Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too, Alex/Cristina, PG-13
Title: Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Cristina Yang, Alex Karev; Alex/Cristina (mentions of Alex/Izzie, Cristina/Owen)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Spoilers: Erm, if you're up-to-date with GA, then you're golden. If you're not, than it's nothing huge. Just Izzie's gone, and Teddy's about.
Word Count: 4165
Summary: Except she’s exactly the person she is, and he’s Alex and everything might not be okay.
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 libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. All song-lyrics mentioned belong to their respective owners, not to me.
Author’s Note: Set just after Christmas. Because, that might be when I started writing it. =S Eek.
Yeah, crack!fic. I kind of had to rush parts, and it's not exactly how I pictured it. But whatevs. It's being posted, because I just don't have the time to look at it anymore and change one-off words.
Dedicated to meghanclaire who is maybe one of the best cheerleaders in the world. Torrance Shipman, ain't got nothing on you. She responds to me "GAH. WHAT THE--" tweets about my own writing with lovely things. And I think I'd have given up if I wasn't sure there was another person as invested in these two as me.
---
She hooks her foot around the stool and leans further onto the bar, somewhere between her third and fourth drink, the room started spinning and she hasn’t been able to get it to stop yet.
“Cristina?”
Her head lifts slowly, “Mm?”
He tilts his head back and forth, thinks about asking her what’s wrong, how her day was, and instead settles on, “Refill?” She doesn’t grunt this time, just presses her fingers against her glass and slides it closer to him- like the effort of the first was too much. She’s on her sixth now, and sipping slowly isn’t really a tried-and-tested method for getting less drunk; maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to- because no matter how many Christmas decorations Joe puts up, the room isn’t pretty enough to will back into focus.
“Were you planning on taking them down anytime soon?” She gestures to the red and green tinsel weaved through the spirits on the top shelf.
“I like to stay festive for as long as possible.”
She nods, “I know people who do that.” The details are for her, a list of people who’ve left her alone in some form or another (Dad. Burke. Izzie.), of people who cook turkeys and sing carols and aren’t here.
She looks up when she feels someone’s eyes (dark, deep, random) on her, smiles into her glass (they’re important in all the ways that don’t really matter when it comes down to it, when it comes to forty years; good-looking, confident, breathing) and wishes Owen was there. She presses her forearms into the bar, leaves red ridges in her pale skin, her eyes prickle. She doesn’t look at him again. She doesn’t need to. If he could just get jealous and if she could just take him home and if they could just be okay. If they could just remember that they actually loved each other, that they were a ‘they’. He’d whisper something that she’d close her eyes and lean against, his warm chest moving up and down against her back, in time with her. She’d feel alive. She’d hear him breathe in the scent of her, she’d know exactly what moving her hair from the back of her neck did to him. What she did to him. He’d move in his chair, and when he gripped her hand (tight, like it meant something) and led her out, he’d shoot a look over his shoulder at the guy staring. He’d push her against the brick outside, because walking across the road was too far. But he’s not. So the eyes on her are kind of pointless. And ultimately ignored.
By this point, her arm’s bent on the bar, her forehead resting on it. Face inches from the surface. It’s comfortable here. Like the only still spot in a place that won’t stop moving. The hum from other people and the crap music on the jukebox is a little quieter here. She sees the faint blur of her face in the varnished wood. Her fingers resting on the glass is the only part of her that likes to remember where she is, what she’s got just inches away from her mouth. For the first time in a while, she’s tired. Exhausted. And maybe all this wondering whether or not to fight for him is actually for nothing, because she’s not sure she can do it anymore. Her leather jacket creaks around her, she imagines strong hands running up her back, underneath her t-shirt, fumbling for bra strap and more skin. The fingers would flex, she’d curve her spine into his palm, she’d fit.
“Phone for you.” The hands move, return to their make-believe lap, and she doesn’t need to look at the empty stool next to her to know that she’s actually alone. “Meredith.”
She holds out her hand without looking up, her voice comes out muffled, “Mer--” her breath steams up the bar, she considers writing her name in it, maybe she’d be remembered.
“Why are you at Joe’s?” She doesn’t really give her a chance, and she hasn’t reached the point where that question actually needs an answer, “Is Alex there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not even looking.”
“I…” She twists her neck, “Joe, is Alex here?”
“Mmhm.” She’s pretty sure he points, he’s pretty sure she doesn’t care where to.
“Apparently he is.”
“And you‘re not even sitting with him?”
“He‘s not sitting with me either.”
“Go, Cristina. He shouldn‘t be alone.”
“Maybe he should be. Maybe that’s exactly what he wa--”
“Go.”
She grunts, “Remember when we hated Alex? I miss that.”
“…Go.”
She keeps the phone at her ear even when Meredith clicks off, thinks of Owen’s deep growl and how he only really says what he needs to, “I miss you-- Us. Just come home.”, she’d nod into the phone, know exactly what he meant even though they only spoke three hours ago, she’d press her cheek against the cool plastic and say, “Are you going to be there?”, close her eyes against his warm voice, “Where else am I gonna go?” and she’d smile and wipe the threat of tears out of her eyes. She’d whisper that she loves him, she’d hear him say it back. They’d work the rest out later.
