(no subject)
Title: Heartbeat Skip, Sudden Slip
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Izzie
Word Count: 1,456
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: I'm struggling to write Grey's lately, so lets call this an attempt to get back into the habit.
Summary: Post finale. These are the things you can never forget: that recipe of your mom's, the exact shade of that dress, and the spot along the curve of your hips where his hand used to rest.
She doesn’t hear the shower running. She also doesn’t hear it turn off.
Lesson One: Listen before you walk into the bathroom when you live with two other people.
“I’m sorry,” and where he kept moving when he walked in on her, she has the grace to look away.
Alex laughs (she thinks she lets out a breath here) and when she looks back, carefully, the towel is around his waist. “Returning the favor?”
She hates that smirk. She hates it but right now she loves it. Because last night there was crying, full on sobbing, and she’s still a little shaken by that. But he’s smirking, that hateful, increasingly confident smirk, and it only makes her smile.
Not interested, not looking, he once told her, and she had glared and shouted and she would repeat it back to him now, going along with this rerun of their history, but she finds the words have stilled on her tongue.
---
Izzie bakes to pass the time between hospital and empty house. Meredith is with Derek, and Alex likes work almost as much as Cristina (dealing, she mumbles, silently) so there’s her and her mixing bowl calls to her, a long lost friend.
She bites into a cupcake, making sure they’re just right, working off of a recipe that only exists in her mind, and he’s in the doorway when she looks up.
“Are you sure a sugar rush is what you want at one in the morning?”
Her lips curl into a smile against the cupcake, as she sets it down, half-eaten on the plate in front of her. “Can’t sleep.”
“She got Derek up there?” He pauses, listens, but only silence greets him, and so the question answers itself. “You know you’re going to hate yourself in the morning for still being up.”
“It is morning, remember.” She tells him, the thought making her yawn.
“Fine. I’m going up to bed then.” The space there asks if she wants him to stay up with her, waits for a protest, but she only nods. He walks over to her, slow, deliberate steps, and butterflies start up in her stomach, against her will. But it’s a napkin he picks up, to wipe at the icing below her lip that she hadn’t even noticed.
She looks down, cheeks flushing, both slightly embarrassed and quietly amused, and she keeps her eyes on the floor until she hears him walk out of the kitchen.
---
She thinks of Denny more now.
Izzie had gotten pretty good at forgetting, at putting it all behind her, because that’s how you move on. No more dwelling, what-if’s and maybes.
She draws parallels now. Painful parallels as she thinks of Alex and his Jane Doe, and how this is really something they should’ve all seen coming.
Repetition, repetition, they see it everyday, learn signs and symptoms and that it’s all a means to an end, but they never learn to apply the things they’ve learned.
That would make life too easy.
---
“You can stop looking at me like that anytime now.” Annoyance in his voice, George is just out of earshot, and she understands by now that he lacks the ability to be a civil human being in the presence of certain people. There’s a facade he needs intact.
“Like what?”
“I’m over it,” he says, simply, in that way that means the exact opposite. He doesn’t like needing people - it’s really not his thing - and so he doesn’t want to need her. At the very least he doesn’t want her to think he needs her.
“Okay,” she replies, tongue darting out to wet her lips in such a way that his eyes are momentarily drawn to her mouth. “But if you ever decide that you’re not over it - “
“I won’t.”
“Okay.”
He narrows his eyes, locks them on her. “I’m fine.”
She wonders how many times he’ll say it before he realizes it becomes meaningless after awhile.
---
They don’t talk about that night.
They don’t, but he has issues with the word ‘please’, for different reasons than previously, and her red shirt sits in the back of her closet, six empty hangers away from that dress, and this is how they forget.
---
“Where are the flashlights?”
The lights are out, thunder in the background, the matches appear to have up and walked away, and if she stubs her toe one more time she’s going to scream.
“I think they’re by the washing machine.” She pauses, trying to picture it. “Or maybe the closet.”
“You say that like there’s only one.” Something hits the floor. “You know that lamp Meredith’s always complaining nearly broke three times at that party of yours?”
She knows this story far too well. “Reason one hundred and one why I’m never allowed to throw parties here.”
There’s a pause; she wonders where he is. “I think I just broke it.”
“We’ll just tell her Derek did it when he ran out this morning and didn’t notice.” She smiles to herself. “Give them something to fight about for a change.”
There’s an ‘ah’ that sounds just about as joyful as one can be after they’ve bumped into more end tables than they knew they had, and a little pinhole of light makes it’s way towards her. It enlarges and she grins as Alex walks towards her, flashlight in hand.
