TITLE: All Roads Lead Back to You (Chapter 1)
AUTHOR: rcruz
RATING: PG-13 (mostly for language)
PAIRING: Callie/Erica, Callie/Arizona (but not really)
SUMMARY: Erica returns to Seattle Grace for a couple of days.
Disclaimer: If I owned them, things would look a lot different. The characters, settings, established histories, and general Grey's Anatomy universe referenced in this work are properties of their respective owners. This is a work of fiction for entertainment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's Note: This was my first attempt at this pairing. The story started out as an exploration of what would happen if Erica came back and found Callie with another woman. I meant to really try to explore the Callie/Arizona thing, but it became a full blown Callica piece pretty much on its own.
I stopped watching Grey's after Erica left, so I am unfamiliar with the Callie/Arizona story. If I get things wrong about them, it's because I'm making it up. I also believe all fanfiction is really one huge alternative universe, so I have no problems changing the histories of the characters somewhat to suit the story. Hope that's okay with folks. I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, so I've tried to keep the medical jargon to a minimum. I am also unfamiliar with Hospital Boards or the hiring practices of major hospitals and I realize that San Francisco has a top rated hospital. I love San Francisco and thought it was a nice place for Erica to end up in, but alas, for this piece the universe is my play thing, so let's just suspend our disbelief and pretend that San Francisco does not have nationally ranked hospitals.
The story has been edited and cleaned up a bit since the original posting to remove typos and grammatical errors.
Chapter 1 - At the Beginning
Erica Hahn was not happy with her life. She wasn't sad about it either. It just was what it was. She was in a beautiful city, having departed in a mad, ridiculous rush from another equally beautiful city just six months prior. But the only time she really enjoyed the city was from her balcony in the apartment she basically ate and slept in. It was one of the only positives of the move she had made - this apartment with its view of the Golden Gate Bridge. She was paying way too much for it, but since she didn't spend money on anything else, she might as well have something nice to look at, had been her reasoning when the rental agent offered it to her. The beauty and sheer accomplishment the bridge represented always captured her imagination, but it also put her in a pensive mood and she did not like that. Thinking about anything besides surgery was dangerous. It sometimes made you hopeful. It made you do things and think things that were out of character and not good for you. It made you make friends and mistakenly think you could actually have a healthy relationship. It made you want things you could not realistically have. Specifically this bridge with its wide expanse made her think of possibilities and all the possibilities she had left behind in an effort to outrun the pain that had become synonymous with Seattle.
But she liked to look at it anyway, so it had become a ritual. After a hurried dinner, she would usually take a glass of wine and sit on her balcony, just focusing on the bridge.
She had gone to Seattle after her residency to compete. She had wanted to be the new attending at Seattle Grace. Preston Burke got it instead and so she had settled for Mercy West, deciding that if she couldn't be at a top teaching hospital, she would raise the level of the hospital she ended up in. She would elevate their cardiothoracic program and she had been successful. Damn successful! She had been so successful that when Preston abandoned Seattle Grace, they asked her to step in and she had swooped in after him, intent on showing them they had made a mistake hiring him over her. It had not turned out the way she expected.
Walking into Seattle Grace had been like walking into a minefield. At every turn something blew up in your face. She could have handled that, if the mines were purely professional. She could handle the boys club of elite attendings that seemed to form some sort of male clique. She could handle sniveling residents vying for her attention trying to suck up to her. She could handle their arrogance, their smug attitudes and the way they mistakenly approached surgery like it was a big game. She had been there too; knew the high that came with holding a scalpel. And she knew that she needed to take them down a peg, or several. So she set about to do just that. She could handle that. But there had been other mines lurking in the halls of that hospital; ones that were impossible to detect and which had ultimately resulted in her mad dash from the hospital and the city.
She sighed and let her mind meander. She both hated and loved going back there.
Erica was no idiot and while she rarely concerned herself with such insignificant things as her looks, she was aware that she had some attractive features. She was tall, an inch or more shy of 6 feet, with long blonde hair and an attractive figure. It had not been a surprise to her that the local bad boy at Seattle Grace spent an inordinate amount of time hitting on her. It was not the first time she had dealt with his type and while she found his persistence annoying, it was nothing she couldn't handle. He was a known quantity, a mine she could see and casually step around without concern.
