Title: Clinging

Author: A. Windsor

Pairing/Characters: Callie/Arizona

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. My almost two years of law school could allow me to legalese this a little more, but it also tells me it's pretty useless. So please don't sue; it's not me, I'm just playing!

Series: Standalone, post ep.

Summary: " But when I'd wake up, I'd remember: They don't make coffins that small." Post-ep to 8x21.

Author's Note: Not beta'd. Some processing, a companion to last week's Soothing.

"Hello, my big girl," Arizona coos, scooping Sofia off the beanbag she's climbing like it's Everest. She buries her face in that soft baby neck and blows a little raspberry.

Sofia giggles.

"I heard you got Zola sick-sick-sick," she murmurs, holding her close. The nursery is relatively empty, so it's nice and quiet while Arizona rocks her baby girl. "Did you have a good day? Even without Zola here to play with?"

Sofia doesn't answer, reaching for her momma's necklace and grabbing hold.

"Ah-ah. That's special, you know that. And ooh, you're getting so strong. Who'd've thought when you were just a tiny... tiny little..."

All she sees is Tommy. That unsalvageable bowel in her hands, his tiny life slipping away over weeks and months. With Sofia, it had been scary, but it had been all miraculous progress, not a slow spiral into finality.

How quickly it could've gone very differently.

She feels the tears dripping off her face before she even realizes she's crying. Sofia turns in her arms and looks up at her with consternation. Her little hand slaps at her face gently, encountering the tears.

Arizona sinks down onto the beanbag and feels the sobbing overtaking her. She kept it together. She tried so hard to keep it together through all of Tommy's short life. She saw Morgan suffering and remembered that fear deep down in her gut. She went home, though, and made crazy, hot love to her wife almost every night and played with her beautiful, perfect, healthy daughter. And she lived. She ignored the memories and she lived.

But now Tommy's in the morgue.

Sofia might be in her arms, babbling for "Momma" but all Arizona can see is that baby in the morgue and how close it was to being hers.

Callie always panics a little when she gets paged to day care. Even though she knows reasonably that there's probably nothing wrong with Sofia besides sore gums or a repeat of last week's projectile vomiting incident, she hurries to day care with just a bit less speed than she does to a trauma.

Carol meets her at the door and brings her inside, gesturing to the main room.

"She's been like that for twenty minutes. We don't know how to stop it."

Ah.

It's not her daughter that is in distress: it's her sweet, sweet wife, clinging to their antsy baby girl while she cries it out on a day care beanbag.

Callie approaches the pair slowly, gently. She sits down in a neighboring beanbag and smiles softly.

"Hi, pretty ladies."

"H-hi, Calliope," Arizona manages, looking up from where her face is buried in Sofia's shoulder.

"Ma!" Sofia giggles. "Hi."

"Hey, Sof. Are you looking after Momma for me?"

"She's doing a good job," Arizona sniffles, wiping her tears on the back of her hand.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"Tommy."

"Oh."

Arizona nods and cries harder.

"Oh, sweetie."

Callie scoots her beanbag closer with an awkward squeak. She slowly extracts Sofia from Arizona's grasp. The poor thing needs to get her play time in after half an hour of comforting her mother. She kisses the baby's cheek and sets her at her feet, next to the blocks.

"Buen trabajo, Sofia mia." [Good work, my Sofia.]

"I'm sorry," Arizona cries, her sobs receding again.

"For what?" Callie shakes her head, gathering her wife into her arms.

It takes a while, between getting Arizona to stop crying long enough to leave the nursery and packing Sofia up for the walk across the street, but Callie finally gets her family home. They have a quiet family dinner, and just like last week, when Arizona was the one shoring up her crumbling wife, they bundle the baby off to bed and curl up on the couch with the TV on low.

"I told her that it would be okay. At the very beginning, I told her it would be okay, because our baby is okay."

"Arizona..."

"I didn't, after that. I tried to never bring up Sofia again. I knew it was false hope, that Sof is one in a million but... I think I always thought he'd pull through."

Her breath is shuddering, and she pulls her knees in tight as she snuggles further under Callie's arm, brushing her cheek against the soft cotton of her wife's t-shirt.

"They don't even make coffins small enough for him."

"Arizona," Callie whispers, holding her tighter, kissing her hair, doing whatever she can to chase away the ghosts that make her love's voice so hollow.

"That's all I could think of. When you were barely hanging on, and she was barely hanging on, I'd try my hardest not to sleep, because when I did all I saw was coffins. Big and small. But when I'd wake up, I'd remember: They don't make coffins that small."

Arizona takes a deep breath, eyes mostly dry, and presses on:

"And I know- I know that she is here and she is whole. She is perfect. I was just telling you that last week. But... I just... I let myself be in denial for so long. It's all hitting me now."

"I should've pushed you harder about it," Callie says, kicking herself.

"No, no. I didn't wanna talk about it. I was separating the mom from the doctor. And god, life is so good right now. I have everything I could ever need. I guess that makes me feel a little guilty."

"Why?"

"Because Morgan and I were in the same place, on the brink of losing everything, but I... got it back. And she has nothing."

"Oh, babe..."

"No, sorry," Arizona shakes her head, tries to throw the perky persona back on. "I'm sorry, I'm being crazy."

"You're allowed," Callie assures her. "And it's not that crazy. This is what being a family is about, right?"

"Taking turns being crazy?"

"Exactly. So we've been a family forever."

Arizona grins just a little and hides that grin against Callie's neck.

"Will you take me to bed and just... hold me?"

Given their extremely active sex life as of late, it's an unusual request, but Callie easily grants it with a whispered oath of:

"Of course."

Callie falls asleep that night with Arizona still clinging tightly to her. Her wife drifted off almost as soon as they hit the mattress, her head pillowed on Callie's chest, arms holding fast around her middle. Callie listens to Arizona's even breathing, listens to it mix with the soft crackle of the baby monitor, the steady rhythm softly lulling her under.

She'd been holding out hope, while she watched her wife toil tirelessly over Morgan's baby, while she teased Alex about being a big dumb gorilla, that Tommy would be a Sofia. He was a fighter, and a SGMW family member, and she'd just... been expecting the same outcome. She'd let herself be in denial and therefore let her wife stay there, too.

Maybe that was better. Maybe that's how moms who also do surgeries on tiny NICU babies on a regular basis have to function, to close themselves off and play the perk, and live their lives as much as they can.

All she knows is that she loves that she can be here for Arizona in any way she can, whether it's on-call room sex to take her mind off of things or play dates to the zoo or just holding her tight while she cries the demons away.

Because Arizona does the same for her.

el fin