I Can't Have You, But I Have Dreams 1/?
Title: I Can't Have You, But I Have Dreams (1/?)
Pairing: Callie/Arizona, as well as light, light, light Callie/Mark (references to it)
Rating: We'll say R, for now.
Summary: Both women are trying to move on post-Africa, which is finally getting easier until Arizona receives a phone call that leaves her reeling.
A/N: I wrote this at work (hence the cut troubles..sorry!) and yep, I hope you all like it. It was hard for me to write in places, def...definitely. Title and Cut lyric come from "Dreams" by Brandi Carlile which is a wonderful song. You should listen to it. Also Malawi is 10 hours ahead of Seattle, random fact.
When Callie Torres moved to Seattle, she found that the one thing she hated most was the rain. Every city got rain, but it seemed to her, at times, that Seattle had taken a few climactic tips from the Amazon rainforest. While most found it comforting to curl up for an evening nap or read a book, Callie knew that rain meant fatalities. On the road, on bikes, and even sometimes in the skies. Plane crashes, to be precise. Plane crashes were gnarly. There were gaping wounds, burns, and bones crushed to dust from these babies. Plane crashes were Callie's least favorite thing to deal with.
This plane was a small one, coming from California to Seattle. It was only housing about fifty people when lightning struck the left propeller. Being that it was a smaller air craft, it didn't stand a chance. And like a wounded duck, down it went, crashing into a field messily. There were twelve survivors. All of them badly injured. The pilot had not survived either, which always made Callie a little uneasy. Added to the general mangling was a sense of shock and panic, fueled by frantic people searching for their loved ones, and sometimes finding out their grim fate.
The ER was a chaotic mess of shouting and slippery tiles. Owen commanded interns and residents alike to their proper places, keeping a sense of order in the jumble of gurneys, the flash of blood, and the somber presence of rain coating over everything. Callie was heading to assess the Jane Doe in room 304. On the way she watched as Lexie Grey pulled a sheet over a little boy's lifeless body and turned crying into the arms of Meredith. The scene sent a foreboding feeling into Callie's heart, forcing it to cue her adrenal glands into pumping impossible amounts of edginess into each nerve and synapse. She was shaking by the time she opened the door to the room Derek was standing in, shaking his head at the woman on the table. In all her years of medicine, Callie had come to learn these wordless gestures. No matter how many times, though, they still gave her a sense of defeat.
When she got into the room, the sheet was being pulled over the woman's face, barely snaking up past her soaking wet hair. Derek murmured to Jackson Avery, "Time of death...?" To which the blue-eyed intern replied "4:18." Callie was met with the harrowing gaze of both men, who offered her not only a stare of loss, but of reverence. Of something… something far surpassing medicine. Empathy.
"Why are you...? Who is under that sheet?" She asked, carefully, watching the men in the room gaze at her with widening eyes.
Derek tried to stop her and Jackson took a hold of her hand. "Don't look under there." He warned.
But Callie, morbidly curious rushed forward, the artificial heat from the OR's lights only intensifying her feeling of dread. She knew before she pulled back the sheet what she would find. Her life, her heart, her hope. The sheet revealed the swollen face of the woman who had left nine weeks ago, its heart shape quality had been taken away due to water retention, and her lips were purple and drawn tightly. She felt the need to vomit just then, and reigned it in with enough time for Derek to cover Arizona's face with the bed sheet again.
"It's not your fault, Callie..."
But in that moment she felt like it was all her fault and she fell to her knees on the cold lineleoum, weeping to a God she wasn't sure existed anymore.
"Callie?"
"Callie."
"CALLIE!"
Callie awoke with a start, face wet with tears. Before now she never dreamt vividly at all. She'd have dreams that were silly and made no sense, or dreams that were sexy and fantastic. But never ones so real she had to take a few seconds to mentally understand that she was not just at the hospital mourning the loss of Arizona. Mark loomed over her, shirtless, with a mug of coffee in his hand. "You slept straight through your alarm again," he grumbled. "C'mon, Torres, get up." He ordered, and the Latina shuffled forward, swinging her legs over the bed onto the floor of their now shared bedroom. She was going to be late.