Then she met Callie Torres, a fifth year resident specializing in orthopedics. Callie was life captured. She was tall, just shy of Erica's 5'10" frame with a full body that curved and moved invitingly. She was bold and brash and beautiful. Erica had noted from the start how beautiful Callie was with her long black hair that looked good no matter what Callie did to it, her flawless caramel skin and a smile that just pulled and tugged at you until you were forced to smile or laugh too. Callie Torres was what happened to you when you weren't paying attention. At least that's how it felt to Erica. Callie Torres had changed everything for her. She had, to her surprise, befriended Callie Torres and the mine field all of sudden became more crowded and harder to navigate.
After Callie Torres, she found her steps hesitant, her balance off, her vision blurred and fuzzy. In all honesty, she had never really been able to navigate the field effectively after Callie.
It had been a surprise to her how everything happened - atypical in every way - at least for her. Their friendship had come easily. That was odd. Friendship never came easy for Erica who was awkward and weird around people she didn't know or like, a category which usually included everyone. But she and Callie were easy. They found it easy to laugh together, talk, drink, dance - everything was just easier with Callie. Suddenly she had a friend and it was new and different and she knew it was putting her off balance, but there was something about her interactions with Callie that she wanted to explore and so she ignored that part of her that usually proceeded with caution, content to let the feelings, these new and interesting feelings, just wash over her.
She knew there was something peculiar going on with Callie, because Erica rarely put others above her patients or her career. But she did with Callie. She let Callie process the end of her marriage with her, listened like she had never listened to anyone before because she wanted Callie to be okay. It was somehow of tantamount importance that that little shit, George O'Malley not break Callie. So she put aside her natural impatience for people in personal crisis that couldn't just make a rational decision and move on, and was just there for Callie. When Callie finally signed those divorce papers, Erica was more relieved than Callie that Callie was free of it all. That should have been her first sign.
But Erica was a master of compartmentalization and so she didn't question her own feelings and just moved on, waiting for the next moment with Callie. She let Callie talk her into everything from all night dancing to sunrise yoga. That was the second sign. She had missed it completely. She should have been alerted by the third sign, but she was too mired in pain to recognize it. When Callie pulled back from her, from them, from the closeness they had established it had confused her. She didn't understand it until she saw Mark and Callie together. The pain was the sign. But it engulfed her and drove out all rational thought. She didn't see it for what it was. All she knew was that it had been her and Callie and now Callie had this thing with Mark and Erica was out. She should have gone back to her old self then, the one that did not make friends easily, the person that was a world class surgeon and nothing else. But the pain did not go away like it should have and seeing Callie or Mark either separate or together was like an incision that refused to heal.
That was when the confusion became too much, when she realized she couldn't work it out on her own and went to Dr. Wyatt. Dr. Wyatt was a psychiatrist, and while psychiatry was not an exact science, it was something and Erica needed something. She wanted someone to tell her what was going on, so she could deal with it and move on. But Dr. Wyatt had not been helpful or at least not in the way Erica wanted her to be. She encouraged Erica to talk to Callie, to tell her what she was feeling. But how could she do that when she didn't know what she was feeling?
In the end, she did tell Callie in her own way, that Callie's withdrawal had hurt her, because she didn't make friends easily and she had with Callie and now Callie was taking it back to be with Sloan. The whole conversation had not made sense to her. She did it expecting nothing to really change, but it had, because Callie had come clean and told her about Montgomery's comment and she laughed, because it seemed funny to her that anyone would mistake their friendship for something else.
In hindsight, she should have just let Callie withdraw from her despite the pain and confusion, because what happened after was just more pain and confusion and culminated in her ultimate retreat from Seattle as her only means of escape.
But for a time at least their friendship had returned and she had Callie back and that seemed like enough. But the references to Sapphic love and threesomes were disturbing to her in unexpected ways. When Callie touched her now, she noted the changes in her own blood pressure, the increased beating of her heart, the tingly feeling that those touches left on her skin, felt even through her clothes. And most telling was the thing she tried hard not to think about. The thing that, despite her best efforts, she thought about anyway and it always managed to produce a knot in her stomach: Callie and Sloan together. It was too hard to keep it all straight in her head, to keep the emotions in check, so she dragged herself back to Dr. Wyatt.
