Leave it Burn (2/2)
Title: Leave it Burn (2/2)
Author: truhekili
Characters/Pairing: Alex/Izzie
Rating: PG-13
Standard disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Word Count: 6,800 (12,900 total)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Begins during the Season 6 Finale. Just how haunted is Seattle Grace, anyway? Two-shot. Complete.
Author’s note: Prompted because Waltzmatilda’s “I’m Alright” ended with such a cliff hanger.
She wakes much too early the first morning they’re back and she watches dawn straggle into the room. He still looks like he’s been run over by what she’d just learned to call a grain thresher and he’s pale and exhausted and it’s the trip and the dust and the cold or his ghost of a mother or his desperate sister or the brother off half a country away. But she still feels like his remains are beside her, snoring softly, while the rest of him died in an elevator and a conference room and a dingy white farm house with rickety steps.
Brushing her fingers lightly over his chest, she remembers with a grimace how his face darkened when she’d asked him about the bullet. She was sure he’d save it, because guys like him keep souvenirs like that, and guys like him flaunt their gnarly scars, and guys like him clamber back onto elevators just to prove they’re fearless, and guys like him would live in supply closets, just to prove they were those guys.
Those guys wouldn’t have dreams like his either, she thinks two weeks later, dreams he still denied having, and they wouldn’t change their scrub tops behind closed doors, or chart and do pre-ops and post-ops and general rounds when they had offers to scrub in on cool surgeries. They wouldn’t stare blankly from the gallery when they thought no one was watching, either, and they wouldn’t sit on cold porch swings sneaking Tuna Delight treats to the neighbor’s grumpy orange cat while willing blondes waited in their beds.
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He fumbles briefly with the scalpel and curses under his breath as he catches Robbins’ patient gaze, and he grips the handle harder then he should when she passes him the next blade herself, and he forces his hands to steady and it’s like he still doesn’t have enough blood to reach his numb fingers and they just won’t bend smoothly and the sympathetic glances from the scrub nurses gnaw through him like acid.
He glances briefly up to the gallery and she’s watching and smiling which makes matters worse and he’s sure he hears whispers and feels stares and it’s like he’s inching closer to permanent residence in Wyatt’s office if he doesn’t stop fumbling with ten blades and avoiding elevators. Then it’ll be all white pills three times a day and incantations from the talking shrinks and none of that ever did clear his mother’s mind of the voices and the shadows and the fog that just never lifted.
He finishes his work and smirks when Robbins compliments him, again, and he charts and rounds and it’s much better the next day, and the next, and the next, until it’s not again and then it’s back to square one. His shift ends at three the following Tuesday, and he changes and swings through the hospital and stops by the clinic and watches through a glass window as Izzie smiles and laughs with a patient and two young nurses.
All eyes are on her face and he watches the small group light up around her and he knows the feeling so well that it burns right through him. She’d beaten it for real, the cancer, and her scans were all clear and she’d gone off somewhere and gotten herself happy, happier then he’d ever seen her, happier without him, happy far away from here, and he reminded himself that that’s what he’d wanted for her when he asked her to go away.
She turns just then, catches his eyes and she’s smiling and walking toward him and his stomach flutters into his shoes and he’d sink into the ground if he could. But then her lips are on his and she’s telling him how well he did and how proud she is and her arms are around him and whatever the hell it is that makes her Iz just bubbles over like uncorked champagne and she still smells like pink frosting and green apple shampoo when her soft curls sweep his face and he’s vaguely buzzed by the time she’s telling him about dinner and he imagines that if Joe was there he’d take his keys and call him a cab.
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She returns to the clinic after watching his latest surgery, relieved that his procedure had gone so well, and that he hadn’t seemed as nervous as he had the day of his first solo, an amputation, she remembered, performed moments after he’d announced abruptly that he saw a future with her, and that he loved her. She remembered his voice, and his trembling hands, and she wondered what he’d seen - since she’d never really asked - before her own future became measurable in days, maybe even hours, or minutes, or seconds.
Whatever he’d seen, she was sure it hadn’t involved peads. Shaking her head with a smirk, she recalled when he was going to be a hot shot Plastic Surgeon in Beverly Hills, with a red Ferrari and, no doubt, a harem of surgically enhanced beauties. She wondered if any of that had still been part of the future he’d envisioned back then, before he started turning up for lunch with red lollypops in his lab coat and spit-up turnips on his shoes.
