Chapter 1: Seattle, 2015
Notes:
FreakingPlane here! So excited for this fic, I’m the British fool that writes the American lesbians and makes sure that they never have a dull day.
For those unfamiliar with Grey’s Anatomy, this is Callie and Arizona:
Just a little information on these ladies if you’re new here!
- Calliope ‘Callie’ Torres: Orthopedic Surgeon, canonically bisexual. A well loved surgical powerhouse who builds bones from nothing, like God. Hates her full name. Has too many feelings to cope with and a daughter fathered by her late best friend.
- Arizona Robbins: Pediatric Surgeon, canonically lesbian. Known as Dr Sweetheart, but can be awful when she chooses to be. The only one allowed to call Callie her full name. Survived a plane crash but lost her left leg above the knee, then cheated on her wife a year later.
- Together, they’re toxic idiots who keep hurting each other but are totally in love. Promise!
For those who do know what I’m talking about, Calzona’s timeline is a bit off in this one. (Whoops.) All you need to know is that it’s been three years since the plane crash and Sofia is six years old:) Obviously no divorce, no thinking about a second kid, no maternal-fetal fellowship and I’ve sent them to therapy too just for the hell of it.
Also, this will be a mix of American English and British English. Just ignore it<3
true_birate (or Q – the bastard who insists on writing in American English and using inched despite not even being American) with some quick notes on the birates:
- James Flint: ex-naval officer turned pirate captain. Brilliant, furious, resolute. Canonically bisexual, polyamorous, and a MESS.
- John Silver: Flint’s sharp-tongued quartermaster and lover with one and a half legs (field-amputated on a pirate ship, because of course) and more charm than you can reasonably fit in one little guy.
- Together, they’re lovers stitched by war, betrayal, and loyalty. They should have destroyed each other ten times over, and yet here they are – inseparable, unstoppable, and still a disaster.
Also, for the purposes of this crossover, Flint still has his hair (because I think he looks really good with his hair:):
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They say that when you die, a great light washes over you. That some sanctified radiance pours itself across your body like baptismal water: a tunnel of light, a chorus of angels descending in golden radiance. They say your life stutters past your eyes like a broken reel – sins, joys, betrayals, loves – everything compressed into a single unbearable instant. Pearlescent gates and harp music. A reckoning. Or, alternatively, fire licking at your heels, shrieking souls packed shoulder to shoulder, every regret you’ve ever known chasing you until eternity becomes a prison with no walls.
Heaven or hell – just two sides of the same fable.
James Flint – a pirate, but nevertheless a Protestant – had assumed, with a kind of bitter certainty, that his fate would be decided between the two. That at the very least there would be judgment. Finality.
He never expected not to end up on one side or the other. To go… someplace else.
When death came, there was no great light. No divine judgment. No golden city, no tribunal of angels, no final clarity or accounting for sins. There was only pain – real, immediate pain. Too alive to belong to death.
The first crack of the musket had torn Silver’s chest open, and Flint was still tasting the violence of it when his body jolted in his arms. Blood welled up fast and vicious, spreading against the fabric of his shirt. Silver’s breath rattled in his throat, a wet, final gurgle, and Flint held him, not tightly enough to stop the inevitable, only enough to feel the moment when the man he loved sagged, slackened, and began to slip away.
His name – John – escaped his mouth in a weak, disbelieving whisper.
Then came the second shot, and Flint felt the world twist and turn. A mutineer’s musket cracked again, and this time it was his own body that was caught in the line of fire. He convulsed as the ball struck him. The pain was sudden, enormous, and then – not.
Just like that, his breath was gone. A life stolen mid-reckoning.
He died grieving.
Not for himself, not for the endless wars, the lost cause, the ruined name that history would forget.
For Silver.
For the man beside him, for the breath already leaving him, for the life they had no time to finish making. For what might have been.
And then – nothing.
Not silence. Not black. Not even the bitter taste of regret. Worse, it was the absence of everything that could be measured, nothingness in its truest and most terrifying state: formless, senseless freefall through void, where thought itself disintegrated, where identity scattered like ash on the wind. He was no longer James McGraw, nor Captain Flint, nor even the amalgam of rage and grief he had long mistaken for himself. He was weight without anchor. Heat without flame. Time – moving and falling endlessly.
Until he wasn’t.
A body. His body. Flint gasped as impact returned him to flesh, meeting cold, hard ground with a choked grunt. He could feel it beneath him – something foreign. Alien. Concrete? Not sand, not soil. Not the sea. The sky above him, if there was one, was too bright. Not the divine gleam of heaven, but the fluorescent burn of something unnatural.
He should not have lungs; he should not have breath. And yet his chest heaved, dragging air in ragged bursts as though it had never stopped.
A strangled groan caught his attention. Flint turned his head sideways, agony tracing down his neck – too precise, too earthly, for any realm beyond the grave.
A body lay crumpled and twisted on the ground beside him. Limbs jittered faintly, proof of life clinging where it had no business remaining.
Silver.
John Silver, half-curled on the concrete like he’d been flung there, sweat-drenched and groaning. His breath came in stutters, each exhale swallowed by the next incoherent moan. The battered peg of his leg sat at a grotesque angle, metal biting against the floor in a grating scrape.
And yet – he breathed. His chest rose. His throat shuddered with sound.
Alive. Hurting, misplaced, fractured, but indisputably alive.
Flint’s pulse lurched, a thing he should no longer possess. Whatever perverse afterlife they found themselves in, it was nothing like he expected. It was no paradise, no inferno, no final judgment.
This was no eternity. It was something far stranger.
And James Flint realized something absurd and entirely possible – he had died. He had bled out on his ship, felt the world narrow to nothing, surrendered to the abyss. And yet death had not taken him. It had simply… relocated him. To the twenty-first century. To the fluorescent glare of modernity. To a world of miracles.
Seattle, Washington. 2015.
[…]
The operating room’s lights were blinding. They shone like the sun as nurses and orderlies alike swarmed the empty OR like ants, clearing away bloody rags and wheeling the patient out through the double doors on the far side. It was surprising how fast they worked. Years of practice, making it like a dance as they worked to sterilise the room for the next patient.
