Title: Extraordinary Measures
Author: J.M. Flowers
Rating: M
AN: I would just like to say thank you, to all of you, for the outpouring of well wishes I received after the last chapter. I'm sorry it's taken so long to get this next chapter out, but I have spent a lot of time working on it. I wrote the first draft months ago, the second draft in the ER of the hospital (which provided some great visuals) a few days before the last chapter was posted, and this third draft was written at 4 and 5 am in the past week. This is definitely the best version of this, so hopefully you can all agree that it was worth the wait. Thanks for continuing to read and support this endeavour.
Oh! And I forgot to add, if you head over to my tumblr (lajanelleint) and click on Extraordinary Measures, you can download the first part of the soundtrack I've been writing to, and check out some of the artwork that's been made.
Mutantur omnis hos et mutamur in illis
"All things change and we change with them"
The yelling happens instantaneously, a flurry of hands quickly filling the space I opened in her. The blood, significantly less than I remember in the first version of this, is caught with lap pads handed off by scrub nurses.
Owen Hunt is the first to look up, remembering I'm there even when he's wrist deep in Arizona's abdomen. "Someone get her out of here," he directs, nodding at me before turning back to Bailey's frantic search for the tear.
"Suction," Bailey orders as another nurse sets a hand on my shoulder, guiding me gently out of the operating room.
In the scrub room, she reaches up to gently remove my mask, rubbing my back as abrupt breaths try to fill my mouth. "It's okay, Dr. Torres," she soothes, "They have everything under control."
Mark crashes through the door with the end of her sentence, pausing at the sight of my hunched form, my labored breathing. "Callie?" he whispers.
The giggle comes from nowhere, erupting out of the center of my chest loudly. A second follows it, equally out of place. My hand comes up to cover my mouth, eager to halt the sound, but I'm still wearing gloves and they're red with her. And I can't help but think they smell like coconut. Like copper. Like forever. Arizona.
I think maybe that's crazy.
So I laugh louder, my other hand pressing against my forehead before I can even think about it. I cut her open. I pressed a scalpel into her skin as though it was any patient; anybody lying on that table.
Mark eyes me carefully, he and the nurse both reaching forward to pull the gloves from my hands, despite the paths they've already made across my face. They're shoved into the bio-waste bin, just like the lap pads full of her blood will be. And Bailey's mask, damp with sweat after a long and stressful surgery. Dr. Hunt's gloves. Arizona's sticky, ripped open clothing. Every trace of this room.
But not her. Please not her. She has to leave this room whole, not a remnant.
I suck back a breath, swallowing my laughter. "She's my tattoo," I whisper.
Mark's brow furrows. "What?" he asks, glancing at the nurse.
"I lost her once, but now she's my tattoo." They seem to have a silent conversation above my head before Mark finally speaks again.
"Callie, do you want to go... talk to someone?" I look up quickly, waiting for him to explain. He stumbles before continuing. "It's just, you've been here all day, and you just... They'll be in surgery for a while, maybe you want to go up to psych or -"
I shrug away from them both, out of their grasps and gentle touches and soothing words. "I'm not crazy," I say. "This isn't shock. I'm not losing it."
Mark tilts his head, as if asking, are you sure?
"I'm not crazy," I repeat.
"Okay," he concedes, lifting both his hands up in defeat before tugging me into a hug. I wobble in his hold before leaning into the sharp edges of his frame.
I saved her.
#
I open my eyes to darkness, no recollection of nodding off after Mark wrapped a blanket around my shoulders in the OR gallery. My face feels sticky with sleep, instead of wiped clean of blood by a nurse's calming hands and warm cloth. And the blanket beneath me doesn't feel soft with age like the patient ones, instead scratching and pulling in the way of lesser-washed versions tucked into on-call rooms. There's a pillow beneath my head that doesn't crunch with the sound of plastic when I move.
I sit up quickly, the sharp proximity of what I think could be a top bunk just narrowly missing my skull. I swing my legs free from the covers, stumbling across the room with my hands in front of me before I feel a light switch. I flick it on, squinting when I'm met with an onslaught of brightness.