She hauled her late lunch outside, despite the chilly fall air, and idly watched the swarm of people crossing the bustling main street along the south side of the hospital. She’d had premonitions back then, too, at least, that’s what her mother’s Psychic Friends would call them, for $29.99 an hour plus tax: visions of tiny hands, and dark curly hair, and wide green eyes, images of carriages and doll houses.
She’d had visions, all right; she’d have it all: she’d be a surgeon, and a wife, and a mother; she’d be every thing she dreamed of, even things girls like her weren’t supposed to be. Smirking, she crumpled up her empty lunch bag and tossed it in the trash bin.
That was an eternity ago, too, when she still wanted to be a surgeon, before she noticed that she didn’t really care that she hadn’t soloed, and that she preferred the clinic bustle, where they actually appreciated her, and where it wasn’t a sin or a crime or a weakness to actually care about people, and where she wasn’t always apologizing for who she was.
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He was sitting bolt up-right again that night, and the vacant gaze still didn’t scream even when he cut into her and her eyes didn’t flinch and he still couldn’t save her and there was so much blood and he couldn’t stop it and it’d leave a vicious scar no matter what he did and he had no answers, anyway, and he never would, and it would take another few minutes of unsteady exhaling to slow his heart rate enough to clear his head.
He forces himself back down onto his pillow and he curses himself because he’s sure she’s awake again, and he feels her arms slide around him, again, and she’s asking him the same questions, and he’ll never have answers for her, either, not any she wants, and he just shrugs and pretends to drift off to sleep again and she’s still there in the morning and her arms are still closed around him and he has to get out before she wakes up.
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Meredith hands her the full set of house keys later that week, with a pointed request for her to take care of things - and she’s sure that by things Mere also means him - and it’s odd that Mere expects her to stay, since everyone else seems convinced she’s already half gone again and even Bailey’s pressing her for a real commitment to the clinic, and that was never part of the plan, at least, not before the plan got shot to hell.
It’s a busy place to take care of, though, Mere’s house, since it’s overrun with spirits and she wonders idly if her mother’s crazy friends from the trailer park would suggest a cleansing or a séance - or at least a Ouija board - and if they’d think she was making fun of them since she’d done that before, about other things she didn’t understand at the time either, things even simpler then ghosts and premonitions - and possibly less tangible.
But the clinic had become her sanctuary instead of the house anyway, since it wasn’t overrun with ghosts - living or dead - and she’d finally found a place for her talents and it reminded her that she didn’t fight for her life just to settle for silence so she hunts him down at lunch and tells him that he’s going back to Wyatt and that she’s coming with him - and she’s sure push will have to come to shove this time - and she expects chairs to scrape and lunch trays to clatter but she doesn’t expect him to stalk away after informing her testily that he’d already been back to seeing Wyatt for three freaking weeks.
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He keeps his next appointment, too, and Izzie will think it’s because of her - or the dreams she shouldn’t know about anyway - but really it’s because he’s fumbling through simple surgeries and its not like he does shrinks, period, ever, but the glint of the metal blades sometimes makes him flinch and elevators still make him nervous and he won’t pop pills like a junkie just to sleep and it’s not like surgeons can be freaking cowards.
He goes the following week too but still tells her nothing when he gets home. He grabs the dusty guitar from the corner of his room instead and forces his clumsy fingers across the strings and its circulation and its pain and its calluses and its his father telling him he’ll never get any of it right and he’ll try harder then, until his fingers bleed, because if his father’s right the whole universe is wrong and he can’t quite give up on the whole universe just yet because Amber just sent him another letter - in sparkle ink - and its full of teen age crap that almost makes him think she may turn out alright despite him.
Setting the guitar down nearly an hour later, he rinses his hands and changes his shirt, pulling on the grey high school wrestling tee she’d sent him. He’d laughed at her letter, explaining that she’d swapped tutoring some dumb jock for it, and that she though he’d like it because it was from their school, and that they still had some of his trophies in the glass case in the gym, but that a few of the teachers still remembered him and he’d probably get detention if he ever went back there so he should steer clear when he visits.
That’s probably true, he imagines, and she tells him that she got almost all A’s and that mom’s taking the meds he sends right, and that Aaron’s in Kansas - hauling drill bits along the yellow brick road - and he wonders why she writes notes when she’s got his cell number, and if she ever thinks about what she wants to be someday, and if she’ll still believe she can be something if she doesn’t get out of there before it’s too late.