She hands Joe back the phone, uses the same hand to make a ‘V’ and point down to her glass in a universal sign for two more drinks. While he pours, dishrag hung over his arm, she looks around for Karev. He’s in a booth, holding a glass in both hands and looking like the definition of melodramatic. But she doesn’t have the energy to make fun of him; she’s pretty much struggling to check her chipped nail varnish and breathe in and back out without it looking like the effort it is.
She slides off of her stool, a man (flannel shirt, possibly the same eyes from earlier) stands in her way, he stands slightly off to the side, fairly typical of someone whose trying to look down her top, "Has anyone ever told you you're beautiful?"
"Yes."
She doesn’t put a name to the story, tries not to think about what happened after, and how it all kind of amounted to something that feels too hard. No happy ending or campfire fable to pass on, a moral to stitch on a pillow. She walks right past, only acknowledges him by steadying herself on his arm- one palm square on his shirt and then into the crowds.
The glass is in front of him before she is. And she spends the slow few seconds it takes him to even look at her, to think about just dashing backwards and leaving. She’s done her part. He at least won’t die of dehydration. He might even be drunk enough to feel okay for a few hours.
She never said she’d grown that much.
She shifts onto the other hip, curls her glass into her wrist and then to her lips, and rolls her eyes. “Move.” He doesn’t argue, doesn’t sigh, just moves across the booth. In his head, she has blonde hair and she smells like fresh laundry and she said the last thing with a smile. And she didn’t leave him in a trailer. Cristina pushes the drink towards him, it takes the place of, “everyone’s worried and I’ve been sent to check up on you.” He moves his fingers around it, and sinks a little lower into his chair. The blonde version leans in, breathes recently-applied vanilla lipgloss and mint into his face, whispers something that he doesn’t even need to hear to feel better. She rests her cheek on his shoulder, she doesn’t wear a headscarf.
“You ever wonder if maybe the person you’re meant to be with-- that maybe they aren’t the right person for you?” It’s as good as anywhere else to start. Thing is, he’s kind of over the whole small-talk thing. But Cristina doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere and he was always told to be a good host (he’s seventeen, his mother whispers it breathily through mascara trails as she pours stale cookies onto a plate and straightens out her dress), so it’ll do. “That maybe somewhere in between soul mates and whatever other crap you want to put on a hallmark card the two of you just don’t work?”
She swallows back her drink, her eyes opening slowly, “All the time.” He leans back slightly, something about her face makes him think of her sat in a pool of white wedding dress after a second guy leaves. Her lipstick smeared across her cheek and wrist, her hair pulled out in half-sank curls. Her face is stone. She sings Madonna. She’s broken all over again.
(The headline reads that someone else in a white coat finds a new life that doesn’t include her.)
“Huh.” He puts his glass down on the table still filled. First time today.
“You wanted something different?” She starts, “Mer’s the speech-giving one. I just…” mock, ruin, break things “I bring alcohol.” Tequila doesn’t help like it used to, Meredith’s not there to drink it with them and that just makes the whole thing so much sadder. She slips her jacket off and lets it fall about her waist.
“Not really.” He murmurs, keeping his gaze focussed on hers, “It’s good whiskey.” Her eyes shift to the side, to the awful carpet and the ash lining the edges, “God, when did we become dark and twisty?”
She shrugs, a half-smile on her lips, she points at him, “Rebecca,” at herself, “Burke.”.
At himself “Cancer, George--”
“George didn’t happen to you.”
“It happened.”
She sighs, points to her own face, “George, choking…”
“Izzie leaving.”
“Yeah. That probably didn’t help.”
He laughs, “So we’re even-- It’s a draw?”
“I guess.” She plays with a loose curl before tucking it back behind her ear, “At least Izzie stuck around for the wedding.”
“At least Owen stuck around.”
“Oh God, we are dark and twisty.”
He takes a sip now, for different reasons than before. In fact for no reason whatsoever. Which is some kind of progress, really. It’s not to forget, or to anaesthetise. It’s more about the fact that it felt like bad grammar not to punctuate the conversation with something, and the slow burn of liquid on his lips and down his throat felt as good as anything else- better than a full-stop. He moves his arm, nudges something. His face drops, maybe it should be to forget, “It’s, uh-- late Christmas present… From Izzie.” And now is the first time she notices the FedEx package by his elbow, a water ring encircling his name on the front, “I can’t open it.” He bursts into raspy laughs, “I got it this morning and I can’t freaking open the thing.” His warm hand clasps around the glass, bringing it to his lips and downing the brown liquid. Coughing, he mentions, “Sorry, Yang.” She doesn’t say anything; doesn’t ask him what he’s apologising for, or tell him he doesn’t need to.
She definitely doesn’t tell him that it’s late, and he’s drunk, and he really just misses his wife.
As if it’s the same thought, he asks, “What are you doing here anyway? Hunt on call?”