Dr Callie Torres watched through the scrub room window as someone started to mop the floor, cleaning away the blood spatters from the traumatic open book pelvic fracture she’d been working on for the last… however many hours it had been. Time seemed to warp when she was doing what she did best, fixing bones while her colleagues in General Surgery worked in the man’s abdomen to fix his ruptured bowel. A well oiled machine, Dr Meredith Grey liked to say.
Meredith had left the OR an hour before Callie, paged to the pit for a car accident and leaving Callie alone to pin a man’s pelvis back together. Not that she minded – she, in fact, liked operating by herself. Especially considering most of the first and second year residents were on some trauma training course and she didn’t have a group of mindless interns stammering and stuttering their way through questions when she needed to focus.
Scrubbing out, Callie ran the coarse brush up and down her arms and over her hands to clean them of the sweat and oils that had accumulated while she wore two pairs of gloves to operate. Blue below, white on top, just in case she nicked or tore a glove on a screw or pin – that was common in Orthopedic Surgery, and the different gloves made it easier to tell when it happened. That being said, they did get awfully warm.
Callie hummed under her breath, looking away from the OR just as they started to bring in the next patient. The turnover was on double time due to another trauma – never a dull day, she thought dryly, – so she worked to vacate the scrub room before the next surgeons and nurses flooded through to scrub in. Callie placed the brush back onto the metal sink with a clanging sound and dried her hands on a cloth, which she put into the laundry.
It always shocked her how quickly they could turn an OR around. It went to show that a hospital was only as good as its staff, and the surgeons made up rather a small percentage of the people that made the building work as smoothly as it did.
Blinking the tiredness from her eyes, Callie headed toward the door of the scrub room. As she reached for the handle, it slammed open and Dr April Kepner, an attending Trauma Surgeon, barged past her. Her pink scrub cap was already on as she tied a mask to her face with practised ease, then grabbed the brush Callie had just put down and started frantically scrubbing at her fingernails. She hit the tap on with her elbow and let the water flow from her hands down her forearms, pumping soap into her hands as she continued to scrub with urgency.
“Sorry,” she said in Callie’s direction, narrowed, keen eyes trained into the OR. “This guy’s on the brink – emergent and traumatic diaphragmatic rupture. Think he’s got some heart issue too because he’s bradycardic and his pressure’s low, I’ve paged Yang because I couldn't get an ultrasound in the pit.”
“No problem,” Callie said with a wave of her hand, a slight grimace turning down the sides of her mouth. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” April shot her a tight smile, and then she was striding into the OR.
Callie shook her head lightly when she finally stepped out into the hospital hallway, bustling with people as it always was during a trauma. The hospital had been quiet for the first four hours of Callie’s shift, and a quick check of her watch told her that she’d been in the OR for four on top of that. Now the supply racks were barer than they had been earlier, scrub caps on nearly every head – including her own – due to people going into back to back surgeries. Luckily Callie hadn’t been paged to another surgery and was hoping that she could take a little breather before she had to operate again. Maybe shotgun a coffee.
Callie pulled her scrub cap off and stuffed it into her scrub pants pocket, then yawned into the back of her hand. She skirted down the edge of the hallway, avoiding gurneys and rushing personnel and greeting everyone she could with a tired smile. Respect was hard to earn in the halls of Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital, and Callie was lucky that she was well liked – she wanted to keep it going, and storming about like a thundercloud on legs was certainly not the way to stay in people’s good books.
Dr Arizona Robbins had walked out of her own surgery around half an hour before, and had then decided to pick up a couple of coffees that she hoped she would be able to share with her wife before one of them was paged again. Her surgery had taken more of a toll on her than she wanted to admit, leaning her right hip against the nurse’s station on the OR floor and flicking mindlessly through a chart, and all she really wanted was to spend a little bit of time with the woman she loved.
Her scrub cap was still in situ on her head, pink butterflies in patchwork squares, and her white coat felt strangely heavy on her shoulders. She looked up when she heard a familiar voice down the hall, her eyes landing on the one person she wanted to see and a crooked smile picking up one side of her mouth as she stepped away from the nurse’s station and grabbed the coffees.
Arizona inhaled sharply through her nose when she stepped forward with her left leg, sudden pressure around her left thigh taking her breath away before it dulled into a low throb. Still, she continued walking forward until she was right in Callie’s path, and then she greeted quietly, “hey you. You alright?”
Callie looked up at the address, a bright smile crossing her exhausted face as she took in the image of her wife, approaching with two coffees like some type of angel. A curl of blonde hair escaped Arizona’s scrub cap and bobbed with the movements of Arizona’s head, and Callie found herself itching to wind it around her finger. She could see that Arizona was surreptitiously favouring her right leg – something no one else would notice, but Callie was well-versed in the Robbins Ways and knew pretty much everything there was to know about the woman in front of her. Still, she didn't mention it.
“Please tell me one of those is for me?” Callie said, half playful and half pleading. “If it’s for Karev, I might divorce you.”
Arizona huffed, catching Callie’s lips in a quick kiss before she murmured, “who else? Black, one sugar. Just how you like it.”
“Oh my god, I might have to marry you again,” Callie flashed Arizona a grin as she took the offered cup, the warmth of the coffee through the paper and cardboard welcome against stiff fingers.
Arizona laughed softly, happy to see that her gift of coffee had done exactly as she’d wanted. She drank from her own cup, adulterated with creamer and at least four sugars, and hummed approvingly. Then, as they both leaned against the wall to stay out of the way of passing gurneys, she asked again, “so, are you okay?”
Callie sipped the drink in her hand and closed her eyes for a second, then looked back to Arizona with a gentle smile. “I’m much better now. How about you?”
“Not too bad.” Arizona shrugged one shoulder and forced herself to be honest to the woman who’d stuck with her through everything. She sighed, “you know how my leg gets after a long surgery. I rested it for a while, took it off for the best part of twenty minutes, and had some paracetamol. It should calm down soon.”
Callie thought that the answer might be something like that. Luckily, she was on Arizona’s left side and could silently link their arms to take a little of Arizona’s weight. She did it wordlessly, shifting the coffee to her left hand and helping Arizona with the right.