He leans back on his bed, calculates the years until he’ll be making anything like decent money, and just shakes his head with a smirk, since nothing in his life ever adds up. He snags the guitar again, strums a complicated cord he can’t do from memory, forces his fingers across the strings again, each time in a different key, each time to a different beat.
It sounds awful, and feels all wrong, but finger control and speed is the goal. Everything at the hospital is moving faster since the merger, except him; everything since his visit home, everything since the shootings is moving faster, except him; everything with Izzie is moving faster, except him. He’ll have to speed up, too, or he’ll get left behind again.
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She knows he’s still going to his appointments but his dreams get worse rather then better and she wonders what Wyatt’s doing with him, and if Wyatt even knows about her - apart from what she’s gathered from the grapevine about the Cancer Chick - and if she thinks its all the abandoning wife’s fault, and if he blames her for his stupid elevator phobia as if she had anything to do with that, and if it’s all about her and not about the gunman who blew a hole in him or the guitar that he strums until he skins his fingers raw.
She wonders if he’s even mentioned the little white farmhouse, too, or the mother whose still there but isn’t, or the sister whose still there but longs to be anywhere else, or the father he beat off with his fists. She’s sure he’s related none of that, actually, because he’s Alex and infuriating and it would be just like him to attribute whatever the hell his night mares are about to a mad gunman, when he’d been steeped in madness his whole life.
It bugs her, all of it, and she still prods him about elevators and drags him into supply rooms and pushes him to return phone calls to his sister, and she knows he wants space but she’s sure that’s the last thing he needs and she learned that from bitter experience herself - that space is just empty and cold and sometimes what you think you need most - what you think you can’t live without - just makes living unbearable once you get it.
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She’s behind him three weeks later when the bathroom mirror abruptly defogs and he still flinches when she slides her hands across his chest and he eyes her warily, waiting for signs, and he knows its coming because it always does. Then he’s trembling again when her skin ripples against his and her arms snake more tightly around him and his groans mingle with hers as she tugs him onto the fluffy bath mat she’d bought the week before.
He’s sure she’s waiting for something - the right job, the right opportunity - but then it’s her fingers and her lips and her curves again and the beastly rumblings and the new rug that needs to be broken in. Then she’s laughing over breakfast and her hair dries in golden waves and she slips her hand in his on their way into the building and she kisses his cheek and she’s off to the clinic where the staff crowds around her and the patients adore her and she’s racing ahead again, into another future that doesn’t include him.
He still picks up more Halloween crap on his way home the next evening, though, Raisinet snack packs for the mangy beggars, and those stupid little candy corns for the cup cakes she’s making for her staff, and the black felt she wanted for who the hell knows what, because she does holidays, and Mere’s neighborhood swarms with kids, and he’s not picking toilet paper out of the trees at three in the morning again this year.
It’s freaking extortion no matter how you decorate it. But it’s too late, anyway, since there’s already a giant plastic spider plopped on Mere’s porch swing when he gets home, and he just shrugs at the bewildered expression that meets him as Cheddar, the neighbor’s crabby cat, swats suspiciously at the spider’s wildly dangling legs, and Alex digs through his bags and offers up some Tuna treats and whispers that he doesn’t get it, either.
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She says another prayer and lights a candle and buys a Christmas decoration from the church fund raiser, though it’s only October, and she picks the angel tree topper with the pale blue dress and the delicate silvery wings and wraps it carefully in tissue paper as she happily stashes it in her large purse, imagining what her tree will look like this year.
She pictures the angel often that day, since it has dark curly hair and green eyes and long eye lashes, almost like the baby she’d pictured the day they harvested her eggs, another dream frozen in limbo, like everything else she’d forgotten about the day she ran away.
He’d be a good father, she’d thought at the time, even back then, before he’d declared for peads. He wouldn’t believe it until he was, and he’d be nervous and awkward and he’d fumble with braids and bicycles. But he wouldn’t give up, and he wouldn’t run away, and he’d never have the right words, but they’d know all they needed to, anyway. She’d even pictured it once, them dancing at their daughter’s wedding.
It was absurd, really, because she was dying when she envisioned it, and she never really believed there’d be a green eyed, curly haired little girl for her to watch grow up. But that’s what they always told her, the people in her chemo group, stay positive, picture the goods things, imagine a future with you in it. And she had, over and over, until it became almost more real then the chemicals dripping into her veins. She’d had premonitions of her death, and premonitions of her future, and her future had won, well, almost.
