Title: Realities
Author: A. Windsor
Pairing/Characters: Callie/Arizona
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. My one semester of law school could allow me to legalese this a little more, but it also tells me it's pretty useless. So please don't sue; it's not mine, I'm just playing!
Series: Zeq!verse.
Summary: The baby becomes Arizona's reality.
Author's Note: Follow-up to Conversations. The final part in the pre-Zeq!miniseries started in Dreams. Beta'd by the wonderful, speedy, snarky roughian. Thanks, you weirdy reindeer.
Holy shit.
She does not curse lightly, but holy shit.
He's a he and he's here. And hers. And perfect.
They're signing the birth certificate, and she knows her heart should be breaking about how her name won't be on it, but it's not. It's too full of the tiny little boy looking up at her from her arms. (Probably not at her, really; he's just a few hours old. But, yeah, her heart feels like it's at her.)
She also feels the terror of the responsibility, of what could go wrong, of the fact that he could be snatched from her without recourse at any second, but they are currently little pricks at her consciousness, because she's overwhelmed with her love for this child.
The last thirty-six hours are a blur of stress and sleeplessness and elation. Callie's due date came and went, and the already on edge mother-to-be panicked and demanded Addison Montgomery's presence immediately. Addison arrived within twenty-four hours. Soon after, they induced, and seventeen grueling hours later, Ezequiel Sloan Torres finally entered the world that had anxiously been awaiting his arrival.
Arizona hasn't slept since right before Addison arrived. She'd barely been able to pull herself away long enough for bathroom breaks during the delivery without a terrified Callie calling out for her. While Mark paced the room, a nervous wreck, or passed out in a nearby chair, or stepped out to get some food or clear his head, Arizona stayed put as much as possible, hand firmly in Callie's, murmuring gentle platitudes to keep her girlfriend from overwhelming herself.
Alex Karev took it upon himself to see to keeping her functional for the process, periodically delivering food and drink for Arizona and distracting Callie with inane talk of football and car engines while Arizona scarfed down her meals one-handedly.
"Torres, ease up, or you'll have to fix her hand and I'll be stuck under Stark," he would tease lightly, and then duck.
And then, finally, the baby was here with Addison's gentle: "You're in trouble, Cal; he's a boy."
A boy.
Mark cut the cord and, teary-eyed, brought him to Callie, but that was okay, because Arizona was pretty much frozen in awe of the squirmy little guy whose screams filled the room, broken out of her reverie only when Callie called her name.
"Arizona. Come meet your son."
Her son. Her arms took him out of instinct, pressing him against her chest. She'd told herself she wouldn't cry but there she was, bawling, barely making out the perfect little features of his face through her tears.
"Tell your momma to stop crying, m'ijo. She's getting you all wet."
Arizona will always remember the way momma sounded coming from Callie's lips, the way her love's own eyes had been just as wet as hers as she looked up from their son to meet her gaze, the way one of them whispered "I love you" and she'll never be sure which.
And so here she is, cuddling newly named Ezequiel while the world spins around her. She's sure other things have happened since Callie confirmed her place as the boy's momma, but it's pretty much all a blur of him. She somehow manages to make a mental note to send something by way of apology to the nurses for all of the hovering she and Mark did during his check-ups and weigh-ins.
Ezequiel's tiny arms flail, and she reaches a finger to trace down the length of one. The gesture seems to calm both his movement and the wail that was building inside of him, and his face relaxes back into blissful newborn contentment.
"There, that's better," she whispers, lips to his temple. "Easy does it, Ezequiel. Oh! EZ. Easy."
She lets out a little laugh at her own sleep-deprived pun, breathing in deep of his wonderful newborn smell. She feels eyes on her as the room clears out. She looks up to see Callie, giving her the most wonderful, gentle smile.
"Are you ever going to let him go?"
Arizona shakes her head wordlessly, coming to sit in the chair beside Callie's bed.
"Not even for me?"
Arizona grins and shakes her head again.
"Hmm. That could get tricky. Please?"
"Okay," Arizona sighs, eyes twinkling, as she gently lays Ezequiel into his other mother's arms.
Taking advantage of her proximity, she presses a kiss to Callie's lips, threading her fingers through her messy curls. Callie hums happily and kisses her right back, Ezequiel unfazed between them. The kiss is unhurried and indifferent to the wide open door to the hospital room, and their lips slide against each other for what feels like an eternity until the squished little man lets out a mighty sneeze.
"Well, hello there, EZ. Are you feeling a little neglected?"
Ezequiel just blinks up at them.
"What did you just call him?" Callie laughs.
Arizona blushes, falling back into her seat.
"EZ."