Arizona didn’t say anything but she did glance sideways at her wife, shooting her a look of gratitude and receiving an incredibly sexy wink in return. Arizona snorted, looking away and letting out a sigh as she allowed Callie to support her.
They started slowly walking along the hall then, and Callie asked, “what were you operating on?”
“A kid came in from the same accident as your guy,” Arizona said, taking another draw from her cup. “Abdomen was massacred. Had to take out a kidney, his spleen, and part of his large bowel. Was a miracle that Yang could fix his heart.” She let out a long breath and looked sideways at Callie.
Callie looked back with a wary, kind expression on her face. She held Arizona a little closer and asked, “so he lived?”
“Only just.”
They ended up sitting down on some chairs lining the hallway, hands linked between them. Silence fell on them but it wasn't uncomfortable – it never was between them now. It had been a year since Arizona’s cheating and subsequent issues, and they’d never been stronger.
Arizona appreciated Callie’s hand in hers as she squeezed and murmured, “sometimes I hate working in peds.”
Callie turned to look at Arizona, who looked worn down after her surgery. She could see it in the lines around Arizona’s mouth and the way she was slumped into her chair like she’d thrown herself into it instead of sitting down normally. She dropped her hand to Arizona and squeezed, simply sitting there as a silent support, watching Arizona’s throat work as she thought.
Arizona’s head was back in that OR, alarms blaring and hot blood pouring over her hands.
“It’s not even the kids that die.” Arizona continued quietly. “I mean, it is. But it’s also the kids who come in with devastating injuries and survive. When they want to run around the ward two days post op and I have to be the bearer of bad news and make them stay in bed. When they cry for parents that have to work to afford the devastating medical bills. When they miss out on school and lose friends from something that wasn’t their fault. Even the chronic illness kids who spend their lives here, it’s not fair.” She shook her head, as if expelling the dark thoughts, and managed a tight smile. “Sorry, that’s morbid.”
“That’s okay,” Callie soothed with a smile of her own. “What we do is hard, there’s no doubt about it. But I just spent four hours piecing a guy’s pelvis back together, and I don't think I've ever been happier.”
Arizona snorted, “so you’ve never regretted picking ortho?”
Callie laughed softly, “of course I have.” She recalled being a resident in orthopedic surgery, the only woman there, and under everyone’s scrutiny. Even at the time, she knew she was better than all of them combined, but it didn’t help to have everyone’s eyes on her at all times.
“We push through. It’s what we do.” She nodded sharply and a grin cracked her face, “anyway, I get to work with you, my darling wife, sometimes and it makes it all worth it.”
That made something light break through Arizona’s dark mood. She felt Callie lift her hand and press a kiss to her knuckles and said quietly, “you know how to make me smile. Thank you.”
Callie smiled softly, “I'm glad I still can. Seven years together, four of marriage, and I still like you, Arizona Robbins.”
Arizona smiled, "I still like you too. Thank god for that, hey?” She bumped Callie’s shoulder with her own and their eyes met, sparkling with love even under the fluorescent hospital hallway lights.
They devolved into idle chatter for a while, taking the time to decompress from stressful surgeries as they sipped coffee and commented on anything that didn’t involve the events within the walls of their place of work.
Then, after a little while, Callie’s pager went off. It beeped harshly in her coat pocket and made them both jump as Arizona rushed to check hers at the same time, only to don a smug smile when it wasn’t hers making the racket.
“Damn.” Callie checked it, eyebrows furrowing. “There’s an emergency in the pit, something about two agitated homeless men, one with a… peg leg? God, I need to go, Owen is struggling to calm them down and the amputee apparently looks half dead.”
She stood up and straightened her shoulders, glad for the reprieve with her wife, despite how brief it had been. Plus, it was a surreptitious way to get Arizona to rest her leg – she knew that Arizona hated having to take leg breaks, sometimes believing that it made her less of a doctor, and if she could charm Arizona into looking after herself, she was damn well going to do it.
Immediately, Arizona nodded. She knew how it went in their place of work – you get paged, you run. Or speedwalk, if you have metal replacing most of your left leg. She inclined her head, “go, go. I’ll catch up but you won’t see me running.” She stood too and patted Callie’s back before catching her lips in a quick kiss. Arizona watched Callie leave before shooting back the last of her coffee like a shot and binning the paper cup. Then she was following her wife to the ER, if at a rather slower pace.
When Callie reached the ER, it was chaos. There was a multiple car MVC that had come in, and amongst the gurneys and medical personnel there were two filthy, half-dressed men, crowding one gurney, both soaked in sweat and visibly distressed, looking like they had been excavated from some other century.
The first – later introduced to her as James Flint – was a vision of fury barely contained in human form. Tangled hair, the color of rust set ablaze, stuck to his forehead. The collar of his linen shirt was torn, smeared with blood, decades out of date, and looked like it belonged in a museum exhibit rather than the emergency room. Every inch of his body vibrated with hostility: jaw locked, shoulders tight like a soldier, spitting a litany of profanity with the cadence of the eighteenth century and the venom of any drunk in a bar fight. He was straining against the hands that tried to hold him back, insisting, no, commanding, that he would leave.
Beside him, on a gurney commandeered for lack of anywhere else to put him, sat John Silver. Long, dark curls, heavy beard, eyes glazed yet quick, flitting to every shadow with paranoia. His pants were torn, and protruding from the ruin was a contraption that Callie could hardly process – a crude, metal peg strapped to his thigh with thin, leather belts. He looked like a man who had survived too much and trusted no one.
Neither of them belonged. Neither understood a single thing around them.
Callie ran a hand over her face, mind racing. Silver had to be the amputee she’d been told about, and the peg was an almost archaic metal… was it a leg? Or was it a hunk of metal strapped in place of a leg? It was sticking out from under his pants, scraped and jagged, a weapon rather than a mobility aid.
She found herself staring longer than she should, as though by sheer scrutiny she might solve the absurdity of what she was seeing. How long had it been since any human being had walked into a hospital with that lashed to their body? She’d never seen anything like it.
“Tell me!” She commanded as a nurse hurried over, already speaking.