Her hands reached for the brown elastic hair tie around her wrist, and she quickly threw her short 'do into an equally as strained ponytail. She stood up, Mark's shirt grazing just above her knees while she slapped him on the shoulder. "Don't wake me up like that, ever again." She warned, giving him her best glare. Not that Arizona was any better with the hostile awakenings. It was just almost... cute when she did it, and never made her feel like going off into a murderous rampage.
She'd have to skip brushing her teeth this morning as she hurriedly shimmied into the jeans crumpled on the floor and pulled an old ringer t-shirt strewn over the dresser over her torso. She didn't care to impress anyone at the hospital anymore, so getting up early, fussing over hair and earrings and which lipstick would look the best on Arizona's neck, didn't matter anymore. And it hadn't mattered for months. Mark had made his snide comments in their apartment, but Callie ignored them. She didn't care about what he thought.
They'd had sex once. Only once (and very drunk). It hurt, far more than she ever remembered it hurting on every level possible. Physically, she was no longer accustomed to Mark in any capacity. Mentally it made her feel like she'd all but pushed Arizona out the door and signed, sealed, and delivered her to Africa. She knew that when or if she ever came back she would never live this down. Ever. But like the blue fading out of her hair, she had a streak in her that defiantly refused to be tamed by that notion alone. She had to cling to something. And after two months of wallowing, she was finally starting to move from the "Why me" stages to regaining her sense of reality. And for now, she really just needed another person in the bed for nights where those dreams seemed too real to cope.
She made it to the hospital in seventeen minutes, making her only four minutes late for her surgery. Jamie Galway didn't mind. He was engrossed in his Nintendo DS, rapidly pushing buttons and sliding the stylus against the touch-pad part of the handheld console. Callie smirked, winking to him. "Are we ready for your new leg, Jame?" She chuckled, watching the boy continue playing his game. His mother gently touched him on the shoulder. He looked up embarrassed and said. "Hey Doctor T. Sorry, I just had to beat Bowser." He grinned and Callie shook her head.
"Today is the big day!" She enthused, "Someone gets their prosthetic leg, which means someone is a lot closer to playing soccer again."
Jamie smiled and nodded emphatically. His leg had been lost when a mail truck hit him on his bicycle, mangling it irreparably. He was finally ready for the rest of the leg to be amputated to the knee and his prosthetic limb to be attached. If all went well, those crutches would be ditched-- for good. The eleven year old made a gesture of victory by pumping his fist in the air.
Doctor Stark entered a few minutes after Callie, grinning smugly to the family and barely regarding her in any capacity. "I'm Doctor Stark and Callie will be assisting me on Jamie's surgery today."
Callie had become used to comments like this from the man. He refused to regard her as a fellow Attending and she found herself having to bite her tongue more times than she would have liked. After Kepner chirped like a nervous chipmunk about how he'd stolen Karev's ping-pong ball idea, she was weary of him. In reality, she could do this surgery in her sleep. She'd done these so many times it was considered an easy day for her.
Jamie's face never changed its hopeful demeanor, which made Callie all the more determined to get this surgery finished, and get him closer to his normal self again.
--------
It went well, as expected. Dr. Stark only criticized her methods twice. Once when she stroked Jamie's forehead just before she began, and another time when she started humming to herself over the mechanical buzzing of the bone saw, which he called an unseemly distraction, and that she should be focused on the procedure not pop songs. He told her not to get too attached as well. Which she knew, very well, from the many years of this hospital. Not to get attached to the people that worked here, either.
After the surgery, she told the Galways that Jamie would be fine and to call at the first sight or smell or something not right. She told them that no question is stupid, and that they shouldn't hesitate to use her number whenever they felt the need. Mrs. Galway hugged her and Mr. Galway did too. It went routine, like a movie script ending, and Callie was so happy that she wasn't even thinking of Arizona, or being sad, or having to go home to she and Mark's messy bachelor pad.
