Disclaimer: Uhm, yeah. They still haven't tried to sell me Grey's Anatomy, and I still don't have enough money to try to buy it.
A/N: This isn't quite what you guys asked for, I don't think, but I kinda like it anyway. (: The italics are flashbacks, sort of, and they should make more sense when the next chapter comes around. This one was easier to write than the last chapter, and I think it turned out a little bit better, too, though I wasn't too sure about Cristina... Well, what do you think?

The Scars to Prove It
Chapter 10 : Survive

A gasp escapes her lips as the knife settles in her stomach. Her knees buckle out from under her but Jose grabs her, keeping her up. The pain has already started shooting through her body, and she can feel the blood slowly starting to soak through her shirt. He forces her head up and when she refuses to meet his eyes, he squeezes his hand around her jaw and sends his knee up until it connects with her stomach. She hears something crack and feels the knife move in her stomach. When the pain begins to melt together, and she decides she just wants it to stop, she moves to meet his gaze. His eyes hold the anger and hatred and disgust she's accustomed to, only there's more of it now than she remembers ever seeing before. She's sure he can see the pain and questions in her own eyes because soon enough, he's giving her the closest thing to an answer that she had expected.

"Your father would be calling you soon, trying to find me," he says, and there is no remorse lying under the coldness of his voice. "And Damien will be close to figuring out about Brandon as well."

And that is all the answer Callie needs. She tries to figure it all out just from that, but her head is starting to feel light on her shoulders and the thoughts keep getting jumbled up. Then she decides that he must be afraid of Carlos. But then what about Damien? He'll be told about Brandon soon anyway, so why is Jose so concerned? His grip on her loosens ever-so-slightly and she winces as her knees fall from underneath her just a little bit more. She doesn't want to die here, not now, not like this...

"Brandon was in a nasty accident, wasn't he?" Jose whispers in her ear before taking a step backwards. He lets go of her arm and though she tries to fight to stay up, her legs collapse underneath her. She hears him chuckle, then footsteps move away from her, but it isn't until she hears the door start to open that she looks up at him. He looks back at her and smirks as the hatred intensifies in her eyes. The realization has settled over her face and she doesn't think she's ever hated him as much as she does now.

The door closes behind Jose and Callie pulls herself towards her purse, trying her best to ignore the pain that shoots through her. She can feel the blood smear against the carpet as she moves. She has her hand in her purse and is fishing for her cell phone when her pager goes off again, and the beeping is almost enough to make her head explode. Her temples are once again throbbing, but right now, she's wishing she still had a hangover instead of this.

She shoves the pager as far away from her as she can, hoping that it will lessen the sound a little bit. Her hand tightens around her phone and she sighs in relief as she pulls it out. She fumbles with it for a second before managing to flip it open. She presses the buttons but her vision is starting to blur and she has to try a few times before she gets the correct three numbers in and can hit the 'send' button. The woman who answers makes her repeat herself several times and asks a bunch of pointless questions, but after a few tries Callie gets her to understand the location, her name, and what's wrong. The lady promises that an ambulance will be there soon and that is all Callie needs to hear. She drops the phone without even bothering to hang up; she can hear the woman's voice still coming out of the earpiece but she can't make out any of the words. She presses her hands around the knife in a futile attempt to stop, or at least slow down, the bleeding.

Finally, as consciousness starts to fade away from her, she lets her head rest against the dirty carpet. The last thing she hears before everything goes black are sirens and a group of people running down the hallway.

----

"Since when do you knock, Cal?" Mark calls as he gets up from the couch and walks towards his door. It's been about half an hour since he paged her, so he assumed she would be home by now. He pulls the door open and his eyebrows furrow in confusion when he notices it isn't Callie at all. "Arizona?"

"Hey," she says quickly, and he notices that she looks just as frantic as she sounds. "Have you seen Calliope?"

"No," he answers, the confusion still evident in his face and voice. "I paged her a little bit ago. She told me to if she wasn't home when I got off."

"Did she say where she was going?" Arizona asks, but she's pretty sure she already knows where the brunette is.

"No." He opens the door even more. "Come in," he offers, then adds, "and tell me what's going on. Why are you freaking out?"

Arizona just shakes her head. "I've got... I have to go," she says, but she only makes it halfway down the hall before both of their pagers start going off.