She returns to the church that evening, to offer another quick prayer on her way home, and while she’s there she lights another candle. She barely remembers their religious significance from Sunday school, barely remembers much of anything beyond the dust to dust mantra. But they were in her premonitions, too, flickering candle lights, and she remembers strange stories about souls reborn from ashes, and fables about forgiveness.
Checking her watch, she notices that it would only be another ten minutes or so before the priest turned up to hear confessions. It was still too soon, though, because she’d cursed God plenty, too, along with just about everything and everybody in her path - her mother, her friends, her husband - and she wasn’t exactly sure how to fix that, either.
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He helps her distribute candy on Halloween and he sneaks the Tuna Delight treats that Izzie buys by the case - for reasons he can’t fathom, though he just doesn’t want to know if she uses them for baking - to the neighbor’s grouchy cat, and there’s taunting and teasing about Izzie’s need for her witch’s costume and whether his scars would really suit a pirate and it gets semi-kinky between door bell rings until a kid’s toy gun startles him.
He recovers immediately and tosses the whole group some choice M&M snack packs but she sees it all and the damage is done and she’s making demands again - about him going back to Wyatt and how she’s coming with him too, for real, this time - and he’s half sure it’s all meant to provoke him, so that it’s all his fault again and always will be - and she can just walk away again and never look back this time.
She goes with him to his next appointment anyway and its stony silence from him as she chatters about his dreams and the freaking toy gun and the elevator thing that she just won’t drop - and what if he just doesn’t need anything from the freaking supply closet - and then he’s asserting that he’s a better pirate then she is a witch - which really leaves Wyatt puzzled - and the session ends abruptly when Izzie demands to know when this is ever going to end, as if he has any freaking clue what the hell “this” is, anyway, as if this is even a word, really.
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She goes to his appointments over the next few weeks, too, despite the grumbling, and she returns to church regularly and she buys another ornament, a drummer boy this time, and she listens to the sermons about peace and joy and she sees it all again - tiny hands and bright green eyes and long lashes peering back at her through flickering candle light, and she wonders sometimes if they’re waiting for her to bring them home.
It was crazy, she told herself - almost like brain tumor crazy - to see bright green eyes peer back at her through delicate flames, and she could never say it out loud without sounding like one of her mother’s psychic friends, the ones she used to make fun of, when they traced lifelines on trembling, upturned palms and read swirling tea leaves and seriously plotted entire futures through Tarot cards anyone could buy on E-bay.
It was all a scam - selling better living through prophecies spun from an eight dollar crystal ball. But she saw things, too, now, and she had more faith in miracles these days, since she was one, and she was starting to think that her premonitions were road signs, and it was all still crazy, but somewhat less so, since she’d already run her life into a ditch, anyway, and finding the right road back had proven elusive at best.
She returns to the house afterwards and tries to pick a fight, as usual - because it’s not angels here, its demons, and it’s not peace and joy, it’s dead silence - and she wonders why he won’t even fight back, or if he thinks they have nothing left to fight for, or if whatever fight he has left is reserved for the dreams that he still denies having.
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He jolts awake again three mornings later, sometime around four a.m., and he drops back onto his pillow, relieved he was far enough away not to wake her this time, her and her questions. They’re always different and always the same, these dream, and they start with her not screaming - though sometimes she’s Reed and sometimes she’s Amber and sometimes she’s his mother and sometimes she’s Mere and sometimes she’s Iz - and they always end with him hurtling down a darkened elevator shaft before he can reach them.
It’s black, jet black, and he always wakes clawing out of his own grave and he’s no expert on normal but this can’t be it, and maybe Wyatt can help with the elevators and the scalpels - something has to - but he’s still not doing pills because then he’s like his father and it would all be easier if Iz would just sleep in her old room because then she wouldn’t know and there’d be fewer questions and she’d stop being so freaking worried in the middle of the night and she’d stop being so freaking angry the mornings after.
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She still pokes and prods him about those dreams weeks later, and he still denies having them and even hints that maybe she’s hearing things in her sleep and maybe Wyatt could do her some good and it all gets snarly and heated and uncomfortable. But she invites her mother down for Thanksgiving anyway, and she sends him to pick her up at the bus station while she bastes and guts a turkey and slides two apple pies into the oven.
