The dull hum of the descending elevator suddenly grew louder as an alien sweep of pink taffeta rustled around her, and blood pooled at her shoes. She let out a harrowing scream, grabbing frantically for the rail as the walls rattled, and squeezing her eyes shut as she braced for impact.
Jolted, Izzie forced her eyes open, blinking into the fluorescent glare as voices murmured and strong hands gripped her arms, and baffled colleagues assured her that they'd come to a stop. They were staring, and she realized then that she was still wearing the standard uniform of the office's medical assistants, and that she'd arrived at her floor.
Alex crawled through a trail of sticky red and tumbled down an icy shaft and slammed onto a hard surface. Sharp metal seared his lungs and hands swarmed over him and muffled voices echoed in his ears and he was pinned which meant the ref had already started the count and he heard numbers chanted in the distance and he had to break free.
Izzie insisted that she was fine, shooed them away, joked awkwardly about her odd elevator phobias, and returned to her work, the filing and charting she did at a large private medical practice because it paid decently and kept her busy, while she waited for the Call, any call, from any surgical program willing to give her another shot.
It would always be all routine tests and flu shots and paper work, until she got the Call, because she had too many red flags in her file, and no one trusted her to do more, and no one expected her to stay even if her health held up, and no one would believe a pretty blonde like her could be a surgeon until she showed them, which she would.
He had to get up or someone else would win the trophy and someone else would be stronger and his mother would still be bleeding, and he had to get up but more metal pierced him and more hands clawed at him and they were throwing him back down the icy elevator shaft and he had to get up before the darkness devoured him again.
Fifty eight seconds of bewildering news footage crawled across the flickering television screen in the suddenly over-crowded waiting room before Izzie realized that the hospital under siege was Seattle Grace.
Four minutes elapsed before her trembling fingers would dial one correct number. Hours straggled by before the first jittery reply came. But she already knew, had already known for hours, or would have, if only she'd put all the pieces together sooner.
She was packed and gone in under two hours.
Hands swarmed around him in steady intervals over the next week, always pulling him back into the elevator just before he could reach her.
Her eyes gazed vacantly and blood pooled around her. But she would have screamed if she could have - or maybe she had, and he was just too far away to hear it.
But he was trapped, like a bug in a pool of sticky red, and then he couldn't move, and then he was crawling but not fast enough, and then they were throwing him down into the darkness again, and the empty-eyed gaze staring back at him still hadn't screamed.
Izzie sat beside him for six days, listening to the vent's steady rhythm, and glaring back at the puzzled expressions as Meredith and Cristina and Bailey and Lexi filtered in and out of his room at all hours, offering stilted greetings and up-dates on the others, and then food and nervous questions about how she was, and eventually places to stay for a day or a week, though they all knew better then to ask how long she'd be there this time.
It was the musty air in the hospital, she imagined, that was still standing everyone's hair on end, as nurses traveled in pairs and orderlies avoided supply closets and janitors furiously scrubbed any suspicious spots and doctors feigned detachment and went about their business and spirits and shadows ruled over them all, immune to reason and logic.
Some of them even acted surprised, as if they didn't know the hospital was haunted; she could have told them that years ago.
The burning haze lifts in fits and starts, always punctuated by another flurry of tubes and beeps and the fire still rages in his chest and he's sure he's suffocating. But there's a cool hand in his and the voice sounds too familiar and he must be hallucinating but the shaky blur around the edges always settles, finally, into a ring of blonde curls that holds steady.
She watches them taper down on his meds over the next week and she wonders what he'll remember. More harrowing tales come and go with the steady stream of visitors and Meredith looks glassy eyed and pale and Cristina would seem hyper professional - except for her jittery voice and darting eyes – and they all inhale sharply when Bailey calls him Alex and whispers something to him while gently clasping his fingers.
Lexi twists herself into an entire case of pretzels until she finally spills everything and then she just keeps saying that he did nothing but apologize to her once he'd called her Iz
Hearing her name like that out loud again makes her queasy and drains the feeling from her limbs. But she wonders if that's just what happens to people when they lose so much blood volume: they forget why they're fighting with you, or maybe, they just forget that fighting was the only thing you had left.
