it's a green christmas in this town (1/4) {ensemble} (cont'd)
“Well, well, look who’s actually coming home for once.” Sadie practically greets her at the door, her and Meredith apparently having beaten Lexie home, no surprise there given that her plans had changed at the last minute.
Lexie’s eyes widen a little, as she hisses, “Keep your voice down.”
Sadie gives her an amused grin, as she, at the exact same volume, asks, “What are you concerned about Death hearing us?”
She still doesn’t understand that nickname. Someone needs to explain that, eventually, possibly in a group setting since as far as she knows she isn’t the only one completely out of the loop on that one. “Yes.”
Now Sadie lowers her voice, and thank goodness for that, because the next words out of her mouth are, “So what’s keeping you from sneaking off with Sloane?”
“Sadie,” she hisses again, her eyes darting around, almost expecting Meredith to step out of the kitchen or down the stairs and hear them.
“Wow, you really do sound like your sister when you do that.” Sadie replies, grabbing Lexie by the wrist and pulling her into the living room, ending up on the couch. “So what, is no one supposed to know?”
Lexie isn’t sure how she didn’t get that by now. “No. No one.”
“Hmm,” Sadie practically hums, thinking on that for a minute. “Him or you?”
“Him. Me. Both.” She can’t really decide.
The other woman looks rather pleased with herself when she says, “Well you two are doing a fantastically shitty job of keeping that under wraps.”
Her next words are enunciated very, very deliberately. “Don’t. Tell. Anyone.”
Sadie just laughs, the kind of laugh where she throws her head back and her blonde waves flow over her shoulders and…just not a very comforting kind of laugh. Lexie doesn’t picture this ending very well. It’s just by whose hand that’s the problem.
---
They spend the first five minutes in total silence, the only sound is that of cars whizzing by and the noise of the car’s engine, a calming rhythm. She never looks at him, much less say anything, and he’s too busy working out what to say to actually get the words out.
This is not a feeling he’s familiar with. Speechlessness.
“Did you hear about the guy down in the pit who shot the deer. He thought it was dead but it wasn’t; tore the shit out of his arm.” Alex starts, figures maybe it’ll strike some chord with her, make her talk if it’s just simple things. Work things.
It doesn’t.
It’s impulsive but it works, because she notices him jump lanes to pull off onto the side of the road, giving him the first words he’s heard from her since this morning. “Alex, what are you doing?” He puts the car in park, wordlessly, and her brows knit together when she asks, “Is something wrong with the car? What’s - what’s going on?”
He turns to face her, studying her features. He can’t help but think this is the most alive, most alert, he’s seen her look in days. “What is your problem?”
“Excuse me?” Izzie asks, taken aback. He isn’t too surprised; he never can find the right words when he needs to. When she isn’t paying attention, like in the on-call room two weeks ago, the words, declarations, just keep flowing. As normal, it’s never when it counts. It never is with him.
“You know, I thought it was something I was doing wrong. But it’s not, is it? People tell me that you’re talking to yourself or not showing up at the damn clinic. You’re never there - I don’t even see you unless we’re in car or in bed, and most nights you aren’t even in bed. So what the hell is it?” And see, this, this, is exactly why he doesn’t have these conversations. Because he doesn’t know how to ask nicely. He just knows how to yell.
Although, the way her eyes flash tells him that, maybe, that’s what she needed. Maybe because it was the one thing no one ever tried. Everyone was too busy being nice, he was too busy being nice, to press, to push. To bring it up. “Alex, I…” she trails off, taking a shaky breath that he hears bounce off the interior of the car. “I told you I was a mess…”
“Yeah. You did. But there’s a difference between being a mess and…talking to people who aren’t there.” He’s frustrated and, yeah, this probably isn’t the best time or place or even person to deal with that with but he’s on a roll and she’s talking and that’s something. Something is better than silence and eyes that don’t meet his. “Just let me in.”