Karev was particularly surly that he couldn't scrub in on that surgery. Stark didn't take a shine to him like other attendings did and mistook his hard exterior for an unwillingness to work. When he did contribute, brilliantly, he was shot down. It was happening so often that he was tailing after Hunt lately, just so he could do something. Or sulking off to on-call rooms with Kepner…
Callie found him sitting in the on-call room she usually napped in, rifling through the bag she usually hid in the empty storage cabinet. She liked this room because it housed a broken automatic pill dispenser, and no one wanted anything to do with it. It was her own deserted island. Her place of refuge. Her phone sat out in his palm and he was scrolling through it, determinedly. His other hand fit underneath his armpit while his eyes focused on the task, brows furrowing in a way that suggested frustration.
"Karev, what in the hell are you doing?" She asked, and startled the man who jolted up and handed her the phone.
"I'm trying to call Robbins, and Chief won't give me the number where she can be reached, because he says I don't need to bother her. But I've gotta talk to her about a case, like, urgently." He mumbled, looking at Callie with determination.
"What do you mean?" Callie asked, "Dr. Stark's here. And yeah, annoying, but he's here. He can help you. Snooping is so not the option."
"No, no. This is an old case. It's too long and complicated to explain. Robbins knows, I need to talk to her." Alex was terse, but this was nothing new to Callie who just rolled her eyes.
"E-mail her? I don't know what you want me to say. We didn't exactly exchange digits the last time I spoke with her. I only have her U.S. number" Callie grumbled, reaching for her phone and tucking it into the front pocket of her scrubs.
"And you can't even give me that?" Karev said as he brushed by her. "Unbelieveable."
"Wait, okay? Jesus..." Callie said and sighed, "Four One Zero, Three Nine Seven, Twenty Four Thirteen...no guarantees she'll answer though." To which Karev smiled and burst out of the room.
When he left she sat there for a moment, thinking of all the times she had dialed that exact same number in the past few weeks. Granted, she never pressed "send" so that the call would actually go through, but she'd stare at it. Sometimes she'd even write a lengthy text message that was well over her cell service's seven page allotment. She wanted Arizona to know that she cared, but the other half of her didn't want her to know that she cared.
What would Karev say to her? Would he mention Callie's name at all? Knowing him, he wouldn't. After getting his ass handed to him by Jackson Avery, he was more or less a lurking presence who showed up for work, and went home at the end of the day. No meddling involved. Callie flopped back onto the bed, thinking of all the times she and Arizona had snuck away in here, and not only to fool around, but sometimes just to sleep. Occasionally they would snuggle and talk, or just nap, too exhausted to trek home after an 18 hour shift.
She wasn't going to let herself cry though. This was the new and improved Callie Torres. The one who didn't go off to cry into on-call rooms. She, instead, decided that she could use the shut eye after her rude awakening from Mark. And she didn't have anything on the schedule for another hour at best. A nap sounded perfect.
Just down the hall, in another on-call room, Alex dialed the number given to him. When it rang once and went straight to voicemail, he grumbled, but listened.
"Hi, you've reached Arizona Robbins. I'm currently in Africa, so my cell is not in use. Feel free to call me at... and listen, this is kind of long: One-one. Eighty Eight. Two Six Five. Three one Zero Forty Eight Seventeen. I know that's a lot of numbers, but that's me. Well. Yeah. Heh. Okay. Hope to hear from you."
“So awkward…” he trailed off, listeing to the message.
Karev jotted the number down and dialed, knowing this charge to his phone was going to be astronomical. When he did call, though, it rang twice and he heard a very faint and distant. "Arizona R---ins, Hello?" And then some static. “’Lo?”
"Arizona?" Alex nearly shouted.
"Who -- this?" She asked, strained and fighting with the reception.
Alex winced. He could hear the distinct sound of children crying in the background. "Karev."
