fic: ...because fic-a-thons are my crack
Title: So Let Me Say Before We Part
Characters/Pairings: Izzie (Izzie/Alex)
Word Count: 520
Rating: PG
Prompt: From softly_me. "You’ll be with me, like a hand print on my heart..."
Author's Note: Originally posted here.
She boards a plane for somewhere that isn't Seattle and as it lifts from the runway, clears the ever-present grey, she wonders, fleetingly, if he can feel the point when she's simply not there any more.
A release of sorts.
She'll be thirty in three days and up in the air it's easy to believe in the future. In what might come next. A heady euphoria that isn't tied to false memories or the promise of possibility.
Of chance.
*
She lands in Palm Beach. Or San Antonio. Or Santa Monica. In the end it doesn't really matter. The sun settles on her shoulders, adds a weight she thinks might just drown her.
She comes to relish the idea it'll do just that. Beneath cumulus nimbus clouds and with her feet on solid ground that seems to stumble and stutter under her nonetheless.
And letting go is infinitely more agonising than she'd ever dared to dread.
*
Her pulse thrums lightly, skims the surface of skin that feels stretched to taut and tearing. She lights a well used candle, pushes the stem into a store bought cupcake and doesn't even bother to extinguish the flame with a puff of exhaled air. Watches the wick burn to ashes and dust instead.
Tosses the lot into the trash, happy birthday to me...
Dials his number seven times. Disconnects the calls before they can drop through. Practises words she can't ever imagine him hearing...
*
I love you...
*
I think I'll always love you...
*
She works her way through seventy four days. Instructs her colleagues to call her Isobel and sometimes forgets not to flinch when they slip.
Izzie...
A reference to a time and a place she can barely bring herself to recall.
*
She watches the shocking events unfold on an early evening news bulletin with the sound muted and the vision chopped off as it is by the shadow of her own hand across her face. Doesn't realise she's on her knees in the middle of her apartment until her fingertips brush carpet stained a perpetual dark brown.
Screams.
There is no one left to hear her.
Doesn't stop until her voice is a ragged exhale of air across the back of her tongue.
*
There's a red-eye that leaves in four hours. She knows because she's checked multiple times over the days and months that have preceded now. A security blanket of sorts.
And she never was one to turn and flee, at least not until she did, but by now it's almost her default setting. She'll thank him for teaching her that much.
One day.
Unpacking was always a task that could wait until tomorrow, until next week, until next year, and so she's ready by the door, keys in hand, not thirty eight minutes later.
Stops at a spidered crack in the side-walk and can't seem to lift her feet to step over it. Figures if he's dead then there's no longer any point. And if he's not then...
Then nothing has changed.
Title: I Swallow The Sound And It Swallows Me Whole
Characters/Pairings: Lexie/April
Word Count: 380
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: From violet1979. "You tell anyone who'll listen but you feel ignored. Nothing's really making any sense at all..."
Author's Note: Originally posted here.
The first time, it's messy. White wine in her lap and the tang of tequila on her teeth.
A dare of sorts.
And the liquor has loosened her angles just enough that she won't back away from the inherent challenge.
*
The thing with Jackson lasts about nine days. Give or take. He confesses then. To the candy and the smiles and the listening to her rant as though she were a prophet proclaiming something earth shattering.
If she's honest with herself though, then she already knew. Had it all figured out from the very beginning.
She screams at him anyhow. Feels the release of pressure she'd yet to acknowledge was building up. Dumps recriminations and blame at his feet and hopes he trips over them on the way out.
That he's not who she's really mad at seems beside the point in that moment.
*
Mark apologises. She laughs in his face. Calls him pathetic and selfish and arrogant and walks away for the last time.
The last time before the next time because, with Mark, with her and Mark, it seems there's always destined to be a next time.
*
There are eyes on them. Pretending not to see and simultaneously glaring daggers. And she thinks she's spent so long doing what everyone else wanted her to do that this time? This time she's not going to think twice.
Fingers twist and they giggle in unison. Uncertain but sure in the same tickling breath.
Teeth on teeth and it's not as smooth as it might be, as it could be, but there's something exhilarating about it all nonetheless.
April whispers words that melt across her tongue. Tangle with lips that refuse to part enough to fully form sounds.
She shrugs her shoulders under the weight of foreign fingers. Grins and pushes back.