“Yeah,” she sighs, she wedges her palms together between her knees and averts his gaze, yawning and blinking- somewhere between amused and nervous. It’s true. It’s true, even without all the parts that matter. (Yes, Owen’s on call. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been here every night this week.) Her shoulders now shrugged up around her neck, she looks back and rests her lips on her bare shoulder, “You want another?” He nods like she knew he would, and passes his glass up; his thumbnail running up and down the lip of the box, eyes intent like wishful thinking is going to make that thing transparent and then it won’t be his fault that he feels as crappy as he’s sure to if he ever comes around to opening it. “Okay.” It’d be her crappy wrapping paper, the red bow, his name written out in her neat and round handwriting on a label with a fricking elf or a reindeer or something. It’d sparkle, it’d shimmer, who the hell cares what’s inside.
He doesn’t look back up from the label (the one with the name he’s not entirely sure they share anymore) until Cristina comes back, eyes tired and hair pulled out from the band he could have sworn she had in all of five minutes ago. But then he wasn’t really looking at her. “Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He swigs the whole glass in a second, laughs as he rolls it in his grip and sees through it- to the wooden table, to the bottom of a bottle you hear about in old country songs. She doesn’t wait for him to ask for another, just pulls the bottle from behind her back, her fingers wrapped around the neck, the deep golden contents sloshing up the sides when it hits the table. He laughs, and then he doesn’t say anything.
They’re just two people sitting next to each other. She looks around, she watches chat up lines fail and succeed, she knows exactly why Alex chose to sit here. The floor is sticky, the leather is burnt and stained, and no one’s here. The flannel shirt walks past, joins a girl at the bar, sits too close to someone he’s only just met. He asks her if anyone’s ever told her she’s beautiful. She doesn’t say yes. She laughs and smiles and does the things you’re supposed to. She flicks her hair over her shoulder with manicured fingers, she runs them along the rim of her glass, she tells him he looks like someone but she can’t think who. He asks her if she wants another drink, she smiles and downs the rest of her vodka tonic, leans in and says ‘love one’. They go home together. Her straightened hair frizzes against his unchanged sheets, her tights rip. He doesn’t wake up to this girl. She’s the one to leave in the morning, not him. She doesn’t come back up with coffee like he fears (ears pricking when he thinks he hears the front door open), she doesn’t leave her number on his bedside table (just red lipstick stains on his collar). He never sees her again. He remembers her first name (the only one she gave him) the whole day after, and then it’s gone.
(Or she falls in love with him and watches him sleep. Or he does, and finds out she gave him a fake number.
Or, you know, none of that happens.)
She feels him looking at her, raises an eyebrow and turns to face him, a single syllable “What?” to spit out.
“Why are you here, Yang?”
“I told you, Mer--”
“Asked you to babysit me, I get it.” He unscrews the top, “Why are you here?”
“Why are you?” is the only thing she can think of saying, and even she knows it’s a lame thing to come back with it’s all she has, “I mean--”
“My wife--” He chokes on the word, “My wife… Left me in a trailer. So I’m back with Meredith and her perfect McDreamy in their big perfect empty house. In their big perfect empty, we-take-in-strays house. I’m in the exact same room, in the exact same house, except George is dead, and Izzie isn’t there, and most of the time they‘re working or screwing in their room. And I can’t be there by myself because it just feels like the stupidest thing ever.” He takes a deep breath, his lips are wet with saliva and alcohol and if she was a different person talking to a different person she’d hug him or tell him everything will be okay, and she’d lie if she didn’t believe it.
Except she’s exactly the person she is, and he’s Alex and everything might not be okay, “Desert-Storm Barbie is in love with my boyfriend. I know it-- I- I see it. And I can’t do anything about it. And I love him, but I saw Meredith fight for Derek and I watched her sit at that bar and drink tequila and wait for him, and when he didn’t show--” Her voice trails off, “I can’t fight for him and then have him not show.” She looks at him, eyes half-filled with tears that she’s blinking back with the kind of determination he’s used to from her, “So I’m here…” She takes the bottle off of him, her fingers grazing against his, pours her own glass and raises it to her mouth, “And I don’t want to think about why I’m here anymore.”
Back to silence. She moves her wrist to pick up the bottle again, pour another, keep on denying, but he puts his hand over hers and guides it back to the table, “You really think you should have more?” He’s not sure when he became that person. The one with all the advice and the knowledge and the tone that tells you to think about what you’re doing. And he’s not sure whether you’re allowed to be that person when you’re pretty drunk yourself.
“Since when do you know what I should have?”
It’s a good question and the answer catches in his throat (sounds vaguely like, pills, sex and liquor is kind of my area of expertise and because the hangover’ll be a bitch in the morning). Her hair falls in front of her eyes, and he knows it’s not blonde but he still feels like he should push it back it behind her ears.
His hand stays on top of hers, because Cristina is exactly the person to ignore him even she agrees with what he’s saying. She keeps her eyes steady on his, her hair is still in front of her face, the music changes. Someone walks past to the dance floor. They take someone with them, arm taut and face full of feigned embarrassment.
