Chapter Text
PART 1
The journal was in German. Callie did not speak German – she had five years of high school French gathering dust in some forgotten corner of her brain – but she knew what a patella looked like in any language. She knew the vivid architecture of a bionic knee joint because she had been staring at this digital diagram for forty minutes while the rain outside the apartment windows went from a light patter to a steady roar, and finally to that exhausted, persistent hiss that filled Seattle completely every June.
Her coffee was cold. She had added whiskey to it at some point, 2:47 am according to the tiny timestamp in the corner of her laptop screen, and the heavy ceramic mug felt lukewarm against her palms despite the hours that had passed since she last brewed it.
Callie saved the link. She opened a new tab, the rhythm of her typing sounding stark and overly loud in the quiet kitchen. Osseointegration outcomes below-knee amputees quality of life.
The apartment settled into the sort of heavy silence that only happened once Sofia was asleep upstairs and the fridge became the loudest thing in the dark. Callie knew the habits of this house by heart. She knew the third stair from the bottom creaked if you stood too close to the wall; she knew the dishwasher rattled twenty minutes after the cycle finished; and she knew, with an instinctual, aching accuracy, the exact sound of Arizona's breathing when the pain pills finally took over – that flat, shallow rhythm where she wasn’t quite asleep, but wasn’t awake enough to remember her leg was gone.
She hadn't heard that breathing tonight.
She clicked through to a Swedish study from three years prior. The abstract was dense and clogged with medical terminology that usually made her brain switch to autopilot during department meetings, but tonight she read every line twice. She absorbed the shape of the letters rather than the actual meaning, hunting for the fragile promise embedded in the statistics. Outcomes improve with early weight-bearing intervention. Success rates measured in significant metric increases.
She bookmarked it. She opened yet another tab.
Callie rubbed her thumb over the side of her ceramic mug, feeling the faint, gritty residue of dried coffee near the rim. She didn't drink the rest. It was mostly liquor now anyway, tepid and pungent, sitting heavy at the bottom of the cup like an unkept promise.
Upstairs, a floorboard groaned.
It wasn't the third stair. It was the floor directly above the kitchen: the left side of their bed, the side where the mattress usually dipped under Arizona’s small, athletic frame.
Callie didn't move her head, but her shoulders went rigid under her tank top. Her hand froze over the trackpad. She stood perfectly still in the dark, listening to the shift from sleep to wakefulness. There was the rustle of a heavy down duvet being pushed aside, followed by a long, heavy silence that always meant Arizona was sitting on the edge of the mattress, waiting for the phantom static in her nerves to quiet down. Then came the single, grounded thump of her heel finding the floor.
A long pause. Then the metallic, distinct shhhk of a heavy Velcro strap being pulled tight against a silicone liner.
Callie closed the laptop lid halfway, shielding her eyes from the sudden drop in light. She didn't close it all the way; she didn't want the small plastic latch to click and betray her presence in the kitchen. In the dimness of the room, her own reflection stretched across the dark windowpane, pale and hollow-eyed against the black Seattle rain that looked like ink sliding down the glass.
The footsteps down the stairs were slow, deliberate, and mathematically uneven. One heavy. One light. One heavy. One light.
Arizona appeared in the doorway. She was wearing an oversized t-shirt that belonged to Callie, the collar hanging loosely off one pale shoulder. Her blonde hair was flattened on one side from the pillow, matted and lacklustre under the weak light of the range hood. In the shadow, she looked strikingly small, almost blurred around the edges, except for the uncompromising gleam of the aluminium pylon beneath her cotton shorts.
She didn't look down at her leg. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the half-closed laptop.
“You’re still up,” Arizona said, her voice raspy with sleep and the lingering chalkiness of the nighttime pills she took to keep from screaming in her sleep.
“Had some charting to finish for the Chief,” Callie deflected. It was a worn-out excuse, something they had both stopped looking at weeks ago. Callie pushed the mug marginally to the left, her fingers sticking slightly to the counter. “Are you hurt? Do you need the breakthrough dose? I have the script in the cabinet.”
Arizona’s jaw set, the muscle shifting slightly under her ear. Callie knew the exact texture of that patch of skin; she used to bury her face right there. “I wanted water.”
“I’ll get it.”
