Disclaimer: I own nothing. If I did, that last scene with Arizona and Boswell? Never would've happened.
Author's Note: I wanted to get this out before the finale. I know, I know, it's just another in a long list of similar fics, but I wanted to have one of my own. I threw in some quotes from older episode's of Grey's - tied it in with the last time something like this happened to Callie, with George and Izzie - but I don't know if it turned out like I hoped. Let me know, please? Reviews are always appreciated. Not sure if I'll continue this or not - depends probably on whether or not anyone wants me to, as well as if I feel inspired enough to be able to. (And probably partly on how badly Thursday's episode pisses me off, to be honest.) Anyway, without any further ado, here's the story.
Bring on the Rain.
There is silence. Thunder crashes outside the window and rain pounds against the roof and life is still moving on out in the hallway. There's the squeaking of rubber shoes against linoleum, the faint beeping of heart monitors, the muffled voices of nurses. But inside the room there is nothing but silence. Arizona tries not to focus on her heart pounding in her ears and Callie tries to ignore all the memories and voices roaring through her head.
There is silence in the room until it all builds up and Callie decides she can't handle it anymore. The images of her wife pressed against another woman won't leave her head, playing behind her eyes on a continuous loop, making up possible scenario after possible scenario, trying to find all the potential ways each movement could have been made – over and over and over, her wife and some other woman, her marriage being tossed away in a matter of seconds, the love of her life, everything she has spent years looking for, years fighting for –
There is silence until Callie's fist collides into the wall, the thud echoing through the small on-call room Arizona drug her into. Her hand stings with pain – no, it throbs, it hurts like hell – but she forces herself not to feel it. It feels like a dull ache compared to the train wreck going on in her head right now. Her breathing is heavy, her chest heaving, a whirlwind of noises and emotions swirling through her brain. She stares at the wall, at the small indention she just made, but she doesn't quite see it. It doesn't quite register.
Arizona winces. She doesn't know what exactly is going on in Callie's head right now, but it is her fault. The guilt is eating her alive. She just got caught up in the moment, in having someone else want her.
"Callie?" she finally asks, quiet and unsure, after another minute of silence from the brunette. She isn't sure exactly what she expected but she thinks it was something more vocal. The anger she expected, sure, but yelling and slamming doors, crying and screaming and cussing. Not punching walls and staying silent. Callie has always been the loud one out of the two, not the silent one, and it scares her.
But Callie can only think about sitting in a hotel room staring at the wall as George finally tells her he slept with Izzie Stevens. She was silent then, too, but she had known long before he told her. She had been prepared. She had told herself they were married and marriage was supposed to last forever. She had been trying to convince herself that she could forgive him and get over it and they could move on. Then she had proven herself wrong.
"What I did to you… It's unforgivable." They had been friends. She had forgiven him enough to be his friend but she doesn't know that she could have ever forgiven him enough to be married to him again. Or maybe she had just realized that he wasn't the one for her. She doesn't know; she can't tell the difference now.
She is sure that Arizona is the one for her. Does that make this forgivable? Or does it just make it even more painful?
Where she had figured it out with George and Izzie, this was unexpected. It was sudden. There was no warning. Hell, Boswell has only been in town a few days.
Arizona was supposed to be the one person she could count on to never leave her. She was supposed to always be there. Even when she was yelling and screaming at Callie for cutting off her leg, even when she wouldn't look at her, even when every word Arizona said was meant to hurt and blame and ruin her wife, she was there. She was there and that meant something, it meant more than every hurtful word or thrown book. It was enough.
Except now. Now everything has changed and Callie doesn't even know what's going on in her own life anymore.
Then she stops. Closes her eyes. Should this really be that big of a surprise? It's just another in a long list of failures. Just another good thing she couldn't hold onto. She wasn't good enough to keep George; it had been her and Izzie and she had said it herself, "I can't compete with you." She wasn't good enough to keep Erica, wasn't lesbian enough. Her family disowned her. She had a baby with Mark – a baby she loves more than anything in the world, but a baby with Mark all the same. Then she messed up her relationship with Arizona more times than she'd like to admit – she ruined Africa, she wanted a baby, she cut off her wife's leg and now she can't keep their marriage from falling apart.
Seems like the only things she's ever been good at were surgery and fucking up.
Callie can't help the dry chuckle that escapes her then. She's back at square one. Back to being that same girl she was five years ago, before she had ever heard of Arizona Robbins. She thought she had grown since then, and in some ways, she still feels like she has. But she has gone from being the one who has it all figured out to the one grasping for just one broken piece of her life to hold onto.
"Callie?" Arizona tries again, confusion now evident in her voice. Laughter can't be a good sign.
She thought that Arizona was the one for her. She thinks she still does. But how do you come back from this? How do they get that trust back? Callie runs a hand over her face, wiping away the tears she hasn't let fall yet. The storm rages on outside the walls of their tiny room and she wants to laugh again, remembering the rain that poured down on the day George came clean about Izzie. She can still feel the rain coating her hair, soaking into her clothes, running down her skin.
Maybe it's fitting. She felt broken then, hurt and betrayed and like she had been knocked down a few good inches. But that was nothing compared to this feeling. She isn't sure she will ever be able to hold her head up again. She isn't sure that she will ever be able to feel whole again. Her world has been ripped apart; everything she believes in has been destroyed. This feeling makes what she felt then seem like a teenage break-up; this storm outside makes the one that day seem like a light misting.
"Please, Callie, please say something."
She has to take a deep breath. She has to steady herself before she can bring herself to say anything. Callie has always been impulsive, always been loud and unable to hide her emotions. She doesn't want to say anything she is going to regret later, and with everything running through her brain she doesn't trust herself to speak. "Get out," she finally manages, her voice barely audible over the storm. When Arizona doesn't move she feels the anger shoot through her again. "Get out," she repeats, louder and stronger, almost shouting.
