A/N: I am continuing this story. I have a map of where I want it to go. For those that have read this in the past, I appreciate your devotion. For those that are new to this story, you should know I do not update frequently. I wanted to abandon this story after I took a writing class and realized how poorly written it is. However, I still love the idea I had behind it, even if the writing isn't as great as it should be. I feel like I need to complete it for my own reasons, and I hope it is at least an entertaining read for those of you who enjoyed the story thus far. Thank you again for your patience. Not sure when I will update again, but the story will be finished sometime during summer break from college. Also, last chapter left off with a sort of promise of Calzona smut, and I will be having a flash back to it in another chapter, but from Aaliyah's unfortunate perspective of having to overhear it while unable to sleep. So it will not be very graphic or sexy. Just so you don't get your hopes up.
The next morning, the sun rose on Seattle and after a quick game of hide and seek, the sun won out and the tired clouds finally retreated. The ocher walls of Aaliyah's bedroom smiled at her through the photos that were tacked there. She sat up in bed, her body slumped over, with thin lines etched in her face that were opened just enough to show beady pupils. As she took in the bright morning light, she thought how cruel the world could be, sharing it's sunshine with a city always cast in shadow, on a day so dark for her. Becoming more aware of her surroundings, she pulled her attention to the faint banging noises that were coming from the kitchen. The sounds of food sizzling and the muffled voices of her parents interrupted her from returning back to last night's events and she crawled off of her bed, onto tired feet that carried her across the taupe carpet.
She didn't register if she had shut her door, or if her parents had said good morning. Everything felt like it was on an entirely different plane. She felt so disconnected from the world she belonged to yesterday.
With twelve cups of coffee in her system, the brunette wondered if there was such a thing as coffee poisoning. Since last night, she felt too sick to fall asleep, and it had nothing to do with her HIV. The sun peaked in through the basement window blinds, creating a pattern of dark gray stripes on her mustard yellow walls. Her aunt wouldn't wake up for another, she looked at the time on the VCR clock, five hours.
"Aaliyah will have woken up by now," she thought to herself, and immediately her stomach twisted in pain at the guilt she felt, (or was it regret, she wasn't sure which she felt more upset about.) She decided thirteen cups of coffee would be too much, so she reluctantly made her way upstairs, almost forgetting to hop over the broken step, before she planted herself in front of the off-pink fridge, grazing for something to fill her up.
"Maddie, remember those scans Mama showed you of little girls with broken legs?" Callie said over her shoulder at the little girl dancing on top of the wooden chair at the breakfast table.
"Yea Mama I sawed them. I remember them," said Madeline, her brown eyes bugging out at the memory.
"Well unless you want your legs to look like that I suggest you get down before you fall." The girl complied as her Mama tossed the scrambled eggs about in the pan one more time. Aaliyah sat herself at a bar stool, staring down at the counter where a plate slid into view seemingly out of no where. She hadn't been paying close attention to the buzz around her, though bits and pieces filtered through now and then. It wasn't until her Mom jabbed her in the shoulder that she focused on what was being said to her.
"Li, did you get any sleep? You look terrible. Are you sick?" Arizona's voice rose at the end. "Do I need to bring you in to the hospital?" she put her own plate of bacon and toast down, intent on getting the thermometer before Aaliyah reached out and grabbed her arm.
"I'm fine, just..." she trailed off, not knowing what to say, but knowing she needed to reply with something. "I just remembered I have an essay due Monday and I never started so I stayed up all night doing the reading." she lifted a forkful of egg up off the plate before placing it back down, not feeling like eating. "I'm trying to go vegetarian now Mom.." the young blonde lied.
Arizona sucked in a deep breath before munching on her crispy bacon in thought.
She knew her daughter was lying, not about her diet but about her essay. She had seen her reading her book throughout the week, sometimes to the kids in the paeds commons. Liyah didn't lie to her parents often, and never about really big things, but she was a teenager now and as much as Arizona dreaded the thought, she knew she would one day have to back off and let her daughter make her own decisions. Today was a step in that direction, although if Arizona were being honest with herself, she would have to admit that she would be listening in to more of her daughter's phone conversations... and maybe even glance down purposefully at her laptop's screen when she walked past... Just to make sure nothing bad was happening.
Callie finished her plate and got her son some more before handing a banana to Aaliyah. "Eat this at least, and then I want you working on that essay right away. Procrastinators don't make it past their boards."
"Alex Karev-"
"Is lucky he had your Mom on his ass-" Arizona shot Callie that look, "butt all the time. And you happen to be fortunate enough to have that same special treatment. Now eat." Aaliyah fed herself if only to stop her parents from getting on her case. She was in absolutely no mood today. Her heart was broken and the part of her that wasn't completely consumed in the misery of that considered whether or not she should administer a shot of adrenaline to it to get it pumping right again.
