Disclaimer: Everything Grey's Anatomy related belongs to Shonda Rhimes and ABC. These characters do not belong to me. (Though if they did, they would probably be a lot happier.)
The Sun From Both Sides
"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides." - David Viscott
-Chapter One-
Izzie waited at the church, like an idiot, for three full hours after the rest of the guests had cleared out. Izzie waited, and hoped, and waited some more.
Then she went home.
When she got there, the lights were all out, and when no one answered her call of greeting, Izzie assumed she was alone. Until she arrived at the bathroom door, and opened it to find Meredith and Cristina laying motionless on the floor, like two puppets whose strings had been cut.
Now, six hours after a wedding that had never taken place, seven hours after her confession of unrequited love, Izzie was leaning against the doorframe, half-in and half-out of a place she knew well. She felt like she had spent the last six months on a journey only to find that, just when she should have been reaching her destination, she was back at square one, full circle to the place she where had been left after Denny's death.
This time, at least, she was not alone.
Meredith, finally seeming to acknowledge Izzie's presence, raised one hand to gesture to the floor, an invitation. Izzie hesitated briefly, and then, with a wry shake of her head, walked over to lower herself next to Cristina. She didn't feel like lying down, though. Instead, she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, cheek resting on the smooth satin of the bridesmaid dress she still wore.
Beside her, Cristina breathed, slow and steady. Mechanical. On Cristina's other side, Meredith's breathing was quiet, for once, and Izzie might not have believed she was doing it at all if she could not see the rise and fall of her friend's chest in her peripheral vision.
It wasn't quite like last time. Last time, Izzie had been numb, uncaring of herself or her surroundings. Izzie wasn't numb this time. She almost wished she were, because feeling hurt. There was the sting of disappointment, and the ache of sadness, but Izzie was used to dealing with those emotions by now, and took a certain comfort in their familiarity, in the knowledge that she was capable of dealing with them because she had dealt with them before.
So, no, it was not like last time. But it still sucked.
It sucked because it was supposed to be simple. Izzie had told George that she loved him, and he was supposed to say it back: cue happy music; roll end credits. But that's not how things ended up. Instead, George hadn't said anything at all, and now she had no idea what to think. Izzie was an optimist, but she was getting a little fed up with having her hopes crushed. She wished she were more like Meredith, a realist, a person who didn't wear her heart on her sleeve all the time.
But then, Izzie reflected, glancing across Cristina to where Meredith was staring blankly up at the ceiling, the realist didn't seem to be faring any better.
Izzie was an optimist, but she was not delusional. She believed in a lot of things, but after Denny, she knew better than to believe in fairytales. George had made his choice, and now Izzie had to live with it. She had promised to support him, to be his friend, and Izzie did not break her promises easily. So, she would go to the hospital, and see him, and smile, and somehow manage to keep on smiling as he talked to her of starting a family with Callie. She would smile as he told her about due dates, asked her advice about baby names, and complained about 3a.m. feedings. Izzie would smile, because that's what friends did, and above all she wanted to remain George's friend, even if it meant letting him break her heart over and over again.
Visions of children with George's eyes and Callie's hair danced before her eyes, and for a moment, Izzie felt dizzy, nauseous. She was grateful for the hard floor beneath her that reminded her that she was not actually spinning endlessly down into a dark well of despair.
A hitch in Cristina's carefully patterned breathing pulled Izzie from her thoughts. Up until then, the three of them had been silent and still, afraid to move for fear of breaking. When she spoke, Cristina's voice was quiet, but it shattered the stillness just the same.
"Burke left me."
Izzie didn't quite know what to say to that, how to make it anything but true. She didn't know how to make it better, so she didn't say anything at all.
After a few moments of renewed silence, Meredith let out an audible breath. "I left Derek."
Another pause followed that confession, but this one felt strained, and Izzie realized it was because this was where she was supposed to profess something, too. So Izzie shrugged, because now that she'd told him, it no longer felt like a secret she had to keep, and said, "I'm in love with George."
There was quiet as they contemplated this.
Then, Cristina let out a noise that was half-snort, half-sob, and said, disgustedly, "We are pathetic."
Izzie smiled despite herself, and just like that she knew that they would all be all right. Eventually.
After that, they didn't speak again, each lost woman lost in her own thoughts. But Cristina's comment had drained the tension from the room, and by the time she noticed the early morning light spilling through the window, across the floor, Izzie had come to a decision.