*
Meredith is horrified. Cristina, oddly intrigued. Alex, Alex just wants to watch.
And they don't get it. None of them. Their opinions are of little consequence because this, what she's doing here? This is all about her.
It's a choice she has made, a road she has deliberately left her footprints along.
Something she can finally call her own.
Title: Sweet Dreams All Covered In Rust
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Cristina
Word Count: 720
Rating: R
Prompt: From nursebadass. "You'll never be enough..."
Author's Note: Originally posted here.
At first, it's bonding over gravel littered common ground. Divorce papers barely signed and black ink a little more than smudged in one corner.
He finds her on the porch and there's flakes of snow settled heavily on her lashes. Her breath hides her, a wall of white as she exhales, and he'd tell her Meredith isn't home, isn't likely to be home, but she knows this already and it is not Meredith that she's here to see.
Her fingers fiddle at the buckle of his jeans before the front door has swung to a heavy close.
Nothing good can come of what will inevitably happen next.
But being good has never really been priority for either of them.
*
Later it is boredom. And laziness.
And a rarely spoken desire for something, anything, that aches with familiarity.
They meet in the tunnels. And it's quick, almost vicious. The silence that separates them split only by the echo of starched cotton hitting faded linoleum floor, and the slapping sting of skin against sweat slippery skin.
Her tongue works its way between his teeth with a practised ease. Meets with very little resistance. Steals the words he can't quite bring himself to say and swallows them down, whole.
Fills her emptied out spaces with the parts of him she knows he'll never willingly offer.
*
He ignores her for three days. Keeps his eyes on his toes and volunteers his time to the clinic lest he run the risk of meeting her at Joe's.
Panics.
Because he's been here before and it's never what it seems.
It all matters little in the end.
She corners him in a supply room. Presses him, shoulder blades to tail bone, against metal shelving that threatens to collapse on top of them with every rocking beat, and rakes her nails down his ribcage. Doesn't even flinch as the pads of her fingertips pass over the jagged scars that spell out chain mail reminders of his vulnerability.
Takes what she wants without question and leaves again. Just to prove a point.
*
It gets easier after that.
And yet seems infinitely more difficult.
Pretense and false promises firmly in place as her panties barely make it past her knees and his lip catches between the nip and bite of bared teeth that mock all he has to offer.
If she is pretending then she is far more adept at it than he.
*
Some days they forget the act. Drop their well established lines and stumble around on the darkened stage until their hips meet or their shoulders touch and the muscle memory starts to kick in.
Anniversaries. Memorials. Commemorations. And they all come to mean the same thing in the end, as the jagged scars they resolutely deny fade but never quite disappear completely.
*
Eventually it's because there is nothing else left.
No one else left. And admitting defeat has never really been an option for either of them.
So they pretend it's what they expected all along. Stolen shards of one another used to stitch their own gaping holes; edges split to frayed and unravelling.
She kisses him and it's soft. Too soft. Willing.
The folds of her sharp angles fit a little more completely into his. Have chiselled away at enough of his concrete shell to make a hollow that aches when it's empty.
*
Along the way he waits for her to disappear. A puff of dust rubbed between palms. A set of melting footprints in the winter snow.
And he wonders if she waits for him to do the same.
Wonders if she forgets that he's tried running, that he's tried hiding, that all his escape routes have been well and truly shut down.
Ineffective as they always seemed to be.
*
In the end he thinks it's because she's run out of options.
Can't quite reconcile his existence with any conscious choice she may have made. Figures he's become default and thinks it's probably more than he deserves.
Loops practised fingertips into the thin strap of her bra and lets it fall to his feet. Makes promises of forever in the only way he really knows how.
Watches as she walks away and comes back.
Walks away again.
Title: This Day Deserves A Truly Sordid End
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Addison
Word Count: 1030
Rating: R
Prompt: From devylish. "The princess and the pauper..."
Author's Note: Originally posted here and here.
Stumbling round. Falling down.
She giggles and bucks her head as he clamps an unsteady palm over her parted lips. Shoves her tongue between his fingers, tastes the heady tang of sex and sweat that clings there.
She's lost a Christian Louboutin somewhere between the cab and wherever the hell it is she's now standing and the lack of balance is just enough to distract her from the inevitable devastation that news will bring in the sobering light of a few hours time.