You can't forget that, though, and you can't forget what you're fighting for now, which has nothing to do with him, and you can't forget all the other premonitions you've had before – and you can't forget how much this reminds you of your mother and her loony friends, with their readings and their Tarot cards – and that's his fault, too, and you'll add it to his tally of crimes the moment he wakes.
They're still pushing and pulling and poking and prodding him and a simmering feral rage bubbles beneath his skin as his blood levels creep back but they can't quite reach the boiling point and he can't muster the fight to push the pokers and prodders away and he can't let the ring of the blonde curls with the cool hand see any of it anyway, or she might not come back again.
It never stops, the fire in his chest, and he can't complain or she'll see he's a coward and he can't wince or she'll see he's a wimp and he can't tell her he still see those vacant eyes staring back at him amid a puddle of blood or she'll think he's a junkie and he can't say the eyes never go away even when he sleeps or she'll think he's like his crazy mother.
Bailey offers her a temporary job in the clinic, since staffing is in chaos with the merger and the mass shootings and the freaked resignations, and she wants to laugh and snort no thank you. But money trumps pride and it's not like her old boss wasn't expecting her to flake out and bail, anyway, since apparently that's one of her red flags.
She shuttles between her new patients and Alex's room and it's like moving from crime scene to crime scene – a security guard dead there, a cardiac nurse mowed down there – and people still inch across the catwalk as if they're waiting for cannon fire and skirt conference rooms and supply closets as if they're land mined– and make-shift memorials spring up around the hospital, while dead ghosts circulate placidly among the living ones.
It's vaguely offensive, and she has to stop herself from shaking April Keppner because she got a second chance, unlike Reed or Charles, and idiotic shrines won't bring anyone back, and she can tell her from bitter experience that grief destroys everything it touches and she just wants to scream at her that once you've fought for your life you should demand more from yourself then piling red balloons and stuffed frogs in the hallway and writing insipid messages on a pink cardboard placard - even if frogs were Reed's favorite animal and Charles was secretly in love with her – as if any of that mattered now.
His face reddens as Teddy Altman pokes and prods the gaping wound and his entire side is a sickening kaleidoscope of blue and black and purple serrated by an angry red chasm and his breath is ragged and forced just from sitting up and fire still rages in his chest and he still has to swallow down the over whelming impulse to shove her hands away.
He catches Izzie watching and shifts awkwardly, shielding what he can from her view because she'll think this makes him a victim – which he isn't – and she'll think it hurts like hell, which is does but she can't know that, and she'll think he's even more damaged goods now because bald grows back but scars like this never fade and she'll probably think he deserved the hole that got blown right through him, anyway.
There's a small window off to her right and the sky's a curious blue grey instead of the usual grey blue but she refuses to look away as Altman continues her exam because she knows he wants her to - and he posted her modeling pictures once - but he told her she was beautiful even when she was bald and he kissed her even when clumps of her hair clung to his tuxedo and he didn't run even when they spent their wedding night in the ICU, and he straightened her wig with the same shy smile he wore when he said 'I do'.
That was all an eternity ago, though, before she died in his arms, before the merger and the misread lab results, before unanswered phone calls and piles of medical bills and divorce papers, before she'd come and gone too many times, before fighting for her life became fighting just to fight - until she had nothing left to fight for, and nothing left to fight with – before she became an anonymous medical assistant with brittle hair and fading hopes and a simmering resentment toward anyone who labeled her a survivor – as if that wasn't just another red flag.
He listened idly as Altman reviewed post-op instructions, his face reddening again as he imagined navigating stairs and cars and Mere's house when he could barely move and barely eat and still saw those eyes in his sleep and still woke abruptly to her face, fine porcelain white in a sea of red, and she still hadn't screamed.
He shifted uncomfortably again and he almost heaved as she taped him back up and he cursed his trembling limbs as he pulled the blanket tightly around him and just leaning back in his bed made him dizzy and he could feel her eyes on him, so intently that he refused to open his own again until the room went quite, except for the monitors.
Izzie returned to the clinic with a queasy feeling because she was sure he'd be pestering Altman to let him out already but he seemed jittery and nervous and his face darkened over when she set a firm release date and he wasn't fighting with the nurses' aides or the physical therapists – who should all hate him by now – and it was all wrong.
She winced as she walked past another of April's memorials – this one covered with names, some she recognized - and she almost wondered if his should be added, like some kind of a John Doe, because they'd found his body in that elevator, and had it upstairs, but the rest of him was still missing, and she wondered how much of it had seeped into flooring that had already been replaced, and how much of it was recoverable.
