Summary: Today is definitely not Izzie Stevens' day, or at least it's not until she finds something interesting in her locker. Set the day after "If Tomorrow Never Comes." AlexIzzie, but only if you tilt your head and squint.
When Izzie Stevens awoke in the morning, she immediately knew that something was very wrong.
She had been woken not by the piercing, angry tone of her alarm clock, but by the soft, distant sound of a car starting, probably Meredith; she had recently taken to leaving later and later for shift, sometimes as little as five minutes before Izzie and George did. Which meant...
"Shit," Izzie said very loudly, sitting bolt upright and fumbling with her bedside clock. She had precisely four minutes until George was going to leave for shift without her.
"Shit, shit, shit," she hissed again, catapulting out of bed and stumbling over to her bureau. She began digging through the drawers, pulling out the first pair of jeans and shirt she found, which she hastily began to tug on, hopping towards the bathroom.
Izzie barely had time to brush her teeth and brush her hair back into a ponytail (all the while cursing the evils of nonfunctioning alarms and carpooling and early shifts) before George was shouting up the stairs at her from the foyer, where he was anxiously waiting for her so they could leave.
No breakfast, no coffee, and no time to acquire either once Izzie arrived at the hospital, already running a little late. Today was clearly not her day, as was evidenced by the fact that all the other interns had begun drifting out of the locker room by the time she finally managed to put in her locker combination number right.
She yanked open her locker and stopped in surprise.
Perched on the top shelf were a steaming cup of coffee and an energy bar. Scrawled messily on the cheery yellow post-it attached to the cup were the words, Sorry about last night.
Izzie stared at it for a moment, blinking slowly. Wait...last night. Last night she had to crack a patient's chest and massage his heart without a resident or an attending to oversee her. Last night Alex had forgotten to change the battery in his pager, the stupid jerk, so he'd been incommunicado for the whole thing. Sorry about last night, the note said.
Suddenly, the correlation between the two events occurred to her and the puzzle pieces snapped neatly into place.
Alex did this?
She picked up the coffee cup and took an experimental sip. She didn't turn green, go into convulsions, or recoil from the taste of it. She took another, larger sip. It wasn't bad. In fact, it was just the way she liked it.
"Huh," she said out loud to herself, peeling the yellow sticky note off the coffee cup and sticking it to the inside wall of her locker. Maybe she would laminate it. Frame it, even. Proof on paper that Alex Karev could, on occasion, deign to be a decent person.
She didn't have a lot of time to spare, but she unwrapped the energy bar anyways and began gobbling it down as fast as she could, alternating bites with swigs of coffee. She had just swallowed the last bite and shut her locker when it occurred to her.
The coffee had been inside her locker. The only way Alex could have gotten in there was if he knew her locker combo, or if he'd broken into it somehow, which meant...
"Bastard."
Izzie glared at the coffee cup in her hand. She was really going to have to kill Alex one of these days. And if she didn't get on it, someone else would probably beat her to the punch.
Tentatively, she sipped the coffee, as if this new revelation might have caused it to take on a newly sinister quality. But, surprisingly enough, it tasted as good as before. Izzie shrugged, took another long drink, and moved towards the locker room door.
Coffee was coffee, after all.