"There's nothing easy about seventeen hours of labor," Callie reproaches, though the tired smile on her lips reveals at least a fraction of her joy at the little nickname Arizona has already created for their son. Her voice gets a little tentative, worried about what reaction her next words will bring. "Mark went to finish up the last of the paperwork stuff. He'll be back soon, and he's going to take Ezequiel to get his little picture taken."
Arizona feels a pang of separation anxiety but blows out a breath. Ezequiel is one-third Mark's, and she's going to have to start getting used to the idea that Mark Sloan will have any period of time where he is one-hundred percent responsible for their little boy.
"Okay. That's... good," she says, and the beaming smile she receives in return is reward enough for swallowing her pride even the littlest bit.
"If you have patients you need to check up on or-"
"Calliope," she scolds, one hand on Callie's knee, the other on Ezequiel's little blanket-covered foot. "There's nowhere else I need to be."
Callie eventually coaxed Arizona into a mid-afternoon nap, so when the evening comes and Mami and Daddy pass out from exhaustion, Momma once again gets her own cuddle time alone with Ezequiel, this time in the nursery so they don't disturb the sleepers. She's speaking to him in a soft voice, reveling in the wonderfully odd feeling of having these one-sided conversations with their living, breathing son in her arms and not with her lips pressed to the taut skin of Calliope's stomach. Not that she didn't love that just as much.
"How do you feel about pale yellow? That's what we painted your room, to get rid of the weird Yang vibes. If I had known that a baby is what it took to get the apartment looking less like the Batcave, maybe I would've agreed to this whole thing a lot sooner. I guess then, though, you wouldn't be you."
She looks up from EZ's face as she hears the door open, surprised to see Lexie Grey timidly entering.
"Hi," Arizona says gently.
Lexie startles with the realization that the peds surgeon has The Baby in her arms. She's frozen in the face of Mark's child, although she's not sure how she could be unprepared for this when her feet lead her to the newborn nursery of their own volition.
"H-hi. I heard it's a boy."
Arizona smiles beautifully, dimples deep, and Lexie realizes that she hasn't seen that smile since the older woman received a grant that changed all of their lives. The smile that used to reassure her in the OR or greet her in the morning for breakfast, back when they were all still a different kind of family.
And she realizes that she has missed Arizona the most purely of their once crazy little foursome. She's still beyond conflicted about Mark, and maybe a little resentful of Callie, who had promised her that those two were done being anything other than friends. But Arizona is as much a victim as she is, and sometimes, though she fights it, she wishes she had the strength to stay like Arizona did.
"He is," Arizona beams, looking back down to the baby in her arms. "His name is Ezequiel."
"That's beautiful."
"Callie picked it. Do you want to hold him?"
Lexie tenses, dark eyes wide with panic.
"You don't have to," Arizona soothes, leaving baby Ezequiel snugly tucked into one arm. "Are you okay?"
"Where are Mark and Callie?"
"Asleep."
"How do you do it?" Lexie blurts, eyes never leaving what little she can see of swaddled Ezequiel. "Knowing what happened, how can you..."
"Come here," Arizona orders softly.
It's a sign of the trust Arizona Robbins instills just by being her that Lexie's feet move forward, once again of their own accord, until she's close enough to look down into the baby's scrunched up little face.
"I love her so much, and I thought that would be enough. And it was, to keep me around. I'm so glad I did because... Look at him."
Ezequiel yawns grandly, and Lexie's heart swells, but only in the way it does for every cute baby and puppy on the street. She feels no claim to this newborn, not in the way Arizona obviously does. But she also doesn't feel repulsed, like she feared she would.
"I don't think I'm that strong. I know," Lexie takes a deep breath, pressing on to the person who is probably the only one who can come close to understanding how she's feeling. "I know that they were single. I know that they weren't cheating, that Mark had tried and failed to get me back a hundred times, that it's my fault that we weren't together. But it still feels like a betrayal."
Arizona just nods, because they're the same feelings she's been wrestling with.
"So why can't I stop loving him? I'm with Jackson now, and it's easy and fun. He's exactly the kind of guy I need at this point of my life. But I can't stop thinking about Mark. I'm not strong enough to stay, and I'm not strong enough to go, and all it's doing is hurting everyone."
"Lexie."
"I can't be a mom. I'm sorry. He's beautiful and perfect and wonderful, but I just can't. I'm too young. It changes you. I see it with my sister and my niece. I'm a good Aunt Lexie, I am, but I can't-"
"Then be Aunt Lexie."
Lexie pauses, mid-meltdown and looks up, meeting Arizona's eyes.
"Do what makes you happy, Lexie. If you want to be Mark, be with Mark, in whatever way you two figure out. It's not all or nothing unless he says it has to be. Just talk to him."
Lexie nods, dumbstruck.
"Okay."
Arizona nods once with finality, readjusting her hold on Ezequiel.
"Can- Can I hold him now?"