He nearly hurls in the elevator and he gasps in the car despite his best efforts and nearly passes out on his way up the stairs and his head is still spinning as Izzie settles him into his bed and it's hours before he remembers that Mere hadn't been the one to bring him home and Izzie was apparently staying in his room since Lexi still hadn't moved out.
Izzie wears seven layers to bed and stays pretty still as far as he can tell, which isn't very far at all, and he's groggy and disoriented the morning after and too shaky to fight when she joins him in the shower.
But he remembers enough to hide the scar as best he can – since his whole right side looks like a freaking hippie tie-dye shirt sewn together by two blind drunks - and he slumps dripping on the bathroom floor where he can tape it back up himself afterwards rather then let her touch it, and he counts it as some kind of victory that he makes it all the way back to his bed before he drifts off again.
She works part-time that week, and is home by three each afternoon, though mostly he's asleep and mostly Mere's still home with Derek, anyway. It's awkward and stilted and the temptation to power bake grows and Lexi is more frantic then usual as she moves out and in, and out and in, and then out again in the span of a week, alternately wearing the ring she hides nervously and fleeing like a startled rabbit at the first hint of conversation.
There's a lot of that going around, and Meredith tip toes around Derek, and Cristina's in the den hiding from Hunt, and Lexi holes up in the attic when her ring's off and Mark's around, and Izzie ends up making large meals and trying new deserts – even though Alex can't really eat and Derek's surly and Mere's distracted and Cristina just picks listlessly at the Marshmallow CoCo Puffs and Lexi finally moves out for good – maybe.
Izzie carts him to his post-op appointments and the mandatory shrink meeting and she tells them that he still needs pain meds and he's still not sleeping well – as if he's not right there in front of them, in the freaking flesh – and he rolls his eyes at Altman as she writes more prescriptions and he gasps again as he tries to dress himself and he snarls at Wyatt when she asks him what he saw, again, as if any of it is past tense, and he can feel Izzie's disapproving stare as he bypasses the elevators and struggles down the stairs.
He listens to her breathing beside him later that night and he tries not to watch how she moves while she sleeps and he tries not to notice how the blonde curls spill over her pillow and he forces his fingers not to brush hers and he wonders why she's still in his bed now that Lexi seems to be gone – not that that situation doesn't change hourly – and he finally focuses on the clock atop his nightstand, watching the minutes crawl past.
It works for eleven minutes, before he's almost dozing again, but he fights to stay awake anyway, away from the vacant-eyed stare that still never screams. He shifts further from Izzie just in case, though, as far as he can, because she's noticed his dreams, and she'll keep telling Wyatt, and the shrink will never clear him to return to work if he's seeing things, and sometimes he half thinks that Izzie being in his bed is another hallucination, anyway - and mostly it's easier to think that she's a hallucination if he stays far enough away so that he can't touch her, and mostly it's easier to think that, anyway, since hallucinations can't leave for real.
She watches him with Mere in the kitchen the following week - notices Mere whisper something to him as he rinses out a drinking glass, and run her fingers lightly across his back as she reaches for a dish towel - and Izzie half expects him to shove her away. But her movements just merit a weak smirk, and she knows that Mere's encouraging him to stick it out with Wyatt, and she wonders when, exactly, Mere became his first choice.
It was all different until it wasn't, and Alex went back upstairs to bed, and Cristina came by toting Tequila and grumbling about Owen and their new apartment, and Mere rolled her eyes about Derek's renewed house plan obsession, and other secrets bubbled between them, too, and she wasn't a part of any of that, either, because she hadn't been there that day, and they were still Meredith and Cristina, but now she was just someone they used to work with. She should have known that, though; she told them that herself.
Padding up the steps, she passes her old bedroom, or Lexi's old room, now empty again, and pauses in the open doorway, and runs her finger over the rough wall paper and the worn wood work, and it all looks just like she'd left it, like she'd never lived there at all, and she wonders sometimes if she's disappearing everywhere, if she's just fading into the shadows, where ghosts and premonitions are more real then flesh and blood.