She remembers too late that her mother really can’t be trusted with guys like Alex, and she almost cringes when the door bursts open and Robbie sweeps inside. But then her arms are around her and Alex wanders in munching her cookies right out of a plastic baggie so she imagines he’s fine no matter what else happened on their ride home.
They’ve met before and she expects things to be chilly because her mother is, well, Robbie, and she lied to him about where Izzie was and she carries back-up Tarot cards in her purse and quotes the National Enquirer like some people quote the Bible and she’s a little too much… well, too much everything for most people - but mostly he just shrugs and smirks and watches football and Robbie bakes him more cookies and kisses him on the cheek when she leaves and whispers something to him that almost makes him smile.
Izzie drives her back to the bus stop herself the following day and she evades every question about her and Alex, and her and her job, and her and Mere’s house, and her and the lover’s card, and it spooks her beyond reason that Alex let her mother read his lifeline and agreed with her about the government concealing UFO’s in New Mexico and raved about her cookies and shrugged and nodded when she invited herself back for Christmas.
Robbie really can’t out-crazy his mother, though, and Izzie actually misses her as the bus pulls away and she’s already planning for Christmas anyway. She swings by the mall just to get a taste of the holiday season and she buys two small gold charms and she people watches as she has them wrapped in delicate silver foil paper and a light dusting of snow covers her car as she drives home and another football game flickers in the darkened living room when she arrives.
It’s barely five p.m. but he’s plainly in the depths of a cookie coma so she stashes her packages in the kitchen and makes her tea and crawls onto the couch beside him, pulling a puffy down throw around them as she settles cautiously into him. It’s still not quite as easy as it used to be, before she’d had to maneuver carefully around thick bandages and deep wounds, but the bandages are long gone while it still takes her a few seconds longer to slide her arms around him, before hesitantly drawing into his chest.
It was silly, she reminded herself, since the scars had mostly closed over, and for months she’d attributed his inability to sleep comfortably in her arms, like he used to, to the deep bruising along his side, which she was sure ached even after he’d stopped wincing, just like she’d attributed his reticence in the shower to thin towels and low blood counts, which must have made him chilly, and his shallow breathing to bruised lungs, judging from the wide purple blue swath that still wrapped around his torso.
It had to be about that, about bullets and crazed gun men and elevators and nightmares, because otherwise it would have something to do with her - his on going hesitance, his reluctance to melt into her hands the way he used to, or to laugh or to shiver or to moan when her hands roamed his skin more freely, or to dissolve into that deep sated purr that used to rumble through him after her beast had had its full of him, and she would curl around him like a contented lioness around her prey, drifting off peacefully.
It couldn’t be her fault, though, or she’d never be able to answer her mother’s questions - about why she was here and when she would tell him - questions that almost made her madder now, because she’d been an expert once - when she was fifteen - on her mother’s choices and failures. She’d had all the answers back then, before Hannah, and Hank, and broken marriages galore.
But none of those answers would change the feel of his body, or the timber of his voice, or the warmth of his breath as he settled into her chest, or the steady beat of his heart under her fingers, or the strength of his arms as he tugged her closer in his sleep, or how much of her seemed to go missing when he wasn’t curled around her, too, or how dark her premonitions seemed, when he wasn’t there, or how much she missed him.
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He stirs to the dull hum of a descending elevator, but there’s no pitch darkness, just the ghostly flicker of the television, and there’s no dead silence, just a steady heartbeat beneath his ear, and there’s no icy piercing, just the soft rise and fall of her chest, and her arms tighten around him as he shifts gingerly, trying not to wake her.
Her murmur echoes through him as she burrows closer, and every curve fills every hollow like a puzzle with no pieces left over, and she still smells like cake frosting and green apple shampoo, and it’s as dizzying as any tumble down an elevator shaft and its been months now and she’s still in his arms and he’s still braced for impact.
He almost curses, because he’s holding his breath and still barely moving and she’s dissolving over him, anyway, and she knows every inch of him even when he’s fully dressed, or covered in scars, and he’s like one of those freaking see through anatomical models in the Skills lab, like all his insides are visible outside, and it doesn’t even matter since he’s spilling into her hands either way and his whole body’s conspiring with her.
He has no idea what their plan is, even, but he almost pulls away because he’s drowsy and warm and the minute he dozes off her chest will drop away and then he’ll be free falling again - through the night mare in the elevator or the dream where she’s still in his arms - and then he’ll wake as he always does, gasping for air or holding his breath.