Mark grabs his jacket and is out the door without a single glance at his pager, and manages to make it into the elevator right behind Arizona. He takes a glance at the blond beside him. He isn't sure what's going on with her and Callie anymore, but he doesn't like it. Callie usually tells him everything... Or at least that's what he'd always thought.

----

They walk into the hospital nearly side-by-side, and Cristina is there waiting for them. The ER is busy, with doctors and nurses running around trying to attend to all of the different patients filling the beds. As far as they can see, though, there aren't any kids, which makes Arizona wonder why she was paged. Mark is scanning the room for any patients who might need plastic surgery, and though he finds some (as well some who might want to consider it even though they aren't injured), he doesn't see any that are so drastic that he needed to be paged.

Even so, Mark asks, "What happened? Where do we need to go?"

"Pile-up on the highway," Cristina answers offhandedly. Then she shakes her head. "You two don't need to go anywhere. You weren't paged for this."

Both attendings look at Cristina in confusion. "Then what were we paged for?" Arizona asks, biting her lip. If she isn't needed here, she really wants to go find Calliope.

"We have..." Cristina seems to be struggling for her words and this alarms Mark. Then her face hardens, and for the first time, Mark realizes that there had been fear and pain in her eyes a few moments ago. Arizona notices this too, and her eyebrows squeeze closer together. Yang sighs. "It's Callie," she finally says. "They already took her to surgery."

The color drains from their faces and Cristina swallows thickly. Mark can see the fear on Arizona's face and she can see the disbelief on his.

"What... What happened to her?" Mark manages.

"I don't know," Cristina says honestly. "She had a stab wound in her lower abdomen."

Mark nods just to let her know that he understands. The pieces start to fall into place in Arizona's mind and she hesitantly croaks out, her voice barely audible, "Where was she found?"

Cristina looks at her in surprise, caught somewhat off-guard by the seemingly random question. "Some hotel a few blocks away, I think."

"Jose," Arizona whispers, but neither of them hear her. Why hadn't she figured that out earlier? If she had, maybe Callie wouldn't be fighting for her life in the OR room right now.

She is fighting, right? Arizona runs a hand through her hair and Mark wipes a hand down the stubble growing on his chin. Both want to know how she's doing, what the chances of survival are, how long it will be before she gets out of surgery, what the side effects could be, how bad the injuries are, exactly what surgery they're performing...

But they are both too afraid of the answers to ask. What if she's barely hanging on? What if there's little to no chance she'll survive? What if she gets out, but never wakes up? What if she can't remember them, or suffers brain injuries, or has some other sort of problem? As far as they know, anything could happen. Anything could be happening.

"I don't know a whole lot," Cristina admits. Mark can tell this is scaring her, too, even though she's trying to hide it. "But if you want, I can tell you what I do know..."

Mark nods numbly. Arizona is practically burning a hole in the ground with her stare and he wonders if she even knows Cristina was just talking. The younger doctor starts walking towards the waiting room and they follow. Mark wraps an arm around Arizona's shoulders and pulls her close as he wills the tears not to fall. She already has tears streaming down her face, and the last thing he needs is to start crying, too. If he started now, he doesn't know if he'd be able to stop. This is his best friend who has her life in the balance.

"She lost quite a bit of blood," Cristina says once they've all sat down. This, being a doctor, she can do. She can pretend she isn't talking about one of her friends and just be a doctor, talking to the family of a patient. Or she can pretend that they're just practicing, pretending that something is wrong with Callie so they can get better at what they do. Like she, Meredith, George, Izzie, and Alex used to do. This is her comfort zone. "She had a punctured lung..." Cristina takes a deep breath as the images of Callie lying on the bed they pulled out of the ambulance rush back to the front of her mind. Maybe this won't be as easy as she thought. "She was unconscious when she got here, so I don't know about brain damage... They took her back for exploratory surgery probably about half an hour ago..."

Somewhere through that, Arizona buried her head in Mark's shoulder as the tears continued to pour out of her eyes. How did this happen to her Calliope? She knows it was Jose, it had to be Jose. That had to be what the address was for. She should have stopped her. She should have known better than to let Calliope walk out of the hospital and go there. Arizona had had a bad feeling as soon as she read the address on that slip of paper. She should have found some way to make Calliope stay at the hospital for just a little while longer. She could have done it, she could have found a way...

