Back To You ~ (Cazzie Fanfic)

Epilogue 2: I'm Sorry

Note about minor revisions to story: 

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for all the love! Just wanted to say I've made some adjustments to the story based on comments here and over on Ao3. I got confused when writing about how long they'd been in their quasi-romantic relationships and said 9 months. 9 months is actually the amount of time from running into each other at the Gardener residence in March/April to the holiday party in early December. So their sort-of relationship has been going on for about 4 months by the time they are at the holiday party, which I think makes more sense for the story.

I added a couple sentences in "Tightly Wound Together" to reflect the fact that Casey and Curtis are not together anymore even though they were never really officially exclusive to begin with.

The "So Bad" epilogue happens about 9 or 10 years after the previous chapter and I edited it to make that more clear.

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Chapter Notes:

CW/TW: description of postpartum depression, extreme postpartum difficulties and just regular old postpartum difficulties. If you know you know.

The Doug-Izzie apology we all want and deserve... and not in the way you were expecting.

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Izzie fights back tears as she paces. She's so tired. She's so painfully, physically, bone tired. So tired that she can't even fathom how anyone can expect this of her. How does anyone do this? What woman, in her right mind, would choose to have more than one child after this? It can't possibly be like this for everyone. That's the only explanation. She passes the microwave again as she slowly makes laps around the first floor. It's 2 AM. She hasn't slept since the one hour nap she'd taken in between feeds around noon the previous day. Oh wait, there was that one 15 minute period she passed out while pumping. That had been... what... 4PM? And every night this week she's gotten no more than two or three hours of cumulative sleep. The baby squeaks and stirs in her arms, tossing her small, fuzzy head. Without realizing it Izzie has accidentally slowed her speed as she rhythmically paces while exaggeratedly rocking the infant at the same time... the only way anyone can get her to sleep. She reaches down into the very core of her being and dredges up the last bit of strength she can muster to pick up her pace again.

"Infants are sleepy," they'd said.

"You can sleep when the baby sleeps," they'd said.

"Drive her around in the car and she'll fall asleep," they'd said.

"Push her in the stroller and she'll fall asleep," they'd said.

"She'll take lots of naps," they'd said.

Lies. Lies from the pit of hell.

Elsa and Doug are staying with them for the time being, and they've been a huge help. Elsa cooks and holds the baby while Izzie eats or showers or changes the monstrously large pads they'd given her at the hospital. And Doug runs errands and repairs anything and everything around the house he can find to repair, when he's not working. Chloe is here a lot of the time and Casey's taking as much time off of training as she can but the Olympics wait for no woman. Gabby also stops by whenever she's not working at the hospital or planning her wedding. So Izzie definitely "has support." But no one told her it would be this hard. No one told Izzie that she'd bleed this much. Just SO much. Or how exhausted her body would be just from healing the internal wound of this child no longer being attached to her uterus. Or that she'd be sitting on ice for a week. No one told her that her baby's mouth would feel like razor blades. And no one expected it to take so long for her milk to come in. Or for the baby to start losing weight instead of gaining it. Or that she'd have to spend 40 minutes of almost every hour nursing her, then giving her a bottle of formula, then pumping with the hospital-grade breast milk pump to try and stimulate her milk production. At least during the day the other adults can do the bottle feeding while Izzie pumps, giving her a little extra time between feeds. And at night she has given up on pumping because she's too busy walking and rocking. Walking and rocking. She feels so guilty for not pumping more even though she knows it doesn't make sense to feel that way.