She hears a low sigh and soft footsteps. Arizona stops by the door, her hand hovering above the handle, staring back at her wife. When the door doesn't open Callie glances up, tears shining even in the dim light of the room, her face illuminated by a shot of lightning. "I love you," Arizona whispers, searching Callie for any reaction.
Callie isn't sure what to do with the words. She isn't sure how to process them, isn't sure how to make them fit with what she has just learned. If Arizona loves her, why would she sleep with Lauren Boswell? Why would she sleep with anyone else? "You don't destroy the person that you love." Callie had said the words herself, yelled them at a freshly dead patient's boyfriend as she did her best not to punch him in the face. And she had meant them. She still believes in them. "You just didn't want to be alone," she had said. "Or maybe, maybe she was just good for your ego. Or maybe she made you feel better about your miserable life, but you didn't love her." So she wonders, did Arizona love her?
"Maybe God wasn't here, either," is all Callie can say, her words quiet and soft. She isn't sure that Arizona could even hear them, not with the distance between them and the storm picking up just outside the window.
"If it's any consolation," she had told Mrs. O'Malley, "George and I got married on the Vegas strip. I'm not sure God was even there." The woman had looked at her with such shock ("God is everywhere," she had promised) and Callie had wanted so badly to believe that she was wrong and Mrs. O'Malley was right. But she hadn't felt Him there with her; she hadn't felt Him for a long time, since she was a little kid attending Mass every Sunday with her parents. She used to believe in God, in marriage, in heaven and hell, but then that had all fallen away from her and she only had love to believe in. And now that was taken away from her, too, with every heartbreak that tore away at her life. With this heartbreak.
Her mother thought that she was going to hell just because she loved Arizona, because she was marrying a woman, but standing there with Bailey reading the script, she had felt like God was with her. She had felt like it was right. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was just hope. Maybe it was just that she wanted it so badly that she was trying to make herself feel better. Maybe God hadn't been there at all; maybe He really had turned His back on her years ago. Maybe He knew just how big of a failure she was and that there was no hope for her.
She doesn't know if she really believes that or not. She doesn't know what she believes anymore. She just wants this to all go away.
There's confusion on the blonde's face, but only seconds pass before Callie turns away, shutting her eyes tight against the tears threatening to fall. Moments later she hears the door open, Arizona take a few steps, and the click of the door closing behind her. The sound seems to resonate through the room, loud and sharp even against the thunder. And then she's alone again, so very alone, just herself and the heartbreak and the storm.
She wants to add to the indention in the wall but she feels like she's about to throw up the food she ate earlier and her hand already hurts like hell. "Fuck," she breathes, rubbing the throbbing knuckles as she turns to lean her back against the wall instead.
Things were just starting to get back to being good. They were starting to get back to normal. They were sleeping together and laughing and comfortable and both taking Sofia to the park. They could joke and tease and it seemed like Arizona believed her when she told her how beautiful she was. And Callie could feel her heart swell every time she saw Arizona smile, which seemed to be happening more often. Things weren't perfect but it felt like they were getting there, one step at a time. Or at least that's what she had thought. But she has a bad habit of being wrong and maybe she shouldn't be too surprised about that, either.
Part of her wants to storm down the hallway and find Lauren Boswell. She wants to make the oh-so-perfect doctor hurt just as much as she does. She wants to show her just how strong her right hook is, just how much pressure it takes to snap a human bone in half.
But the other part of her feels defeated. Beaten down by what her life has become. Ready to give up, ready to give in, to throw in the towel and be done with it all. Callie has been too close to her breaking point for months now and she is sometimes surprised that she has held on as well as she has.
She hasn't grieved completely for Mark yet; he remains in a corner of her mind, waiting to be dealt with, but other than a few tears or a memory every now and then she does everything she can not to think about him. It still doesn't feel like he or Lexie are really gone; sometimes she turns down the corner and sees dark hair and expects Lexie to turn around. Sometimes she reaches down to page Mark and realizes that no one would answer her calls. Sometimes she wants to find a book in the library and reaches for her phone, knowing Lexie would know exactly what she is looking for, and reaches the phone number just to remember that the woman never made it back from the plane crash. Sometimes she thinks about bursting through the door across from her apartment to tell him about whatever happened that day, and then she remembers that she will be greeted with nothing but an empty apartment and the stale smell of his cologne.
Just now she was reaching for her phone, ready to call Mark and tell him she needed him. But her hand stops halfway to her pocket.
She has raised a toddler for months now basically on her own. Until recently she has been the only one to see Sofia's first steps, the only one to try to teach her to use a spoon and to get her changed in the morning. She has struggled to get her to bed, trying to figure out what it was that Arizona did that made Sofia fall asleep so easily.
She has had to try to get over the fact that she cut off her wife's leg. That she was the one who did that. She has tried to get over that guilt, and she has tried to do it knowing that Arizona still blamed her. Part of Callie still blames herself; part of her knows it was the only option. She doesn't think that will ever go away.
She has tried to help Arizona get her spark back. She has dealt with the anger and the insults and every comment she has thrown her way, has endured every "fuck you" and "get the hell away from me." She has cleaned piss off the floor and never looked at her wife differently for it. She has backed off when Arizona needed it and been there to catch her when she needed it. She tried to be patient and she tried to be supportive and she's done everything she could, she has tried everything she could think of, has tried to make everything better.
And she still failed.
She doesn't know where to go from here. She doesn't know where she wants to go from here.
She feels the broken part of her win as she slides to the floor. She wraps her arms around her knees, leans her head against the wall, and cries.