Mark holds Arizona tightly beside him, almost afraid of letting go. Tears are stinging in his eyes and it takes everything he has not to let them run down his face. He should have paged Callie when he first got off, not when he got home. Maybe those twenty minutes or so would have made a difference. That amount of time could have saved her life. If only he had thought about it, maybe she wouldn't be here right now, at least not like this. They wouldn't be here right now. There would be no worrying, no fear, no tears. They could move on with their lives, have just another boring night in after work.

"I'll go see if there are any updates," Cristina offers. She doesn't do too well in situations like these and watching them, watching how this is effecting them is making her think about it more and more and she can't do that. She has to try to stay detached. She has to stay professional and calm.

Mark nods. "Thank you," he whispers, his voice cracking. Cristina nods at him before leaving, and once she has left the room the tears start to slide down his face. There are a ton of other people in the room, no doubt relatives of the patients in the ER or other patients scattered around the hospital, but he doesn't know a single one of them and so he doesn't care. His shoulders start to shake as he sobs, and Arizona grabs a fistful of his shirt in her hand. For some reason, it comforts him to know that Arizona is right here beside him. He hates that she has to go through this, but it's nice to know somebody's there, even if she is crying just as much as he is.

----

The little boy laughs at her as she spins around. "Aunt Callie," he whines through his laughter, "You aren't supposed to do it like that!" She grins despite the pang in her heart as he calls her Aunt Callie and crouches down to her knees. He has Jose's - Aria's? - hair and skin color, but those big brown eyes are definitely from her.

"Well how did you mean it then?" she asks, and she follows him obediently as he grabs her hand and pulls her further into the living room. He instructs her on how to do it the 'right way,' and she can't help but smile at how adorable he is. Why did she give this all up?

----

Tears are still rolling down Mark's face when he realizes that Arizona has cried herself to sleep on his lap. She can't be very comfortable, and he won't be surprised if she has neck pains when she wakes up, but she finally looks peaceful. Her face is red from crying, and even in her sleep she doesn't look happy, but at least she isn't dealing with the pain right now. He hopes she doesn't have to wake up soon; he doesn't want her to have to keep feeling this pain. He might not show it that well, or very often, but he really does care for Arizona. She may have ended up hurting Callie, but he can tell that she still loves her. He can tell that they still love each other.

He finds himself absentmindedly rubbing her arm and back. He's gotten lost in his thoughts again, and he can't force himself to think about anything else even though that's all he wants to do. He can't help but think about Callie, only a few hallways away with a stab wound, and how he's just sitting here, useless. There isn't a damn thing he can do to help save his friend's life.

She can't die. Mark won't let her. What is he supposed to do without her? Who would be there to tell him, when it starts to happen again, that his man-whoring ways are wrong, but still not judge him on it? Who would be there to actually understand? She is probably the only person he has ever met that truly understands what he feels. Derek is a good friend, sure, but he doesn't get it. Derek has always been the mature, marrying kind. Callie understands why he needs the sex, no strings attached, because she's been there before. Who will be there to yell at him when he's starting to act too immature? Who will be there to gossip with him at the lunch table, or make fun of random people walking by in the halls? Who will talk him out of the slump he gets in after a break-up? He's gotten mad at her and he's tried to push her away so many times, but she always comes back and pushes her way back into his life. How many people would try that hard, especially for someone like him?

He needs his best friend. He needs his work wife.

----

Her dad pushes open her bedroom door. Usually she would be mad at him for not knocking, but she can see the tears building up in his eyes and his shoulders are slumped forward.

"What's wrong, Daddy?" Callie asks, the worry starting to build up in her. A million different scenarios are running through her head at a million miles a minute, but none of them are anywhere near what comes out of his mouth.

"It's Brandon, Calliope," he says, and his voice sounds smaller than she has ever heard it. "He was hit by a car. We need... We need to get to the hospital."

----

Mark lets a few more tears slide down his cheeks before he sees Cristina walking down the hall towards him. He thinks about waking Arizona up, and is still trying to decide when Cristina confirms it.

"She might want to hear this."

"No, don't leave me to die here
Help me survive here
Alone, don't remember, remember"
"Evil Angel" - Breaking Benjamin