SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM

A/N: So I've been doing Insanity, because I am a sadist and, apparently, I have no regard for my own personal safety. Anyone else out there done this? And anyone else want to bitch slap Tania across the face? She's always showing me up, damn you Tania, DAMN YOU!

Rant over! Now onto the next chapter and a bit of drama :o

Disclaimer: Grey's Anatomy and the characters herein are the intellectual property of Shonda Rhimes. You go girl.

Chapter 17: Vita/Mors

"Aaah! Arizona!" The Latina screams, the shock of the blonde's icy skin against her own causing her body to shiver at the contact. "I hate you!"

It seemed every time Callie had snuggled herself into a nice, snuggly cocoon of warmth, Arizona wasn't two minutes behind to come and freeze her to death.

"I love you too. Now come warm me up please." Arizona demands more than asks, snuggling the blankets of their bed around herself as she tries to get some warmth back into her frozen body. That was one thing about the Middle East, unlike Washington it rarely got too cold, except that one night…

"I don't understand how you get so cold, your feet are like icicles!" Callie squeals, wrapping the blonde in her arms and intertwining their legs despite her protestations.

"Lucky that I have you to be my own personal body warmer then." Arizona giggles, earning her a poke in the belly, the Latina's arms having wrapped themselves around the blonde's waist.

"I knew there was an ulterior motive to you asking me to move in with you." The Latina jests, feigning hurt, her bottom lip jutting out in a pout.

"The truth comes out." The blonde plays, earning her another poke in the stomach and eliciting a round of laughter from the pair.

Breathing deeply into the comfortable silence the two of them have lapsed into, Callie rests her chin on the blonde's shoulder, breathing in the fruity fragrance of her girlfriend's trademark shampoo.

"Does it hurt more?" The Latina asks into the darkness, her fingers absently stroking the side of Arizona's scarred leg.

"Hmm?" Arizona mumbles, her eyes becoming more clouded by sleep with each passing second.

"Your leg. Does it hurt more? When it's cold." Callie's voice is barely more than a whisper, as if frightened to bring the subject up.

"Mmm… Yeah, a bit." Came the reply, the marine's voice mirroring that of her girlfriend's. "It'll probably be like that from now on, right?"

"Yeah, babe. Probably…" The thing about surgery and physiotherapy was that it can only get you so far. When the injury was so severe, when the trauma was so massive, there was always going to be a lasting impact.

"Thought so." Arizona answers, her voice sounding resigned but neutral. No anger, no hurt, no betrayal, just acceptance. "Guess that means you'll never be able to leave me then."

"Just try to get rid of me." Callie whispers, her own eyes fluttering open and closed in an attempt to stay awake.

"Do you have to go to work tomorrow?" The blonde whines, not looking forward to another day of entertaining herself whilst her gorgeous girlfriend is off cutting people open and saving lives.

"Yep."

"Why don't you…" Arizona begins, her voice low and conspiratorial as she turns over from her position being spooned to come face to face with her girlfriend, "just call in sick and spend the whole day in in bed. With me."

Arizona starts laying soft kisses along the Latina's collar bone and neck, making her girlfriend's eyes roll back into her eyelids.

"Arizona…" Callie warns, the resolve sounding weak, even to the Latina's own ears. "We can't… I need to sleep… I…"

Arizona slips her hand swiftly into her girlfriend's panties, swiping her fingers gently across the Latina's clit before plunging two fingers into her molten core.

"Tell me what you need, Calliope." Arizona whispers, Callie's hips arching up into her touch, speaking a thousand words in one movement, the surgeon's body betraying her brain.

"Fuck me…" The Latina gasps.

"Well, if you say so."

Another day, another shift at work and another wake up at the ass crack of dawn. It was one of the few things that Callie hated about being a surgeon, but then the world didn't run on Callie's time. The world had its own plans and didn't care whether or not Callie was sleeping or not, was tired or not. Not that she could really complain.

A wide grin erupts on the Latina's face as she remembers the fun and games Arizona and herself had played last night. She'd started off the night content to simply fall asleep with her girlfriend in her arms, but when Arizona had other ideas… The two of them hadn't gotten to sleep until around 3:30 AM, and what with Callie's shift starting at 09:00… She really hadn't had that much sleep.

Not that she was complaining or anything. Life was too good at the moment to be complaining, which was rare for Callie because God knows the world had sent her a good lifetimes worth of complaints in her time as one of its many inhabitants. Just having Arizona with her, knowing that the blonde beauty was her girlfriend, was in love with her of all people, it made everything else in the world, however bad, tolerable.

