Izzie Stevens lay quietly on his bed, gazing at the twilight, a pale purple mist driftin past the window. He'd fallen asleep nearly an hour before, but she refused to loosen her embrace, fearing that he might unravel further, as his mother had before she'd slit her wrists, as Rebecca had - right before his eyes. She'd returned home expecting to face anger, or bitterness, or seething disdain; she never expected what she found instead. She'd always known about the father he despised, but never about the mother that he would have done anything for - but for whom nothing would have been enough.
She finally exhaled, delicately running her fingers through his hair, stroking the soft curve of his cheek, tracing its passage into the incongruously rugged line of his jaw. She knew it was just the shadows in the room, but it unsettled her how much he looked like he had in the hospital, when he'd begged her for a second chance. She'd known, long before, some of what he'd done to protect his mother from his father; she'd never imagined how far he'd gone to protect her from herself. But that was love, and someday, Izzie would love her mother again, too, maybe even as much as Alex had loved his.
Izzie smiled wryly at the familiar thought. Her mother, Barbara, always loved someday, almost as much as she loved to cook, almost as much as she hated her job as a waitress in a truck stop diner. Barbara Stevens hated her job, but she loved her customers, most of them down on their luck, but like her, just one lucky break away from someday, when she would win the lottery, and her and Izzie would move to a bigger trailer, a double-wide with a neatly planted flower bed and a roof that didn't ping in the rain; when her singing career would take off, and they would leave behind the home with the rotting floor boards and the drafty windows, the crazy hours at the diner and the psychics who promised her the moon.
She got Izzie to love someday, too. Someday, they would go to Disney Land on her mother's tips; Santa Claus would bring the red bicycle with the multi-colored streamers and the silver horn; her father would return to take them away from the dingy home that was never more than two months ahead of being towed away for unpaid lot rent. Izzie loved someday, when the boy who got her pregnant at fifteen would play house with her and her daughter. But he wasn't interested in someday.
Izzie blamed her mother for having her give Hannah up, but she still loved someday, when she would find someone who would love her for her, and not for her face or her figure. And she found him in her dreams, when Denny would get a new heart, and they would live happily ever after. But someday came and went in a heartbeat, collapsing into a crumpled heap of pink fabric.
Except that she found that man again, and she would be with him someday, when he finally left his wife. But Izzie was already a woman, despite her girlish giggles when he shoved peanuts up his nose, and George was still a boy, frozen in a time that had passed her by: She'd already done love at fifteen. And someday came again, and their untimely romance - of goofy glances and hearts drawn on notebooks between classes – foundered as she became someone she didn't recognize, a dirty mistress, a cheater by proxy, and someday was further away then ever.
But Izzie still loved someday, so much that she sometimes almost hated Alex. Someday, she insisted angrily, she wouldn't be the pretty blonde supermodel that he had used as a sexual conquest; except that while she had been waiting for someday, she had been using him; while she was casually feeding her beast, he was fumbling blindly towards love. She told him, when he tried the second time around, that it was too soon, but that maybe they could try again, someday. And while she waited for someday, Alex waited for her.
But Alex wasn't a someday kind of guy. He'd failed his mother, failed Izzie, failed his medical boards. The litany was endless, and just hours before, he'd pleaded with her for another second chance to try the impossible, and again he failed. She rested her head against his, tightening her embrace. He'd be embarrassed, she knew, to find her there when he woke up. But she could never leave him alone like this, not without reassuring him that someday he would feel better, that someday he would forgive himself for his mother's death, that someday, someone would want him.
She glanced at the small clock on his bedside table, watching as the light breeze ruffled the curtains. Carefully pulling his blanket over them, she wondered if her mother was working the late shift at the diner that evening. She wondered what Barbara looked like these days, and if she might have time to phone her in the morning. Maybe tomorrow she would call her, she thought, settling closer to Alex as she sank into the familiar rhythm of his breathing.
--
Hours later, Alex Karev stirred in the chill air, his head swimming as his eyes slit open, peering at the steel grey dawn. He shifted furtively, trying not to wake Izzie, whose soft arms curled around him like barbed wire. Despite his shivering, his face flushed red as he recalled the previous evening. His first impulse was to flee from the bed, but he still felt vaguely nauseous and his limbs were numb. He inhaled sharply, trying to quell the bile rising in his throat. He was fine, he'd insisted all along, he had to be fine, he was hard core – about everything except his mother.
Izzie turned into him, and he automatically reached for the blanket covering them, wrapping it more snugly around her as she drew closer into his chest. He couldn't remember a time when he didn't want to protect her, when he didn't want her, even long after she'd decided she didn't want him. That had been his doing, he knew, that she thought he was scum, and that he'd been using her. He never apologized for cheating on her; he wouldn't. He'd seen it all before, with his parents, the lies, the excuses, the explanations; whatever little he was, he was not going to be his father's son.
Except that maybe he already was, since he'd failed her as much as his father had. Alex loved his mother more than anything, and she loved him, but not as much as she loved God. She told him that God loved him too, at least, until he was sixteen.
Because she loved God, she believed that marriage was forever, even if her bastard of a husband damn near beat her to death. She believed that everything happened for a reason. She believed it was her calling to save him from the drugs and the rage that consumed him, and so she prayed to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, to change him. She believed that love endured anything, that it was patient, and kind, and never failed.
But God didn't hear the screaming, didn't see the blood, didn't feel the broken bones, and didn't answer panicked prayers. God didn't feed her, or clean her, or calm her when her sanity shattered amid the nightmare she lived because everything happens for a reason. Alex hated God, almost as much as he hated his father – almost as much as he hated himself for being just like him, the night he drove him away, and his mother cried.