Callie was already on her foot before the sentence had even cleared her throat. She lifted her chair by the frame so it wouldn't scrape the floor, a custom she’d formed to keep from waking either their daughter or her wife, and reached the sink before Arizona could even step across the threshold. She turned the chrome tap, using only the cold side. She remembered that Arizona hated how the pipes ran warm in the summer months, always complaining that it tasted like dried soil.
She pivoted and held the glass out.
Arizona was still standing three feet away, her good hand resting lightly against the doorframe for balance. She looked at Callie’s extended hand, then slowly up at Callie’s face. For a second, her blue eyes were inscrutable – flat, cold, like the water in the glass.
Then she took it. Her fingers didn't brush Callie’s skin.
“Thanks,” Arizona muttered. She drank it standing up, her throat working in quick, desperate swallows and her head tilted back so far that Callie could see the small, blue veins pulsing beneath the thin skin of her neck.
“Are you...” Callie started, her voice instinctively dropping into that cadence she used when she was doing post-op rounds at six in the morning. “Does it feel heavy tonight? The humidity can cause the residual limb to swell sometimes. I can take a look at the skin-gate if it’s rubbing. I have the new—”
Arizona set the glass down on the counter, it made a sharp echo against the dark granite.
“It’s fine, Callie.”
“I’m just saying, if the liner is trapping sweat against the scar tissue, you’re going to get an infection, and then we’ll have to go ba—”
“I said it’s fine.” Arizona forced a small, reflexive smile that went nowhere near her eyes. She reached out and brushed her fingers against Callie’s forearm, a brief pressure that lasted for a fraction of a second. “Go to sleep. You have that revision arthroplasty at eight.”
She turned around. One heavy step. One light step.
Callie stood by the sink until the floorboards upstairs stopped crying under the weight of the aluminium. She opened the laptop again, but the lines of the Swedish study were gone from her mind, her chest suddenly tightening with a familiar, suffocating weight. Her fingers found the keys again. She typed: silicone liner friction blisters revision surgery techniques.
・・・・・
There was no sun, just a flat, sodden gloom that rendered the granite of the kitchen island cold and lifeless. The sugary, aggressive steam from the hot maple syrup – which was still bubbling in a tiny copper pan – stayed thick in the air, clinging in sticky, translucent veins to the glass of the windowpane. Down on the floor, squeezed into the narrow gap between the counter and the fridge, Sofia sat, dropping a plastic animal magnet against the appliance's white base over and over again with a dull plastic click.
Arizona was at the stove with her back to the door, methodically flipping pancakes.
Callie watched her from the doorway for a second before she moved. She reached down from her wooden barstool, wrapping her hands under Sofia’s armpits to haul her off the linoleum. "Up we go, chunk. Off the rug," she mumbled, shifting the toddler onto her hip before dropping her into the highchair. Sofia let out a small, wet whine, kicking her bare feet against the wooden tray until Callie shoved a piece of sliced banana into her hand.
Arizona didn't look around; she couldn't. Her fingers were white knuckled against the handle of the cheap silver spatula, her neck rigid with an implacable tension. Beneath her faded t-shirt, her shoulder blades bunched up high, frozen in place as though she were bracing herself for a crushing blow.
Something in Callie's chest did a fast, painful leap at the sight of it. For months, every single movement in this apartment had been a matter of rigid medical calculation, but here was Arizona, simply standing at the stove. Yet the whole tableau felt impossibly fragile: her weight was balanced entirely on her right hip, her left leg jutting out at an awkward angle on the floor to keep the residual limb from pressing too deeply into the bottom of the plastic socket.
"There's one left," Arizona muttered without turning around. "Sofia already tried to face-plant into the butter, but the pancake itself is fine."
Sofia made a garbled, high-pitched noise through a mouthful of banana, slapping her sticky palms against the plastic tray.
"You absolutely did," Arizona said quietly to the wall.
Callie pulled the plate towards her. She took a bite, her eyes automatically dropping to the floor. Through the interstice between the kitchen island and the stove, she tracked the alignment of Arizona’s ankles. It was a compulsion she couldn't switch off; measuring the exact angle of the aluminium pylon against the floorboards, looking for the tiny tremors in Arizona’s left calf that meant the quadriceps were giving out.
Arizona didn't turn around, but her back went noticeably stiffer. She slid her right foot an inch to the side, a protective nudge meant to block Callie’s line of sight. Her fingers tightened further on the spatula, the joints in her hand popping with a brittle crack in the quiet room.