Aaliyah sat at her laptop, staring blankly at the blinding white screen of the word processor. Callie walked behind her in the living room, frantically gathering some random things; "probably her phone, keys, and Danny's back pack" Liyah mused. The Latina was running late for work and she still had to drop Danny off at his friend's for the day.
"It's fine babe, I can drop him off on my way to Wegman's," Arizona reassured her wife. "I've just got to get a shower and get Madeline ready."
"But Carl's Mom is taking us to the skate park before the teenagers take it over and I can't be late!"
"Oh. No, no skate park." Callie looked from the irate face of her son to her hesitant wife for help.
"Calliope, little boys like to play rough, and as long as he wears the protective gear I don't have any issue with him skating."
"Skate BOARDING mom, not skating." Danny groaned.
"And you know Marie will watch them like a hawk. Like a ninja hawk with special secret service training." Arizona exaggerated.
"Besides, if I break something you can just fix it."
"You aren't helping Danny."
Somehow, the issue was settled because Aaliyah found herself still staring at a blank screen moments later, but with a nearly quiet house. After a few moments of torturing herself with thoughts of her, Aaliyah began to type up her essay if only to distract herself. She wrote a quick introductory paragraph about the way the fairies in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" manipulated the characters in the forest and the history behind the title of the play. Normally Aaliyah hated Shakespeare, but she had honestly enjoyed this play more than any of the others she had been forced to read for class.
That was how she had felt before she was abandoned by her girlfriend. Now, she resented the book for its themes of love and for the way Helena ended up getting the man of her dreams in the end through a spell. The irony of not having her own fairy to watch over her lesbian love life did not escape her, and only furthered her resentment. Regardless of how she felt though, the essay was still due Monday, and so she continued to type until her essay became more of a diary entry where she ranted on about the absurdity of having someone change their heart so abruptly just because of a flower with magical powers.
Her essay continued to disclose some personal information about her own love life as evidence as to why the play "was an unrealistic slap in the face that was comparable to any Kate Hudson one and a half star chick flick in theatres today."
By the time Aaliyah was finished her essay, Arizona had already showered and was braiding her youngest daughter's hair.
"Did you finish your essay?" Arizona shouted over her shoulder to Aaliyah.
"Yea."
"You wanna come with? You can pick up a treat for tonight," Arizona asked, trying to cheer her up. She still wished Li would open up to her but she wasn't going to push her, so when Aaliyah turned her down, she let it go.
"Mommy, can I pick out a treat for tonight!" asked a hopeful Madeline.
"I'll make you a deal: you behave at the store and in the car and you can pick out a dessert for everyone." She finished with a final loop of the elastic hairband snapping into place. Madeline cheered and ran to her bedroom to pick out a plush friend to bring along for the journey.
Aaliyah came back to her laptop after grabbing a glass of water to find that the paper had jammed in the printer. She yanked it out and selected the print button again. When nothing happened, she clicked a few more times, frustrated with the slow response of her computer. Finally it began to print.
The essay was only meant to be one page but in her rant she lost track of that fact and ended up with three very revealing pages. Her mind was so stressed out that she hadn't realized exactly what she had done, so she grabbed the essay, collated it with a quick shuffle in her hands, and went to her bedroom to tuck it away in her book bag.
Madeline had returned with an armful of fuzzy colorful friends, dropping a duck or a penguin here and there. She had become interested in birds and collected a new plush every time she visited the aviary gift shop at the zoo. Apparently she believed she was part robin because of her Mommy's last name. Arizona just shook her head and told her to bring ONE friend along and only one because there weren't enough seat belts for all of her friends. The little girl couldn't argue with that logic and so she ran back to her room, gathering the odd fallen toy on her way.
Arizona was about to call Aaliyah to tell her to shut the printer off if she was done when she noticed a stack of papers piled in the tray. She figured her daughter might be laying down still not feeling well, so she grabbed them and began to order then for her by page number. When she had everything in order, she walked towards Aaliyah's bedroom when something, a name, on the essay caught her eye.
"...Natalie could not love me any more than Demetrius loved Helena. It was all a lie. The poor girl could not see because of the dreamlike haze of it all but she was being used by Demetrius, who even with a spell probably only wanted her for her body, because lets face it the dominant one always wants sex, and us girls like Helena are desperate enough to give it to them. And then, they're gone just like Lysander after the spell was lifted." Arizona read one of the more brief paragraphs from her daughter's essay. Panic overtook her senses. "the dominant one always wants sex, and us girls like Helena are desperate enough to give it to them." Arizona knocked on her eldest daughter's bedroom door calmly, intent on having a discussion about this. "How could she be so irresponsible! She said she was a virgin!" thoughtArizona as she heard Aaliyah make her way to the door.