news and he dropped the phone and everything else dropped him (and you're not even sure your voice would work anymore, even if you did have something meaningful, something adequate to say). The fingers on his shoulder tighten and the movement and the pressure say more than he could ever hope to anyway.
He crumbles then like he always swore he would never do. Bends at the waist until his forehead touches the soft earth and his tears become mud on his lips (and you swear you can almost... almost taste her again).
She still doesn't speak but he knows she is there, behind him somewhere. Sitting...
Waiting...
Watching...
She is probably the only person who understands him, the only person left who understands him. And it is because of this that he can't look at her, can't speak to her, can't have anything to do with her. And so he pushes up from the dirt and the tears and the memories at his feet, turns to leave and doesn't look back.
She calls his name then, it is an apology and an acknowledgment and an it's okay and an I understand all rolled into two syllables. It makes his shoulders shake and his knees threaten to send him back to the ground and his vision blurs momentarily to a watery grey.
He is stuck, metaphorically, literally, figuratively. He can't go back, there can be no going back from something like this, despite the fact that he wants to, wants to so badly it makes his skin crawl and his fingernails itch. But forward seems impossible, too. He's not even sure that forward exists and if it does he sure as hell can't see it.
His mouth moves, opens and closes and forms a soundless stream of meaningless words. Arms circle him from behind, the touch is foreign, unwanted and he struggles to remove them, to get them the hell off. She says his name again and he wants to scream. To pull his hair out, to punch his fist through the windscreen of the Jeep.
He thought she'd always be here. Even when he was on the other side of the country he thought she'd always be here, even though he, of all people, should know that the chances of that were slim. So slim. His fingers tangle in the grass and it is only then that he realises he is no longer standing, she is still wrapped around him and they are sprawled on the grass, damp and staining.
“God, I miss her so much... so so so much... what the hell am I supposed to do now?”
Her fingernails trail matching tracks across his shoulder blades, arching his back and curling his toes. Her breath is hot on his neck and he pulls her mouth towards his...
“Kiss me, Alex Karev, kiss me so you don't miss me...”