When the last pancake was done, Arizona moved to the sink. It was a distance of only three steps, but she navigated them with a meticulous, heavy-light rhythm that sounded like someone desperately counting numbers in their head just to stay upright. She turned on the tap, letting the water roar violently against the metal skillet to drown out the silence between them. She scrubbed the cast iron with too much force, her head bowed so low that her blonde curls hid her face entirely.
"You were up late," Arizona remarked, keeping her face directed at the running water as her arms swept to wipe down the counter with a yellow sponge.
"Couldn't sleep," Callie said around a piece of cold pancake.
"Mm."
Arizona didn't offer anything else. She killed the tap, the sudden absence of the rushing water leaving a vacuum so absolute it felt physical, and reached for the dish towel hanging from the oven handle. As she raised her arms to dry her hands, the faded fabric of her t-shirt pulled taut and she winced, just a small, sharp catch in her throat as the upper rim of the plastic socket dug into the tender flesh of her groin. She caught herself instantly, her jaw locking into a hard line as her eyes flicked sideways to see if Callie had logged the slip.
Callie had stopped chewing. Her fork was suspended half an inch above the plate.
Arizona didn't look back. She hung the towel over the oven handle, smoothing out the damp wrinkles with her palms, tugging at the corners with repetitive, obsessive strokes until the cotton hung artificially straight. She was taking too long with it, fixing a piece of fabric just to keep her hands busy because she knew, with a sickening certainty, that Callie was diagnosing her.
Without a word, Arizona forced herself past the island, her stride wooden as she deliberately skewed her posture, keeping her left side as far from Callie’s reaching distance as the narrow kitchen allowed. She didn't look back as she retreated from the room, leaving the towel hanging in its suffocating symmetry on the stove, and the morning proceeded without another sound.
・・・・・
It was a Sunday afternoon in late July, and the rain turned the apartment windows into sheet iron. Sofia was on the living room rug, her small belly protruding over the elastic waistband of her fleece leggings as she aggressively hammered a plastic toy cup against the leg of the coffee table. She was fourteen months old, navigating the world with a thick-diapered wobble, her vocabulary limited to sharp babbles that only Callie and Arizona could translate.
Callie walked out of the kitchen carrying two mugs of tea, her socks sliding slightly on the hardwood. Arizona was on the couch, her head leaning back against the cushions. Her left leg was unbuckled, the titanium pylon lying horizontally on the carpet like a discarded scaffold. She was halfway through a clinical journal she had been staring at for three days, her fingers absentmindedly tapping against the paper.
Sofia suddenly stopped hammering. Her large, dark eyes fixed on the aluminium pylon of the prosthetic. To her, the metal wasn't a tragedy; it was just another object in the room. Dropping her toy, she crawled over to the couch with a wet grunt.
She didn't hesitate. Sofia wedged her knees against the mechanical ankle, trying to use the footplate as a stepping stool to climb onto Arizona’s lap. As she slipped, her hands slapped the metal pipe, making a loud, hollow ping. Sofia stopped, blinked, and then deliberately smacked the metal again with her open palm, delighted by the weird drum. She looked up at Arizona and let out a breathless shriek of joy.
She pulled herself up, locking her sticky fingers around the leather strap of the socket. "Up!" Sofia crowed. "Up, up."
The prosthetic groaned, the metal base shifting an inch on the hardwood with a jagged scrape.
Callie froze by the table, the mugs heavy in her hands, her breath catching as she braced for Arizona's reaction.
But Arizona just looked down at their daughter. Her mouth twitched, the unforgiving line of her jaw dissolving all at once. She dropped the medical journal onto her lap.
"Sofia, sweetie, that is not a climbing wall," Arizona wheezed. Her voice carried that light, teasing lilt that Callie hadn't heard since the spring. She leaned over the sofa, tickling the back of Sofia’s neck until the little girl collapsed into a fit of wet shriek-giggles, her foot slipping softly back onto the rug.
She reached down, scooping Sofia up by her armpits and hoisting her onto the cushion beside her. "I don't think the manual covered toddler defence," Arizona murmured. She looked up over the little girl's head, her blue eyes briefly catching Callie’s in the overcast.