“They won’t tell us who they are, but we heard names – ginger’s James, the amputee’s John. They were found in the ambulance bay, lying there like they dropped out of the sky. Both disoriented, both insisting they’d been shot, though on the initial exam we couldn’t see any injuries indicating as such, other than bruising. They’re combative, extremely. Could be drugs, could be psych. They’re shouting about traitorous mutineers and curses.”
Callie’s eyebrows lowered fractionally, processing, as the nurse went on.
“They may need sedation. The one with the peg leg – he grabbed an IV pole and told a nurse he’d gut her like a shark. Sargasso shark, I think? Whatever that is. The other, James, convinced him to sit down, but they’re still volatile. Overhead lights are freaking them out, Dr Hunt’s been trying to talk to them, but—” She made a helpless gesture toward the scene. “They’re having none of it.”
Mind flying with the speed of a woman who knew how to de-escalate a situation where all hope seemed lost, Callie nodded sharply, “alright. Thanks.”
She strode over, sneakers squeaking on the floor as she shoved her white coat sleeves up to her elbows. Keen, surgeon’s eyes scanned the scene again, and she spotted Owen running a hand over his face.
“Owen?” She called over the noise, scanning the two men before her and finding the ginger’s — Flint’s — eyes. They were like storm-lashed steel, meeting hers with a look so sharp, so furious, she swore it could boil water. His scowl deepened, and she felt, absurdly, as though she’d just been challenged to a duel. She hardened her own gaze in reply, jaw set and eyes narrowed.
Owen turned to her, stress around his mouth and shining in his eyes. “Torres, I think we’ll need to sedate them.”
Callie nodded slowly, looking between the men and seeing something in their eyes that she’d seen so many times before — uncontrollable anger masking visceral fear. She pulled in a deep breath, trying not to see Arizona in front of her, scared out of her wits and screaming to cover up the pit of fear consuming her from the inside that nothing would ever be the same again. It was crazy how often she saw her wife in patients and no matter how she tried to force it down, sometimes the resemblance was more uncanny than others.
“Let me try.” She murmured to Owen, “they’re terrified.”
It took a moment, as though Owen was thinking it through and weighing their options, but then he nodded. “Okay. But if they escalate, I’m having them sedated.”
Callie nodded once, turning away from her rugged, ex-military chief and back to the men causing a scene in their already overcrowded ER.
Having become adept at breaking through Arizona’s depression and fear spirals, Callie strode over to them with her hands out and used her most commanding tone to say, “hey!”
They didn’t stop, so Callie clapped her hands and snapped, “Hey!”
Both men stilled, looking her up and down like she was a bit of dirt scraped from the bottom of their shoes.
”My name is Dr Torres, I'm an orthopedic surgeon.” She introduced herself, glaring between them with her firmest gaze. “I need you both to calm down. Okay? Can you do that? Because I know you’re scared.”
Flint’s laugh was dry, venomous. “Calm? You want fucking calm? You tear me from death, trap me in this blinding madhouse, and demand civility? I’ve seen war kinder than this. Tell me where the hell we are!”
Callie felt his gaze like a hand pressed to her throat – it burned into her like he was measuring how easily she could be taken down if it came to it.
Yet even as he raged, she saw the tell. The way his hand never strayed far from Silver, fingers brushing his arm, shoulder, sleeve – shielding him, claiming him, refusing to let go. The gesture was quiet, almost imperceptible, but absolute.
Whatever battlefield they stumbled from, whatever impossible violence had carried them here, Flint had chosen his side.
He would not release Silver, not to strangers, not to death, not to fate. Not again.
Callie pulled in a deep breath at his tone, keeping her face even though her tone was bordering on dangerous. “Sir, you cannot speak to us like that. We are only here to help. You are in the emergency room at Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital, because you were both found half conscious outside the doors.”
Owen was still standing at her shoulder like a shadow, waiting for his time to step in and assess their conditions properly. He was watching her try to de-escalate them, her body poised for defence but her words sharp and kind. Owen had been there for the aftermath of the plane crash that had taken Arizona’s leg, had seen both Arizona and Callie’s sides of the trauma that had almost torn them apart, so he knew that she was reverting back into old habits for their patients’ sake.
Callie straightened her spine, daring him to clap back at her as her teeth ground and echoed in her skull like glass ground against glass.
Flint glared at her, unflinching. “I’ll speak to you however I damn well please!”
Callie didn’t react, having also built up rather a thick skin against verbal barbs with the events of the past few years. Sharp words barely affected her now – she’d heard so many of them that they’d lost their bite. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes to really show Flint that his words meant nothing to her, and instead grabbed a pair of gloves from a nearby suture tray. Silver still looked awful, and she wasn't going to play games with a man’s health. The latex stung her wrist as she snapped on the gloves and asked briskly, “now, can you tell me if you are on any sort of drugs? Marijuana, oxy, meth, anything illegal?”
Flint let out a scoffing laugh. “Drugs? You think we’re dazed, you insufferable—?” he bit off the curse and stepped forward, placing himself squarely between Silver and the nurses holding syringes of sedative, flanked by security in heavy vests. “You think this is some kind of opium fit? That we’re just mad and spouting nonsense?”
“Sir—” Callie began but was abruptly cut off. She waved off the nurses and security trying to crowd the men, catching Owen’s eye in a way that said, ‘stick with me on this one.’
“Do not come near him.” Flint’s voice dropped, filled with the threat of violence. Like that of a man used to being obeyed at gunpoint. “You touch him without cause, I swear, I’ll—”
“James.”
That single word broke through everything: through the chatter, through the threat, through Flint himself.
Silver’s voice was shredded, but it held just enough weight to make Flint turn like he’d been struck. His eyes, glazed with pain, fluttered open just long enough to find him. Then he slumped in the gurney. Sweat gathered at his temples, beading, streaking down into the scruff of his beard. His lips were blood-specked and dark.
“My chest,” he rasped, breath hitching. “Feels like—” he gasped, grimacing, “like something’s inside it. Tearing. Hot blade, twisting.” His eyes shot upward to the fluorescent lights, pupils blown wide, terror in his face. “I can’t… fuck— I can’t catch a breath—!”