"Al-- is every ----- okay?" More static resounded. “Karev?" Arizona was shouting on her end, but to Alex, it sounded like she had dunked the receiver underwater and was currently whispering from above it.
Then the phone went dead.
Arizona stared at it, wondering why Karev would call her. She closed the door to her makeshift office for a moment and sat in the stiff seat slid in there for her. She assumed first off that it might have been a case question, which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. But, why couldn't he ask someone else? She was oceans away. What if it were something more serious? What if it were Callie?
The woman had been forcibly trying to remove Calliope from her brain, but it was so difficult. Work was good. Work kept her busy and focused, and awash with a sense of reward each and every time she helped a child who probably wouldn't be helped otherwise. She'd administered vaccinations, dosed out antibiotics. She'd done more than a few sutures, appendectomies, setting bones in plaster, and dealing with things like head lice and worms. The kids loved her, and she loved them. And it made her think of babies. Babies she was supposed to have with Callie. The same woman she left at the airport. But she was tired of feeling like the villain. Sincerely tired of it. She wasn't capable of being the villain. This was a dream of hers since medical school. Callie should have known that.
Regardless, Callie was still deeply embedded into her heart, and she wasn't going to assume the role of heartless bitch if something was seriously wrong. She opened the top drawer of her desk and fished out that heart necklace, holding it in her palm for a moment before placing it back amongst the paper clips and staples.
She was going to call her.
She picked up her receiver which felt like it weighed pounds instead of ounces and cradled it against her shoulder. She dialed. It rang. Twice. Then it picked up. She braced herself, "Hello... listen I ..."
An audible BOOP sounded and then a pre-recorded voice. "Please dial your country code for calls placed outside of the country. Thank you."
Jesus. She almost lost it. Her palms were sweating and she had to hang up the phone. She took a deep breath, and tried again.
This time she dialed, carefully, including the '1' for the United States, and then the number she knew by heart.
===
Callie felt her phone vibrating against her breast pocket, cursing whomever it was that felt the need to wake her up. She assumed it was Mark, or Alex, or probably the Chief wondering where the hell she was. Blindly, she pushed the green icon and held the phone against her ear.
"Hello.." She drawled, clearly unamused.
"Cal- Calliope?" Came the small voice on the other end of the receiver.
"Arizona." Callie said, sitting up. She knew this game well. It was a sick game her subconscious played on her. She was hoping this wasn't a dream.
"How...how are you?" Arizona asked.
The pain in Callie's heart was so strong she had to lie back down. She clutched at the spot her scrub top hid. It couldn't have been a dream.
"Well, I'm okay..."
Arizona was doodling nervously on the large desk calendar, filling it with scribbles and hearts and flowers. She really didn't know what to say to the woman and was content listening to the static scratching on her end. This was the first time they'd spoken since she left. Both seemingly a bit too stubborn to call.
"Karev..."
"I know. He needed to talk to you about something."
Hearing the voice on the other end of the receiver made Arizona’s stomach twist uncomfortably. She just wanted to talk to her.
“Okay. I will send him… e-mail.” And there she was, cutting out again.
“I’m kind of losing you,” Callie said, plugging her free ear.
“Sorry, if you’re on a cell the ---- is --- like --- bad…”
Callie chuckled. Even with the static it still sounded just like her.
“Cal----?” Arizona said, picking the receiver up and carrying it and the desk phone closer to the window.
“Yeah?” Callie was jacking the volume higher on her end to no avail.
“My dad… service… bad so… we Skype…”
“What?”
“DO --- HAVE SKYPE?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna --- skype with --- please?”
Callie hesitated. “Okay…” She wanted to say no. With everything inside of her, but something tugged her forward. Something wanted to. Actually, something needed to. She needed this. Maybe it would be some closure.
“I’ll ---- you up. Tomorrow...mornin'... Eleven Your… your time. Did --- hear that?”
“Yeah. I heard that. Talk then.”
And just like that Callie was going to Skype with Arizona Robbins. Just like that she’d get to see her face again. And just like that she was crying again in the on-call room.