Sofia immediately began playing with Arizona’s hair, shoving a handful of blonde curls into her own mouth. Arizona didn't mind; she just leaned in and blew a loud raspberry against Sofia’s cheek until the toddler squealed.
Callie set the mug down and stayed on her knees by the coffee table, her hand resting against the warm ceramic. She watched them, her own throat tightening as she leaned against the sofa frame, laughing softly with them. Her eyes stung because, for three whole minutes, they were just a family again.
・・・・・
The thirty seconds happened on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. A stolen sliver of time neither woman would ever stop hoarding in memory afterwards.
Callie had just hung up the phone with the hospital – her mind still cluttered with trauma rotation schedules and shifting block hours – when she stepped back into the kitchen. Arizona was leaning against the granite counter, reading a paperback with the radio playing on low from the small speaker on the windowsill. It was something slow, the notes trailing softly beneath the persistent hiss of the summer rain against the glass.
Arizona looked up from the page. Then, without a word, she set the book down face-open on the counter and held out her right hand, her palm open and facing upwards.
Callie stared at the pale curve of her fingers for a split second, her brain stalling, before she stepped forward and took it. Rings of gold chimed together as their hands met, a tiny, bright sound that used to make them smile.
They didn't really dance. It was more like they allowed themselves to drift into the narrow space between the sink and the table, their bodies falling into a heavy, familiar alignment that Callie hadn't felt since February. Arizona's right hand rested flat against the small of her wife’s back, the pressure light but steady, her thumb hooking slightly into the fabric of the cotton shirt, while Callie's chin dropped naturally into the hollow of Arizona's shoulder. The house was entirely empty; Sofia was at the hospital's daycare for another three hours, and for the first time in half a year, the air in the kitchen didn't smell like rubbing alcohol or old gauze.
It felt remarkably easy, like an inheritance they had almost forgotten they owned. Callie closed her eyes, breathing in the scent of Arizona’s shampoo – a piquant, herbal aroma – and let her weight sink into the embrace. For those few seconds, the physical boundaries of the room seemed to melt away; she could feel the familiar suppleness of Arizona’s waist, the subtle, rhythmic sway of her hips against her own, and the sheer luxury of not having to think about a prognosis.
Arizona tilted her head back slightly, her gaze catching Callie's. Fleetingly, the defensive line of her jaw slackened, her mouth curving into a faint, tentative smile that looked almost shy – a flash of the old, uninjured version of who she used to be – as if they were teenagers meeting in the dark.
"Hey," Arizona murmured, the single word heavy with everything they hadn't said all morning.
"Hi," Callie whispered back, her chest aching with the sudden, overwhelming warmth of it.
"You're home early."
"They cleared the board. I wanted to see you."
She’s coming back, Callie thought, a sudden, fierce wave of triumph rising in her chest. She knew immediately that she shouldn't name it, that defining the feeling was a jinx, a dangerous piece of hubris that assumed a single good afternoon was a milestone of permanent recovery. But the illusion was too seductive to resist. She let herself believe it anyway, pressing her face deeper into the warm skin of Arizona's neck, already imagining the long, quiet dinner they would have tonight, the casual way they might share a bottle of wine after Sofia went to bed, the quiet reclamation of their bed. She was already building a future out of thirty seconds of movement.
Then Arizona rotated her pelvis to reach back towards the counter for her coffee mug.
The rotation was minute, but the muscles along her spine instantly went taut, freezing mid-turn. A wet, heavy suction sound leaked from inside the silicone liner, that blunt, muffled noise of raw skin being pinched and sheared against plastic under pressure. A sharp, microscopic flinch travelled through Arizona's entire frame; her fingers instantly clawing into Callie's shoulder, her nails biting into the fabric with enough force to leave deep, white crescents against Callie's skin, holding on just to keep from dropping to the floor.
Before she could stop herself, before she could remember to just be a wife, Callie’s eyes dropped.
The fantasy dissolved before she could even catch her breath. Her eyes snagged instantly on the left leg, tracking the precise line where the hard polyurethane edge met the cotton shorts. Her mind, operating on a decade of surgical conditioning, immediately began calculating the friction coefficient, diagnosing the failure of the shuttle lock, scrutinising the red, irritated skin she knew was blistering beneath the fabric.