Glancing back over her shoulder at the breathless, panicked words, Callie caught Owen’s eye again. His face was grave; eyebrows furrowed and jaw set as his trauma educated mind raced through all of the possibilities for what could be wrong with Silver. Callie’s mind was fighting to catch up as well, running through symptoms and everything she could think of as she looked away from Owen and back to the man threatening to die right in front of her.
Silver’s fingers scrabbled weakly at his chest. “Feels like there's a fucking hole there. Like I’m dying again. James—” his breath hitched, panic rising in his throat. “ Fuck… I don’t want to die again… I don’t want to—!”
And then, abruptly, his hand fell limp. His eyes rolled back. His body collapsed into slackness, shuddering once before stilling.
The world might as well have slid out from under Flint’s feet.
“Shit.” Owen muttered, loud enough only for Callie to hear as he stepped forward and then froze at a sharp cry.
“John!”
Flint lunged, catching Silver’s sagging body before it collapsed entirely. His hands clamped onto his partner’s shoulders, fist tightening in fabric as though he could drag Silver back into the living world by sheer force alone. “John – John, stay with me. Don’t you fucking dare—”
A nurse stepped forward with a syringe, too quick. Callie’s scalding glare seared into him like a warning, but Flint saw first.
“Don’t touch him!” The snarl erupted, teeth bared, his body braced between Silver and every stranger in the room.
Callie moved quickly, stepping into his line of sight and grabbing Owen’s arm, dragging him behind her as she forced herself to be heard. “He’s crashing, James! That means he is dying, right here and right now. If there’s internal bleeding or cardiac trauma, something wrong inside him, he could die. We need to examine him now, and you are obstructing that. Either let him go, or you will be forcibly removed by these waiting gentlemen.”
Her voice was strong. Her eyes were certain.
Flint’s chest heaved. His hands stayed fisted in the fabric of Silver’s shirt, knuckles bloodless, grip iron-clad. But something in him wavered. A thread pulled loose in the weave. Unraveling.
“He was shot,” he ground out, voice suddenly hoarse, “in the chest. I saw the blood. I felt him dying in my arms.”
Callie didn’t flinch. Her eyes instinctively scanned Silver’s torso and she could feel that Owen was doing the same. She saw no entry wound. No blood soaking through his shirt. Nothing that looked like a gunshot – at least, not anymore. Whatever blood he had seen must’ve been old, internal, or imagined in panic. But that didn’t mean Silver wasn’t dying.
“Okay,” she said. “Then let us try to help him.”
She didn’t believe he’d been shot – there was nothing – but the symptoms were undeniable. Chest pain, breathlessness, sudden pallor, the way his consciousness slipped from him like sand through clenched fists. And Flint’s terror was real enough to make her gut twist.
For a moment, the pause held. But then, against all odds, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Flint shifted aside, just enough for them to approach.
Owen was already issuing commands before his hands reached Silver’s chest, pulling open his shirt and calling orders for an ultrasound, eyes scanning over the dark, prominent bruising coating Silver’s chest like spilled ink across paper.
Flint hovered, watching with horror that was too controlled to be mistaken for ignorance. His gaze darted from Silver’s slack face to the unmarred skin where the bullet hole should have been. But there was no wound, no torn flesh where he’d sworn he’d seen blood before. No proof. And yet, he could feel it in his bones – something was wrong. Unmistakably, the same way a sailor senses a storm hours before the sky darkens. Something was failing inside him, collapsing.
Silver hadn’t gone slack from pain alone. Nor from the gunshot.
It was the fall, the trauma, the impossible trick of whatever had thrown them into this antiseptic future.
And death threatened to take him again, to turn their inexplicable survival and relocation to this God forsaken new, gleaming world into a cruel joke.
Meanwhile, Callie had pulled her stethoscope out and had pressed the bell to Silver’s chest, listening hard for his heartbeat, which was slow and sluggish. A bad sign.
“He’s bradycardic,” she told Owen as he had his own listen, “heart rate is slow and syrupy, like he’s trying to pump honey.”
That was all it took – nurses surged forward, attaching cords of various colours to everywhere they could reach and slipping IVs into his arms, tape slapping down, gloves moving fast and urgent. In seconds, Silver disappeared beneath the machinery of medicine, body buried from Flint’s view behind a curtain of plastic wires, blinking monitors, and latex-gloved hands.
Flint, already agitated – terrified – as he was, did not fucking like it.
“What are you doing to him?” his voice rasped over the din. No one turned, no one answered, not with Owen still shouting for that damn ultrasound. “He’s not a corpse to dissect!”
But his word drowned in the storm, unheard, unheeded.
Then a new figure broke into the mess.
When Arizona reached the ER, it was in more chaos than she’d seen earlier. She stumbled into it, looking more composed than she felt as her left thigh twinged and she fought not to seek solace in the form of a chair. Arizona ignored it petulantly, hearing a specific, deep and scared tone over the hubbub of the echoing room. Her eyes trained on Callie, a powerhouse in blue scrubs with her white coat rolled up to her elbows, in full blown Dr Torres mode, but she still heard that voice yelling words she couldn’t make out and filed them away for later.
Callie’s eyebrows were furrowed and her eyes were dark as she calculated medicine and injury, barking orders that surrounding personnel completed without complaint. Arizona watched for a moment, always eager to watch the woman she loved command a room like a conductor led an orchestra, and then noticed the man they were working on was the amputee.
Arizona would stay out of the way until she was needed, but her head reminded her that the amputee hadn’t come in alone. That almost certainly meant that there was a family member who may need help too, and she had a little time to spare. She scanned the busy ER and spotted a ginger man standing to the side, one hand cupping the back of his head as his face contorted in what looked like a mixture of agony, rage, and utter despair.
As quickly as she could, Arizona made her way over to him. A few feet away she called Callie’s name and met her eye, and indicating the ginger with a tilt of her head and a furrow of her brow. The silent communication came to them easily now, years of knowing each other inside and out letting unspoken words pass between them just with a furrowed brow or a twitch of a humoured lip.