“I’m just…” she hesitates on the next part of her sentence, makes him want to yell at her to just say it, but he doesn’t, and she seems to choose a better alternative because she says, “I just need some time to work through things on my own okay?”
He sighs, because he doesn’t like it but he doesn’t have much of a choice either, he said he’d never leave and that’s a promise he intends to keep, so he shifts the car into gear and gets them back on the road again, leaving the conversation, and her question, hanging.
Alex goes upstairs the moment they get home, without a word to her or Sadie and Lexie, both of whom practically jumped as soon as the door opened. Meredith almost runs into him, coming out of her own room, and asks with raised eyebrows, “Did you talk to her?”
A slammed door serves as her answer, and he hears her hand come up, on the other side, poised to knock. She stops, lets out a breath that sounds like his name, and moments later he can hear her footfalls on the stairs.
The next time the door opens he’s been in bed for ten minutes, the lights off, and even with his back facing the door he knows who it is when the door clicks shut. “Alex,” Izzie whispers, sitting down on the edge of the bed, “are you awake?”
He doesn’t answer, just to see what’ll happen. She gives a heavy sigh, then stretches out next to him on the bed, nothing but the silence and a sliver of empty bed space between them.
---
By the time Mark pulls up outside of Meredith’s house it’s after ten and he gives into curiosity, following Derek up the steps and into the house.
The house is dark except for the blue glow of the television in the living room. Sadie sits on the far side of the couch, legs stretched out along half the length of it, but she starts when the door closes, leaning forward so she can glance into the other room.
“Death is upstairs,” she points out, as soon as she gets a good look at them, trying to be helpful. Then, glancing at Mark, she adds, “That is if you need her.”
Derek doesn’t read between the lines of her statement, even if Mark does, instead telling her, and by extension Mark, “you should get some sleep; tomorrow will probably be busy.”
Sadie shrugs when she says, “Who needs sleep,” and she sort of gives Mark this look like she’s contemplating all the ways in which he could possibly aid in keeping her awake. Normally he’d be all for taking advantage of that. Right now, however, because he apparently has been brainwashed in the past few weeks, his eyes are searching the house for Lexie as discretely as possible. She isn’t in his sight line. Probably went home to O’Malley.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Derek says, looking his way now, apparently finding it necessary to lower his voice in a way that makes Sadie give him a raised eyebrow and a very amused look. He is so not helping matters. “And thanks.”
“Yeah,” Mark nods, narrowing his eyes slightly at Sadie, before he ducks out the door.
It’ll be the first night he’s spent by himself in the hotel in at least a week, and he isn’t exactly jumping for joy, as surprising as that is to him. He’s grown accustomed to having Lexie there, even in that short time, even when their relationship is all about sneaking around and lying. She’s still managed to get under his skin.
He’s halfway to his car when he hears the door open behind him, and footsteps come down the stairs and start down the walk.
“She’s upstairs you know.” Sadie’s voice floats through the cold evening air. He doesn’t so much turn as stop. “Mer put her up in Stevens’ room for the night, said she was tired of falling over sleeping bags in the morning.”
Mark frowns, plays dumb, even, especially, as he turns to face her. “I have no idea who you would be referring to.”
“Okay, fine. Never figured you for someone who would shoot down the chance to get laid.” There’s a faked carelessness in her voice, like she doesn’t care if he comes back in that door or not, but he’s fairly sure she wouldn’t be standing out in the cold if she didn’t.
Slowly, he turns around, giving in. Again. “Which bedroom is this?”
---
Lexie doesn’t automatically recognize that anything is out of the ordinary. It’s more in stages.
There’s a hand on her waist and lips on her neck, a bare chest pressed against her tank top clad back, and she sighs, moving closer to the warmth. She’s gotten used to not sleeping in an empty bed; now she almost expects it, a body instead of cool, crisp sheets.
But. It’s a body she hadn’t gone to bed with, last she checked, and these aren’t Mark’s hotel room sheets, and so she jerks upright, eyes wide and unblinking, and her shoulder slams into something hard as she does.