When Callie looked back up, the warmth in Arizona's face completely crumpled. Her features flattened out, blanched and inert, a sudden emotional withdrawal that left the room feeling frigid.
"The coffee'll be cold," Arizona said. Her hand recoiled from Callie’s waist, dragging back against her own ribs with a spasmodic jerk as if her skin had fused to Callie’s clothing.
"I know," Callie whispered, her own hands falling uselessly to her sides, her palms tingling from the sudden loss of contact.
Arizona picked up her mug and her paperback, her stride heavy and uneven as she moved out of the kitchen towards the living room. Her left shoe made a dull, mechanical thud against the floorboards with every second step.
Callie stood alone by the sink, listening to the music finish its last few bars, unable to move until the song ended and the digital speaker automatically selected something else – something faster, something cheerful, something completely uncongenial for the desolation left in the room.
・・・・・
As the late summer weeks bled into autumn, the resentment had stopped being an occasional flare and had become the permanent atmosphere of the apartment, settling into the corners of the rooms like dust that no amount of cleaning could remove. They developed a silent language of micro-transactions, a calculated way of moving through the narrow hallways that required no voice at all.
When Callie attended an ortho conference in Vancouver, she spent an hour in an artisanal boutique buying a specific brand of organic, cold-pressed scar-tissue oil. She left it on Arizona’s side of the bathroom sink basin without a word; the receipt tucked discreetly beneath the glass bottle like a medical prescription. Three days later, the bottle had been pushed into the dark corner of the medicine cabinet, the plastic seal completely untouched, a thin layer of moisture already gathering on the amber glass.
“You walked for ten minutes longer today," Callie said one evening. They were sitting on the living room couch after Sofia had been put to bed. She meant it as something good, but even to her own ears, her voice carried a heavy, manufactured warmth – the exact clinical tone she used when charting a patient's incremental progress on a clipboard. It was an instinct she hated herself for, this inability to look at her own wife without mapping the trajectory of her impairment.
Arizona didn't look up from the screen. "Did I."
"David said you did the full loop around the gym without stopping."
"David talks too much."
"He was just encouraged by the extension in your knee," the words slipping out before she could filter the surgeon out of her tone. "We both are."
Arizona changed the channel, her thumb pressing the remote button with a dull, plastic click. On the screen, a late-night nature documentary flitted into view, some grey, violent footage of a silverback gorilla navigating a muddy ridge in the rain. It was something she would never normally watch, but she kept her eyes glued to the shifting pixels as if the survival of the animal depended on her attention. There were exactly eight inches of empty space between their hips on the cushion, just enough room so that Callie’s thigh would never accidentally brush against the hard pylon of the socket.
"It's good,” Arizona added. “My leg is progressing. It’s fucking thrilling, isn't it?"
Callie opened her mouth to say something else, but the atmosphere in the room had completely curdled, turning so thick that the words felt too heavy to form. She closed her lips, leaning back against the sofa and watched the stroboscopic pallor of the television screen without taking any of it in. In the dark, her thumb worked mindlessly at her left hand, twisting her wedding ring around the knuckle again and again until the platinum bit into her skin.
・・・・・
The blunt, metallic clatter of the prosthetic’s heavy aluminium strap hitting the bedroom hardwood woke her at 3 am. Callie didn't move. She lay totally still on her side of the mattress, her eyes wide, staring at the faint, gray outline of the wardrobe against the wall.
On the other side of the bed, the blankets rustled with a dry friction as Arizona shifted to get up. Callie didn't turn her head, but her mind automatically tracked the choreography of the room: the single-footed pivot against the mattress edge, the dragging, uneven weight of that familiar gait, and then the thin streak of yellow nightlight disappearing as the bathroom door closed, followed by the remote, muffled sound of running water.
Callie kept her eyes fixed on the shadow of the ceiling fixture, her tongue dry against the roof of her mouth, waiting for the plumbing in the walls to go quiet again.
When Arizona finally came back into the room and settled beneath the duvet, she didn't say anything. Neither of them did. They lay there, perfectly rigid, listening to each other pretend to be asleep with their backs turned. The scant inches of cold mattress between them had ceased to be a simple physical separation; it felt vast and unplumbed now, a dead weight in the dark that kept them both completely stranded on their own sides of the bed.