Today, though, the world seemed to agree with Callie - that today was going to be a good day. For once the roads were almost empty, traffic flowing steadily as people made their way to and from work, or simply out to enjoy the day. 8:20 AM. She was going to be early, well, earlier than usual at least, the brunette liking to get a handle on her cases before the start of her shift and morning rounds.

If Callie had a choice, if she hadn't become a surgeon, if her life had been different, she would have very much liked to have been a race car driver. Oh, her dad would have had a hernia over that one, Callie smiled, chuckling at the thought. There were only two other places where she got the same kind of calmness and relaxation, the feeling of complete ease as she felt in the OR. One was every minute, every second she spent with Arizona, at least when they weren't raising the temperature of the room, and the second was sitting behind the wheel of her beloved T-Bird.

"Today is going to be a good day…" Callie mused aloud, squinting into the early morning sunlight. "A really good…"

BANG

A bright white light, and pain. Lots of pain. Then nothing…

There's only so much time a person can spend in bed in one day. Especially when there's only one person in said bed and the other side is cold and empty. Having said that, Arizona had done pretty well today, managing to stay horizontal right up until 09:00 AM, which for a marine who is used to getting up before the rooster earlier, was quite an achievement. It was at times like this that the field office didn't need her to start doing whatever it was exactly she was supposed to be doing until later in the month.

It was at that point that Arizona decided that she was going to make today a really good day. A productive day, and one that would start with surprising her gorgeous girlfriend at work. That is what bought her to the bakery just across the road from the hospital. Lattes and lemon poppy seed scones were Callie's one weakness, the woman just couldn't get enough of the things, and Arizona loved the way her girlfriend smiled at her whenever she popped in unannounced in the middle of one of her marathon shifts just because… Plus Wallace was out with is mom, so…

Checking her watch, Arizona smiled. Callie wasn't due in surgery until 12:00 PM and it had just turned 10:00, so she had plenty of time to spend with the Latina, preferably picking up where they left off last night or more precisely, this morning.

Arizona took in a deep breath of the Seattle air. It was a beautiful sunny day today, not exactly warm, but sunny. It was one of the things that Arizona liked about Seattle, that even though you got horribly rainy days in their millions, the days when the sun came out, after it had rained, were spectacular. In the mornings there was something about the way the sun reflected off the evaporating rain. It wasn't really something she'd gotten to enjoy in Iraq.

Deciding to walk instead of getting her usual cab, there had been some sort of accident on the roads somewhere that had turned the streets of Seattle into gridlock, Arizona couldn't help but huff at her slow progress. She'd ditched her crutches, much to her girlfriend's chagrin, and that of her physio, who had both told her it was too soon to go it alone, but whatever. She hated the things and the blisters they gave her on her hands, plus she was much quicker by her own steam, not that that meant she was sprightly exactly. Promising to catch a cab home would placate Callie, Arizona was sure, not to mention the baked goods in her hand.

Finally reaching the doors to the hospital, a sight she was more than familiar with, Arizona stepped from the calm of the morning into what appeared to be the apocalypse. Gurneys were everywhere, triage kits strewn about the lobby with more doctors than Arizona had seen in her life (and Arizona had seen her fair share of doctors) running around, many ….

"What happened here?" Arizona calls to a nurse she recognises, one of Callie's scrub nurses… Julie, maybe?

"10 Car Pile-Up on the freeway." The nurse shouted to her, the woman never breaking her own stride. "18 wheeler blindsided a sports car and jack knifed. Nasty stuff."

"Jesus…" Arizona breathes, closing her eyes to the destruction. One thing she'd learnt, pretty much on the first day she had returned from her first tour of duty was that she could be killed just as easily at home, at peace, then she could at work, in the middle of a battlefield.

Walking further into the hospital, Arizona moves her way to the emergency department. If it is as bad as it seems, they were going to need as much help as they could get. She wasn't a trained nurse, nor did she profess to have any medical knowledge larger than your average bathroom cabinet, but she had two steady hands and was good under pressure. Maybe crowd control…

Suddenly a whizz of muscle, topped by a mop of unmistakable ginger hair passes in a blur in front of the marine. Just the man she was looking for.

"Major Hunt." Arizona calls, but the man continues on his path, seemingly oblivious of her shouts.

"Major!" Arizona repeats, her best battlefield shout being employed to gain the retired ranger's attention.