He doesn’t really know where the urge comes from (and ask him in a few days and he’ll tell you that he was drunk and couldn’t tell you what happened if you paid him), but his hand tangles in her curls and brings her face closer to his. The pads of her fingers squeak against the seat. He waits a second to kiss her, partly because he’s still deciding whether or not to do it, and partly because he quite likes the how her face looks this close. She places her palms on his chest, lets it rise and fall once because that’s about enough time for her to think I won’t be like her and for him to not care.
No vanilla lipgloss. She smells like leather and shampoo.
He strokes his thumb underneath her chin, pulls her lips to meet his. As soon as they press together, he closes his eyes and, half-expecting to picture someone else, all he can think about is Yang and the way she fits nicely underneath his hands and how she shouldn’t. His arm curves around her back, she rests against it, shakes her hair behind her shoulders in the time she takes a breath in. She stops. Her hands find his face. She runs her fingertips over his lips, the ones that taste of her and whiskey, and kisses him again. Teeth and tongue. Her bottom lip tingles when he nips on it. (Maybe it’ll bleed, she thinks. She’d taste it, metallic and crimson, on her tongue as she ran it over her lips when she walked home. She’d press the back of her hand to her mouth the next day when she remembered. She’d wear a darker shade of lipstick. She’d press it on harder than she would normally. And she’d miss it when it went.)
His heels dig into the floor, pushing his back into the cushion and she props herself onto one knee, the other leg bent and braced on the hardwood floor. Neither of them recognise the song. They don’t worry that someone could see. That any minute Alex is going to force an “Uh--” out of his throat and she’s going to look over her shoulder at the same spot as him. Owen and Izzie side-by-side, arms crossed, faces blank. His fingers spread underneath her shirt, she gasps. He smiles against her lips, she grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls herself closer. She arches her back over him, breathes heavily on his skin. Leans on his shoulder while she tries to think. He buries his face in the crook of her neck.
(She doesn’t know how she’s going to end this sentence but she starts it anyway.) “I--” It could be a no or a stop or a this isn’t right, but it doesn’t feel like it. Even though it should. And because he’s freaking out that it could mean all of the above, he presses the heel of his hand in between her legs so that he can feel the warmth of her skin through her jeans. She makes this low breathy, groan from somewhere, she wordlessly tells him that she hasn’t felt this okay in a while. He runs his lips along her throat.
If they didn’t know each other better, he’d say she was shaking, and she’d say he was scared.
She closes her eyes and breathes out, leaning her forehead onto his. He thinks of telling Izzie, of what she might say. Her face drops, her heart sinks. He swears he can hear it break. She cracks and splinters and he tells her he didn’t mean anything. He lies. He tells her he could never think of Yang that way. He could. He says her name like that, like ‘Yang’ is foreign and weird and alien. He says Izzie like a deep breath, like he doesn’t have to think about it. He thinks entirely too much about it. Yang is a fact, Yang was there. He’s sorry, but how did he know that she wasn’t screwing someone in a trailer down there. She’ll sigh, she’ll walk away. She’ll turn back in the doorway, and tell him it’s okay, that she half-expected him to do something like this. That it’s kind of nice that some things don’t change. “I’m gonna go upstairs and unpack my things. Seeing as we’re not staying in the trailer anymore.” Yeah, he rubs his jaw, Yeah. Fine. They sleep next to each other. They don’t talk. He rests his hands behind his head on the pillow. He thinks about the way Cristina kisses and how it’s the one thing that didn’t feel like a competition. About how he’ll probably stay with Izzie forever. Their babies picked from a test tube that he feeds strained carrots and formula to. A wife who ups and leaves at random intervals, a husband who cheats when he has nothing better to do, Just a regular marriage, eh.
He sees Cristina in the hall later that day, Izzie hasn’t spoken to her, and he doesn’t think she will. She ducks into a patient’s room, she waits for him to walk past the door. There’s a staff meeting in a few weeks, she stands in front of him, she runs her fingers through her hair. He closes his eyes and breathes in deep. He turns it into a yawn when his wife looks at him. In a year, he holds her waist to push past her in the hall, they both pretend that her breath didn’t catch in her throat when they hear it.
In ten, she’s married to Owen. She’s at her anniversary party and she tastes like whiskey all over again.
She mumbles something, he wakes up just in time to hear her say, “Do you feel like an idiot?”
“… I don’t know.” He stretches up and kisses her again, her lips part to let him in, her eyes flutter shut, “You want me to go?”
She thinks her clearest and most sober thought all night, “I don’t wanna be alone.”
He nods against her chest. They breathe out at the same time. A shallow sigh that they take back in the same moment. He takes his hands off of her thighs, and she untangles herself from him, she sits back onto the chair, he reaches forward and pours them both a drink. She takes it from him.
“You--” She’s pretty sure that that question is going to include the words ‘talk’ and ‘about this’.
“We don’t have to.”
She’s definitely not blonde. He nods, and it means okay and thank you and how the hell did that just happen. “It’s good whiskey.” Someone says for the second time this night, and someone else replies with “Yeah. It is.”
She knows exactly why Alex chose this spot. It’s a good place to hide.