Closing the door behind her, she walks quietly down the hall, slipping into his bed and studying his face. She wonders if he's disappearing, too, because he's not fighting her and he's not fighting back against Altman and Wyatt, and he still moves too slow and breathes too shallow, and he just looks puzzled and much too startled when she slowly peels off his clothes, and if he wasn't Alex she'd swear it was mild panic that flooded his eyes as she traced her hand teasingly along his thigh, following the curve of his hip.
This had always been the easy part for them, once, but she stalls, suddenly hesitant, as he nervously averts his eyes, tracking her movements as she traces delicately across his torso. She sees him cringe despite her slow stroking, and she needs a new map of his body, because the bandages and bruising stand out starkly against his pale skin, and the blue purple swath that sprawls over his side makes him stiff, and she's almost afraid to touch him at first, since she can't readily find familiar places to rest her hands while she re-routes, and she realizes then why he locks the bathroom door now when he showers.
She's sure his eyes follow hers, and she catches one wary look. But then she brushes over the first land mark she remembers well, and catches his deep sigh, and then she wanders west over two long moans, and the territory all grows familiar, and she takes a slight eastern detour across a few intense gasps, and an entire hemisphere trembles as she sets a more leisurely pace for that leg of the world tour, and she recalls all the side roads as the terrain trembles beneath her, and the geography is all so well mapped by then that she can find her way even in pitch darkness, and a long, shuddering groan tells her she's home.
Her fingers are sticky like blood – though he's sure it's just cake frosting – the first night that she peels off his faded blue tee shirt to a familiar sound track of beastly rumblings, and her old room is still empty but Izzie's still staying in his bed, and he's groggy when she wakes him but he's seen this act before and he knows it's feeding time at the zoo even before her clothes join the rest of his on the night stand, and he expects to wake to nightmares these days, but not to dreams.
Her skin slides across his and he tries not to gasp and he's sure that she'll stop when she hesitates, when the crater in his chest repels her and she sees how little the ugly bruising has faded. But her beast must be starving, since she just shifts around awkwardly and her hands sink lower and part of him almost tries to pull away, but not any part of him under her fingers, and another moan escapes him before he can move.
Moving just draws her closer, anyway, and he's sure she knows his blood counts are still low, and this still may not be happening outside of his head, except that she's as loud as he remembers, and her lips are as soft, and her fingers are as strong, and she still smells like green apple shampoo and cake frosting and she just curves in all the right places, and then her skin is rippling against his again and all of his senses are rioting and his lungs are rebelling and everything is quivering and fevered heat bubbles through his veins.
He winces when she pauses and curls carefully around him, and moans as her fingers are teasing while she giggles into his ear, and he curses his trembling limbs as giggling turns to nibbling and he's sure the beast will slink away hungry. But then his eyes roll back in his head and he hears a rumbling growl he's pretty sure comes from him and a different kind of fire erupts below his scar line and he imagines she'd drown out a whole jungle of horny hyenas by the time she's coiling lazily around him again.
His breath returns slowly and her silky skin wraps around him and her warm curves pour into his body, and he's still dazed and lightheaded as her lips nuzzle his neck, and his arms close automatically around her as she settles into him with a contented murmur, as if she expects to stay there, and he wonders vaguely as she drifts off in his arms if she'll vanish again before morning, and if he's about to wake to a different kind of nightmare.
She pokes him gently the next morning, kisses him softly, grabs his hand and tugs him to the shower. She imagines that he's uncertain and awkward because he's still groggy, and that he's trembling slightly afterward because the towels are too thin and the room is too cool, and because he has appointments with Altman and Wyatt early that afternoon.
She drops him back home sometime after five, and swings by the store to pick up more cup cake frosting. She buys four thick yellow bath towels, too, and lettuce, and milk, and runs methodically down her list, hesitating briefly before tossing yet another case of Tuna Delight cat treats into her cart, before moving on to sugar and tea bags. The clerk even prints out coupons for her, now, for squeaky cat toys and organic kitty litter.
It just makes her roll her eyes again the following week, as she puts another batch of cup cakes in the oven, and then peeks out at him from the window – where he's perched on the porch swing again with the nosy neighbor cat who adopted him – sneaking the orange and white striped tabby silly fish shaped treats despite his repeated insistence that it's just a freaking Creamsicle with claws.
