Chapter 3 - Damage Gets Done
Quiet rapping on the front door of her new apartment yanked Arizona face-first out of a deep sleep.
She flew upright and opened her eyes to the darkness, pausing just a moment and listening. The knocking started up once more and she groaned and pulled the chain on her lamp just as the new series of knocks increased in volume the slightest bit.
It took her a couple minutes of fussing to strap on her prosthetic, and she grumbled the whole time, the words 'manners' and 'middle of the goddamn night' popping up more than once. Stumbling and still half asleep, she haphazardly wrapped a robe around her pajamas and grabbed her phone from the bedside table, activating the emergency alert.
She let her finger hover over the slider as she walked down the hall as silently as she could, hoping that no creak in the floorboard would alert whoever had the gall to pound on the doors of sleeping strangers. The knocking paused intermittently before starting up once more just as Arizona warily approached the peephole.
She stuck her face up to the door slowly, praying that no one was trying to look into it while she had her eye to the glass. Outside she saw Calliope, looking around the hall nervously, arms wrapped around herself.
Without hesitation, Arizona opened the door to reveal her. Callie stood staring at the blonde, shivering in a strapless black dress that revealed her seemingly endless smooth tan legs and a neckline that displayed a dangerous amount of her chest. Her dark hair tumbled in loose ringlets as she ran her fingers back through the black curls to pull them out of her face.
She was wearing that lipstick Arizona had always loved to ruin, and those heels that made her ass pop. She couldn't help but smile softly as she remembered that they had been a birthday present for Callie. Well, not exactly a birthday present, but close enough.
The two of them had spent a day out on the town near the beginning of their relationship, almost feverish with the need to see each other outside of the hospital or Callie's apartment, which had only happened to be the frequent destination based on proximity to the hospital. Days off had aligned like the sun and stars, and that serendipity saw them burning a trail through Capitol Hill's shops.
"How do I look, babe?" Callie flirted as she snapped the dressing room curtain back. She stood there in the fluffiest white fur coat Arizona had ever laid eyes on, the hair completely unidentifiable as having once belonged to a living creature. At the very least, the beast had to have been mythical, certainly more so now that it was draped around the shoulders of the hottest woman she had ever known. Underneath, Callie seemed to have found a red dress that hugged every single curve like it had been made custom, and an upside-down triangle-shaped window on the chest pretty much guaranteed that Arizona was not looking her in the eyes.
The pièce de résistance, however, was a relatively simple pair of black heels. They had a short platform, a peep toe, and a 5-inch heel that forced Callie to walk with such a sway in her hips that Arizona felt dizzy. The brunette did a little spin around and strutted toward her girlfriend sitting on a bench, and the blonde tried and failed to remember how to breathe.
"Well? Do you like it? I can't decide if I should get the dress or the shoes. The coat is an absolute no-go; that price would bleed me dry right now. I just thought it would be fun to try on."
Her girlfriend looked herself up and down in the mirror and let the fur drop down to cover only her forearms, exposing the dress's distinct backless nature and all of the freckles and tanned skin that Arizona spent her waking nights thinking about.
Callie threw an innocent glance over her shoulder as she looked back at Arizona, who was still reeling and whose bright blue eyes she could see had gone dark. A mischievous grin spread across the brunette's face at the sight of her.
Looking straight into her girlfriend's still wide eyes with a raised brow, she strutted back over to the bench and placed her hands on Arizona's shoulders, working the muscles. She slowly bent over at the waist, letting one knee bend to brush against Arizona's shaking leg, to hover her by the side of her girlfriend's head, making sure she had a clear view into the window of her dress. After she took her sweet time breathing in the flowery smell of conditioner mixed with the natural sweet smell of Arizona, Callie finally spoke, lips brushing her ear and sending a shiver up her spine.
"You like it, huh?" Callie whispered, smiling and pressing her lips softly to Arizona's earlobe. She felt her girlfriend shudder as she trailed a finger ever so lightly down the other side of her neck, biting gingerly into the soft skin her mouth had already been working on.