Please review ^_^
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Cristina Yang, Alex Karev; Alex/Cristina (mentions of Alex/Izzie, Cristina/Owen)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Spoilers: Erm, if you're up-to-date with GA, then you're golden. If you're not, than it's nothing huge. Just Izzie's gone, and Teddy's about.
Word Count: 4165
Summary: Except she’s exactly the person she is, and he’s Alex and everything might not be okay.
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 libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. All song-lyrics mentioned belong to their respective owners, not to me.
Author’s Note: Set just after Christmas. Because, that might be when I started writing it. =S Eek.
Yeah, crack!fic. I kind of had to rush parts, and it's not exactly how I pictured it. But whatevs. It's being posted, because I just don't have the time to look at it anymore and change one-off words.
Dedicated to meghanclaire who is maybe one of the best cheerleaders in the world. Torrance Shipman, ain't got nothing on you. She responds to me "GAH. WHAT THE--" tweets about my own writing with lovely things. And I think I'd have given up if I wasn't sure there was another person as invested in these two as me.
---
She hooks her foot around the stool and leans further onto the bar, somewhere between her third and fourth drink, the room started spinning and she hasn’t been able to get it to stop yet.
“Cristina?”
Her head lifts slowly, “Mm?”
He tilts his head back and forth, thinks about asking her what’s wrong, how her day was, and instead settles on, “Refill?” She doesn’t grunt this time, just presses her fingers against her glass and slides it closer to him- like the effort of the first was too much. She’s on her sixth now, and sipping slowly isn’t really a tried-and-tested method for getting less drunk; maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to- because no matter how many Christmas decorations Joe puts up, the room isn’t pretty enough to will back into focus.
“Were you planning on taking them down anytime soon?” She gestures to the red and green tinsel weaved through the spirits on the top shelf.
“I like to stay festive for as long as possible.”
She nods, “I know people who do that.” The details are for her, a list of people who’ve left her alone in some form or another (Dad. Burke. Izzie.), of people who cook turkeys and sing carols and aren’t here.
She looks up when she feels someone’s eyes (dark, deep, random) on her, smiles into her glass (they’re important in all the ways that don’t really matter when it comes down to it, when it comes to forty years; good-looking, confident, breathing) and wishes Owen was there. She presses her forearms into the bar, leaves red ridges in her pale skin, her eyes prickle. She doesn’t look at him again. She doesn’t need to. If he could just get jealous and if she could just take him home and if they could just be okay. If they could just remember that they actually loved each other, that they were a ‘they’. He’d whisper something that she’d close her eyes and lean against, his warm chest moving up and down against her back, in time with her. She’d feel alive. She’d hear him breathe in the scent of her, she’d know exactly what moving her hair from the back of her neck did to him. What she did to him. He’d move in his chair, and when he gripped her hand (tight, like it meant something) and led her out, he’d shoot a look over his shoulder at the guy staring. He’d push her against the brick outside, because walking across the road was too far. But he’s not. So the eyes on her are kind of pointless. And ultimately ignored.
By this point, her arm’s bent on the bar, her forehead resting on it. Face inches from the surface. It’s comfortable here. Like the only still spot in a place that won’t stop moving. The hum from other people and the crap music on the jukebox is a little quieter here. She sees the faint blur of her face in the varnished wood. Her fingers resting on the glass is the only part of her that likes to remember where she is, what she’s got just inches away from her mouth. For the first time in a while, she’s tired. Exhausted. And maybe all this wondering whether or not to fight for him is actually for nothing, because she’s not sure she can do it anymore. Her leather jacket creaks around her, she imagines strong hands running up her back, underneath her t-shirt, fumbling for bra strap and more skin. The fingers would flex, she’d curve her spine into his palm, she’d fit.
“Phone for you.” The hands move, return to their make-believe lap, and she doesn’t need to look at the empty stool next to her to know that she’s actually alone. “Meredith.”
She holds out her hand without looking up, her voice comes out muffled, “Mer--” her breath steams up the bar, she considers writing her name in it, maybe she’d be remembered.
“Why are you at Joe’s?” She doesn’t really give her a chance, and she hasn’t reached the point where that question actually needs an answer, “Is Alex there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not even looking.”
“I…” She twists her neck, “Joe, is Alex here?”
“Mmhm.” She’s pretty sure he points, he’s pretty sure she doesn’t care where to.
“Apparently he is.”
“And you‘re not even sitting with him?”
“He‘s not sitting with me either.”
“Go, Cristina. He shouldn‘t be alone.”
“Maybe he should be. Maybe that’s exactly what he wa--”
“Go.”
She grunts, “Remember when we hated Alex? I miss that.”
“…Go.”
She keeps the phone at her ear even when Meredith clicks off, thinks of Owen’s deep growl and how he only really says what he needs to, “I miss you-- Us. Just come home.”, she’d nod into the phone, know exactly what he meant even though they only spoke three hours ago, she’d press her cheek against the cool plastic and say, “Are you going to be there?”, close her eyes against his warm voice, “Where else am I gonna go?” and she’d smile and wipe the threat of tears out of her eyes. She’d whisper that she loves him, she’d hear him say it back. They’d work the rest out later.