"Robbins…" Hunt gulps, his voice hoarse and out of breath. "Arizona…" His voice softens, his eyes conveying a look of sympathy mixed with hurt and fatigue.

"I… I'm so sorry…."

What..? Why was he sorry? None of it made the least bit of sense to Arizona, the Major had never been anything but amiable to her, no, they weren't exactly best friends, but Arizona liked to say they were friends, if not only due to their past experiences in the military.

Opening her mouth to begin voicing her questions to the Major, a door slamming open in her peripheral vision takes the blonde's attention. Turning her gaze to the newly opened door, Arizona has to blink twice before her mind can allow her to take in the scene before her.

There, on a table is the woman she loves. She can't see much, but what she can see is a lot of blood, blood on the gurney, blood the floor, blood oozing from her girlfriend's body… A body that was as pale as a ghost. It wasn't Callie… It wasn't HER Calliope.

But it was.

Bile starts to rise in Arizona's throat, a lemon poppy seed scone falling to the floor from her limp fingers with a deafening thud.

In the moments before death the brain is deprived of oxygen, cortisol is released, brain waves surge all culminating in what many people describe as an ethereal experience, a calming out of body experience that many attribute to a higher power, to God or Allah, or whatever deity they believe in. Some say they see their families, people they love.

It's all science, it's all part of the body's deception - easing you into death. But damn if it doesn't feel real.

"So what do you think?" A voice permeates the silence, close but from an unseen source.

It sounded familiar, the voice, although Callie couldn't quite place it. The inflections sounded familiar, the cheerful, bouncy pattern of their speech, yet unequivocally male.

"It's okay, Callie. I know this is all a bit weird." The voice laughs gently, although it did little to ease the surgeon.

'That' Callie thought, 'was the understatement of the century.'

"Who… who are you?" Her voice sounds distant, even to herself, a shout as a whisper, as though her lungs were still.

"That doesn't really matter." The voice seems to smile, "You'll figure it out eventually, I don't doubt. You are amazingly intelligent, after all. You know, that cartilage is quite something."

"G… G… God?" Callie stumbles. She didn't know how she'd gotten here, or where this was, all she remembered was a bright white light and the worst pain she'd ever felt in her life.

"Oh, I am definitely not God! Definitely not." Finally, a figure appears from the ether, a silhouette against a harsh white backdrop. "I'm just a messenger, a guide."

"A guide for what? Where am I?" Her heart felt as though it was going to beat out of her chest.

"You must have some idea, Callie. You did, after all, just ask if I was God."

"Heaven?" Callie whispers, not entirely sure she wanted to know the answer.

"Not quite. But close. Too close really." The figure sighs, their shoulders visibly slumping before continuing, "This is kind of like limbo. This is where you make your choice."

"Why is everything so white and fluffy?"

"Don't ask me, this is your mind, not mine." The silhouette laughs lightly, taking a step forward, their face remaining masked. "Everything here is what you make it, Callie."

"Is that..?"

A girl, no more than four had appeared in a similar fashion as her 'guide'. Her long blonde hair hung in soft ringlets around her shoulders, her skin a magnificent copper that seemed to glow in the bright light. Turning her face to Callie, the girl smiled that unmistakable dimpled smile, her eyes green speckled with gold and blue hues that made Callie's heart melt.

The figure simply nods in response.

"Just remember that none of this…" The guide adds, gesticulating to the open expanse before him, the child that had suddenly appeared hopping from ethereal cloud to ethereal cloud, "is real. And you can't stay here forever."

"Why..?"

"You know the answer to that one, Callie. That's not the right question." Her guide replies, shaking their shrouded head.

"Then what are the right questions?!" Callie cries, why are there never any simple answers?

"Do you want to be here?" The voice answers without a hesitation, their tone sharp and to the point, giving Callie pause.

"I don't know..? I mean I didn't really have a choice in the matter… I don't even remember what happened, one second I was fine and then…"

Callie dropped her hands to her sides with an audible smack. All this talk of choices was giving her a headache, the way the figure before her managed to reply to all of her questions, yet avoid giving her any answers… It was infuriating.

"That is true, you didn't have a choice in that…"

"But I have a choice now..?" Callie interrupted, reading in between the lines. She was a doctor, after all.

"Maybe… But time is running out. You have to decide, Callie. Decide whether you'd rather come with me or go back to her."

The name didn't need to be said, Callie knew exactly who the man meant.

"Arizona…"

"She needs you, Calliope." The voice continues, pressing and urgent. "More than you know."