"Your birthday's in a couple months, right?" Arizona blurted, standing abruptly and pulling her girlfriend back toward the dressing room as Callie just laughed and laughed.
"Callie, it's the middle of the night, what are you doing here? Where's Sofia?" questioned Arizona, respectfully looking directly into Callie's eyes and nowhere else.
"She's fine. Don't worry about her," said Callie, stepping slowly inside the apartment toward Arizona.
"Again, what are you doing here? I have things to do tomorrow, and you need to go home," Arizona insisted, growing more confused by the second.
"I came to do this," Callie whispered as she cupped Arizona's cheek and brought her face in close.
Arizona gasped as she felt Callie's lips pressed against hers. She sat there dumbly for a minute until she felt Callie's tongue passing over her bottom lip.
Against her better judgment, her eyes fluttered shut and she snaked her hands around Callie's neck and began to twirl her fingers through the curls at the base of her neck. Hot breath danced across her cheeks and it felt like her whole body was on fire, and she was losing control by the second as Callie's hands found her waist underneath her robe. She felt fingernails dig into the sensitive skin of just above her hip bones to pull her closer, pressing their bodies together. She moaned into Callie's mouth just as she felt those lips move against hers, whispering something, but too quietly for her to hear.
Reluctantly, Arizona broke the kiss and dropped her forehead against Callie's, trying to concentrate despite the heat radiating off of their bodies.
"Sorry, did you say something?" she whispered, still breathless.
"Huh? No," Callie responded, making a face.
She frowned, unsure, but leaned in once more. Arizona moved a hand to hold the taller woman's face, thumb brushing against the curve of her jaw, and savored the taste of those full lips once more. She took her sweet time, wrapping her arms around Callie's neck to hold her close and kiss her softly, only for her lips to begin moving once again, in full force.
"What are you saying, Callie? I can't understand you," Arizona asked more emphatically this time as she leaned back, peeved at the second interruption.
Callie's now wide eyed face was slick with sweat and tears. There were dark circles under burning red eyes and her skin was clammy to the touch as Arizona wrenched herself out of the brunette's now weak grip. She thought she even saw blood drip down from the outer corner of Callie's right eye as she whispered.
"You ruined me."
Arizona started at the sudden change in Callie's appearance and demeanor and backed away wordlessly into the wall. Her eyes welled up as she sank down to the floor, willing everything to stop. Callie just stood there, repeating the phrase over and over, gradually increasing in volume, staring at the spot where Arizona had once stood. Those dark eyes betrayed nothing but pain and guilt that had rotted away within her, and she began to wail horrific primal sobs, her nails carving deep red canyons down her cheeks.
Arizona cried out at the sight and cowered further into herself and the safety of the wall. She prided herself on being stable in tense situations, but the scene before her couldn't begin to compare to the day to day pressures of her job or her life. That sureness and stability was crumbling to dust with each second that passed.
"Callie, what's going on? I'm scared! Please, stop!" Arizona pleaded, whimpering and crushing her hands to her ears and shutting her eyes, completely unable to dull the shrieking that was stabbing her brain and burrowing into her psyche.
She didn't even get a break from the vision with her eyes closed. She could see everything as her ex-wife's jaw seemed to unhinge and she began yanking at her long, silken hair, dark tresses falling to the floor with a wet slop.
Arizona was paralyzed by the scene before her as blood streamed down Callie's shaking face and neck, dribbling to soak the floor beneath her. The edges of the crimson in those plush fibers inched closer and closer to Arizona as she tried pointlessly to fold in upon herself and avoid its advance.
Out of nowhere, Callie's juddering suddenly stopped. She collapsed on her knees into the puddle in front of a cowering Arizona, whose head fell weakly back to hit the wall, a last useless effort to keep her distance from the horror show before her.
Callie reached out to Arizona's trembling form, using a bloodied hand to brush a strand of blonde hair out of her face as the woman let out a small sob.
