A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews, guys! They made me so happy! This is one of my favorite parts in the whole story, so I hope you like it.

Disclaimer: The lines spoken in the part in italics are from the episode, 4x17, Freedom (Pt. 2). I definitely did not write these lines, I only added the descriptions behind them.

Irony. Izzie Stevens has always had a love/hate relationship with it. Like how ironic it is that this was the second time she peed on a stick with a positive result. How ironic it was that this is the second time that she'd peed on a stick, and had nobody standing outside the bathroom, waiting to hear what happens. She's never been a fan of irony; it always shows up at the most inappropriate times in her life.

She was on the borderline between awake and sleep when her alarm clock started ringing, much too loudly, in her opinion. She stood up and pushed her curtains aside, only to be greeted by rainy, dark Seattle weather. She was never a fan of the rain, but living in Washington had conditioned her to accept it. She got ready as she usually did, trying to prevent the thought of what she'd discovered the night before from even entering her mind. She couldn't think about it; she had patients to think about. She should be focusing on her career, and the brand new clinic that Bailey had officially given her. Bailey had even said, "make me proud", and she intended to do just that.

She put on her best Izzie-optimistic face as she left her room, closing the door behind herself. Walking downstairs, she made sure she was quiet enough not to wake anyone else, and made a pot of coffee. She made extra for Meredith and Alex, and usually Derek, as she did every morning. As soon as she poured her coffee into the mug, she was gone.

She was paged to the ER as soon as she stepped foot in the hospital. Predictable, rain always meant accidents. The first patient was a young, 20 year old girl. She looked way too young to even have been driving. Her car had slipped, hit a pole, and flipped over on impact, it was a bad one. The patient was sent to the OR right away with an intracranial hemorrhage. Derek was paged to the ER room, and asked Izzie if she would like to scrub in. She knew she wanted to, but she couldn't. She couldn't be digging deep in some girls' brain that morning. "No thank you, Dr. Shepherd, I think I'll just observe from the gallery today" she told him. The fact was, no one ever turned down an offer to scrub in on brain surgery. Maybe that was why the look on his face was so shocked. They wheeled the patient out of the room, with the band of doctors following her, leaving Izzie alone as they left.

Unfortunately, it was right at that time when her first round of morning sickness kicked in. She'd been expecting it; she knew it was going to happen. She was a doctor, after all, she knew what was supposed to start soon. She just didn't know when. She clutched her stomach, said a quiet 'excuse me', and almost ran over to the first bathroom she could find. She ran into a stall and knelt over the toilet, praying that nobody else was in the bathroom. It was unimaginable that she'd be doing this every morning for the next month or so.

She knew he'd be upset, even if he didn't know it himself. That's why she walked over to his room the night after Ava was committed to the psychiatric center. That's why she faltered between actually talking to him and just offering him a plate of fresh-baked cookies and a bottle of tequila. Personally, Izzie had never been in this situation. She'd never fallen in love with someone and then had them go crazy. But she did know how it felt to have someone ripped apart from you like that. That's why she wanted nothing more than for him to smile again. It had been a long time since he'd smiled.

He was sitting on his bed, facing the opposite direction. She hovered in the doorway for a few seconds before speaking. "I'm sorry."

"Whatever" he replied, completely monotone. He was always quick to use that defense.

It wasn't until she walked over to his bed and sat down next to him did she see that he was crying. "Not whatever, I'm sorry…about Rebecca, and your mom. I'm sorry" she said.

He turned to her, placing one hand on the side of her face, and kissed her. And at first she didn't fight it. But something in her reminded her that he was too upset to realize what he was doing.

"Alex."

"Please? Just this once. Just for this one night, please?"

The amount of passion he had in his eyes made her feel like it was almost okay to kiss him back. Maybe kissing him back would make him feel better. That was the point of coming in his room in the first place, wasn't it? Maybe that's all he really needed to feel better. And maybe she wouldn't even think she was doing it for her own selfish reasons. So she kissed him back with as much fervor as he'd kissed her.

After a few seconds, he broke the kiss and began to sob, so she stayed with him as he cried. A state she was so sure he wouldn't want anyone but her to see him in. A state of him that she'd rarely ever been exposed to. This was Alex so far-gone, the same way she'd felt when she was lying on the bathroom floor in her dress.

A few nights later, she learned that although kissing him wasn't going to fix the situation, it did make him feel better. Or at least that's what she thought, when he showed up in her doorway the next night. He became attached to her for the wrong reasons and she let him because she was feeling empathetic. Normally, she wouldn't stand for something like this. She would never sleep with someone just because they were upset. But with Alex it was different. Even though she knew that he didn't feel that way about her at that moment, she couldn't help but feel happy when she would wake up next to him. Their friendship became a toy for both of them to use to get what they wanted, and as long as it made them both content, she didn't see a problem in what she was doing.