She wonders what he's hiding from this time, and she brings him out one of her cup cakes and watches him abruptly shoo the cat away and she asks him point blank if it's her, or surly Derek, or jittery Mere – though she can't imagine him hiding anything from her – or the hospital, or the nightmares he won't tell her about, or the phone messages from his brother, or the cards from Amber – and she reminds him that he'd promised her a trip, once, too, before she knew about Aaron, or the little sister who sent him get well notes in bright purple envelopes.
He just shrugs and gnaws quietly on his cup cake, though, and the night grows darker and cooler, and she waits until he's out-right shivering before she drags him inside, and she reminds him through gritted teeth that he hasn't heard the last of this.
She leaves for work early the next morning, earlier then necessary, and she breathes a sigh of relief as familiar faces arrive and the clinic springs to life. She'd tried to be almost invisible when Bailey first asked her back, tried not being the cancer chick, the one who screwed ghosts, the one who stole organs, the one who got fired, and ran away.
She tried not to be any of those things, but the cold stares still came, the raised eyebrows and quick glances and whispers, the tip toeing around her as if she were a bomb waiting to detonate and she wondered, sometimes, what she was even battling them for.
But the clinic needed her, and she could still be an actual doctor there, and it wasn't all about cutting and competing, and some people actually left happy, and flu shots did save lives, and she loved it when children learned not to fear hospitals so much, and it seemed less like settling when relieved patients who could never afford to see a doctor without her actually thanked her, and told her how much they appreciated how much she cared.
He tells her he'll just wait for her to finish her shift on the day of his next round of appointments, and that he'll just hang around the hospital, even though he's still weeks from returning to work. He has to, because the house is one prison and his body is still another and their eyes are a third, and he needs to be somewhere else, anywhere else.
It's all still there, though – the acrid antiseptics and the hums and beeps of the monitors and the hisses of the vents and the blare of the sirens in the ambulance bay – followed by the low whispers and the curious stares and the questions, and the stark reminders that leave him sweating on a bench outside near the side entrance.
He waits for her to finish again a week later, this time in the clinic since he has to get used to it, and he watches a little girl giggle at her, gap toothed and freckled, as she holds out her arm for stitches, and it's all there all over again – all of her – and it's her laugh, and her smile, and the way the kid takes her hand after she finishes, and her voice, and the way people light up around her – like when she was the bright yellow for the crazy cardiac chick – and his stomach sinks because he knows she's biding her time again.
He wonders if its anger or guilt or just a perverse desire to punish him for not signing the divorce papers fast enough, for not mailing them back to her until the day before … the day before… that's keeping her here. It's either that, or him being a freaking invalid, he imagines, and he shoves himself out of his chair and he struggles to walk faster because then she can run again, away from every reminder, away from him.
He walks as fast as he can. But then it's her hands and her lips and her skin again and she pulls him up the stairs and she peels off his clothes and the scars still don't deter her and the beast must still be hungry and her body still coils gently around him as she drifts off in his arms, and he wonders how much worse it will be the next time he finds a note in his locker, the next time dream turns to nightmare.
She watches him pull back over the next few days and she's sure he should be fighting for space by now and she crowds him to try to provoke him and she's nagging him about appointments again and taunting him about driving and elevators and squawking about him not being back at work yet though she's sure it's still too soon.
She listens as Altman clears him to drive and says he can return to part time scut in two weeks, and she almost tosses in two more cents later that night, but then he announces abruptly that he's going to Iowa for a few days. Izzie insists that she's going, too, and he finally fights back some - for the first time that she can remember since she'd been back - but she still does most of the driving while he grumbles about not needing a baby sitter.
It's just as well that she's mad since now she'll shut up about the trip he'd promised and he's sure she's already had her fill of corn stalks and silo sightings and it's not like Iowa was a vacation destination and she could crow all she wanted but everybody here drives around grain threshers and if she didn't really want to know what that smell was then she shouldn't have freaking asked and there are no vegetarians in the Farm Belt, anyway.
That's all forgotten, though, when their car pulls slowly up the dusty dirt road, and a familiar feeling washes over him – hazy and suffocating. He shouldn't be here, and she sure shouldn't have come with him.
But Amber had sent him six cards after he'd been shot, and it was maybe the one thing in a million that he hadn't screwed up beyond repair, yet, and Izzie was long gone already, even if she was sitting right there beside him, but Amber signed her cards with a glitter pen and Snoopy stickers and she didn't sound like she hated him.