"How could you do this to me, Arizona? I thought you loved me," Callie murmured, brushing her thumb across Arizona's tear stained cheek, leaving red in its wake.
The cold patch of fabric from her pillow pressing on Arizona's cheek brought her gradually into consciousness. She forced her head up wearily and touched her face, her fingers coming away damp. She stared into space just beyond her hand for a long moment, sniffling quietly as the sun peeked in through the curtains of her bedroom. Quickly brushing it away with a shaky exhale, she sat up just as her alarm went off, and she began to get ready for her first day at her new job.
Callie shoved through the doors of her research lab and greeted her interns with the raise of her half full takeaway coffee cup. There was a smattering of light colored scrubs typing away at their desks along the walls and facing the middle of the room. In the back was a glass door labeled "Callie Torres, MD, FACS" in fine black lettering, the last four letters a bit shinier than the rest.
"Good morning, Dr. Torres!" one resident greeted cheerily, hopping up from her painstakingly organized desk. Callie was already beginning to regret waking up that morning at the grating April-like peppiness and volume coming from her underling. This mouse of a woman with short brown hair and large golden wire frames held up a binder to her yawning attending. Callie grabbed it one handed as she bumped her office door open with her hip.
Setting her coffee down in one of the few as of yet unoccupied spots on her desk, she took a seat and woke her computer up, plopping the binder down onto a shorter stack of case files. She typed her login as she began to leaf through the gathered documents.
She was certain she remembered where she put the file, but her organization in this office had never quite gotten sorted out, so she spent a ludicrous amount of time searching through a bunch of folders of the same color and only minor differences in thickness. This is like the stupidest matching game in the world, only it sucks ass, leads to nothing, and I get to play it by myself every day for a salary, Callie thought bitterly.
At the door, Callie's resident cleared her throat, so she looked up from her pile of nonsense papers
"It's some of the statistics we've gathered from recent research by other orthopedic surgeons. Most of them conclude that thighbone fractures have variable rates of mortality based on location of the break. However, age seems to be the main factor due to decrease in bone density. Let me know if you need us to look for anything else," she said, leaning against the doorframe slightly.
Closing the file in front of her and moving it to the other side of her desk, Callie opted instead to leaf through one of the taller stacks of yellow folders.
"Thank you, Dr. Baker." she answered.
"Of course," the short woman replied, beginning to back out of the doorway.
"Actually," Callie spoke up, still concentrated, beginning to flip through both the binder and a case file, "could you take a look at studies that just deal with MVC patients?"
"Sure thing, Dr. Torres!" Dr. Baker quipped, returning quickly to her computer to do some more digging.
Callie reached out blindly for her coffee, raising it to her lips and leaving a trace of red on the lid. She was trying to compare lab results to see if there were any indicators for a loss of bone density that hadn't been identified.
She counted from file to file just how many pieces their bone had shattered into, how many inches long the laceration in their leg was, where their bone had broken through skin. When that failed, she flipped through a few dozen pages to check pathology reports and see what antibiotics had failed to treat the infections on this patient's external fixator. When that failed, she checked the patient's family history for any other signs that there was nothing more they could have done.
Just as she was about to move to another case file, the phone on her desk began to ring. She read the ID and swallowed hard, clearing her throat before picking up.
"Hello, Chief." She hadn't been expecting any call from him today. Any day was a bad day to get a call from your boss, but it especially made her nervous coming out of nowhere.
"Yes, good morning, Dr. Torres! How are you doing?" bellowed the chief of surgery for Columbia Medical Center, Dr. Emmett Kincaid.
He was a kind, patient man. It wasn't that Callie didn't get along with him, so much as the kindness and patience seemed to her a charade on the very edge of cracking. She didn't want to be around, or responsible, when it did. He didn't wait for her to answer.
"Your research is going well, I assume? I'd like an update by the end of the day, just to make sure everything is on track. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how shareholders can get!" he finished, chuckling to himself at the half-baked observation that Callie was once part-owner of a hospital.