Pairing: Callie/Arizona, as well as light, light, light Callie/Mark (references to it)
Rating: We'll say R, for now.
Summary: Both women are trying to move on post-Africa, which is finally getting easier until Arizona receives a phone call that leaves her reeling.
A/N: I wrote this at work (hence the cut troubles..sorry!) and yep, I hope you all like it. It was hard for me to write in places, def...definitely. Title and Cut lyric come from "Dreams" by Brandi Carlile which is a wonderful song. You should listen to it. Also Malawi is 10 hours ahead of Seattle, random fact.
When Callie Torres moved to Seattle, she found that the one thing she hated most was the rain. Every city got rain, but it seemed to her, at times, that Seattle had taken a few climactic tips from the Amazon rainforest. While most found it comforting to curl up for an evening nap or read a book, Callie knew that rain meant fatalities. On the road, on bikes, and even sometimes in the skies. Plane crashes, to be precise. Plane crashes were gnarly. There were gaping wounds, burns, and bones crushed to dust from these babies. Plane crashes were Callie's least favorite thing to deal with.
This plane was a small one, coming from California to Seattle. It was only housing about fifty people when lightning struck the left propeller. Being that it was a smaller air craft, it didn't stand a chance. And like a wounded duck, down it went, crashing into a field messily. There were twelve survivors. All of them badly injured. The pilot had not survived either, which always made Callie a little uneasy. Added to the general mangling was a sense of shock and panic, fueled by frantic people searching for their loved ones, and sometimes finding out their grim fate.
The ER was a chaotic mess of shouting and slippery tiles. Owen commanded interns and residents alike to their proper places, keeping a sense of order in the jumble of gurneys, the flash of blood, and the somber presence of rain coating over everything. Callie was heading to assess the Jane Doe in room 304. On the way she watched as Lexie Grey pulled a sheet over a little boy's lifeless body and turned crying into the arms of Meredith. The scene sent a foreboding feeling into Callie's heart, forcing it to cue her adrenal glands into pumping impossible amounts of edginess into each nerve and synapse. She was shaking by the time she opened the door to the room Derek was standing in, shaking his head at the woman on the table. In all her years of medicine, Callie had come to learn these wordless gestures. No matter how many times, though, they still gave her a sense of defeat.
When she got into the room, the sheet was being pulled over the woman's face, barely snaking up past her soaking wet hair. Derek murmured to Jackson Avery, "Time of death...?" To which the blue-eyed intern replied "4:18." Callie was met with the harrowing gaze of both men, who offered her not only a stare of loss, but of reverence. Of something… something far surpassing medicine. Empathy.
"Why are you...? Who is under that sheet?" She asked, carefully, watching the men in the room gaze at her with widening eyes.
Derek tried to stop her and Jackson took a hold of her hand. "Don't look under there." He warned.
But Callie, morbidly curious rushed forward, the artificial heat from the OR's lights only intensifying her feeling of dread. She knew before she pulled back the sheet what she would find. Her life, her heart, her hope. The sheet revealed the swollen face of the woman who had left nine weeks ago, its heart shape quality had been taken away due to water retention, and her lips were purple and drawn tightly. She felt the need to vomit just then, and reigned it in with enough time for Derek to cover Arizona's face with the bed sheet again.
"It's not your fault, Callie..."
But in that moment she felt like it was all her fault and she fell to her knees on the cold lineleoum, weeping to a God she wasn't sure existed anymore.
"Callie?"
"Callie."
"CALLIE!"
Callie awoke with a start, face wet with tears. Before now she never dreamt vividly at all. She'd have dreams that were silly and made no sense, or dreams that were sexy and fantastic. But never ones so real she had to take a few seconds to mentally understand that she was not just at the hospital mourning the loss of Arizona. Mark loomed over her, shirtless, with a mug of coffee in his hand. "You slept straight through your alarm again," he grumbled. "C'mon, Torres, get up." He ordered, and the Latina shuffled forward, swinging her legs over the bed onto the floor of their now shared bedroom. She was going to be late.
