The 502 Stories

By AmboDriver

Disclaimer: As usual, I don't own anything. I'm just playing around with them. They are owned by Shondaland, ABC, and probably a lot of other really rich folks.

A/N: Well at least this one has only been sitting about 5 weeks between updates (compared to about 9 weeks for my other story). Damned writers block combined with grad school and a full-time job…well, yeah, you can imagine. But I'm back on the horse now, so hoping to keep it up. Updates might not be super-fast, but they'll be better than they have been. Promise.

Hope you all enjoy this chapter. It's a little less happy than some, but a good and important scene from their joint recovery I think. I'd love to hear what you think, of course, and thank you all in advance for your reviews.

Chapter 8 – Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Arizona couldn't sleep. It was little wonder since the medical bed was far from comfortable, no matter what position she had it in. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. "We should move our bed back in here." The thought came so naturally to her that it surprised her and she laughed quietly to herself. "And then what? Then we have to figure out where we go from there, huh?" The thought strangely enough both terrified and excited her. She wanted things to start to get back to normal between her and Callie. They were making progress, but being able to sleep in the same room, in the same bed, would certainly be a huge step in the right direction. That still didn't mean it didn't terrify her.

Arizona rolled over on her side in an attempt to sleep when she heard something coming from the living room. It took her a moment to pick out the quiet noise, but soon she was sure it was her wife's voice, although she couldn't make out the words. Frowning, she sat up and reached for the crutches she had propped against the nightstand. She stood on her right foot and propped them under her armpits before slowly starting to hobble out into the living room.

The light from the moon and street lights shining through the windows was just enough to make out Callie sleeping on the sofa bed. She was half on her stomach, legs tangled in the sheets and blanket, and her hair was a mess hiding her face. Arizona frowned again as she watched Callie's head shake in her sleep. "Please. Please," her wife said quietly, her voice strangled with emotion.

Arizona instantly recognized Callie's nightmare state. She wasn't often one to have them, but it had certainly happened at least a handful of times in all the years they had been sharing a bed. With that experience behind her, Arizona knew that if she didn't wake Callie up now, her desperation would just increase until she woke up, likely screaming, and most definitely falling off the sofa bed and potentially hurting herself on the coffee table.

Anticipating at least a small cry at the interruption to her nightmare, Arizona quickly went to Sofia's door and peeked in, noticing that their daughter seemed completely knocked out. She let out a brief sigh of relief and shut the door firmly, hoping that any noise Callie might make when interrupted wouldn't disturb their daughter's rest. They didn't need a crying toddler on their hands this late at night if they could help it.

Arizona then hopped back over to the living room and sat down on the coffee table. She moved her crutches on the other side of the table and then took a deep breath. She leaned over to Callie and shook her shoulder gently. "Callie, wake up," she said, trying to keep her voice just loud enough to do the trick. When Callie just shook her head and continued to mumble out a stream of ever more frantic pleading, she did it again, shaking her shoulder harder and increasing the volume of her voice. "Callie, wake up."

"Huh? What?" Callie asked as her body jerked awake. Her arm flew out, as if trying to ward off some unexpected attack, and her eyes blinked open. "What?" It took her a few moments until her eyes seemed to focus, all the while her chest rising and falling quickly with the panicked breaths she was pulling into her lungs. Finally, she seemed to come back to herself and frowned. "Arizona?"

"Hey," she said, her voice low. She smiled gently, hoping to help calm her wife down. "You were having a nightmare."

"I'm sorry if I woke you," Callie said as she struggled to disentangle herself from the bedding wrapped around her feet. Finally, she kicked her legs free and sat up, turning to face Arizona. "I'm awake now. You can go back to bed."

For a split second Arizona considered doing just that, but she understood the power of nightmares, more now than ever, having suffered through them many nights in the last fourteen or so months—first in the wake of the car crash and then almost nightly since their plane fell from the sky. While Arizona was one to try to handle her own problems herself, she knew her wife needed to get things out. She wasn't someone who could keep her problems to herself for long and perhaps if Arizona talked it out with her, at least one of them would get a good night's sleep. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," Callie said dismissively as she rose to her feet and put distance between them by heading into the kitchen. She poked her head into the fridge and then looked over at Arizona. "Do you want some water?"