She hands Joe back the phone, uses the same hand to make a ‘V’ and point down to her glass in a universal sign for two more drinks. While he pours, dishrag hung over his arm, she looks around for Karev. He’s in a booth, holding a glass in both hands and looking like the definition of melodramatic. But she doesn’t have the energy to make fun of him; she’s pretty much struggling to check her chipped nail varnish and breathe in and back out without it looking like the effort it is.
She slides off of her stool, a man (flannel shirt, possibly the same eyes from earlier) stands in her way, he stands slightly off to the side, fairly typical of someone whose trying to look down her top, "Has anyone ever told you you're beautiful?"
"Yes."
She doesn’t put a name to the story, tries not to think about what happened after, and how it all kind of amounted to something that feels too hard. No happy ending or campfire fable to pass on, a moral to stitch on a pillow. She walks right past, only acknowledges him by steadying herself on his arm- one palm square on his shirt and then into the crowds.
The glass is in front of him before she is. And she spends the slow few seconds it takes him to even look at her, to think about just dashing backwards and leaving. She’s done her part. He at least won’t die of dehydration. He might even be drunk enough to feel okay for a few hours.
She never said she’d grown that much.
She shifts onto the other hip, curls her glass into her wrist and then to her lips, and rolls her eyes. “Move.” He doesn’t argue, doesn’t sigh, just moves across the booth. In his head, she has blonde hair and she smells like fresh laundry and she said the last thing with a smile. And she didn’t leave him in a trailer. Cristina pushes the drink towards him, it takes the place of, “everyone’s worried and I’ve been sent to check up on you.” He moves his fingers around it, and sinks a little lower into his chair. The blonde version leans in, breathes recently-applied vanilla lipgloss and mint into his face, whispers something that he doesn’t even need to hear to feel better. She rests her cheek on his shoulder, she doesn’t wear a headscarf.
“You ever wonder if maybe the person you’re meant to be with-- that maybe they aren’t the right person for you?” It’s as good as anywhere else to start. Thing is, he’s kind of over the whole small-talk thing. But Cristina doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere and he was always told to be a good host (he’s seventeen, his mother whispers it breathily through mascara trails as she pours stale cookies onto a plate and straightens out her dress), so it’ll do. “That maybe somewhere in between soul mates and whatever other crap you want to put on a hallmark card the two of you just don’t work?”
She swallows back her drink, her eyes opening slowly, “All the time.” He leans back slightly, something about her face makes him think of her sat in a pool of white wedding dress after a second guy leaves. Her lipstick smeared across her cheek and wrist, her hair pulled out in half-sank curls. Her face is stone. She sings Madonna. She’s broken all over again.
(The headline reads that someone else in a white coat finds a new life that doesn’t include her.)
“Huh.” He puts his glass down on the table still filled. First time today.
“You wanted something different?” She starts, “Mer’s the speech-giving one. I just…” mock, ruin, break things “I bring alcohol.” Tequila doesn’t help like it used to, Meredith’s not there to drink it with them and that just makes the whole thing so much sadder. She slips her jacket off and lets it fall about her waist.
“Not really.” He murmurs, keeping his gaze focussed on hers, “It’s good whiskey.” Her eyes shift to the side, to the awful carpet and the ash lining the edges, “God, when did we become dark and twisty?”
She shrugs, a half-smile on her lips, she points at him, “Rebecca,” at herself, “Burke.”.
At himself “Cancer, George--”
“George didn’t happen to you.”
“It happened.”
She sighs, points to her own face, “George, choking…”
“Izzie leaving.”
“Yeah. That probably didn’t help.”
He laughs, “So we’re even-- It’s a draw?”
“I guess.” She plays with a loose curl before tucking it back behind her ear, “At least Izzie stuck around for the wedding.”
“At least Owen stuck around.”
“Oh God, we are dark and twisty.”
He takes a sip now, for different reasons than before. In fact for no reason whatsoever. Which is some kind of progress, really. It’s not to forget, or to anaesthetise. It’s more about the fact that it felt like bad grammar not to punctuate the conversation with something, and the slow burn of liquid on his lips and down his throat felt as good as anything else- better than a full-stop. He moves his arm, nudges something. His face drops, maybe it should be to forget, “It’s, uh-- late Christmas present… From Izzie.” And now is the first time she notices the FedEx package by his elbow, a water ring encircling his name on the front, “I can’t open it.” He bursts into raspy laughs, “I got it this morning and I can’t freaking open the thing.” His warm hand clasps around the glass, bringing it to his lips and downing the brown liquid. Coughing, he mentions, “Sorry, Yang.” She doesn’t say anything; doesn’t ask him what he’s apologising for, or tell him he doesn’t need to.
She definitely doesn’t tell him that it’s late, and he’s drunk, and he really just misses his wife.
As if it’s the same thought, he asks, “What are you doing here anyway? Hunt on call?”