Her fingers snag in the belt loops of his dress pants and the inexpensive polyester reminds her she'll be slumming it tonight.
Relishes the idea with a fervor she's not felt for decades.
*
The occasion had started with some degree of pained innocence. A gilded wedding invitation in the mail and the ghosted assumption that she'd politely decline.
But if life has taught her anything, it's that in the unexpected, opportunities lie.
And so she accepts. With pleasure even.
Packs an inappropriate dress alongside even more deliciously inappropriate shoes, wings her way back to the ever present Seattle drizzle. And touching down feels a lot less like coming home than it used to.
Progress of sorts, she grins. Shrugs.
*
He slides in next to her at the church. The back row. A dumping ground for outcasts. And they've done this before but there'll be no encouraging him off and away this time.
She bumps her knee against his, a deliberate hi there that fools neither of them as he returns the movement in lieu of words she knows he'd only stumble over anyhow.
Wonders briefly if this is his first time back in a church after his own failed happily ever after. Figures, though, that a string of funerals probably broke that connection any number of months and years ago...
Blinks back inexplicable tears as a slash of silk and bright white lace passes to her left.
*
He slides a glass of champagne between her curled fingertips. Tilts his own shallow tumbler into its rim in a mock salute and downs the lot in one go.
Makes his intentions more than clear.
Each and every sordid one of them.
*
The race to oblivion starts at around the same time the speeches do. And she loses track of who gets there first.
There's a courtyard, leafy and damp, and he pulls her back into the trellis, parts willing lips with his scotch soaked tongue, drives a knee up between her thighs.
Stops short but only just.
And the memory of him, distant as it may be, fills her with a degree of anticipation that she thinks might just be her complete un-doing...
*
They're a dichotomy of sorts when they're drunk. But at least she's sober enough to see it. He's silent and staring. An absurd degree of focused intensity that only fuels the hysteria that builds within her.
Bubbles and bubbles 'til it's leaking, un-checked.
She works her blood red nails into the knot of his tie, slides it to loose without needing to look. Head tilted back into his fists and left leg up over one hip.
Notes with a degree of self-satisfaction that the cab driver changes up through the gears with a little more ferocity than is entirely necessary.
Grinds them to a halt against the curb that almost send her teeth through his lower lip.
Only serves to take her further from control.
*
His apartment is empty. Quite literally empty.
A squat television teeters precariously atop a plastic packing container. Aerial rabbit-eared beside it and held in place with a series of stacked medical journals.
He wrests her attention back with his hands. Cups her backside, presses her up against plasterboard that creaks and groans under the pressure.
She's almost waiting for it to splinter, send them both sprawling into the abandoned garden space on the other side.
Loses it completely then. With one shoe on and one shoe lost and the buttons of his white dress shirt scattered like marbles at their feet.
*
It's how they're caught.
Half naked and hysterical when the lights switch to shocking and people that are vaguely familiar to her loom, tableaued silhouettes, in her peripheral vision.
She brings her fingers to her face. Burrows her head in the curve of his collar bone and chalks one up to drunken debauchery.
*
She thanks him for a lovely evening. Chokes around the words with a glint in her eye as he ducks his head and apologises once again.
Completely unnecessary, she assures him. But apology accepted.
Harper Avery's grandson had dropped her missing shoe on the kitchen table. The sight of it perched there, red leather sole against the worn bench top, is almost too much and so she snatches it back.
Curls her fingers through his and drags him resolutely outside. A different cab driver and a different result as they sit at opposite ends of the rear bench seat.
Wait out the trip to The Archfield with barely their fingertips entwined.
*
The numbers tick off slowly, one by one by one, as the elevator makes its steady ascent. Spits them out into a softly lit hallway with carpet that muffles their steady path.
She closes the door behind them, waits for the heavy wood to fall into place before cupping his face in her hands. Runs fingers over the arch of his eyebrow and the pretense and bravado he'd hidden behind all night shifts floor-ward.
Leaves him exposed. Confused.
Maybe.
With the lights off she sheds clothing in layers as they make towards the bed. Stops just short of naked and slides between the silk sheets, wraps her buzzing limbs around his as fingers work through the hair at the nape of her neck.
Gentle and quiet in the shadows that fall though heavy drapes still pulled askew.
Good night, as a sigh.
See you in the morning, as a whispered promise.