"Sure," Arizona said, waiting patiently for Callie to return with the bottles. She watched the way her wife didn't seem to want to look at her and the hesitant way she held the bottle of water out to Arizona, like she was afraid of being bitten. She waited for Callie to sit back down on the edge of the sofa bed and then ducked her head so that she could catch her gaze in the soft light from outside. "Please, tell me about the nightmare."

"It was nothing," Callie said, obviously lying, as she pulled her feet up underneath her and twisted the cap off the bottle. "Really, I don't even remember."

"You're lying." Arizona stood and used the couch arm rest to hold herself up as she leaned over and turned on the lamp on the end table. She then turned and sat next to Callie on the sofa bed, hoping that her wife would see she was serious about wanting to talk. "Now, just tell me so we can both try to get some sleep."

Callie stared at her, her eyes wide in fear, but she didn't look away. Finally, she seemed to deflate and her head fell. "I don't want to talk about it."

Arizona thought she knew what Callie was hesitant about. "Are you afraid of worrying me because I already have enough to worry about? Or do you think your nightmare isn't equal to the ones that I have all the time?" When Callie's breath obviously caught, Arizona realized she had struck a chord. "That's it, huh? This isn't a competition, Callie. I wasn't the only one who went through Hell. I know you did, too."

"It's nothing compared—"

"Stop it," Arizona said to cut her off. She let out a quick breath and softened her voice. "Sorry, but listen. I know we've both been so focused on me, for probably both the right and wrong reasons, but I want you to tell me what's going on. Please? The only way we're going to get through this is if we start being honest with one another."

Callie winced as she looked up at Arizona. "It's in the past Arizona."

"But it's not. If it were in the past you wouldn't be having nightmares. Now spill it." She took a swig from her water bottle, hoping that pulling back on the seriousness just a bit might do the trick.

Callie nodded as she let out a deep breath. "I was dreaming about the day they found you."

Arizona's brow furrowed. "You had a nightmare about me being found? Is your life so horrible with me around now that you're having nightmares about me being found?"

"No, no," Callie said as she grabbed Arizona's forearm. She stared at where her hand was and then quickly let go, as if she were surprised she had touched Arizona at all. Finally, she looked up at Arizona. "The dream is always the same. I'm sitting on the floor in the corner of the conference room. That became my little cave in a way to hide from the world while we waited hour after hour with no news. We had been told that morning that if they didn't find you by sunset they were going to have to scale back the search the next day. I knew that meant they figured you were all dead, so every minute that went by just made that such a bigger possibility."

Arizona pulled her leg up under her as she nodded. "As hard as it was to be out in those woods with my injury and the fear of not making it, I can't imagine how hard it would be to just not know where we were or how we were doing. At least I knew you and Sofia were safe. And it wasn't just me you had to worry about."

Callie nodded and wiped at her left eye. "I kept thinking about Sofia losing both of you." She closed her eyes and shook her head as if chasing away some thought or image. "I kept thinking how much she would miss out on without her daddy and her mama."

"You would have, too," Arizona added, hoping to prod her forward in revealing what was bothering her.

"Yeah," Callie said with a nod. She kept her eyes on the water bottle in her hands, but didn't say anything else.

Arizona felt a hint of frustration well up in her, but she pushed it away. She needed to remember her own words. This wasn't a competition and Callie had a right to have horrible memories and fears, too. And if she was reluctant to share them, then Arizona needed to be supportive, even if it frustrated her to pull the information from her wife bit by bit. "So you're sitting in the corner and what happens?"

"The phone rang. We were getting updates three times a day, but this time it rang at a time when we weren't expecting it, so that could mean only one thing."

"They'd found us."

"Right. I remember Owen looking up at me with such fear in his eyes as he reached out for the phone. And I knew exactly what he was feeling. It had been hard to have hope, and it got harder every hour, but right then it was like reality was about to hit and it was going to be so final, one way or another. I was terrified and I just went back to the same prayer I'd been saying the entire time. I just kept saying in my head that I just wanted you to be alive. That was all I wanted." Tears spilled out over her lashes and down her face.

Arizona was confused at why Callie was so upset about this. She had come back alive so Callie had gotten what she prayed for. And then Arizona started to realize what might be bothering her wife. "You didn't pray for anyone else to come home. Do you blame yourself for Lexie and Mark?"