"Of course, Chief Kincaid," Callie said, making a mental note to get some of her interns to put a progress report together by the afternoon. She didn't exactly know what to tell him, she had been letting Dr. Baker partially run the show for the last couple months in order to look into some personal research. She still spent a couple hours each day looking over results and whatnot, signing off or suggesting changes in parameters, but as far as her interests were concerned, she had checked out.
"But that's not why I wanted to talk to you, of course. Legal has been working on the Huerta case and they need another statement from you," Kincaid said.
The moment the name crossed Callie's ear, her heart began pounding in her chest, and she felt a bead of sweat travel from her hairline down her face and neck. She knew intellectually that her boss was still saying words, she caught "no fault" and "unforeseen complication", but she might as well have not even been in the room anymore.
She feigned understanding with a noncommittal hum and a deftly placed "I understand" and breathed a horrifyingly deep sigh of relief upon hearing what sounded like "ciao" and the click of the receiver on the other line.
She gently placed the handset back on its cradle and inhaled slowly, closing her eyes and trying to center herself with her palms on her knees, nails digging into the skin of her legs through the fabric of her scrubs. She exhaled sharply, then opened her desk drawer and pulled out a rattier looking case file than the rest of the ones littering her desk, filled to the brim with colorful flags poking out. Carefully, Callie opened it up and began to read.
7 months ago
The wailing and whooping of the sirens startled Callie from her morning fog just as she had the audacity to close her eyes and yawn. She had made the bold decision to forgo caffeine this morning. In other words, she had forgotten to grab coffee and was paying the price. It helped her out the slightest bit to reframe it as a choice, rather than admitting that Penny had distracted her and in the rush of running late, there was no time to even stop in the attendings' lounge before she was paged to her first trauma case in over a month.
The way the day was already turning out, it seemed that maybe she wouldn't even end up needing it. She rubbed her hands together to build up some kind of warmth against the East Coast chill as she stood in the vestibule of Columbia's emergency department, and the ambulance came to a screeching halt in front of her.
"Female, 17, MVC with compound femur fracture and crush injuries to the chest and compression of the cervical spine," shouted the paramedic as she hopped down from the back of the vehicle. "We stabilized the neck and leg and dressed the open fracture in the field, gave her some hydrocodone. She was in the car for a while while we waited for fire and rescue to bring spreaders."
"Thank you, I'll take it from here," Callie said, hoping to hide her childish glee from the very serious faces all around her. She was honestly elated to finally be working on a trauma case after many, many hip replacements.
These old money New Yorkers would probably replace all their bones with titanium in a heartbeat for the simple fact of having the money to do so. Sometimes, she was able to find joy in the routine of it all, but nothing would ever make Callie Torres feel more alive than taking something truly broken and making it whole.
Fixing something fucked up, seemingly beyond repair? That was where she thrived.
She waved a hand to a small group of nurses waiting just inside and wheeled the patient inside the doors toward a private trauma room. She could see tears streaming down the face of the young girl with dark, almost black hair, bruises and scratches interrupting her tan skin. She looked into the girl's brown eyes and reached out to touch her hand and try to comfort her.
"Can you tell me your name?" Callie asked, trying not to shout into the face of her patient but trying to be heard over the ambient chaos of the emergency department.
"I... Isabella," the girl wept in between gasping breaths as her eyes darted around the room, "Wh- where's my mom? I need my m... mom."
"We'll call her, okay?" Callie soothed, retrieving a pair of latex gloves and pulling them on. She walked around to the other side of the gurney while nurses worked around her, assessing her other injuries. She asked one of the nurses to notify Isabella's parents and she visibly relaxed, still shaking from fear and pain.
Callie lifted the blanket and gauze to reveal the upper part of the thigh bone protruding out, with a decent amount of the muscle visible from the tear in the skin. She was internally whooping with joy for a case that clearly required surgical intervention, but she had to fight very hard to keep it internal.