The room around me is familiar, coming into focus as my eyes adjust. There are two bunk beds, one bottom bed mussed from my own body; a metal cabinet to the left of the door; to the other side, beneath the light switch, is a scratch in the paint made by busy hands wearing a wedding ring that still adorns my finger. An eerie comfort washes over me, knowing I'm in our fourth floor on-call room.
But I have no idea how I got here.
I lunge for my pager on the pillow, searching for the time, but the screen stays blank. It must be dead, I think, which makes the worst realization come rushing back to slam into my chest. She wasn't out of surgery, yet. I have no idea if she's okay.
Why would I be in an on-call room when she was still on the table?
I can't help but wonder if maybe the universe has tossed me backwards, back to the beginning. Because I don't remember feeling the push of the machine, or waking up to the pinch of the needles, and surely Mark didn't carry me across the hospital to tuck me into a bed in an on-call room.
That's crazy.
Maybe I'm crazy.
Or maybe it didn't work.
Maybe any second now Mark is going to be pounding on the door and I'm going to have to relive it all again. More blood in her hair and on her face and they still won't start in the abdomen, so I'll wake up in Dr. Lewis' machine without her. Months of reliving our happiness wasted, leaving me with nothing. No Arizona. No proper goodbye. No forever.
I can't do it again.
I won't do it again.
I rush toward the door, my fingers wrapping around the knob and propelling me into the hallway. It's empty: no nurses bustling about, no doctors running past. It's quiet. Silent.
I walk slowly, carefully, in the direction of Pediatrics, though I'm not sure why. She won't be talking to a patient, waiting for me. She was in a car accident.
The lights are dimmed beyond the double doors, a single person sitting behind the desk at the nurses' station. She looks up, smiling politely. "Dr. Torres," she murmurs, "Can I help you?"
Where's Arizona? What happened?
"The time?" I finally manage, my voice hoarse. I turn away to cough into my shoulder, trying to clear my throat. The room across the hall is empty, its lights out, the curtains on the window left open. Stars hang across the dark canvas of the sky.
"It's just after one," the nurse tells me when I turn back towards her.
"Thank you," I whisper, nodding awkwardly before moving towards the doors I came in through.
The accident happened before eleven, though. Surely it had been longer than two hours when Mark wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. And I'm certainly not reliving it, when she was pronounced dead before midnight. I must be in a different day, I think.
Only, nothing's familiar.
I head for the attendings' lounge, eager to change my clothes and wash the sleep from my face, but somewhere along the way I lose my focus. When I finally look up, the uncomfortable whir of the emergency room is all around me. Even in the middle of the night, there's a certain hum. Children, grown and earning their own worry lines, sit hunched over at the bedsides of parents. Patients still waiting for consults move in fitful states of sleep. Behind a curtain, someone gags loudly.
But Teddy doesn't stand, shaking, in front of the sliding doors with a piece of glass in the side of her head. And Owen Hunt doesn't call for a bag of O Neg. Bailey doesn't yell for someone to book an OR. The hum isn't tragic - it's normal. Predictable, almost.
As predictable as the resident on Arizona's case.
"Is Meredith Grey here?" I ask the woman at the desk, barely paying enough attention to her to catch more than the shake of her head. "Is she in surgery?" I press, praying she'll know.
"She went home hours ago," she says finally.
If Meredith's not here, then -
"You should too, Dr. Torres," she adds.
I turn quickly, finally giving her my full attention: dark brown hair, light blue scrubs. A resident, I guess, though not one I recognize. She knows my name, but I'm not certain I've ever seen her before. "Excuse me?" I ask, realizing I'm not even sure what she said.
My movement, my tone, something, makes her falter. "It's just," she says, sheepish, "You look tired, you've been here all day. You should go home, too."
Would residents be telling me to go home if Arizona was still in surgery? Would Meredith be at home if she was?
I nod, schooling my features into something I hope looks a little softer. I suppose it works because the resident visibly relaxes. "Thank you," I whisper, turning away to escape out the double doors and once again be engulfed by the silence of the hallway.
I get myself to the attendings' lounge the second try, dropping onto the bench in front of my locker with a sigh - equal parts exhaustion and confusion, trying to make sense of where I am. It's not the night of the accident, Arizona's not in surgery, Mark isn't following me around and holding me up. Maybe...