Callie shook her head as she wiped frantically at her cheek. "No. Not really. I mean I certainly prayed for Mark to return earlier. I didn't want Sofia to lose her daddy and he was my best friend. But right then all I could do was think about you, so maybe I feel a little guilty, because I still should have been praying for them." She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. "But worse I never once prayed that you come home healthy. I just kept saying in my head that it didn't matter, that as long as you were alive we'd be okay, that our love would be enough to get us through." She laughed dryly. "I even remember thinking I could handle it if you had amnesia, because if I had to, I'd get you to fall in love with me again. God, I clearly watch too many bad TV shows."

Arizona couldn't help but let out the softest of laughs at her joke, but she quickly got serious again. "Do you really think your prayer caused me to lose my leg?"

Callie shrugged but then shook her head. "No, I know that isn't the case." She swallowed hard and finally turned tear-filled eyes up to Arizona. "But what if it was? Shouldn't I have asked that you, that none of you, were hurt?"

Arizona couldn't help but let out an exasperated sigh. "Callie, listen to me." She reached over and took her wife's hand, feeling how even this little bit of contact seemed somehow alien to her now. She shook her head and waited for Callie's brown eyes to meet her own. "From the moment you knew we were missing, you prayed we would be found, right?"

"Of course."

"Well, do you really think God left us out there for four days just so my leg would get so infected it couldn't be saved? Because you never specifically ask that I wasn't hurt? Really?" She knew Callie's faith was certainly stronger than her own, but she couldn't believe her wife would really think that.

"No." Callie let out a loud sigh. "I'm just disappointed in myself for not asking for more. I feel like I gave up on you in a way." She wiped at another tear that streaked down her cheek. "I think that's probably why I promised you that day in the hospital that you wouldn't lose your leg. You told me not to give up on you and I didn't want to do that again."

The fact that Callie had promised her that was still a sore point for Arizona and it hurt to remember that promise and the disappointing outcome. So, not wanting to really dwell on that, she decided to try to steer the conversation back to where it had started. "Okay, I get that. I get that you think that, but my leg was already broken by the time you knew we were missing. The wheels were already in motion and the infection was already setting in by that first night when you found out. The only thing that would have saved it really was being found earlier and that was just bad luck. We weren't where they looked first. But you're right, the most important thing is that they found us before we were all dead. Another day or two and we would have been dropping like flies." She bit at her lip. "But you couldn't have known any of that when that phone rang."

"No, I didn't know anything then. I think I just relive that moment in my dreams because I've never been so scared in my life. And that was just the beginning of a hellish rollercoaster of emotion. First Owen answered and I saw him sigh in relief. I thought that meant you were all safe. But then he tensed again and his eyes met mine and there was something in them that terrified me, like he was going to tell me specifically some bad news. When he got off the phone, he still just looked at me for a moment before he said that you'd all been found and all but one of you were alive. He said the commander of the search only knew that it was a woman who had died. We didn't have a name. There was a twenty-five percent chance it was you. Thirty minutes. That's about all it took until we got another call and found out it was Lexie. For thirty minutes I was faced with the very real possibility that you were dead."

"That must have been horrible. I didn't know they had called you and told you that." Arizona felt tears coming to her own eyes and she blinked to keep them from falling. "I can't imagine how scary that must have been."

"It was. Up until then I could believe that you would all come home alive. But now we knew the crash had been bad enough that someone died. I swear I wore a hole in the floor with all the pacing I did in those thirty minutes. And then the phone rang again."

Arizona reached up and wiped a tear off Callie's cheek without even thinking about it. When Callie looked at her with surprise playing in her eyes, she realized what she had done and instead of instantly retreating like she inherently wanted to, she just nodded and forced a little smile onto her lips. "Go on."

"When Owen answered the phone, I couldn't even look at him. I couldn't stand the idea of him giving me that look. So I turned and looked out of the window, and that window faces our building, so I was staring right at it. And this time I prayed that it was anyone but you. I was being so selfish. I didn't care if it was Meredith, or Lexie, or even Cristina. I knew it had to be one of you, so I prayed it was anyone but you." Callie's eyes dropped and she shook her head a little. "Anyone but you," she said so quietly Arizona barely heard it.

Arizona gave her a few moments while she thought about how she would have reacted. It didn't surprise her at all that Callie would think that. Anyone would in that situation. And it certainly didn't surprise her that Callie would be beating herself up about it now. Sometimes her wife had a hard time understanding that she was only human. Finally she tilted Callie's face so they were looking at one another. "You listen to me. You didn't do anything wrong. What were you supposed to do, hope it was me that was dead so that you could feel noble for being so selfless? Really? Someone was dead. Nothing you thought or did at that point was going to change that or who it was. Stop feeling bad that you acted just like anyone else would have. If it had been you on that plane, I would have done the same exact thing."

