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Arizona should be done with her shower at any minute.
Therefore, Callie sits, medical journal in her hands as she passes through the pages, pretending to be engrossed into whatever new whipple technique was being tested. She knows how much her wife hates it when she waits for her outside the bathroom, attentive at any kind of noise that could indicate something going wrong. After all, she has repeated it time and time again in the past months.
It hadn’t always been like that, quite the opposite, they used to love taking showers together at any given time.
It saved time, it saved water, it could be fitted as a part of their everyday routine. Just a small moment together. It didn’t always lead to sex, opposite to that, more times than not it was filled with small kisses and nothing past that.
There was something about baths, about the way Arizona so gently massaged the shampoo out of Callie’s scalf, brushed her hair with her fingers, care written all over her face. It might’ve been something about the vulnerability of it, of nothing but them. Without words, just nurturing attention. The carresing that came with slow and steady hands and feeling cherished, treasured.
Callie adores her wife, every part of her.
But she also adored the times coming home to her, to draw mindless patterns on her back, a way to comfort her after long days of work. Even the bad days, that found them curled in bed, were some of her favorites. And it took them years, but they had developed a routine, a knowingly habit of when and how to hug and kiss the tears away.
But planes fall out of the sky, and legs get amputated, and now Callie sits, trying to pretend that nothing is wrong even if Arizona can barely stand to watch herself in the mirror.
She knows. Of course, she knows. She knows of phantom pain, and self loathing. She hears the talks of the hospital. The things Arizona doesn’t tell her. The details, or most likely huge secrets, that she tries to keep from her.
Because this Arizona keeps secrets and wakes up in the middle of the night and feels bugs in a leg that no longer exists. She doesn’t wake up her wife. She doesn’t explain what she’s feeling or thinking but gets Alex Karev to stab scalpels on a prosthesis and Owen Hunt to talk about beaches and waves.
Because Arizona only talks when she thinks the problem is solved and pretends to not break.
Clinging to a missing limb, massaging the sheets and trying not to excessively move the bed so Callie’s heavy sleep won’t get interrupted. Even if Callie hasn’t been a heavy sleeper since the day she found out the love of her life was missing, just gone, somewhere between Seattle and Boise.
She is not an idiot and she knows how her wife used to be, and she can tell that there’s still a shadow that isn’t quite erased. A lingering gloom that never leaves. It dims, it obscures. It is present as they scream to each other like never before. It shatters the person she used to know.
And it paralyzes her.
Sometimes she thinks of what it would be to just leave the city behind. To take Sofia, who’s too young to really remember everything that happened, and run away. Where Mark’s apartment doesn’t exist and she doesn’t feel like she’ll find his ghost each time she walks through the hospital.
And it makes her feel egoistical, and despise herself to even speculate.
But she needs somewhere where her wife is just a distant memory and not a constant reminder of broken promises, and not a proof of how she failed. Not only as a doctor, not only because she couldn’t save the fucking leg, but also how she failed as a partner . How she should’ve listened to Owen when he said she should prepare Arizona for the worst, how she should’ve been supportive.
She failed Arizona in every single way. Yet all she selfishly can think about was how much she wants to get away from everything because being stuck there didn’t do much except making her miss how life used to be.
How much she had and took for granted.
Callie exists in a limbo, between the happy memories of things that happened not even a year ago and the constant weight of the present. Because the phantom of angry, empty Arizona can only taint the smallest part of the woman she married.
Magic smiles and screaming matches somehow coexist in a symbiotic balance.
And she wants to run away because some days it’s almost impossible to conceive both. To understand the change. They aren’t supposed to constantly injure each other, to know precisely how to cut deep. She shouldn’t do things just to then notice how it isn’t the same as it used to be.
The past months have been so confusing, that while not wanting to burden her wife and bottling up feelings, all she can do is yell at her instead of talk. Order instead of asking. Grief and hope and so many feelings she can’t even name, flooding every part of her life.
And she is so tired.
The sound of the door forces her to stop her thoughts, cautiously keeping her eyes on the pages. She slightly twitches for a moment, as the bed balances itself under the weight of the other woman. At the time her wife settles in the bed, she has to remind herself again not to look, not to make her uncomfortable in any way.
Because, apparently, Callie was only allowed to see the remaining stump only when fighting, but rarely when they were at peace. The negative sentiments swirling around it, a part of all the adverse and unfavorable and pessimistic events of the last few months and not what it really was.
A part of her wife. A neutral part of her body, that was going to accompany the wife she loves so much forever. The wife she hopes to be married to until the end of the times.