She would not be that person who didn't get over things, who lay down and fell into depression just because not everything was going as planned. Izzie wanted to be better than that, to rise above the place where life had led her. She wanted to break out of the circle, and make her own path.
There was a distant buzzing that she took a moment to recognize as the alarm clock going off in her bedroom down the hall. It was that sound, so familiar, so completely ordinary that it somehow seemed incongruous to the situation at hand, that finally made her move. Izzie exhaled, and with that expulsion of breath, she finally felt light enough to rise.
Meredith and Cristina watched her climb to her feet, stared at her as she stood looking down at them with the rueful, knowing expression of someone who knew exactly what it was going to take to survive.
"It's time to get up," Izzie said, extending a hand to each of them. "We've got work to do."
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George's alarm clock went off at 4:45 a.m., the way it had every day for the past year. But, for the first time in a year, George didn't get up.
Beside him, Callie shifted in her sleep, but didn't wake. She was used to sleeping through his alarm, since residents didn't have to be at the hospital quite as early as interns.
Which was what George was.
Still.
There was a part of him that couldn't believe that he had failed the thing he had spent a whole year of his life working toward. That part of George was screaming at him to get up and go already, so that Bailey wouldn't kick his ass from here to Chicago for being late.
But a greater part of George knew that he wasn't going anywhere. His test results had made that perfectly clear. He was suddenly overwhelmingly grateful that Callie slept like the dead, because if she were awake, they would have to talk, and George had no idea what he could say to his wife- who had ranked first in her year after her exam, and who had just been named Chief Resident- that would make her understand why he couldn't go in to the hospital today.
She had wanted to talk about it last night, when she'd arrived home from Cristina and Burke's disastrous wedding to find George curled up in a ball on their bed. But, looking into her earnest, anxious face, George hadn't been able to find the words. Instead, he'd rolled away from her and stared at the glowing red numbers of his digital clock, where his gaze remained fixed the rest of the night.
The doctor in him said it was shock, the inability of his mind and body to deal with the situation he had found himself in. All George knew was that he felt as if he were disappearing, like little bits of him were breaking off and drifting away. The only thing that was holding him together were the stark, predictable numbers on the LCD screen in front of him.
Now it was 4:45 a.m., and the significance of those numbers, the ones he had woken up to so many times before, jolted his thoughts into wakefulness. Memories of times spent at the hospital rushed unbidden to his mind, and closely linked to those were the people he had shared those times with. Alex, Cristina, Meredith- his thoughts snagged on Izzie, and George, who had believed himself to be numb by that point, felt a fresh wave of loss wash over him.
He was suddenly drowning in thoughts of her. There was a time when this would have made him smile, when memories of his friend were happy things that helped him through particularly grueling days. Now, though, thoughts of Izzie were laced through with pain, so that George couldn't even remember the good things without being overwhelmed by his wanting of her, without being reminded of what he couldn't have.
So George tried to stop thinking, tried to go back to that numb state where everything was dulled by indifference. But, now that he'd started, he couldn't seem to stop. It was enough to drive him from the bed in a fit of desperation, and he stumbled upright in the dark. Maybe if he were moving, he wouldn't have to think.
It seemed a good enough theory, so George shut down his brain, and let his body take control. His hands grabbed his keys and wallet from the bedside table, and his feet carried him across the room to the door- so far, so good. He opened it- and here one hand betrayed him, hesitated there, and considered the woman he was leaving without a word on the other side. But then, thankfully, his legs took over, and carried him away to the elevator instead. His finger pushed the button that would take him to the parking garage, and once he arrived there, his body took him to his car, and folded itself inside. One foot hit the gas pedal, and then he was moving even faster than before.
For two hours, George managed not to think about anything but the road ahead of him, until he arrived at his destination, and realized it was exactly where he needed to be.
He congratulated his body on being so wonderfully effective without his brain.
George climbed out of the car, walked up the worn stone path toward the house, and knocked on the door. After a few minutes, a woman in a yellow terrycloth robe answered, her eyes widening in surprised recognition as she got a good look at the figure in her doorway.
"George!" she exclaimed.
"I need to stay here for awhile," George said, without preamble.
Mrs. O'Malley looked her son up and down. She took in the dried tear tracks on his cheeks, the way his shoulders slumped in the rumpled tux he wore, the dullness in his normally bright blue eyes. Her brows knit in concern. "What's wrong?"
"Everything."