It’s all madness, anyway, because, she’s nuzzling his neck and murmuring things in his ear that just can’t be and any sane person would run at the first hint of beastly rumblings and sane people know that flickering light at the end of any dark tunnel is an on-coming train, and sane people know better then to keep making the same mistakes.
She shreds his sanity with his clothes, though, and he’s falling again, slipping down off the couch, and madness courses through his veins as her silky skin wraps around him and any sane person would avoid this stretch of jungle and any sane person would refuse to moan the beast’s name and any sane person would flee before she curled around him, digging her claws in deep to make another meal of his remains.
That’s what sane people would do, but she doesn’t go back to her old bedroom, and she doesn’t prowl off afterwards, she pushes harder and he pulls back further because he’s sure she’ll leave him if he fights back, and she’ll leave him if he doesn’t, and she’ll leave him even if he could just stop being the guy who flinches at elevators, and she’ll leave because he’ll still have scars he can’t hide - and he wonders if the shots you don’t see coming are easier - though that may be the coward talking, too.
She’s there in his next session, though, and complaining about his unspoken dreams again, and it just doesn’t matter, and he finally asks her bluntly how he’s supposed to tell anyone about his dreams of digging his way out of his own grave without them thinking he’s crazy - and she knows about his mother and Wyatt knows about the elevators and they’ll put it all together and then he’ll be like his mother - which is possibly worse then ending up like his father, since at least he knew why you were beating the crap out of him - and it wasn’t like Izzie was trapped in some freaking farm house with him, anyway, and it wasn’t like he was some freaking invalid, and it wasn’t like he needed a sitter.
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Silence echoes through the room after that, and Wyatt’s pen scratches furiously across her yellow note pad and Izzie’s stomach plunges into her shoes and she grabs his hand and pulls harder then she intends to and catches his eyes - startled and bewildered and terrified - and his face reddens as she forces it back to hers when he tries to look away.
It’s what she gets for pushing so hard, she imagines frantically, and she just blurts out that her full time job at the clinic starts in January, and that she never actually signed the final divorce papers he’d sent back to her the day before the shootings - so, technically, they’re still sort of married - and she still has her toy ring and his pirate costume needs work and she hates his guitar playing - because, really, what the hell kind of music is that, anyway - and he sneaks the neighbor’s grumpy orange cat too many Tuna treats.
It all comes out in a jumble and she notices briefly that Wyatt looks about ready to drown herself in her aquarium, and Alex is turning ten shades of red and probably fuming, and she wonders in a panic if her church offers a 911 confession hot-line, and she’d swear later that it was all instinct as she grabbed her purse and fled for her life while Wyatt’s angel fish gazed on serenely and she rapidly scribbled more notes in his file.
She returns from church later that evening and he eyes her warily and she says nothing about the straggly little fir tree now standing awkwardly in the living room, though it’s still four weeks until Christmas, and she breezes into the kitchen and pounds and chops and rolls and shoves a batch of sugar cookie bells and stars and snowmen into the oven and she pulls squashed boxes of red and green decorations and a plastic manger scene from the over stuffed closet in the den.
She notices him eying her hesitantly as she surveys the tree, fluffing out its branches and hanging felt reindeer and placing her new angel carefully on top. So she presses a big package of tinsel into his hands and he shuffles his feet while she adds twinkling lights and fat candy canes and she swats him playfully when he mutters something about a case of tin foil exploding and she’s laughing when she hangs the final decoration, and she turns the little drummer boy’s face away from them, before peeling off Alex’s clothes.
“I didn’t sign the final papers,” she reminds him quietly, nearly an hour later, stroking him gently and picking stray tinsel from his shoulder, as he carefully untangles and errant plastic manger sheep from her hair.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, his voice wavering as his breath still returned.
“I was mad at you for taking so long to send them back,” she said, tracing her fingers lightly down his side and lingering along the curve of his hip.
“I heard,” he muttered bitterly, “from Mere.”
“That wasn’t fair,” she agreed wryly. “I should have yelled at you directly.”
“Right,” he snorted, averting his eyes.
“You told me to leave,” she retorted sharply.
“Not the first time,” he snapped. “You didn’t even give me a chance. You just… I was trying to help you. How could you think-“
“I wasn’t,” she interrupted hurriedly. “Thinking, I just, it all happened so fast.”
“I came back again,” she added softly, after an awkward silence, her warm hand re-settling tentatively just beneath his rib cage.