“Yeah,” she sighs, she wedges her palms together between her knees and averts his gaze, yawning and blinking- somewhere between amused and nervous. It’s true. It’s true, even without all the parts that matter. (Yes, Owen’s on call. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been here every night this week.) Her shoulders now shrugged up around her neck, she looks back and rests her lips on her bare shoulder, “You want another?” He nods like she knew he would, and passes his glass up; his thumbnail running up and down the lip of the box, eyes intent like wishful thinking is going to make that thing transparent and then it won’t be his fault that he feels as crappy as he’s sure to if he ever comes around to opening it. “Okay.” It’d be her crappy wrapping paper, the red bow, his name written out in her neat and round handwriting on a label with a fricking elf or a reindeer or something. It’d sparkle, it’d shimmer, who the hell cares what’s inside.
He doesn’t look back up from the label (the one with the name he’s not entirely sure they share anymore) until Cristina comes back, eyes tired and hair pulled out from the band he could have sworn she had in all of five minutes ago. But then he wasn’t really looking at her. “Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He swigs the whole glass in a second, laughs as he rolls it in his grip and sees through it- to the wooden table, to the bottom of a bottle you hear about in old country songs. She doesn’t wait for him to ask for another, just pulls the bottle from behind her back, her fingers wrapped around the neck, the deep golden contents sloshing up the sides when it hits the table. He laughs, and then he doesn’t say anything.
They’re just two people sitting next to each other. She looks around, she watches chat up lines fail and succeed, she knows exactly why Alex chose to sit here. The floor is sticky, the leather is burnt and stained, and no one’s here. The flannel shirt walks past, joins a girl at the bar, sits too close to someone he’s only just met. He asks her if anyone’s ever told her she’s beautiful. She doesn’t say yes. She laughs and smiles and does the things you’re supposed to. She flicks her hair over her shoulder with manicured fingers, she runs them along the rim of her glass, she tells him he looks like someone but she can’t think who. He asks her if she wants another drink, she smiles and downs the rest of her vodka tonic, leans in and says ‘love one’. They go home together. Her straightened hair frizzes against his unchanged sheets, her tights rip. He doesn’t wake up to this girl. She’s the one to leave in the morning, not him. She doesn’t come back up with coffee like he fears (ears pricking when he thinks he hears the front door open), she doesn’t leave her number on his bedside table (just red lipstick stains on his collar). He never sees her again. He remembers her first name (the only one she gave him) the whole day after, and then it’s gone.
(Or she falls in love with him and watches him sleep. Or he does, and finds out she gave him a fake number.
Or, you know, none of that happens.)
She feels him looking at her, raises an eyebrow and turns to face him, a single syllable “What?” to spit out.
“Why are you here, Yang?”
“I told you, Mer--”
“Asked you to babysit me, I get it.” He unscrews the top, “Why are you here?”
“Why are you?” is the only thing she can think of saying, and even she knows it’s a lame thing to come back with it’s all she has, “I mean--”
“My wife--” He chokes on the word, “My wife… Left me in a trailer. So I’m back with Meredith and her perfect McDreamy in their big perfect empty house. In their big perfect empty, we-take-in-strays house. I’m in the exact same room, in the exact same house, except George is dead, and Izzie isn’t there, and most of the time they‘re working or screwing in their room. And I can’t be there by myself because it just feels like the stupidest thing ever.” He takes a deep breath, his lips are wet with saliva and alcohol and if she was a different person talking to a different person she’d hug him or tell him everything will be okay, and she’d lie if she didn’t believe it.
Except she’s exactly the person she is, and he’s Alex and everything might not be okay, “Desert-Storm Barbie is in love with my boyfriend. I know it-- I- I see it. And I can’t do anything about it. And I love him, but I saw Meredith fight for Derek and I watched her sit at that bar and drink tequila and wait for him, and when he didn’t show--” Her voice trails off, “I can’t fight for him and then have him not show.” She looks at him, eyes half-filled with tears that she’s blinking back with the kind of determination he’s used to from her, “So I’m here…” She takes the bottle off of him, her fingers grazing against his, pours her own glass and raises it to her mouth, “And I don’t want to think about why I’m here anymore.”
Back to silence. She moves her wrist to pick up the bottle again, pour another, keep on denying, but he puts his hand over hers and guides it back to the table, “You really think you should have more?” He’s not sure when he became that person. The one with all the advice and the knowledge and the tone that tells you to think about what you’re doing. And he’s not sure whether you’re allowed to be that person when you’re pretty drunk yourself.
“Since when do you know what I should have?”
It’s a good question and the answer catches in his throat (sounds vaguely like, pills, sex and liquor is kind of my area of expertise and because the hangover’ll be a bitch in the morning). Her hair falls in front of her eyes, and he knows it’s not blonde but he still feels like he should push it back it behind her ears.
His hand stays on top of hers, because Cristina is exactly the person to ignore him even she agrees with what he’s saying. She keeps her eyes steady on his, her hair is still in front of her face, the music changes. Someone walks past to the dance floor. They take someone with them, arm taut and face full of feigned embarrassment.