I don't know how to finish that thought. The weight of what certainly feels like a long work day sits heavily on my shoulders, a strangling need for Arizona finding its way inside me with just as much force and drawing a fist around my stomach with nauseating strength. I don't know where I am, or what's going on, or how to find her. If she's even alive.
I choke back a sob.
The door is thrown open, rattling on its hinges and making me jump. Mark strides into the room, a grin on his face. "I," he announces, "just rocked a nose job."
I wipe at my tears, studying him. "At one in the morning?" I ask, mentally grabbing at the first familiar thing all night: my best friend, the one person who never changes, who always makes sense.
He shrugs, dropping onto the bench next to me. "So, it wasn't a self-elected nose job. She'll still look beautiful when she wakes up." One of his hands hooks beneath my chin, lifting my gaze to his eyes. "What's wrong?" he whispers.
I shake my head, running my fingers through my hair.
"The dream again?" he continues, standing up and pulling his shirt off. "You know, Cal, one of these days you're just going to have to accept it and move on. It's been three months."
My body heaves at the mention of time, the sharp taste of parmesan stabbing the back of my throat. I lunge across the room for the garbage can, gagging. Mark sighs loudly from behind me, pulling my hair away from my face, both of us waiting for me to spill my guts. Nothing comes.
"You can't keep doing this to yourself," he whispers, letting go of my hair when I take a deep breath and lean back against him.
"I feel like I'm going crazy," I tell him.
He laughs lightly, patting me on the shoulder. "Go home, get some sleep."
It almost sounds like a good idea when he says it.
So I tug a shirt over my head and put on my jacket and squeeze my legs back into the pair of jeans folded on the shelf in my locker and stumble out of the hospital praying to God that something - anything - will make sense in the morning. That everything will be okay if I just go home and crawl into bed and sleep. Sleep sounds fantastic.
Until the doors of the elevator in my building open and suddenly - coconut. It wafts into the foyer, as familiar as the swipe of cologne Mark put on his bare chest in the lounge, as startling as the taste of parmesan had been in my throat.
I step into the box, breathing in the scent with deep, shuddering breaths. It's coconut shampoo, all around me, as strong as if she were standing right next to me. Like the Friday nights when she would smuggle it into a post-work shower, filling the lounge with her secret trademark and heeding comments about piƱa coladas and nights off. The Friday nights when I would take her home and kiss her in this very elevator and somehow fall impossibly deeper in love with her - coconut.
The lift dings, metal parting to reveal the fifth floor. The smell is even stronger here, thicker like a burning heat. It coats my lungs. I can taste it on my tongue. I stumble forward, hastily searching for my key to shove into the lock, fighting with my conscience to run away. I could get a drink, a hotel room.
Or maybe a Friday night.
My key finally fits in place, the lock clicking. I throw the door open, pausing. The lights are all off, the apartment silent. I don't hear the shower running.
I don't smell coconut.
Tears pool in my eyes, my brain still screaming at me to run, some horrid voice in my head swearing that she's not here. That she's gone and she's dead and I'm never gonna get to say goodbye.
I slam the door, cursing everything: that stupid machine, Dr. Lewis for inventing it, Denia for helping him when he got too sick. Arizona and her stupid box of articles and her stupid ideas and for dying when she wasn't supposed to. She left me all alone, wasting my money on a bunch of wires that couldn't even bring her back to me.
I drop to the floor, sobs racking through me. Loud enough that I don't hear the bedroom door open at first, and I don't look up until another whiff of coconut fills my nose. The light from the bedroom catches a ring, glinting off a gold band. Fingers dart through messy blonde hair, still damp, releasing the smell. I make out the curve of a cheek, the puckering of a dimple in a tired smile. She rubs at her eyes.
My heart pounds within the confines of my chest, fear squeezing tighter. I'm not sure how to breathe, or blink. Or speak. Her voice fills the room before I can run, the scratch of sleep like piano keys and flat lines in my ears, playing some horrible tune I know by heart, except... she isn't bloody. She isn't dead. She's -
"Calliope?"