She didn't want to talk to Callie about what was happening with her like the good doctor suggested. She knew Callie and Callie would freak. She needed to find a way to resolve this on her own. The kiss in the elevator was the perfect opportunity. In her mind, it would resolve everything. She could kiss Callie in a setting that was clearly not serious, answer some of her internal questions, and mess with Mark as a bonus.
But again her rational plans became jumbled. Erica had not expected to linger, she had not expected to be affected by the feel of Callie's soft skin under her fingers. She had not expected the caress she bestowed on Callie. Callie did not react. She had read Callie's stunned face as she pulled away, made her parting shot to Sloan and walked away from the both of them as fast as her feet would carry her. She worried afterwards, afraid that Callie would retreat again.
But at least the questions had been answered, had been her thought as she drove home that night. Clearly she was attracted to Callie Torres. It should have freaked her out, but somehow it didn't. Since Callie was not interested, it was not something she needed to deal with too much and Callie was clearly not interested. This was all one sided. She didn't even need to figure out what this meant about her, because it was just Callie she was attracted to and nothing would come of it.
Callie had not retreated, but she did start acting strange around her again and she was giving Erica these looks that Erica was having a hard time deciphering. Sometimes she would look guiltily at Erica, like she did when she had finally showed up for the cement boy trauma. Other times the looks were more intense. She couldn't tell if Callie was frustrated, annoyed, or pained. Erica had not been able to figure out what that was about, but she was having a hard enough time getting a handle on herself, despite her earlier declaration that it was resolved, to worry about Callie's weird behavior too much.
And then Callie kissed her. Callie had really kissed her. There was no game, no pretense that the kiss was anything but a kiss, sweet and passionate. And she kissed Callie back, releasing some of the energy she had been keeping locked up. She pulled Callie to her and kissed her full on the lips, enjoying the taste, letting herself feel everything she had kept at bay.
They had been in front of the hospital parking lot and so things got awkward afterward. They needed to talk about what had just happened, but as Erica made the suggestion that they go somewhere quiet, she knew the moment was slipping away. She was watching it go as she looked at Callie standing there, agreeing but not really looking at her. Callie's eyes were everywhere looking for someone, Erica thought, but not her, not Erica. She went through the motions anyway and they agreed to meet at a bar and grill that was not Joe's, but was not too far away. They walked in separate directions toward their cars and Erica wondered why she was even bothering.
Apparently Callie had been curious, but the curiosity was quenched and she was done. For Erica, the kiss meant she had to think about this thing that was going on with her just a little more.
By the time she found her keys and made it to bar, the moment had fled the state. Callie had gotten her a glass of wine and was already halfway through a beer. She smiled as Erica made her way to the tiny table she had claimed, but her eyes went past Erica to the door.
They had made their way through their drinks without saying much. Finally Erica ended the agony declaring that she was tired and that perhaps they would be more ready to talk another time. Callie looked relieved. So they had smiled at each other and said their goodnights.
The next week had been spent ignoring each other as much as they could or alternatively trying to look busier than they were when they could no longer avoid each other. That kind of worked for Erica because she was starting to see the signs and she didn't like what they were telling her.
After being been called in on Callie's experimental hypothermia case, she knew she would have to deal with this thing, even if Callie wanted nothing to do with her. She had seen the look of utter and complete panic on Callie's face as she stood there struggling to answer the Chief and Bailey's questions, trying to deal with the complications that were possible with any treatment, but were practically guaranteed with experimental ones. She saw the cloud of doubt descend on Callie, saw her trying to back off of what she had started. And surprisingly Erica reached out a hand to steady Callie and ultimately prevented her from getting completely lost in the fear. The speech had tumbled out of her, about experimenting and trying new things and despite the double meaning, it centered Callie and allowed her to complete the procedure and to take charge of the situation; to harness the knowledge she had acquired and against all odds, actually pull it off.