Suddenly it all falls into place. The voice… Only Arizona ever calls her Calliope… Well, Arizona and her Dad, but only Arizona says it like that…

"Tim?"

"I knew you'd get it." Finally coming into focus, the man smiled that dimpled smile that Callie loved so much. "My sister chose well with you. She loves you more than anything I've ever seen."

"I love her too, so much…" Callie answered, the tears threatening in her eyes mirrored on the face of Arizona's passed brother.

"I know." Tim smiles sadly.

"I can't imagine life without her." Callie whispers, wiping away an escaped tear.

"What about death?" Tim asks, completely serious. "A lifetime is a long time, but death is eternal."

"I can't… I can't do this to her, I can't… I need to be with her, Tim. I love her, I want to be with her, the real her, not something that my brain has conjured up, I…" Callie gasps, her lungs definitely failing her now.

"Calm down, Callie… Breathe…" Tim soothes, bringing his hands to the sides of her face.

"Callie..? You need to breathe…" "Where's that blood bag?!"

I'll breathe, I'll breathe for you Arizona…

"You didn't fucking call me?" Arizona cries, anger oozing from every pore of her body.

"Arizona…" Mark pleads; his eyes filled with unshed tears, the usually strong man seeming small and weak at this moment.

"NO MARK. WHAT THE FUCK!" The blonde screams, no longer able to keep her anger in check, her fear pushing all semblance of control out of her command.

"Arizona, please…" Mark tries to speak, but is instantly cut-off by a furious blonde.

"WHAT IS IT? IS IT BECAUSE I AM A WOMAN? IS IT BECAUSE WE ARE GAY?" Arizona knew how stupid that sounded, none of the people who worked in the hospital cared whether she was gay, straight, or bi, and everyone here loved Callie almost as much as she did, but she was angry dammit!

"ARIZONA! WE DIDN'T RING YOU BECAUSE NO-ONE HAS YOUR NUMBER." Mark screams, his tone matching that of the blonde haired woman.

"What do you mean you don't have my number? Callie has my number Mark, my number is in Callie's phone, the phone that she takes everywhere, Mark!" Tears in the blonde's eyes, anger subsiding into pain, the fear leaping forward once again to override any other emotion.

How did this happen? She was going to work, the same way she does every day… What..? It didn't make sense, it was Callie… Callie was always so careful, it was Arizona that was the reckless one, the one that everything happened to, and that was the way Arizona liked it. Just thinking about anything hurting Calliope made her stomach churn. It was all wrong, she must be in some horrible nightmare…

"Yeah, well…" Mark holds up a bag containing the remains of a very familiar looking phone and Arizona's stomach drops.

Silence is all that answers him. The blonde feels her body hit the floor, but she has no idea how she got there, but there's no pain from the fall. The only pain she feels is a sudden fire burning beneath her surgical scars, matched only by the flames burning her heart into ash, the rest of her body, ice.

"I would have rung you if I knew your number, Arizona, you know that! I would have fucking come to your apartment and gotten you if I'd had the time, but I was trying to save lives, Arizona." Mark's voice starts to become raised, his own anger bubbling over.

One again, the man is answered only by the steady beep-beep of nearby hospital equipment.

"Look. Usually insurance leads us to emergency contacts, but obviously Callie hadn't changed hers yet, or she'd forgotten about it." Sloan continues after blowing out a calming breath. "Whatever, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that her Father was her emergency contact."

"Okay." Arizona responds, choking down a sob, her body wrapped around itself on the floor. One word sentences were a miracle at this moment.

"It's an obligation to ring them, if we have their details." Mark finishes, his voice softer than when he had begun.

It made sense that Callie had her father as her emergency contact. Even if she didn't speak to him that often, he was still her dad and she still loved him. Her and Callie hadn't even been together a year… And she'd been so busy with the cartilage, the shooting… Everything… It hurt, but it made sense.

"Okay." Arizona nods, scrubbing angrily at her damp eyes, a new resolve coming over the blonde as she tries to bring herself back to her feet. If she wanted Callie to fight, then that meant that she had to fight too, and Arizona was pretty damn good at fighting.

"He's already on a plane out here."

A/N 2: So today's chapter title means Life/Death. Hands up who got that already! What do you guys think? I thought that Arizona seems to always be the one under the knife, and she deals pretty well. But how will she fair when it's not her, but the woman she loves in danger? Stay tuned for more! Thanks for reading guys :)