Callie heard Arizona call her name and looked up, meeting her gaze and seeing a question in her eyes. Callie nodded and looked back to Silver, fingers tracing the contours of his collarbones, checking for any displacement. “Can you stay with him?” She asked, glancing at Flint while lowering her voice. “The ginger. I don’t think he’s going to sit quietly through this, but I don’t think he’s a danger. Name’s James Flint.”
“You got it,” Arizona said, nodding in Callie’s direction. Then Arizona stepped closer to the man, holding a hand out and saying gently, “sir, you shouldn’t be here to see this.”
Flint didn’t so much as glance at her. His entire being was fastened to the gurney where Silver still lay visible between the medical personnel – a curly lock of dark, matted hair dangling over the edge, the occasional glint of the metal of his peg where his leg should have been, still not removed, neglected in favor of tending to whatever emergency had taken Silver out. Flint’s jaw clenched as though sight alone were the tether keeping him upright.
“Try to move me,” he said hoarsely, hoping against hope that it would be enough to deter the blonde woman, “and see what happens.”
Used to aggression in family members of trauma patients, Arizona didn’t flinch. She merely said firmly, in a voice that could cut through his fear, “I know it’s difficult, but if you refuse to leave I'm going to have to ask you to at least sit down, Mr. Flint. You look pale and your heart must be going a mile a minute. I may have muscles under these scrubs, but you’re practically a brick wall and I won’t be able to catch you if you go down.” She smiled softly, “please, sit.”
“You think you can right this wrong with a goddamned chair?” Flint tried to argue.
But the tremble in his legs betrayed his inner weakness.
The fall had gotten to him too. No matter how he tried to force himself to ignore his own injuries, his pounding headache, in favour of helping Silver – his knees were too goddamn weak. He sank down onto the neighbouring gurney as that blonde in those same strange navy blue clothes stood beside him, grabbing his wrist and pressing her fingers into his flesh, checking something tied to her wrist.
He jerked to pull away, but she held fast.
“Stay still.” She muttered, not relaxing her grip.
Flint grunted; she was pretty strong for a woman, and his fight was losing will with every second Silver was unconscious. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing—?”
And then a shrill, eccentric beeping sound sliced through the air.
Silver was attached to a cardiac monitor, it had come alive, and Callie’s eyes widened.
Owen was still looking at Silver’s chest, quick fingers running over ribs and palpating bruises, scanning the rest of him with eyes like steel. Callie rolled her neck and called urgently, “his oxygen is way down and I need to intubate: give me a laryngoscope and a size eight ET tube!”
There was a heavy pause as a nurse rifled through a nearby cart, her footsteps quick on the floor as she rushed back to Callie’s side and ripped the ET tube from the packaging, then jammed it into Callie’s gloved hand.
Her fingers closed around the ET tube as a pair of nurses pulled Silver flat on the gurney, tilting his head right back. Callie’s fingers felt over the hinge of his jaw, finding the muscles tensed and hard as a rock. Callie cursed, then snapped, “his jaw’s locked down, I need him relaxed now!”
“Paralytics and meds are in, go ahead.” Someone said a mere ten seconds later, but it felt like hours to Callie as she supported the unconscious man’s jaw in her hand, feeling the coarse hair of his beard against her skin through her gloves. As soon as she was given the go ahead, Callie did as was needed — wasting no time before she got his jaw to fall open. She then placed the laryngoscope into his mouth, pressing down to open his throat as she followed it with the ET tube in one smooth motion.
The moment Silver’s body stilled under her hands, Flint broke.
He stood back up, ripping his hand away from Arizona like she’d struck him. His hand shot to a nearby IV pole, rattling it harshly in a bid to keep himself upright when his legs threatened to buckle. His voice tore through the ER, raw, cracked, almost unrecognizable from its authority.
“What the hell are you doing to him? That’s his fucking throat! Are you out of your minds?! John!” His shout cracked on the name – either from panic or desperately holding himself together. “ Stop it! You’ll kill him!”
His distress was palpable, and it never got easier to witness — even for a woman who’d been in the medical field for as long as Arizona. She inhaled deeply, trying to think of ways to comfort the man and deciding that he was someone who needed to know how things worked, needed to understand them to find relief. Her brother had been the exact same growing up – she knew the need to understand when she saw it.
Arizona took this and ran with it, stepping toward Flint and saying carefully but quickly, “it’s to help him breathe. He would be more likely to die without it. It’s a tube into his lungs that’s connected to that yellow bag — you see that one, the one the nurse is squeezing every two seconds? It’s keeping him alive. You need to let them work.” She put his hand on his arm and squeezed, saying, firmer, “stay out of the damn way and let them work if you want him to live.”
Harsh, maybe. But it did the trick.
Flint’s fists clenched at his sides, knuckles white, breath shallow and frantic, but he believed her – somehow, he did. His entire world narrowed to the press and release of that bag: compress, release, compress, release. It steadied him, even if only barely.
Then, with a stiff nod and a broken sound stuck in his throat, he stepped back.
Arizona smiled tightly and released her hold on his arm. “Well done. Thank you.”
But that peace lasted for only a second.
Owen suddenly lifted his head from where he’d been listening to Silver’s heart, pulling his stethoscope from his ears and hooking it back around his neck as he said, “Muffled heart sounds and JVD: Torres, this is delayed cardiac tamponade.”
“Crap.” Callie breathed, stepping around the bed just as the ultrasound was wheeled up. She took the gel and squirted a healthy amount onto Silver’s distended chest, while Owen took the wand and pressed it into the bruising, peering at the grainy ultrasound image.
He nodded sharply, “I’m right, his pericardium is full of fluid. I need to drain it or his heart will stop.”
Callie nodded sharply, orthopedic mind running for cardio and struggling to keep up slightly. She asked after a moment, “okay, uh, I’ll hold the ultrasound if you’re doing a pericardiocentesis, or are you doing a pericardial window?”
“Pericardiocentesis.” Owen confirmed, “we don’t have time for a window. I need betadine and an eighteen gauge spinal needle, now!”
Arizona stayed beside Flint, narrating their every move in layman’s terms to him, who only seemed to calm — if calm was the right word for sending murderous daggers at anyone touching what she presumed to be his husband — when he knew exactly what was going on.