Arizona beams at her and moves to lay the newborn in Lexie's waiting arms. Lexie adjusts to the weight and wills the trembling out of her hands, searching Ezequiel's malleable features for any resemblance to Mark.
"He's got the Sloan nose," she breathes.
Her eyes are locked on the baby, so she misses the way Arizona's smile tightens, just a little bit, before relaxing back to her previous grin, adoring and maternal.
"It's a good nose," Arizona admits. "Lexie, Mark and I... Well, you know how we are. But he loves you, and that's not nothing, and I want you to understand what it means when I say that. So, if you can give it one last shot, it's probably worth the risk."
Ezequiel flails and yawns, charming his companions and claiming the women's full attention. Neither, then, notices his daddy on the other side of the nursery window.
"We have to change."
"What?"
"Mark, you and I. We have to change. He can't grow up watching us tear each other apart. That's not healthy."
"No, I guess not."
"We're both at fault."
God, it takes a lot out of her to say that.
Mark and Arizona are in the cafeteria, sipping coffee, because Callie and Ezequiel kicked them out for some alone time without the "hovering" and "nagging". They'd reluctantly complied because their fear of Callie Torres briefly outweighed their burning need to be as close to their son as possible.
"I saw you with Lexie."
Of course he doesn't concede to any fault, but he also doesn't contradict her statement. She'll take it for now.
"You did?" Arizona asks, tone neutral.
"Holding Ezequiel."
"Yes."
"It was—did you tell her I'm scum?" Mark questions, half-angry bluster, half-broken.
"What? Mark, no! I told her that if she thought she could somehow make it work, she should take the chance."
"Really?"
"Mark, I don't think you're scum. Persistently obnoxious? Yes. A thorn in the side of my relationship? Certainly. Overly promiscuous, occasionally degrading to women, and often inappropriate? Check. But you're loyal, and when you love, you love fiercely. That I respect. And I know that, though sometimes misguided, you always have Callie and our son's best interest at heart."
Mark is stunned into silence for a good minute, and Arizona uncomfortably drops her gaze to her coffee cup, peeling away the thermal cardboard.
"Thanks," he finally manages, a little hoarse.
She lifts her eyes expectantly, and he rubs uncomfortably at the back of his neck.
"I, uh, don't hate you either. Hell, Robbins, before all this Africa bullshit and then, y'know, our kid, I kind of liked you. I know you didn't like me at all, but I thought you were good for Callie, even with all that perk, and really fun to tease, 'cause you could give as good as you got. But you left her. You left her broken and homeless and jobless, and you're right, I am loyal, and for the life of me, sometimes I don't understand why she took you back. You didn't see her when you were gone; she barely functioned for the first month. I just..."
"I love her, Mark."
Mark chuckles a little.
"That's what she tells me, too. And I guess I just have trouble seeing how 'I love her' always makes it better in the end for you two. 'Cause I love Lexie more than I've loved anything in my life, up until yesterday, obviously, and that doesn't just magically make it all better."
Arizona frowns a little at the surge of sympathy she feels.
"It's not magic. It's hard work. It's just acknowledging that you'll do whatever work it takes because you love each other."
Mark scratches at his facial hair and sighs.
"You tell her that?"
"Kinda."
Mark nods.
"You've gotta understand that I'm in this. That I'm the father."
"You have to understand that that isn't some sort of magical male trump card, and that it gives you exactly the same claim that Callie and I have."
"I don't want to get outvoted for the rest of my life, just because there are two of you, and you're a couple."
Arizona sighs and smiles, just a little bit. "I can't say that we won't agree on some things, or even a lot of things, but I can promise that we will not agree on everything. Have you met Calliope?"
Mark snorts in acquiescence.
"I propose a deal."
"Okay..." Mark says warily.
"No more fighting dirty. We'll try our best to disagree as adults. And at a minimum, never any fighting in front of EZ."
Mark holds his hand out, and she takes it with a firm shake.
"Deal."
"Deal."
"EZ, though, Robbins? Really?"
"Ezequiel is a mouthful for such a tiny little human."
"Alright, he needs a nickname. But I'm not calling my kid-"
She clears her throat and raises an eyebrow.
"Our kid," he corrects with a sigh. "I'm not calling him 'Easy'. That's weird."
Arizona shrugs and takes a sip of her coffee.
"That's your call."
Mark looks down at his watch, and Arizona does the same. They both lock eyes again with a shared understanding.
"Think we can get out of exile yet?" he asks even as he starts to stand.
"Certainly worth asking," Arizona says, close behind him.
"Do you think she exiled us so that we could talk about our feelings?" Mark asks, holding the cafeteria door open for her.
"I wouldn't put it past her."
Mark shakes his head. "I'm glad you're the one in the relationship with her."
"Um, thanks?"
el fin