Her hands reached for the brown elastic hair tie around her wrist, and she quickly threw her short 'do into an equally as strained ponytail. She stood up, Mark's shirt grazing just above her knees while she slapped him on the shoulder. "Don't wake me up like that, ever again." She warned, giving him her best glare. Not that Arizona was any better with the hostile awakenings. It was just almost... cute when she did it, and never made her feel like going off into a murderous rampage.
She'd have to skip brushing her teeth this morning as she hurriedly shimmied into the jeans crumpled on the floor and pulled an old ringer t-shirt strewn over the dresser over her torso. She didn't care to impress anyone at the hospital anymore, so getting up early, fussing over hair and earrings and which lipstick would look the best on Arizona's neck, didn't matter anymore. And it hadn't mattered for months. Mark had made his snide comments in their apartment, but Callie ignored them. She didn't care about what he thought.
They'd had sex once. Only once (and very drunk). It hurt, far more than she ever remembered it hurting on every level possible. Physically, she was no longer accustomed to Mark in any capacity. Mentally it made her feel like she'd all but pushed Arizona out the door and signed, sealed, and delivered her to Africa. She knew that when or if she ever came back she would never live this down. Ever. But like the blue fading out of her hair, she had a streak in her that defiantly refused to be tamed by that notion alone. She had to cling to something. And after two months of wallowing, she was finally starting to move from the "Why me" stages to regaining her sense of reality. And for now, she really just needed another person in the bed for nights where those dreams seemed too real to cope.
She made it to the hospital in seventeen minutes, making her only four minutes late for her surgery. Jamie Galway didn't mind. He was engrossed in his Nintendo DS, rapidly pushing buttons and sliding the stylus against the touch-pad part of the handheld console. Callie smirked, winking to him. "Are we ready for your new leg, Jame?" She chuckled, watching the boy continue playing his game. His mother gently touched him on the shoulder. He looked up embarrassed and said. "Hey Doctor T. Sorry, I just had to beat Bowser." He grinned and Callie shook her head.
"Today is the big day!" She enthused, "Someone gets their prosthetic leg, which means someone is a lot closer to playing soccer again."
Jamie smiled and nodded emphatically. His leg had been lost when a mail truck hit him on his bicycle, mangling it irreparably. He was finally ready for the rest of the leg to be amputated to the knee and his prosthetic limb to be attached. If all went well, those crutches would be ditched-- for good. The eleven year old made a gesture of victory by pumping his fist in the air.
Doctor Stark entered a few minutes after Callie, grinning smugly to the family and barely regarding her in any capacity. "I'm Doctor Stark and Callie will be assisting me on Jamie's surgery today."
Callie had become used to comments like this from the man. He refused to regard her as a fellow Attending and she found herself having to bite her tongue more times than she would have liked. After Kepner chirped like a nervous chipmunk about how he'd stolen Karev's ping-pong ball idea, she was weary of him. In reality, she could do this surgery in her sleep. She'd done these so many times it was considered an easy day for her.
Jamie's face never changed its hopeful demeanor, which made Callie all the more determined to get this surgery finished, and get him closer to his normal self again.
--------
It went well, as expected. Dr. Stark only criticized her methods twice. Once when she stroked Jamie's forehead just before she began, and another time when she started humming to herself over the mechanical buzzing of the bone saw, which he called an unseemly distraction, and that she should be focused on the procedure not pop songs. He told her not to get too attached as well. Which she knew, very well, from the many years of this hospital. Not to get attached to the people that worked here, either.
After the surgery, she told the Galways that Jamie would be fine and to call at the first sight or smell or something not right. She told them that no question is stupid, and that they shouldn't hesitate to use her number whenever they felt the need. Mrs. Galway hugged her and Mr. Galway did too. It went routine, like a movie script ending, and Callie was so happy that she wasn't even thinking of Arizona, or being sad, or having to go home to she and Mark's messy bachelor pad.