Callie has to force herself still, as Arizona’s hair touches her neck, and Arizona’s head rests on her shoulder.
For a second it’s all she can feel, the light tickling feeling of the blonde strands and the weight that sits on her left side. And it’s intoxicating, as the smell of the shampoo and fresh clothes and her have always been. Callie’s skin is almost burning and her heart is aching and she wants to drown in the feeling of having her .
It is the most contact they had had in bed for weeks, maybe months, maybe since the last time Arizona let her hold her hand while in the hospital.
“What are you reading?”
“Just whipples.” Callie answers, trying to keep her pulse steady.
She is almost sure that it must be sky-rocketing, as it pumps, rumbles through her ears and if she’s not careful her wife will be able to hear it too. Because she can feel her breathing, steady, unforced, just the rising and falling of her chest. And the top of her head, so near that Callie could just rest her chin there if she desires to. And she’s so close to her that it might as well be a dream.
She misses intimacy more than anything.
Misses the slight touches, the knowing hands, the goodnight kisses. She doesn’t miss sex as much, or maybe she does, but she misses the affection that came with it more. The care that her wife used put in each stroke, the familiarity of her lips, of freely, boundless, loving her. The easy way to comfort each other.
And now Arizona is resting her head on her shoulder, and it feels like everything all at once.
And it doesn’t feel normal, it doesn't feel sane or rational. It feels like a reverie, a joyful trance and all her fantasies coming true. Because she has missed her, missed her wife and not the empty shell of her. She missed the happiness, the simple.
But the second she knows how close her fingers are to her wife’s face, how she could brush the hair out of the way, even if she’s not going to do it, makes her forget about all she craves. Leave behind any selfish idea she had. Because her wife isn’t absent for a second, and all the times she didn’t escape are worth the short time it’ll last.
She passes the page, aware that if she doesn’t, Arizona might recognize her head going at miles per hour and not just thinking about new techniques and whatever the next article said. She might hear her screaming thoughts of how much she misses what they used to be. She might get away, sheltering herself in her place on the bed.
Arizona does it constantly, close off, at the slight unwanted touch or look, the one Callie doesn’t realize she made. She flinches, defensely making herself small in the bed, or getting away on her wheelchair. And it makes Callie not know what to do, how to soothe her wife.
A wife she isn’t sure how to talk to, how to touch, how to express her devotion to.
But God, she has always loved Arizona like no one else. Loving her was involuntary, easy. Because her smiles light up rooms and her mind seems to always be three steps ahead and she can be so utterly and unbelievably stubborn.
And she knows she can’t be gone, she knows Arizona, the full form of herself, is somewhere. Probably still in her head, but somewhere. Because she still loves her to pieces, and she can’t love someone she doesn’t know, so her wife must still be her wife and one day she’ll wake up and things will be fine.
Because not even a plane out of the sky should be able to empty the good things out of her wife. And Callie wants to believe that not even her betrayal, her broken promise, is capable of destroying the family they built.
As minutes pass by, with pages that might as well be blank, Arizona’s breath starts to slow down, as her eyelids fall and her nose twitches.
Callie decides to not move, to not make the slightest attempt to discard the journal or help Arizona into a more comfortable position to sleep. Instead she stares at her, at all the details she might’ve missed before, at the scar on her forehead from the car crash and the tiny, almost impossible to perceive ones that decorated her left cheek and forehead after the plane crash. She stares at her hands, the ones she knew so well, as they rested. She stares at her hair, at every part of her that she can see without movement.
She relaxes under the weight on her shoulder. Keeping her eyes on her wife as the loosening and relief comes through her. They’ve been in the same position more times than she can count. Arizona leaning on her, on beds, couches, the backseat of a car and maybe even the floor. After long days and long nights, they always come back to it, apparently even now.
And she thinks that even if all of her wife’s weight is on her, it won’t do much than just make Callie feel lighter. Because the more domesticity there’s between them, the closer they are to being back to themselves. The more Arizona lets her fears and burdens on her, the more at ease Callie feels.
The limbo is wearing down on them, and she knows it. She knows that at some point it’ll come crashing back, because if they don’t have a real talk it’ll be just a matter of time until they hit the point of no return. When the oblivion is so colossal that it takes everything, and they won’t know how to come back.
But she takes the small win, and she allows herself to try to sync her breaths with Arizona’s, to become just one, moving at the same pace. Because she had missed her wife, her Arizona, and her Arizona’s touch, and her Arizona’s speeches, and her Arizona’s smiles, and her Arizona’s everything.
And maybe, just maybe, she will get her back, if they can only get away from the uncertainty they’ve been living into.