One of the trauma attendings walked in and introduced himself as Dr. Price, moving to assess the injuries to Isabella's chest and neck and listening for compromised breath sounds. Just as he lifted the stethoscope, Isabella coughed up a spatter of dark red onto her already bloodied shirt and her eyelids fluttered shut. All of the staff sprung into action as the heart rate monitor began to beep rapidly and raise alarm. A nurse lifted the patient's shirt and palpated her abdomen to find it rigid. The young girl's blood pressure began to drop fast and her heart rate rose in tandem to compensate.
"We need to get her a stat CT, x-ray, and up to an OR," shouted Dr. Price, "Dr. Torres, I'll have someone page you once we have her ready for you."
"Thanks, keep me posted," Callie answered as she deposited her gloves into the trash and watched the poor girl get wheeled out the door and down the long hall.
The nurse Callie sent off stepped back in the now empty room, "Mom is on her way, said she's about an hour out."
"Okay, they just took her to CT. Could you let me know once they get her x-rays back?"
"Of course, Dr. Torres," the nurse nodded.
Callie couldn't help but continue to feel giddy, even as the nurse went off to find her patient in radiology. This is exactly the kind of interesting case she needed to get her old mojo back. It wasn't quite building a guy a fresh set of legs, but she knew she would make it work. She didn't have much time to sit with the feeling before she heard her pager go off and she was off to see another patient.
Callie's keys clinked as she dropped them in their tray by the front door and made her way into her apartment, where she was greeted by her smiling girlfriend playing chef in the kitchen.
"Hey, baby," Callie called out, crossing the tidy living room to the kitchen and meeting Penny at the counter for a peck on the cheek. "How was your day?"
Penny was cutting some vegetables, it looked like she was working on a pasta primavera. There was water on the stove starting to boil so Callie set her purse down on one of the dining room chairs, rolling up her sleeves to help with the cooking. She pulled another cutting board out from one of the cabinets, snagged a cooking knife from the drawer, and started slicing some zucchini that had been sitting clean in a colander in the sink.
"It was pretty good! One of the other fellows screwed something up, so it was nice to not have to worry about getting chewed out, at least for the day," Penny mused while she sliced grape tomatoes in half. "How was yours? Was it Gertrude or Herbert today?" she joked.
"Oh ha ha, you think you're so funny," Callie scoffed playfully, "I actually got paged to a trauma today, finally! And no one swiped it out from under me this time, so that was fantastic."
"That's amazing! What was it?"
"MVC, compound femur fracture. There are so many little pieces I get to put back together. It's like Christmas," Callie sighed, wistful at the memory. It really had been one of her better days in recent memory, she hadn't spent more than an hour or two actively worrying about her daughter in Seattle, which was an all time record.
Ever since Sofia had gone back to live with Arizona, she'd been really trying to focus on the fact that Sofia would be loved and cared for, no matter which side of the country she was on. Sometimes, it even helped. She still got a bit weepy when she accidentally stepped on one of her toys, but she was taking it in stride. She was in a new place, she could be new, too. She dumped a box of penne into the roiling pot of water and went back to cutting up vegetables, smiling to herself. Penny paused to look over at her, warmed by the happiness coming off her girlfriend in waves.
"I know it's been hard without Sofia, but I think you're really doing the right thing by taking her feelings into consideration in all this," Penny said, setting her knife down and closing the distance between her and Callie.
She snuck around behind the taller woman and wrapped her arms around her waist and pressed her ear to her back. She began to sway softly from side to side to music only they could hear, and Callie set her own knife down to turn toward Penny in the small space between them. She looked down into teasing green eyes as Penny rested her hands on either side of her, trapping her against the counter.
"I love you," Callie murmured, lifting her hands to Penny's face and pulling her in for a long kiss.
A/N: I suppose this is where you discover my secret evil plan to subject you to a little bit of Callie/Penny. Did they have a ship name? I hope not. Oh well~!