Karev was particularly surly that he couldn't scrub in on that surgery. Stark didn't take a shine to him like other attendings did and mistook his hard exterior for an unwillingness to work. When he did contribute, brilliantly, he was shot down. It was happening so often that he was tailing after Hunt lately, just so he could do something. Or sulking off to on-call rooms with Kepner…
Callie found him sitting in the on-call room she usually napped in, rifling through the bag she usually hid in the empty storage cabinet. She liked this room because it housed a broken automatic pill dispenser, and no one wanted anything to do with it. It was her own deserted island. Her place of refuge. Her phone sat out in his palm and he was scrolling through it, determinedly. His other hand fit underneath his armpit while his eyes focused on the task, brows furrowing in a way that suggested frustration.
"Karev, what in the hell are you doing?" She asked, and startled the man who jolted up and handed her the phone.
"I'm trying to call Robbins, and Chief won't give me the number where she can be reached, because he says I don't need to bother her. But I've gotta talk to her about a case, like, urgently." He mumbled, looking at Callie with determination.
"What do you mean?" Callie asked, "Dr. Stark's here. And yeah, annoying, but he's here. He can help you. Snooping is so not the option."
"No, no. This is an old case. It's too long and complicated to explain. Robbins knows, I need to talk to her." Alex was terse, but this was nothing new to Callie who just rolled her eyes.
"E-mail her? I don't know what you want me to say. We didn't exactly exchange digits the last time I spoke with her. I only have her U.S. number" Callie grumbled, reaching for her phone and tucking it into the front pocket of her scrubs.
"And you can't even give me that?" Karev said as he brushed by her. "Unbelieveable."
"Wait, okay? Jesus..." Callie said and sighed, "Four One Zero, Three Nine Seven, Twenty Four Thirteen...no guarantees she'll answer though." To which Karev smiled and burst out of the room.
When he left she sat there for a moment, thinking of all the times she had dialed that exact same number in the past few weeks. Granted, she never pressed "send" so that the call would actually go through, but she'd stare at it. Sometimes she'd even write a lengthy text message that was well over her cell service's seven page allotment. She wanted Arizona to know that she cared, but the other half of her didn't want her to know that she cared.
What would Karev say to her? Would he mention Callie's name at all? Knowing him, he wouldn't. After getting his ass handed to him by Jackson Avery, he was more or less a lurking presence who showed up for work, and went home at the end of the day. No meddling involved. Callie flopped back onto the bed, thinking of all the times she and Arizona had snuck away in here, and not only to fool around, but sometimes just to sleep. Occasionally they would snuggle and talk, or just nap, too exhausted to trek home after an 18 hour shift.
She wasn't going to let herself cry though. This was the new and improved Callie Torres. The one who didn't go off to cry into on-call rooms. She, instead, decided that she could use the shut eye after her rude awakening from Mark. And she didn't have anything on the schedule for another hour at best. A nap sounded perfect.
Just down the hall, in another on-call room, Alex dialed the number given to him. When it rang once and went straight to voicemail, he grumbled, but listened.
"Hi, you've reached Arizona Robbins. I'm currently in Africa, so my cell is not in use. Feel free to call me at... and listen, this is kind of long: One-one. Eighty Eight. Two Six Five. Three one Zero Forty Eight Seventeen. I know that's a lot of numbers, but that's me. Well. Yeah. Heh. Okay. Hope to hear from you."
“So awkward…” he trailed off, listeing to the message.
Karev jotted the number down and dialed, knowing this charge to his phone was going to be astronomical. When he did call, though, it rang twice and he heard a very faint and distant. "Arizona R---ins, Hello?" And then some static. “’Lo?”
"Arizona?" Alex nearly shouted.
"Who -- this?" She asked, strained and fighting with the reception.
Alex winced. He could hear the distinct sound of children crying in the background. "Karev."