“Would you have, if I hadn’t…” he trailed off uncomfortably, watching her eyes and her fingers as she stroked delicately along his torso.
“Don’t think I’m crazy,” she said, almost cringing because she was sure that’s exactly what he’d think before she even got all the words out. “But I knew about it before anyone even called…”she hesitated, trying not to sound like her mother as she almost motioned toward the scar lines raking his body. “Well…“she continued, shaking her head wryly at his puzzled expression. “I just knew I had to come back.”
Her fingers came to a stop again, resting in a familiar spot, and she couldn’t quite see his eyes, but she could feel his heart beating steadily, could feel the rush or air into his lungs, and the contraction of muscle against bone as his ribs rose and fell, and the warm flow of blood through his veins, and the rippling pulse of his nerves as his flesh quivered slightly beneath her touch, as a deep moan simmered just below the surface of his skin.
“I think I’m supposed to be here. Does that sound crazy?” she asked softly, studying him closely.
“You didn’t think that before,” he muttered, still not quite looking at her.
“But I do now,” she insisted. “We could start over.”
“It’s not getting better, this thing with Wyatt,” he mumbled, his voice ragged, his gaze following the path of her warm hands again, as they curled softly beneath his ribs.
“It will,” she asserted. “It’s only been six months.”
“But what if it takes-“ he protested, frowning seriously.
“Then we’ll deal with it,” she interrupted fiercely, cutting him off.
“We will?” he echoed, hesitantly emphasizing the “we.”
“I bought Amber a Christmas present already,” she blurted out suddenly.
“We never really do holidays,” he replied reluctantly, his puzzled frown indicating that she’d probably turned without signaling again.
“It’s a little gold charm,” Izzie added. “It’s just something to let her know we were thinking about her.” She watches as least eleven distinct moods scrawl across his face just then, and she’s sure he doesn’t realize that he’s always either all in or all out, and he’s all in with Amber even if he won’t notice that for another few years at least.
“She likes shiny stuff,” he agrees, nodding after a long silence, and she imagines that he’s basing that assessment entirely on the glittery card she’d spied in the bulky envelop that his tee shirt came in, and that that’s probably everything he knows about teen aged girls.
“We could invite her here, sometime,” Izzie continued. “Let her see what her big brother does in the big city. Let her be proud of you.”
“Right,” he smirked, lowering his eyes again.
“Robbins raves about you, you know,” she added, pulling him closer. “So does Bailey. You’re… you’re a good doctor.”
“So,” he stammered, his face reddening again. “We can like, start over?”
“You never really proposed, you know,” she added pointedly, lightly kissing his neck.
“No time,” he shrugged sheepishly.
“Or guts,” she taunted, brushing her fingers along an especially ticklish spot she’d re-discovered recently. “And you ate the gum ball that came with my wedding ring.”
“You hate grape,” he protested, squirming slightly. “And you were still hurling up everything back then, anyway. Why waste a perfectly good $0.75 cent gum ball?”
“We could start from the beginning,” she said, tugging him closer, and almost giggling as she resisted the impulse to point out that his makeshift budget had apparently expanded to include line items for Tuna Delight cat treats and red lollypops and a spindly, homeless Christmas tree that no sane person would have blown more then a nickel on.
“You know, do it right,” she added, her hands sliding gently around his ribs again, rising and falling in another familiar rhythm as his breathing slowed beneath them.
“I returned the tux already,” he noted, peeking suspiciously down at her hands again despite the muffled sigh that escaped him.
“We’re still married,” she reminded him, rolling her eyes. “I like you better like this anyway,” she teased, tracing her fingers along his bare body again, and frowning when he shifted slightly, as her hands passed over his side.
“It’s hot,” she teased, brushing her hand lightly over the fading purple blue swath still surrounding his surgical scars. “It makes you look like Barney.”
“I’ve spent months in peads,” he snorted, sighing softly again as she continued her explorations, “never been mistaken for Barney.”
“Maybe a pirate, then,” she agreed, studying his skin more seriously. “We can work on your costume for next year,” she added.
“Witches are into pirates?” he smirked, his own fingers making her shiver, as they trailed lazily over her collar bone.
“And purple dinosaurs,” she agreed, nodding seriously and curling into him with a contented murmur.
“It’s not going away,” he repeated quietly, his hand settling over hers. “I’m trying, but… it’s just not going away.”
“Neither am I,” she whispered, burrowing closely into his arms.