She had recognized that sign, because Erica Hahn did not do that. She was not soft and cuddly. She did not hold resident's hands. She was harsh and impatient and had no time for stumbling doctors that tripped over their own words and expressed anything but complete confidence in their skills and ability. But she had held Callie's hand in that moment, she had reached out to her in a way she had never done with anybody professionally. And it had nothing to do with her changing or growing as a teacher and everything to do with this particular woman; this woman that she could not stand seeing hurt or confused or insecure.
I need to figure this out anyway, she had been thinking, as she signed off on one last chart before walking out of the hospital that night. Even if Callie Torres wanted nothing to do with her, Erica needed to figure out what this meant about herself.
But Callie had surprised her by wanting to try. She stood in front of Erica trying to be brash and bold and confident, but unable to hide the little girl that felt scared and vulnerable and unsure. Erica never hesitated to share her own doubts and insecurities, because this was Callie and she couldn't do anything about Callie's fears, but she could let her know that she wasn't alone. They agreed to be scared together.
It had been the start of something so incredible and beautiful and life altering that Erica barely knew how to get a handle on it. But Callie did not really keep up her end of the bargain and in the end, she found herself always chasing Callie. They would take a step closer to figuring things out and then Callie would run and Erica would give chase. Even after she realized Callie was running to Mark of all people, she pushed her discomfort aside, the nagging feeling of nausea that was trying to warn her of the impending pain, and continued the chase. And worse, even after discovering that Callie was going to Mark for more than emotional support, that their physical relationship had not quite ended, she had not done the smart thing. Instead, she said okay, hoping she could deal, hoping that Callie would work out whatever she had to work out and find her way back to Erica.
But hope started to dwindle after that and when Callie chose to side with Izzie Stephens and the hospital over her and her patient. Her patient lost a heart because Izzie Stephens had not been a professional, had allowed her personal feelings for a patient to take precedence over her oath as a doctor. Stephens cut that LVAD line to move him up on the transplant list. That was wrong. Anyway you looked at it, it was wrong - morally, legally, and ethically - it was wrong. Callie had not seen it that way. Callie told her she was wrong, had stood on the other side of the line with Mark and the hospital and left Erica out in the cold.
And so she left. She did not reported them, wanting to sever ties with the place forever. Not reporting them was the most selfish thing she had ever done as a doctor. She wondered still whether that had been the right decision. Had she reported them there would be an investigation and she would be involved. She would have to face them and she had simply decided that she was done letting Seattle cut her heart away piece by piece. Instead, she would take what remained and go somewhere else.
She resigned. She put the word out that she was looking and to her surprise she received offers immediately. Too stunned and hurt to think clearly she picked the first job offer that came her way outside of Seattle and just packed up and went. She hadn't considered her career or whether the move made sense. She just left never expecting to return.
But time sometimes brings with it clarity and with clarity came the realization that her hasty move had been bad. There was nothing about San Francisco Medical that appealed to her. She was lucky that Mercy had never really given up on her. Months into her job at San Francisco Medical, she knew she had made a mistake and started listening to Mercy West. She listened to their offer and had to admit, it was hard to pass up. They were offering Chief of Surgery. It took awhile to work everything out. Mercy had to deal with the old Chief who was way past retirement age, but stubborn. He had not wanted to move, was angry at the Board and that made things complicated. But it was done now.
In six months she would be on her way back to Seattle. Not to Seattle Grace, but to Seattle and she had to mentally prepare herself for that. Because Seattle meant Callie and while time had given her clarity in her professional life, it had not been so kind on her heart. Her heart still hurt. She had left pieces of her heart with Callie Torres in Seattle and had not felt whole since. A meeting with Callie, she imagined, would be disastrous for her.
She had learned to be content in San Francisco. She wasn't happy, but she was surviving, which was more than she could have hoped for when she left Seattle. She hoped she could continue to survive with pieces of her heart missing. She didn't know what she would do if she ran into Callie. She couldn't very well ask for the pieces back. She suspected that just seeing Callie would awaken a longing she had worked her at suppressing the last six months. Erica would just have to stay away from Seattle Grace. She could do that. She could make her life at Mercy West and never have to set foot in Seattle Grace again.