He doesn’t really know where the urge comes from (and ask him in a few days and he’ll tell you that he was drunk and couldn’t tell you what happened if you paid him), but his hand tangles in her curls and brings her face closer to his. The pads of her fingers squeak against the seat. He waits a second to kiss her, partly because he’s still deciding whether or not to do it, and partly because he quite likes the how her face looks this close. She places her palms on his chest, lets it rise and fall once because that’s about enough time for her to think I won’t be like her and for him to not care.
No vanilla lipgloss. She smells like leather and shampoo.
He strokes his thumb underneath her chin, pulls her lips to meet his. As soon as they press together, he closes his eyes and, half-expecting to picture someone else, all he can think about is Yang and the way she fits nicely underneath his hands and how she shouldn’t. His arm curves around her back, she rests against it, shakes her hair behind her shoulders in the time she takes a breath in. She stops. Her hands find his face. She runs her fingertips over his lips, the ones that taste of her and whiskey, and kisses him again. Teeth and tongue. Her bottom lip tingles when he nips on it. (Maybe it’ll bleed, she thinks. She’d taste it, metallic and crimson, on her tongue as she ran it over her lips when she walked home. She’d press the back of her hand to her mouth the next day when she remembered. She’d wear a darker shade of lipstick. She’d press it on harder than she would normally. And she’d miss it when it went.)
His heels dig into the floor, pushing his back into the cushion and she props herself onto one knee, the other leg bent and braced on the hardwood floor. Neither of them recognise the song. They don’t worry that someone could see. That any minute Alex is going to force an “Uh--” out of his throat and she’s going to look over her shoulder at the same spot as him. Owen and Izzie side-by-side, arms crossed, faces blank. His fingers spread underneath her shirt, she gasps. He smiles against her lips, she grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls herself closer. She arches her back over him, breathes heavily on his skin. Leans on his shoulder while she tries to think. He buries his face in the crook of her neck.
(She doesn’t know how she’s going to end this sentence but she starts it anyway.) “I--” It could be a no or a stop or a this isn’t right, but it doesn’t feel like it. Even though it should. And because he’s freaking out that it could mean all of the above, he presses the heel of his hand in between her legs so that he can feel the warmth of her skin through her jeans. She makes this low breathy, groan from somewhere, she wordlessly tells him that she hasn’t felt this okay in a while. He runs his lips along her throat.
If they didn’t know each other better, he’d say she was shaking, and she’d say he was scared.
She closes her eyes and breathes out, leaning her forehead onto his. He thinks of telling Izzie, of what she might say. Her face drops, her heart sinks. He swears he can hear it break. She cracks and splinters and he tells her he didn’t mean anything. He lies. He tells her he could never think of Yang that way. He could. He says her name like that, like ‘Yang’ is foreign and weird and alien. He says Izzie like a deep breath, like he doesn’t have to think about it. He thinks entirely too much about it. Yang is a fact, Yang was there. He’s sorry, but how did he know that she wasn’t screwing someone in a trailer down there. She’ll sigh, she’ll walk away. She’ll turn back in the doorway, and tell him it’s okay, that she half-expected him to do something like this. That it’s kind of nice that some things don’t change. “I’m gonna go upstairs and unpack my things. Seeing as we’re not staying in the trailer anymore.” Yeah, he rubs his jaw, Yeah. Fine. They sleep next to each other. They don’t talk. He rests his hands behind his head on the pillow. He thinks about the way Cristina kisses and how it’s the one thing that didn’t feel like a competition. About how he’ll probably stay with Izzie forever. Their babies picked from a test tube that he feeds strained carrots and formula to. A wife who ups and leaves at random intervals, a husband who cheats when he has nothing better to do, Just a regular marriage, eh.
He sees Cristina in the hall later that day, Izzie hasn’t spoken to her, and he doesn’t think she will. She ducks into a patient’s room, she waits for him to walk past the door. There’s a staff meeting in a few weeks, she stands in front of him, she runs her fingers through her hair. He closes his eyes and breathes in deep. He turns it into a yawn when his wife looks at him. In a year, he holds her waist to push past her in the hall, they both pretend that her breath didn’t catch in her throat when they hear it.
In ten, she’s married to Owen. She’s at her anniversary party and she tastes like whiskey all over again.
She mumbles something, he wakes up just in time to hear her say, “Do you feel like an idiot?”
“… I don’t know.” He stretches up and kisses her again, her lips part to let him in, her eyes flutter shut, “You want me to go?”
She thinks her clearest and most sober thought all night, “I don’t wanna be alone.”
He nods against her chest. They breathe out at the same time. A shallow sigh that they take back in the same moment. He takes his hands off of her thighs, and she untangles herself from him, she sits back onto the chair, he reaches forward and pours them both a drink. She takes it from him.
“You--” She’s pretty sure that that question is going to include the words ‘talk’ and ‘about this’.
“We don’t have to.”
She’s definitely not blonde. He nods, and it means okay and thank you and how the hell did that just happen. “It’s good whiskey.” Someone says for the second time this night, and someone else replies with “Yeah. It is.”
She knows exactly why Alex chose this spot. It’s a good place to hide.
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