"Al-- is every ----- okay?" More static resounded. “Karev?" Arizona was shouting on her end, but to Alex, it sounded like she had dunked the receiver underwater and was currently whispering from above it.
Then the phone went dead.
Arizona stared at it, wondering why Karev would call her. She closed the door to her makeshift office for a moment and sat in the stiff seat slid in there for her. She assumed first off that it might have been a case question, which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. But, why couldn't he ask someone else? She was oceans away. What if it were something more serious? What if it were Callie?
The woman had been forcibly trying to remove Calliope from her brain, but it was so difficult. Work was good. Work kept her busy and focused, and awash with a sense of reward each and every time she helped a child who probably wouldn't be helped otherwise. She'd administered vaccinations, dosed out antibiotics. She'd done more than a few sutures, appendectomies, setting bones in plaster, and dealing with things like head lice and worms. The kids loved her, and she loved them. And it made her think of babies. Babies she was supposed to have with Callie. The same woman she left at the airport. But she was tired of feeling like the villain. Sincerely tired of it. She wasn't capable of being the villain. This was a dream of hers since medical school. Callie should have known that.
Regardless, Callie was still deeply embedded into her heart, and she wasn't going to assume the role of heartless bitch if something was seriously wrong. She opened the top drawer of her desk and fished out that heart necklace, holding it in her palm for a moment before placing it back amongst the paper clips and staples.
She was going to call her.
She picked up her receiver which felt like it weighed pounds instead of ounces and cradled it against her shoulder. She dialed. It rang. Twice. Then it picked up. She braced herself, "Hello... listen I ..."
An audible BOOP sounded and then a pre-recorded voice. "Please dial your country code for calls placed outside of the country. Thank you."
Jesus. She almost lost it. Her palms were sweating and she had to hang up the phone. She took a deep breath, and tried again.
This time she dialed, carefully, including the '1' for the United States, and then the number she knew by heart.
===
Callie felt her phone vibrating against her breast pocket, cursing whomever it was that felt the need to wake her up. She assumed it was Mark, or Alex, or probably the Chief wondering where the hell she was. Blindly, she pushed the green icon and held the phone against her ear.
"Hello.." She drawled, clearly unamused.
"Cal- Calliope?" Came the small voice on the other end of the receiver.
"Arizona." Callie said, sitting up. She knew this game well. It was a sick game her subconscious played on her. She was hoping this wasn't a dream.
"How...how are you?" Arizona asked.
The pain in Callie's heart was so strong she had to lie back down. She clutched at the spot her scrub top hid. It couldn't have been a dream.
"Well, I'm okay..."
Arizona was doodling nervously on the large desk calendar, filling it with scribbles and hearts and flowers. She really didn't know what to say to the woman and was content listening to the static scratching on her end. This was the first time they'd spoken since she left. Both seemingly a bit too stubborn to call.
"Karev..."
"I know. He needed to talk to you about something."
Hearing the voice on the other end of the receiver made Arizona’s stomach twist uncomfortably. She just wanted to talk to her.
“Okay. I will send him… e-mail.” And there she was, cutting out again.
“I’m kind of losing you,” Callie said, plugging her free ear.
“Sorry, if you’re on a cell the ---- is --- like --- bad…”
Callie chuckled. Even with the static it still sounded just like her.
“Cal----?” Arizona said, picking the receiver up and carrying it and the desk phone closer to the window.
“Yeah?” Callie was jacking the volume higher on her end to no avail.
“My dad… service… bad so… we Skype…”
“What?”
“DO --- HAVE SKYPE?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna --- skype with --- please?”
Callie hesitated. “Okay…” She wanted to say no. With everything inside of her, but something tugged her forward. Something wanted to. Actually, something needed to. She needed this. Maybe it would be some closure.
“I’ll ---- you up. Tomorrow...mornin'... Eleven Your… your time. Did --- hear that?”
“Yeah. I heard that. Talk then.”
And just like that Callie was going to Skype with Arizona Robbins. Just like that she’d get to see her face again. And just like that she was crying again in the on-call room.