“So, John has a cardiac tamponade, or a pericardial effusion.” Arizona spoke as Owen spread betadine across Silver’s chest to sterilise it. “It means the layer of skin around his heart, his pericardial sac, has filled with fluid, probably blood, and is essentially suffocating his heart. If they don’t drain the fluid, his heart will stop. They have to do this, okay?”
A pause, filled with erratic beeping and the shouting of medical personnel.
“How?” Flint asked, eerily calm.
Arizona turned slightly to meet his green eyes. He looked haunted. Hollowed. But calculation still burned just beneath this exterior – he was a man who needed logic laid out before him. Answers were necessary – he needed to believe they weren’t about to butcher the last person he had left.
She felt that. She knew how it felt to stand aside, helpless and gutted while the person you loved most in the world teetered on the border between life and death. Arizona remembered arguing with Mark over Callie’s treatment after the car accident, so fuelled with grief and shock that she would have done anything to have her wake up.
“How do they reach it?” he pressed. “The heart’s inside his chest. You mean to tell me they’ll pierce it blindly and call that medicine? He’s been through too much to have some barbarians rip his heart into pieces pretending to heal him.” And then, he added, quieter, “He can’t take much more.”
“Scalpel.”
Owen’s order snapped air taut. The tool was placed in his hand, and he was already making a subxiphoid incision between Silver’s second and third rib, a small amount of blood spilling from the wound as Callie situated the ultrasound probe above the incision. Owen was handed the needle, a great long thing that glinted in the synthetic light. He lined it up with Silver’s left shoulder and rolled his neck as he prepared to insert it into Silver’s chest.
Arizona leaned close to Flint and spoke quietly so as not to disturb Owen’s concentration. She tried to ignore the pungent blend of sweat, old gunpowder, and iron that clung to him – like he had been pulled straight from the poop deck of a ship. This was a man not very well acquainted with soap, she figured out quickly.
“It isn’t blind. They use a needle to get to his heart through his chest,” she explained, watching them work. “They won’t cut him open if they can help it, Mr. Flint. The blood will come out through the needle. Dr Hunt’s done this many times, he knows what he’s doing.”
As Owen worked with the needle, fingers pressing over Silver’s chest, Flint’s eyes narrowed. “He won’t feel it?” he asked.
Arizona answered with the only truth she could give. “He’s unconscious. Sedated, with medicine. And if they don’t do this, he’ll never wake up. You need to trust them, sir, or you won’t see him again.”
Trust was not in Flint’s vocabulary, not anymore. But he forced himself into stillness, jaw locked and fists trembling, concentrating as he watched, or tried to. He didn’t even dare blink as Owen angled the needle toward Silver’s shoulder and began to push through.
“Careful.” Callie murmured, “don’t puncture the heart.”
Owen grunted, hands steady and pressure even. “Who’s the trauma surgeon here, Torres?”
“Right.” Callie cleared her throat, “sorry.” She glanced up, spotting Arizona sitting with Flint, who was completely frozen in place apart from a slight twitch in his hands, as if trying to hold back from reaching out. She looked back at the ultrasound screen, the stark white of the metal needle encroaching gently on the sporadically beating heart. “Just saying, he’s got a very protective… whoever that is over there.”
Owen spoke through his teeth, concentration in every syllable. “They always have family, Torres. Just because they look like all they’ve got is each other doesn’t mean we need to treat them differently.”
“I know that,” Callie said quietly. “I just… we need to fix this guy, otherwise I think the other one will commit a war crime.”
“Gee, thanks for the confidence.” Owen muttered, “can you move a little to the… thanks.”
Owen didn’t look up until he pushed through the slight resistance and blood started flowing up the needle and down the cannula into the collection bag tied to the bed. He sighed in relief, pulling the needle free and leaving the soft cannula in Silver’s chest, which a nurse secured into place with a strip of medical tape and a large band-aid.
“Pressure’s coming up,” a nurse called out from the monitor. “Rhythm stabilising.”
Arizona let out a long breath and smiled. “He’s okay. That’s the worst of it over. It’ll be a long road back, but he’s alive.” She glanced sideways, seeing Flint almost deflate with relief.
Flint’s body sagged; he nodded and exhaled a grateful but utterly defeated sigh – like a man vanquished. He didn’t yell or argue or glare. For the first time since the chaos began, he was silent, eyes fixed on the man who, by any sane measure, should have died twice over by now.
But Silver hadn’t.
And if Flint had anything to say about it – no matter what heartless, merciless fate still haunted them – he never would.
Notes:
For reference, here is Silver’s peg leg:
Thank you to FreakingPlane for being a real one <3 and committing to actually making this mess a reality!! Calzona and Silverflint have so much in common, it’s ridiculous!!
Comments going “....what?” or otherwise are very welcome!
Thank you to true_birate for letting me send you a million calzona clips so that you know all about them before you’ve even seen the show, you’re a godsend:D and you’re awesome to write with<3
I hope someone loves this fic as much we do, always happy to hear what people think.
For more birates check out true_birate, and for more calzona you can take a trip to my profile (i think it’s quite obvious who writes who… but you never know!)
Chapter 2: Something New And Strange And Fascinating
Notes:
In this chapter: Flint is networking, Silver is crashing out, Arizona is agreeing to things she definitely should NOT. Honestly, she should leave that hospital and never return – everyone starts to die when they walk through the doors, even the damn staff!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The pen clicked softly in Flint’s hand, a small, metallic snap that startled him more than it should have. He turned it over between his fingers with the same cautious reverence he might’ve shown a pistol he’d never fired before – part fascination, part distrust. A weapon disguised as an object of convenience. When he finally brought it to the paper, the ink spilled out smoothly, black and immediate.
Marvelous.
He watched the line form beneath the ballpoint, curving into the loops and angles of his name as if the thing had known his hand all along. It didn’t smudge. It didn’t require an inkwell. And it didn’t feel like much, light and hollow, but the way it obeyed – it was nothing short of magic. Seamless. So absurdly elegant for something so throwaway.
He filled out the papers. Signed each one.
James Flint, partner.
He stared at the words a moment too long.