“My hero,” she says, a touch of sarcasm, and there’s a moment as he hands her the second flashlight, as their hands brush, that begs to make this into a cliché, some bad teen movie, and it’s for that reason that they both separate. “We should find those matches.”
They should be more worried about putting out those sparks.
---
That night spans into a series of nights in which there is just something going on between them that she does not want to acknowledge.
This is a year ago. This is a year ago when everything was bright and new and she was just starting to feel drawn to this man she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know.
Except it’s not. They’re just operating in a fixed pattern, repeating in intervals. She went from hating him to liking him back to hating him and now she’s just starting to like him again in that way that didn’t quite work the first time. It won’t work this time either; at least she doesn’t plan to give it the chance to.
But her plans never work.
And since it was her that crawled into bed with him she can’t even hide behind it’s his fault.
“This is crazy right?” She doesn’t expect much of an answer, but it’s on her mind and thus translates into actual words.
When someone - she doesn’t know if it’s her, him, or both - maneuvers so that he’s leaning over her with his lips on her neck and the hand that is not bracing himself against the bed snakes underneath her shirt, to trace the outline of her side, down to her hips, she forgets to care.
---
She’s with him when he finds out.
“She was a sick girl.” It’s good that it’s Bailey who tells him this, it’s better than her or Meredith or practically anyone else here. There’s authority in her words. “She had a history of...she had a history and there’s only so much anyone could do. It’s no one’s fault.”
The important thing here is that while her hand is the one that reaches out in the first place it’s his that won’t let go.
---
He nearly curses her out the next day on the second ‘are you sure you’re okay?’
(Stupid bitch, she hears again, words she can’t get out of her mind yet; too fresh and all too harsh)
She leaves him alone after that.
---
“I’m not over it.”
First, there is the olive branch.
---
There are no tears this time.
Some would call that progress.
But it’s still a fall; just an easier one to get back up from.
---
These are the things she can never forget: that recipe of her mom’s, the exact shade of that dress, and the spot along the curve of her hips where his hand used to rest.
Does. She would cross out used to, in exchange for does. As in once again; as in do-over, let’s give this one more try. Because maybe these past two years, the hell they’ve been through, is just a way of making them stronger.
And she isn’t preaching forgive and forget. You don’t forget, not really. You shouldn’t. You should learn. Learn from the mistakes, the failures, the successes, and everything in between.
She’s learning to like second chances.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Izzie
Word Count: 1,456
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: I'm struggling to write Grey's lately, so lets call this an attempt to get back into the habit.
Summary: Post finale. These are the things you can never forget: that recipe of your mom's, the exact shade of that dress, and the spot along the curve of your hips where his hand used to rest.
She doesn’t hear the shower running. She also doesn’t hear it turn off.
Lesson One: Listen before you walk into the bathroom when you live with two other people.
“I’m sorry,” and where he kept moving when he walked in on her, she has the grace to look away.
Alex laughs (she thinks she lets out a breath here) and when she looks back, carefully, the towel is around his waist. “Returning the favor?”
She hates that smirk. She hates it but right now she loves it. Because last night there was crying, full on sobbing, and she’s still a little shaken by that. But he’s smirking, that hateful, increasingly confident smirk, and it only makes her smile.
Not interested, not looking, he once told her, and she had glared and shouted and she would repeat it back to him now, going along with this rerun of their history, but she finds the words have stilled on her tongue.
---
Izzie bakes to pass the time between hospital and empty house. Meredith is with Derek, and Alex likes work almost as much as Cristina (dealing, she mumbles, silently) so there’s her and her mixing bowl calls to her, a long lost friend.
She bites into a cupcake, making sure they’re just right, working off of a recipe that only exists in her mind, and he’s in the doorway when she looks up.
“Are you sure a sugar rush is what you want at one in the morning?”
Her lips curl into a smile against the cupcake, as she sets it down, half-eaten on the plate in front of her. “Can’t sleep.”
“She got Derek up there?” He pauses, listens, but only silence greets him, and so the question answers itself. “You know you’re going to hate yourself in the morning for still being up.”
“It is morning, remember.” She tells him, the thought making her yawn.
“Fine. I’m going up to bed then.” The space there asks if she wants him to stay up with her, waits for a protest, but she only nods. He walks over to her, slow, deliberate steps, and butterflies start up in her stomach, against her will. But it’s a napkin he picks up, to wipe at the icing below her lip that she hadn’t even noticed.
She looks down, cheeks flushing, both slightly embarrassed and quietly amused, and she keeps her eyes on the floor until she hears him walk out of the kitchen.
---
She thinks of Denny more now.
