Snippet #1840362

"Who are we missing?" Turtle had calmed down enough to ask, turning to Izzie. "Lucy ain't here," Izzie replied tersely. It was highly likely she'd been delayed on her way here--after all, not everyone can be as punctual as us, she mused, crossing her arms as she looked over at the collected group.

Somehow, just looking at them, even Izzie couldn't help but crack a smile--she felt the corners of her lips tugged upwards just a bit in a minute semblance of a smile, a minuscule expression of the joy she felt at being here with people she had been missing for years. And they all had their differences, but in the end, they all cared for one another. Sure, Vinny and Izzie were liable to get into a spat at any time over music, given they hated the genres the other listened to, but even then, Izzie could remember having a good time hanging out with them--hell, she'd been there when he was thirteen and had smoked his first cigarette. She could remember clearly how he'd nearly coughed up a damn lung afterwards, while she, sixteen years old and no stranger even then to substance abuse, smirked and smoked her own cigarette calmly. Alice was that same kindly, enthusiastic girl who had kept all the others anchored with her seemingly endless supplies of optimism and happiness. Roy and Pierce, the 'musicians', so to speak, of the group...which Izzie still envied them for. She would've given a hell of a lot (well, she didn't have much, but a hell of a lot of what she did have) to be able to play the music she loved much like Roy and Pierce could with the music they enjoyed, but it would've been a pointless endeavour--she'd never be as good as them, she'd probably never be good at all. She'd given up on that quite a while ago.

Turtle was still Turtle.

That was not surprising.

"It has been a while since all of us were here," Vinny said, voicing the thoughts that it seemed everyone was thinking. "We've all changed. Some for the better, and some for the weirder. Not saying that's a bad thing."

When Izzie saw Ellie decide to sit not far away at an empty table, however, the smile was replaced rapidly by a frown. Shit, I really did offend her...him, fuck it... Izzie didn't like that idea. Ellie, man or woman, regardless of his or her physical appearance, as long as he was still, at his core, 'Ellie'...Izzie cared about him. And she didn't like the idea that Ellie might have thought Izzie disapproved of him now, or that she thought he was a freak, because she didn't. Didn't matter if she went around acting as though people and their opinions of her didn't mean shit to Izzie, the idea that Ellie might now view her as looking down on him, might even think he disgusted her, was reprehensible to her...

Gritting her teeth, Izzie decided that the possibility of someone she actually cared about thinking she hated him was far worse than the thought of swallowing her pride for once. So she forced herself from her seat, made her way through the group, walking towards Ellie where he sat alone in one of the nearby booths, back turned to the others.

"So..." she trailed off as she approached, stopping at the other end of the booth and turning to face Ellie, leaning against the hard wood surface of the booth seat's side and turned her head to face him. "Guess I can't call you Ellie anymore? You go by something else?" She just couldn't straight up apologise for it. Nor could she straight up just tell him that her opinion of him as a person hadn't changed--which, she realised, she was genuinely afraid he thought. Twenty one years she'd been a stubborn, headstrong woman, twenty one years she'd refused to apologise for anything, to anyone. Not even for something like this, and not to someone whom Izzie counted among the few in life she'd come to regard as worth the risk of trusting.