"I know, but—"

"No buts. You already know that I wished Alex had been on that plane instead of me. And you know what? If I could make the choice today, if I could go back in time and decide not to take his place, even knowing what I know now, I'd do it. And I wouldn't think twice. Does that make me horrible?"

"Of course not."

"Exactly. So just stop it. Stop worrying about it."

Callie started to talk, like she was about to argue, but then she let out a quiet sigh and rolled her eyes with a hint of amusement. "You're right."

"Of course I'm right. Now I know just because your brain knows you shouldn't worry about it, that it might take a while to get over the nightmares, to make your heart believe it." Arizona swallowed hard, thinking of all the images that plagued her own sleep almost nightly. "Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever get a full night's sleep without waking up from a dream about crashing or the memories of waking up to my leg being gone or any of the dozen or so other nightmares that seem to be on a screwed up playlist in my head."

"You know, if you want, I'm here to listen, too," Callie offered a little hesitantly.

"I know." Arizona said with a genuine smile. As they were slowly starting to let each other back in, even when things still felt strained between them, she knew Callie would be there for her. It was just so hard to open herself up, to make herself feel vulnerable with Callie. Or maybe it was better to say feel more vulnerable. It was hard not to feel vulnerable when your whole life was changed and you could barely get around and care for yourself without help. "Not tonight, but someday I'll tell you. Right now, it's late and you have to work tomorrow."

Callie stretched and her back gave out an audible pop. She smiled a little sheepishly but then covered it by just nodding and holding her hand out for Arizona's bottle of water. "I'll put these in the recycling bin."

"Callie," Arizona said as her wife started to get up.

Callie stopped and sat back down. "What?"

Arizona had started speaking before she could even think about it and for once she decided to continue on kind of recklessly. If she continued to think things over too much they might never make much progress back to one another. "What do you say we call the medical supply company and get that bed out of here? They'll set up our bed, right?"

A momentary look of enthusiasm that was quickly covered with an obvious attempt to school her features flashed across Callie's face. "Yeah, sure. I guess our bed is more comfortable than that medical bed, huh?"

Arizona nodded. "I think it might help me sleep a little better."

Callie nodded and smiled, but there was sadness to it. "I'll call tomorrow and set it up for a day I have off." She then got up and went into the kitchen to toss out the water bottles.

Arizona watched her wife, her heart pounding as she quickly wondered if she could offer to let Callie back into their bed once it was there. Part of her wanted to, but another part was terrified. She was the most vulnerable when she was asleep and she also wasn't sure if her sleep would be improved if she was worried about Callie sleeping just inches away. But then she rolled her eyes at her indecision and swallowed hard. "Um, you know, I bet our bed is way more comfortable than this sofa bed, too."

Callie looked up quickly, her eyes wide. "You sure?"

Arizona pushed herself to standing and then leaned over the coffee table, balanced on her right hand as she grabbed her crutches from the other side. She used the time it took to pull herself back to standing to think about how to answer that. If she were honest, she'd have to say she wasn't. She was so far from sure it surprised even her. But she wanted Callie to think she was ready to make this step. So, as she placed the crutches under her arms she nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure."

Callie's smile was blinding. "I'm glad."

Arizona forced herself to push her uncertainty down and smile back. "Okay, well I better let you get some sleep." She started to hop back toward the bedroom, but stopped as she passed Callie. "I hope you sleep well, Callie."

"I think I will now," her wife answered with a sweet smile.

Arizona nodded and then went back into the bedroom. After climbing into bed, she rolled on her side and looked out into the living room to where Callie was sorting out her bedding. She felt a nervous nausea start to settle into her stomach as her mind tripped over the fact that she had just welcomed Callie back into their bed. It's her bed, too, she tried to reason with herself, but it wasn't helping the nervousness and downright fear that was settling over her. "Stop it," she hissed quietly to herself. "None of this was her fault, so stop punishing her. It's time to start moving on, Arizona. It's time to move on. Just act as if and maybe it'll be all right. Please, just let it be all right."

She closed her eyes and tried to settle her mind, but it just wasn't happening. Which was probably for the best, since while Callie might have gotten some relief from her nightmares, Arizona was sure she would be haunted for many nights to come.

TBC…