Izzie had gotten pretty good at forgetting, at putting it all behind her, because that’s how you move on. No more dwelling, what-if’s and maybes.
She draws parallels now. Painful parallels as she thinks of Alex and his Jane Doe, and how this is really something they should’ve all seen coming.
Repetition, repetition, they see it everyday, learn signs and symptoms and that it’s all a means to an end, but they never learn to apply the things they’ve learned.
That would make life too easy.
---
“You can stop looking at me like that anytime now.” Annoyance in his voice, George is just out of earshot, and she understands by now that he lacks the ability to be a civil human being in the presence of certain people. There’s a facade he needs intact.
“Like what?”
“I’m over it,” he says, simply, in that way that means the exact opposite. He doesn’t like needing people - it’s really not his thing - and so he doesn’t want to need her. At the very least he doesn’t want her to think he needs her.
“Okay,” she replies, tongue darting out to wet her lips in such a way that his eyes are momentarily drawn to her mouth. “But if you ever decide that you’re not over it - “
“I won’t.”
“Okay.”
He narrows his eyes, locks them on her. “I’m fine.”
She wonders how many times he’ll say it before he realizes it becomes meaningless after awhile.
---
They don’t talk about that night.
They don’t, but he has issues with the word ‘please’, for different reasons than previously, and her red shirt sits in the back of her closet, six empty hangers away from that dress, and this is how they forget.
---
“Where are the flashlights?”
The lights are out, thunder in the background, the matches appear to have up and walked away, and if she stubs her toe one more time she’s going to scream.
“I think they’re by the washing machine.” She pauses, trying to picture it. “Or maybe the closet.”
“You say that like there’s only one.” Something hits the floor. “You know that lamp Meredith’s always complaining nearly broke three times at that party of yours?”
She knows this story far too well. “Reason one hundred and one why I’m never allowed to throw parties here.”
There’s a pause; she wonders where he is. “I think I just broke it.”
“We’ll just tell her Derek did it when he ran out this morning and didn’t notice.” She smiles to herself. “Give them something to fight about for a change.”
There’s an ‘ah’ that sounds just about as joyful as one can be after they’ve bumped into more end tables than they knew they had, and a little pinhole of light makes it’s way towards her. It enlarges and she grins as Alex walks towards her, flashlight in hand.
“My hero,” she says, a touch of sarcasm, and there’s a moment as he hands her the second flashlight, as their hands brush, that begs to make this into a cliché, some bad teen movie, and it’s for that reason that they both separate. “We should find those matches.”
They should be more worried about putting out those sparks.
---
That night spans into a series of nights in which there is just something going on between them that she does not want to acknowledge.
This is a year ago. This is a year ago when everything was bright and new and she was just starting to feel drawn to this man she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know.
Except it’s not. They’re just operating in a fixed pattern, repeating in intervals. She went from hating him to liking him back to hating him and now she’s just starting to like him again in that way that didn’t quite work the first time. It won’t work this time either; at least she doesn’t plan to give it the chance to.
But her plans never work.
And since it was her that crawled into bed with him she can’t even hide behind it’s his fault.
“This is crazy right?” She doesn’t expect much of an answer, but it’s on her mind and thus translates into actual words.
When someone - she doesn’t know if it’s her, him, or both - maneuvers so that he’s leaning over her with his lips on her neck and the hand that is not bracing himself against the bed snakes underneath her shirt, to trace the outline of her side, down to her hips, she forgets to care.
---
She’s with him when he finds out.
“She was a sick girl.” It’s good that it’s Bailey who tells him this, it’s better than her or Meredith or practically anyone else here. There’s authority in her words. “She had a history of...she had a history and there’s only so much anyone could do. It’s no one’s fault.”
The important thing here is that while her hand is the one that reaches out in the first place it’s his that won’t let go.
---
He nearly curses her out the next day on the second ‘are you sure you’re okay?’
(Stupid bitch, she hears again, words she can’t get out of her mind yet; too fresh and all too harsh)
She leaves him alone after that.
---
“I’m not over it.”
First, there is the olive branch.
---
There are no tears this time.
Some would call that progress.
But it’s still a fall; just an easier one to get back up from.
---
These are the things she can never forget: that recipe of her mom’s, the exact shade of that dress, and the spot along the curve of her hips where his hand used to rest.
Does. She would cross out used to, in exchange for does. As in once again; as in do-over, let’s give this one more try. Because maybe these past two years, the hell they’ve been through, is just a way of making them stronger.
And she isn’t preaching forgive and forget. You don’t forget, not really. You shouldn’t. You should learn. Learn from the mistakes, the failures, the successes, and everything in between.
She’s learning to like second chances.