Title: Cigarettes & Wedding Bands
Rating: M
Pairing: George/Izzie
Chapters: 1/5
1. If It's Broke.. Fix It
Izzie knows he's there before he speaks, before she even see's him out of the corner of her eye, storming toward her. She's filling out the paperwork for Mrs Rogersons surgery when she feels it. The familiar ache in her ribcage that she's been experiencing around him the last few weeks, the ache which has significantly increased in the last day and a half.
Her pen falters along the page as she waits for him to reach her. She knows, without a doubt that he remembers. She can see it in the way he strides towards her, the unmissable expression on his face, the way he holds himself despite the emotional and physical pain he's obviously in.
So she stops what she's doing and takes a step back from the nurses station, pausing for a moment as she prays for the courage she needs to get through this.
"You remembered."
It's a statement not a question, and she follows him as he leads her to the linen closet behind her, and she can feel the nurses eyes following them, but she's too exhausted to care.
He shuts the door with force, and she tries to remember a time when things were this bad between them. It takes all she has to turn and face him, and even more not to cry as she really looks at him.
For the first time she sees him objectively, outside of the warm devotion in which she has always enveloped him. He stands a few feet away from her backed against the far wall, his eyes downcast and tinged purple, an obvious sign of stress and lack of sleep. The look on his face is somewhere between longing and disbelief, but most of all it's just hurt. Izzie knows because it's the same feeling she's been carrying around with her all week.
They stand there for what feel's like minutes but in reality is only seconds before he crosses the room to stand in front of her, his hand bracing the metal shelf in an attempt not to touch her.
The emotion that he feels for her in that second is so strong that he has to physically turn around to restrain it. He takes it out on the opposite wall, his arm hitting the storage unit in an attempt to dispel it.
She has to place a hand to her mouth in order to keep from sobbing and when he turns around to look at her, the vulnerability in his eyes makes her knees shake.
She can't find the words to tell him that this will be okay and that they can get past this, because she's unsure if they can, and because her hand is touching his face and it makes him physically tremble. The pure, raw emotion behind his eyes brings back that deep, familiar ache and it feel's like she's lying on the bathroom floor, in her prom dress all over again.
His head is shaking and she knows he's feeling guilty about Callie, because that's the kind of man George is, and because he can't not feel that. What they did was wrong, even though nothing has ever felt more right, and Izzie can't help but want him even more because of that.
She closes her eyes when his hand intertwines hers, and Izzie feels the knife in her chest twist further in as the band of his wedding ring hits her bare skin. A white, sharp reminder of the sin they have comitted and the woman waiting for him a few floors below, completely unaware of what has occurred between them.
"George, please."
It's what Izzie wants to say, but the only thing she can manage is a shaky breath. The sight of tears in his eyes, the paleness spread across his face and the cool, clammy feeling of his hand gripping hers is a current of emotion entirely too strong for the both of them, and she watches as he leaves the room, almost running back to the hospital floor.
It's only after the door is once again slammed shut does she allow the tears to fall. Izzie is a strong girl, she always has been, but in this moment she's 16 again, alone, scared and pregnant, hiding from the big bad world. The linen closet she's hiding away in is her tiny bedroom in a double wide in a Chehalis trailer park, and the shelf she's bracing herself against for support is her mothers arms holding her close and whispering words of love and hope, despite the whiskey on her breath and tears in her eyes.
She's still shaken up fourteen minutes later when she emerges from the closet, eyes rimmed and pager buzzing loudly. She can barely walk straight as she makes it to Mrs Rogerson's room, in time to draw blood samples for the surgery, and it take's all Izzie has left inside her to hold it together when Nina leaves the room to find a senior nurse, complaining about her incompetence.
She feels like running out the door and all the way home, where she can lock the bedroom door and be away from everything, but she needs to be strong and she needs to get through this day, so she draw's strength from the only place she knows. Denny. Whenever she's scared or unsure she thinks of him and the overwhelming sense of belief he always had in her, and she feels okay, at least a little bit.
She listens to Mrs Rogerson talk for the next few minutes, let's her say the words she's been needing to get out, dying to get out, and Izzie takes a moment to pray that she will make it through the surgery, although she knows as a trained medical professional, its an unlikely outcome.
It's only hours later that she's standing back in the same room, in the same spot, alongside her best friend and his wife, delivering the news to a young girl that her mother didn't make it, and watching as she blames herself does she herself feel able to open up.
"Your mother.. talked to me."
She can feel his eyes on her. Callie's too.
"She wasn't ready to leave you, but she was ready to leave her body."
She continues on, despite the resistance she's met with, because it's what Mrs Rogerson had wanted her to do, she had asked Izzie to explain to her daughter, had made her promise. Had known she wasn't going to pull through.
"What she was afraid of was that you had taken on so much of her disease that you were freezing up, too. You spent so much time planning and helping her avoid risk. God knows, that's what you should have been doing, but.. she was worried.."
"You have a healthy body, Nina. If you fall down, you won't turn to stone, and your mom so wanted you to just let yourself fall."
"Messing up.. It's what makes a person.."
"It's how we learn.. Where we find joy.. In the things you don't plan for, the things you never see coming."
She know's the words she's saying are true. She's speaking from her heart, and despite all the pain she knows she's caused in the past twenty four hours, the pain she's going to cause in the next twenty four, and the pain she's feeling right at this very moment, being with George had given her joy, and hope. Even if it were only for one night.
She holds onto those words when she's sitting beside him at 4am, in the empty locker room, while the other interns are either doing the first of their rounds or making use of the time to grab a nap in the on-call rooms.
He had cornered her after they had left Mrs Rogerson's room, while his wife was still inside and asked her to meet him later on. She had been hesitant to agree, but had done so anyway.
So they sit here together, alone.
"Okay.. It happened. It was a mistake and it happened. People make mistakes."
She's the first to speak. He sits there beside her, eyes unfocused and he's not the George she knows. He's not her George anymore.
"We need to figure out where we go from here, figure out how to tell Callie-"
She knows that will be the hardest part of all this, telling Callie, and despite the fact she's never liked the woman, she would never wish this upon anyone. He cut's her off before she can continue on.
"I'm not going to tell Callie."
George's tone is sharp, and deliberate and his whole demeanor is tired, and Izzie just wants to go erase these past few days. She want's a do-over.
"Do you know how much this would hurt her?"
She wonder's if he realizes how much he's hurting her?
"I'm not going to clear my conscience at her expense. She has done nothing but support me, encourage me and believe in me and this is how I pay her back."
She almost laughs aloud if the situation weren't so tragic. What about all the support and encouragement and belief she had put in him these past few months. It makes her head spin and her heart ache.
"No. I have to live with what I did."
What we did. She silently adds.
Izzie's not a naive woman, and she's not a foolish one either, and she wasn't alone that night. They had both been there. Izzie and George. George and Izzie. She wasn't Bethany Whisper, kneeling on the bed in her lingerie, seducing him like a succubus. He had initiated the first move, the first kiss, and he had been been the one to whisper in her ear, as they lay intwined on her bed, how much he had wanted her for so long. She wonder's if he remembers that part.
"This is our secret, OK?"
And it's all she can do to agree. Because in this moment, right now, she just want's to get away from him.
"Okay."