“Fuck,” it comes out as a low growl, and Mark’s holding his jaw when she turns to look at him and this is Meredith’s house, he is very much not supposed to be here.
“What are you doing?” She keeps her voice down too, because the last thing she wants is a scene. “Are you trying to get caught?”
“I drove Derek home. Figured the night didn’t have to be a complete waste.” His hand drops from cradling his jaw to the strap of her tank, and it’s just freaking amazing how quickly he can go from zero to sixty. It’s amazing how quickly she’s starting to be able to do that too, as she bites her lip and forces herself to stop his hand before it moves down any further.
“Won’t he know you were here?” His other hand, the free one, starts with the hem of her shirt now, slipping underneath and up her sides, hands still cold from the cold air outside. It makes her shiver and her voice shake when she adds, “You’re the one who is so petrified about being found out.”
“I’ll leave before everyone else wakes up. You think this is the first time I’ve done this Grey?” Her answer to that comes out as a moan from the combined efforts of his fingers and his lips that start down her collarbone, her throat, and she sinks back into the bed, head against the pillow, as he moves over top of her.
There suddenly just isn’t that much to talk about after that.
---
Izzie just doesn’t sleep anymore.
Most nights she gets out of bed and paces, either in her own room or downstairs, where she’s alone and it’s just her and Denny and if she closes her eyes sometimes she can forget he’s there. She can convince herself that she’s alone. It’s worth the lack of sleep, just to have that moment where she can tell herself that she is fine and sane and this all just temporary.
Tonight that isn’t an option. She can hear the television on downstairs, the sound of who she guesses must be Sadie in either the living room or the kitchen. Lexie’s in her room for the night. Alex has an arm slung around her, very much in a possessive way and showing few signs of letting go anytime soon, a move he made in his sleep considering before he drifted off he wasn’t even acknowledging her presence, instead opting to feign sleep. No, she isn’t going anywhere tonight.
Neither is Denny, apparently. He stands in the corner, along the wall, watching her with an intensity that rattles her to the core. He doesn’t say anything and neither does she. It’s her new thing, trying her damndest to ignore his very presence in hopes that, eventually, he’ll just stop. It doesn’t seem to be working but, at this point, she has very little to lose.
She needs him gone. For her career, for her relationships, for her. Izzie knows that now.
It’s just a matter of how.
---
Sadie had meant to go to bed, not spill the remaining liquid in her glass so that it soaked straight through the blanket. But that’s the kind of thing that would happen to her at almost midnight when she has to be up at four thirty.
She tries three closets downstairs, before realizing that Meredith had said she kept the blankets upstairs and so Sadie made the trek up in the dark, glad that the hallway was clear and she didn’t fall over someone’s discarded shoe or end up with something lodged in her foot. That also tended to happen - but that was downstairs.
Even in the dark she knows her way around. She’s only been her for weeks but she can tell where she is by what she’s hearing. The bedroom closest to the stairs on her right, the one where she can currently hear shaky breathing that dictates someone’s crying and doesn’t want someone else to know it, that’s Alex’s room and, presently, Izzie’s. The one directly across from that, on the left, the one with soft, fairly muffled moans coming from it, is currently, thanks to her, being occupied by both Lexie and Mark. The one at the end of the hall, right near where the linen closet, the one with the rhythmic snoring, is Meredith and Derek’s.
She doesn’t know how they can all sleep up there; it’s anything but quiet, despite some effort.
Feeling around for a blanket, she presses her lips together and tries not to laugh. It takes only a few seconds to find one that she deems suitable and, pleased, she creeps back down the stairs, tossing the soiled one in the laundry on her way back over to the living room.
From her eventual spot on the couch, as she tries to settle down and close her eyes, tries to sleep, she can see light snow falling outside of the window. All she can think of is the surgeries she’ll have to sit back and watch, instead of actually aid on.
---
Part 2