・・・・・
It was past midnight, and the apartment had cooled down after the storm. They were lying on their backs, staring at the dark patterns of shadows on the ceiling, the mattress still carrying the faint, clean scent of newly washed cotton.
"Callie," Arizona whispered into the dark, her voice dry and gravelly from tiredness. "Are you awake?"
"Mm," Callie murmured, her eyes heavy. "What's wrong? Does it hurt?"
"No," Arizona deadpanned, pausing for a long moment. "I was just thinking. If I ever get kidnapped, the ransom note is going to be super cheap. Like, they’ll only have to mail you one shoe to prove they have me."
Callie froze. The phrase hung in the air for a second, stupid, morbid, and completely uncalled for in the middle of the night.
She lay perfectly still for two seconds, processing the sheer absurdity of it, and then a sudden, uncontrollable snort burst out of her nose. She tried to smother it with her pillow, but the laughter clawed its way out anyway, a shaking, helpless giggle that made her ribs ache. She clapped a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking as she tried to keep from waking Sofia down the hall. Arizona turned her head on the pillow, a faint, visible flash of teeth in the dark as she smiled, her own chest moving with a private amusement.
"That’s awful," Callie whispered fiercely, her shoulder bumping against Arizona’s as she laughed. "That’s a terrible joke. You’re going to hell."
"I'm serious," Arizona murmured, and Callie could hear the small, stupid smirk in her voice, that old, dry humour that used to come out whenever they were too exhausted to be careful around each other.
"You're an idiot," Callie muttered, her hand moving across the mattress on its own, her knuckles just grazing the fabric of Arizona's sleeve.
"I know," Arizona admitted, her voice dropping. She didn't pull her arm away; it stayed right there, her breath even and warm in the small space between them.
They lay like that until five in the morning, their skin nearly touching on the sheets, neither of them moving to close the final inch of distance, but neither of them turning away either.
・・・・・
The friction began long before they ever made it to the mattress.
By nine o’clock, they had already bludgeoned their way through most of a heavy, vinegary Cabernet, drinking not from wine glasses but from the stained ceramic mugs Callie had grabbed from the drying rack because the thought of rinsing stemware felt like an insupportable chore at this point. The alcohol hadn't made them soft or loose; it had just rendered them dull and slightly clumsy, a pair of tired surgeons trying to use intoxication to smother the suffocating quiet. Sofia was finally down, her small nursery at the end of the hall sealed shut, leaving the two of them under the harsh, humming halogen bar-lights of the island.
It was Arizona who started it, her movement sudden and twitchy, completely stripped of any grace. She set her mug down with a hard clatter that splashed dark red liquid across the marble, lunging forward to fist her hand into the faded fabric of Callie’s oversized sleepshirt, yanking her so hard the seams groaned. Her mouth slammed into Callie’s with a hungry, weeping, devotional weight; less an act of desire and more an aggressive attempt to reclaim something that had been stolen from them in the mud.
"Come on," Arizona muttered against her lips, her breath hot and smelling sourly of the cheap wine. Her hands were already tearing at the hem, her blunt knuckles scraping roughly against Callie's ribs. "Callie, please. Just come to bed."
There was no romance in the walk down the hallway. Arizona’s left side dragged behind her, a jagged, uneven scrape-and-thud against the floorboards that shook the thin drywall with every second step. They eventually tumbled onto the sagging foam mattress, the heavy down comforter instantly bunching up into an unmanageable, sweaty knot between their thighs. Arizona’s fingers gripped the headboard until her skin went ghost-white; she was trying so hard to perform the role of the woman she used to be, desperately trying to force her limbs into an old habit of pleasure that had been erased months ago.
Callie let herself be pulled under, her brain reeling from the sudden rush of movement, her hands sliding down Arizona’s back to hold her still. Her broad palms followed the tight curve of Arizona’s waist, the skin there warm and slick with a thin layer of nervous sweat. By blind muscle memory, her fingers dipped lower, automatically searching for the thick, athletic curve of Arizona’s left thigh to hoist her closer.
Her hand dropped through the empty air first, and then smacked directly into the raw, reconstructed landscape of the stump. The sound was horrifyingly distinct in the small room – the fleshy, solid slap of bare skin hitting the fibrous ridge where the quadriceps had been folded over and stapled down into the sawn bone.