She told him that night that he lacked faith, and he watched her dissolve in his father's absence. Her love for her husband had been her life, and she had failed him. She hated herself, but Alex still loved her, even as her mind clouded, leaving behind a shadowy figure with trembling hands tangled in rosary beads. He still loved her when he removed those beads from her hands for the last time, to clean the blood them, before they came for her body. Later that week, he watched love lower her into a shallow grave.
By then he'd had enough of love, of faith, and hope, and forgiveness, and all the other crap that had killed her. He'd had enough of promises and lies and secrets, and whatever the hell else people called loved when they were desperate to fool themselves. He'd trust what he could see, and hear, and feel; he'd trust the here and now; he'd trust no one but himself, he'd be hardcore. He'd love the only way that made sense, with his hands, his lips, his body. He'd love only in silence, because words spin deceit, and only as far as his body would take him, because bodies don't lie.
And he was fine, until Izzie came along, and drew his attention beyond her lips and her hands and her face, beyond one night, and got him thinking about someday. Until he failed her, and she still believed in someday, but not in him, and he became temporary, until some one better came along, and she dumped him for someday.
But she'd already done her damage, and when Rebecca came, he'd almost believed that she saw something in him. But she'd seen nothing real; no more than his mother had in his father. She'd almost had him believing that the future could be different than the past, and even that he could be a decent father, and not his father's son. But that too had been a love stillborn, a product of fevered imagination.
And the truth remained, that he had failed, again, and that no one wanted him – even when he begged. He lay quietly, listening as Izzie started to stir, sighing as she moved gracefully beside him. He felt her hand lightly stroking his arm, and he would probably have jumped out of the window right then, except that his head was still swimming and his limbs were still heavy, and he was running out of places to run. She'd already seen him fail his boards, fail in surgery, fail her, fail Rebecca, fail his mother. Worse, she'd already seen him need, like his junkie bastard of a father.
He hated pity, almost as much as he hated himself for his failures, almost as much as he hated her for seeing him like this. He hated how she drew the damn blanket around him, warming him from the early morning chill. He hated how she curled around him like that, tying him together when everything else was falling apart. He hated that she knew how to quiet him, and that he could no longer fend off his exhaustion when she lay beside him, breathing so peacefully. He hated that as much as he wanted to escape, all he could do was sink further into the bed, into sleep, into her.
--
Meredith Grey gazed silently at the candles flickering in the breeze, dotting the pale moonlight with fiery sparks. She'd watched Derek Shepherd walk away, again, to dump another soon to be ex who-knows-what, so that they could try for good, again. She appreciated the impulse - he wanted to build their house on a solid foundation - the castle he'd dreamed up for them in some romantic fantasy. But she knew that castles built on clouds were no less fragile than houses made of candles, and that they were both walking off into the darkness.
She sat quietly on the grassy hill, surveying the outline of the home she thought he envisioned, so different from her house, her mother's house, really, the regal Queen Anne perched atop a city hill, peering imperiously down over its neighbors. Derek could have his fantasies, so long as the house he imagined was nothing like her mother's, just as she would be anything but her mother's daughter.
Meredith had loved her mother the only way she was permitted, from a discrete distance, her hands pressed against the glass, as if from the front row of an operating room gallery, the way one might love movie stars, larger than life figures known only at arms length.
Ellis Grey loved her house, which had been her mother's before her. She loved her mother's house, but not her mother, an imposing matriarch who disapproved of every thing, including her opinionated and energetic and brilliant daughter. Ellis Grey was everything a little girl ought not to be, and made every mistake a proper woman ought not to make, choosing a weak husband and a powerful career. She reluctantly had a child, in a rare bow to convention, and brokered a shocking affair because she wanted more from life than to be ordinary.
And through it all, Ellis Grey loved that house, with its elaborate furnishings, its silk rugs and grand architecture, its commanding view. She loved it almost as much as she loved being a surgeon, with its daily life or death dramas, so far removed from the dreary routine of diapers and spilled milk, of scraped knees and dented lunch boxes, of crabby husbands and overcooked meals.
Meredith hated her mother's house, with all its expensive appointments that couldn't be touched, its fine china that couldn't be used, its sterile rooms, where she was a permanent guest until she was sent away to boarding school, where she might earn her mother's love. But try as she might, her mother's love lie elsewhere, in her work, which never failed her, and in a man she could never win. No matter how brilliant a surgeon she became, Ellis Grey was never good enough, not for her mother, who would always think she'd married beneath the family name, and not for the man she pursued, who'd chosen for his wife not a renowned surgeon, but someone imperfectly ordinary.
But Ellis Grey loved him, enough to become the most ordinary of clichés, the mistress who accepted the scraps of love that he tossed her while wrestling with his conceit that he was a good man. Meredith watched her mother's life from the shadows, like a grainy old movie with a muffled soundtrack, and vowed to be nothing like her. Except that she had already become a surgeon, too, and too late to impress her mother; and she too had been a mistress, watching as a different man bartered with his conscience at her expense. It would all have been mindlessly redundant, had Meredith not won Derek, and had she not found herself here, framing out his fantasies in a ring of fire.
She would not be her mother's daughter, she insisted angrily to the fates, she would not be another powerful surgeon undone by a man always half there; she would not settle for a shadow love, where she would be a guest in someone else's dream. She would not love as her mother had, from behind glass walls. She would love this life Derek offered her, this castle in the clouds, built as far away as she could imagine from her mother's house. She would love it, if only she could figure out how.