Izzie watches the blood drain from his face as she rolls the car to a stop, and she follows him past the cow mailbox and up the creaky wooden steps, and he knocks on the heavy black door, and he promises his mother that he's fine – which he's not - before they're even in the small living room, and he tells his sister he's already back at work -which he isn't – though Amber's already excitedly asked him twice if he's really a doctor now, and if he's ever delivered a real baby by himself - and it's lie after lie settling over the worn floral furnishings and the faded green carpet, like the ever present prairie dust that swirls through the fading afternoon sun pouring in through the lace curtains.
He introduces her as Izzie, just Izzie, Izzie from Washington state, Izzie a great doctor who runs a clinic, and bakes the world's best cup cakes, and likes her iced tea with two sugars; just Izzie, who works at the same hospital with him, and wanted to see Iowa – and if it weren't for that last part, it would sound almost like she was his prom date.
She almost interrupts, almost puts a stop to the whole charade, until she realizes that his mother's not all there, and his sister's itching to leave Iowa by any means necessary, and his brother's a long haul truck driver whose out on the road somewhere near Nebraska, and his father's long gone, and home to him is the center of five spokes that barely touch, all pointing loosely to a cramped house not much sturdier than a double wide.
She listens over the next few days, as he explains the impossible to his sister, and humors his mother while checking her meds, and awkwardly semi-parents both of them, who seem oddly dependent on him, and he's always halting and uncertain.
She has no idea who he is here, either, any more then he seems to– since it's not really lying when you're trying to calm a tenuously controlled schizophrenic, and you can't tell the entire truth to an impressionable teenager clinging to whatever hope she has left, and it's all just some desperate web he's trying to patch together as he goes – and she knows the whole thing breaks if he does.
She watches Amber closely, and she has long curly hair and bright hazel eyes and she's too pretty and smart for her own good and she has that smirk and his eye lashes - and it all looks too familiar - and she wonders if he knows how close she probably is to being one hot football player away from ruining her future. She watches him with his mother, too, watches him count pills and peer at dosage instructions as he half listens to a story about a neighbor down the street with two wives and a three legged dog – or a three legged wife and two dogs – since the details blur together after a while.
She almost laughs, because her mother has those same kind of neighbors in the trailer park, and she wonders if maybe Iowa has the same problem with three legged dogs that Washington state does, and she watches him as he finally puts the pill bottles down on the table and just listens, and he's got that look: that he wants it to stop but he can't stop it, or won't stop it, or tried to stop it and failed, or was just too tired to try anymore.
They stay two days longer then they'd planned, five total, and she watches as he gives Amber money he doesn't really have, and leaves more meds for his mother with a new schedule taped firmly to the creaky refrigerator, and promises them both he'll visit again soon, and she wonders what soon means to a teenager whose alternately cold and clingy and a mother whose entire concept of time hinges on three white pills taken twice daily.
He tells Amber he wishes things could have been different, and he means it in more ways then he can count, even if he doesn't think any of it could have been, and he thinks she gets it and she promises she'll keep writing and she hugs him like she means it and like she's happy to see him and he promises he'll keep helping her as much as he can even though he knows she'll learn soon enough that he's never been much help to anyone.
He tells his mother he loves her – which is as true as it is impossible – since she's never been her, really, and the voices never go away completely and he never can trust what she's saying until he checks for himself, and she's always a few missed pills away from knifes and cops and ambulances. But he knows that love is just like that – that you never know what's coming or what you did wrong to set it off and it's always your fault and you can't be mad at crazy and you should always sleep behind locked bedroom doors anyway because sometimes love gets confused or takes a beige pill instead of a white one or forgets that you're not one of Them, whoever Them is that week.
He drives back most of the distance himself – over Izzie's protests – because he needs to see something other then corn even if it's just road - until she wrests the keys away from him at a road stop. It's just as well because everything blurs into the horizon when the road's so flat that vertical and horizontal run together, and it makes drivers bleary eyed after a while and then it's easy to make a wrong turn and hard to spot grain threshers.
She's squawking about that again an hour or two later – something about paying more attention to slow moving vehicles and pain meds not mixing with driving. But he'd stopped even half listening at least four farms ago, and he's not sure which of his crimes she's really mad about this time, and he hopes that at least Izzie knows the score now because he doesn't know why she's still here and he doesn't have it in him to ask her to go again.