Arizona’s whole spine buckled in a violent, electric spasm, a whistling gasp tearing out of her throat as her head cracked back against the headboard. The jerk was purely primitive, the chaotic survival response of a body under threat, so abrupt that her flailing elbow accidentally caught Callie hard across the collarbone.
"Shit," Arizona choked out, her fingers instantly wrenching away from Callie’s shirt, her arms wrapping around her own chest as she curled inward.
"Sorry. Gosh, let me see," Callie blurted out, the caretaker reflex exploding before she could stop it. The wine vanished from her blood, replaced by the thundering adrenaline of a trauma room. She reached out in the dark, her fingers immediately seeking the margins of the scar to palpate for damage. "Did the distal end split? Are you bleeding? Arizona, talk to me—"
"Don't touch it!" Arizona hissed, her voice cracking as she slapped Callie’s hand away. The sound of the palm-strike was wet and sharp in the dark. She was panting, her breath rattling in her throat like gravel in a tin can. "Don't do the doctor voice. Just... don't."
Callie didn't lower herself. She remained hovering over Arizona, her biceps rigid and trembling as she held her weight off the sheets, her face close enough to see the pale, watery shine of Arizona’s wide eyes. "You’re six months out from a major flap revision," she rasped, the protective panic making her words sound heavy in the dark. "If you shear that tissue against the linen, Arizona—"
"I didn't shear anything," Arizona said, her voice barely audible. She lay completely still, arms stuck straight down at her sides as if trying to occupy minimal space, her breathing too rapid against the sheets. The unbridled fervor from earlier had leaked out of her, leaving her looking small and strangely exposed under the grey light from the window. "Just... keep going. It's fine. I want to."
But the momentum was dead. They both knew it. The bedroom felt instantly cold, the scent of damp wood-rot colonising the air, mixed with the smell of the rain outside and the sour leather of the prosthetic straps coiled on the floor by the nightstand.
Callie lowered herself back down, but the lover in her had retreated, leaving only the hyper-vigilant instincts of a surgeon. Every shift of her body became an excruciating exercise in avoidance. She locked her elbows, bracing her palms flat on the hardwood headboard, her muscles aching under the strain of keeping her torso suspended, desperate to ensure no part of her own skin accidentally brushed against Arizona's left flank. She was working around a body she was suddenly terrified to touch, her mind flooded with phantom pain scales and nerve maps.
"Does this hurt?" Callie whispered into the dark, her mouth hovering over Arizona’s ear. "If I move here... is that too much weight?"
Arizona didn't answer with words. She stared at the plaster ceiling, her face ironed out into a vacant mask. She moved her hips when she was supposed to, a perfunctory, compliant sway that felt so thoroughly detached it made Callie’s stomach twist with a rancid, greasy wave of self-loathing. Every time Callie tried to lean into her, Arizona’s pelvis instinctively shuddered a few millimeters to the right, her nerve endings rebelling against the proximity long before the choice could even reach her brain.
The illusion finally shattered when Callie tried to shift her knee to brace herself. Her thigh caught the stubborn tip of Arizona’s residual limb, dragging the scarred stump across the heavy linen sheet with a dry, raspy shudder; a visceral, grating sound that pooled in the room like a crushing, stifling tide.
The silence between them was immense and completely intractable.
"Callie. Get off." Arizona murmured, not yelling.
Callie didn't argue; too tired to even try. She rolled off her, her limbs feeling heavy and useless. She lay back on her side of the mattress, the drying sweat turning cold and tacky in the draft from the window, her tongue dry against the roof of her mouth.
Arizona didn't look at her. She reached down with her right foot, caught the tangled edge of the duvet with her toes, and yanked the heavy fabric over her left hip until the vacancy beneath the cloth was entirely hidden from view. She rolled onto one side, pulling her knees up towards her chest, transforming herself into a small, unapproachable knot at the very edge of the bed.
Callie stared at the ceiling fixture, listening to the dull, continuous thunk-thunk-thunk of the clogged gutter outside the glass. An airless trench had opened up in the centre of the mattress, a valley of stiff linen that neither of them had the strength or the right to cross.
On the floor, the titanium buckles of the prosthetic sat still in the shadow of the nightstand, looking like a piece of machinery left behind in a deserted ward. Callie watched the metal until her eyes burned from the glare of the streetlamps, but she didn't close them until the sky turned the colour of wet tin at four in the morning.