The paper bore them without fuss, smooth and obedient. A man could write his name a thousand times with one of these devices, and each one would look the same – precise and stripped of all struggle. In his world, permanence came with cost – ink stains, sealing vax, the lingering smell of lampblack. Here, it cost nothing.
Silver’s stack of paperwork sat beneath his hand like a puzzle. A dozen forms, littered with questions in stiff, bureaucratic phrases. Alien in their language but not entirely incomprehensible, half-filled out by a hasty hand. Someone had taken the time to write John Silver at the top of each one. The letters were familiar. The world was not.
Around him, the hospital hummed – everything did in this strange place – and the room glowed with artificial light. Machines beeped softly down the corridor. Silver was sleeping in one of the ICU rooms, still sedated, a tube down his throat and a bag draining fluid from his heart, but stable. His heart was still beating – stronger now, rhythmic and steady. Alive.
The people here all wore the same strange livery. Everyone, other than patients and family members, were in those strange blue clothes, crisp and sterile. Some light, some dark. The dark blues – command, he thought, surgeons and leaders, most of the people who’d worked on Silver. The light blue ones scurried about like junior hands on a deck, ferrying orders, shuffling papers – like they had places to be but not enough time.
He himself had been dressed in those same blues, forced into them when he was stopped at the door that swallowed Silver. The smell of blood and gunpowder on his own clothes had earned only curled lips and hard stares, before some nameless figure told him that his attire wasn’t suitable for a sterile environment and shoved a pile of blue cloth into his hands. He’d raged at first – tossed the clothes to the ground, cursed them to their faces – but rage was no weapon against a door that barred him from Silver side. In the end, he had yielded; his need to see Silver alive had prevailed.
The room where he changed was as alien as the rest – clinical white with blue accents, a dripping tap that gurgled on forever in the corner, and objects of metal and plastic he hadn’t dared touch. Even the walls seemed to hum, just like the overhead lights. People were everywhere; they flooded the halls like ants, yelling to each other and passing papers back and forth. He had never felt smaller, more invisible. His old clothes had been taken, shoved in a bag, destined, he suspected, for fire. Incinerated and erased due to the smell.
The navy fabric hung poorly on him: uncomfortable on his frame, too tight around the waist without a belt, too loose at his shoulders and legs. The fabric itched in unfamiliar places. It made him feel awkward, though he didn’t dare show it. His hands were free of salt and sand, washed under an endless supply of water with something that smelled suspiciously sweet. Clean, but wrong. He rubbed his fingertips together in thought, unsettled by how smooth they felt.
Still, he endured. He had no choice.
The disguise was the price of entry to the secret floor where Silver was sequestered, hidden from sight – kept away from him – if he wasn’t wearing the damn clothes.
He was still fighting to believe it, all of it – this world, these machines, these people. These fucking people. Of all of them, the one that stayed with him most vividly was the blonde – Dr Robbins, Arizona. She had spoken to him as though he were a man, not a mad dog snapping at his leash. It had unsettled him more than he cared to admit.
But now, she was gone.
Arizona and Callie had vanished into their own labyrinth once Owen took Silver up to the recovery floor and Flint followed like a man hollowed out. When the men were out of her sight, Arizona had headed up to the peds floor for a post-surgery check up on the kid she’d worked on with Cristina Yang, a usual event after a traumatic surgery. Arizona couldn’t sleep most nights after a big trauma, especially if a kid had died or was hanging in the balance. Luckily he was doing okay and Arizona was so relieved that she decided to head back to the ICU and just look in on John Silver.
Just one look.
A peek. A reprieve during a busy shift.
All she wanted to know was that he was alive.
When she got there, she spotted Flint immediately.
He was at the nurses’ station, wearing navy blue scrubs that had no doubt been given to him to polish him up for the ICU. The sight of him in the uniform didn’t make him look any less out of place; if anything, the loose fabric made him look like a wolf shoved into a borrowed coat. He was stiff. But calmer. And that was something. A good sign – she thought if John had died, there wouldn’t be a nurse left standing, and Flint would be in shackles or a body bag.
He confused her.
James Flint was rugged and rough, utterly unlike anyone she’d ever seen or treated. He was an anomaly. And she didn't know if he fascinated her or unsettled her, and perhaps that was what intrigued her the most. That strange pull. It wasn’t attraction – of course it wasn’t – but it was some kind of macabre magnetism she couldn’t ignore.
Arizona had always been insatiably curious.
As she watched Flint from afar, she wanted to find out why he had captured her attention. Why she wanted to know more. Her curiosity had always been a flaw in childhood and university, but a blessing in med school, residency and now her full time job. Arizona Robbins didn’t look away when something caught her eye, she stepped closer and worked out why.
So she approached him, pushing forward, sidestepping the thoughts in her head that this was a terrible idea in favour of learning more about the puzzle of a man standing before her.
Flint heard her long before she reached him. He didn’t need to see her to know it was her – her gait was stable, but the uneven rhythm of her footsteps gave her away, one step subtly different from the other. Arizona moved quietly, almost like she intended to catch him off-guard, but Flint sensed her, waiting for her to stop a few feet away before he looked up.
“You’re filling out the permission forms?” She asked casually, hoping that the opening would introduce further conversation. A faint smile played around her mouth though she made sure her eyes were serious and kind. “Brave. Most people don’t volunteer for hospital paperwork.”
Flint glanced at the pen in his hand, at the papers, the John Silver, all the familiar and unfamiliar words, then back at her. “It’s a small thing to do… I’ve no idea what half of it says.”
“Judging by the handwriting,” Arizona said, peeking at the form and letting her nose wrinkle, “Neither do most of our doctors. Fluent in chicken scratch, all of them.” She laughed softly, a sound light and careful like the tinkling of a wind-chime.
She waited for a beat, gauging Flint’s reaction, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. But the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It stretched hollow between them. Arizona recognised the emptiness in the quiet – the sound of a man worn down. She knew that silence. She’d lived that silence.
“You seem… better,” she ventured after a moment, gentler now. “Less ready to murder everyone within ten feet of yourself.” The corner of her mouth twitched in an attempt of a smile, hoping the joke would land.
Flint didn’t respond immediately. His eyes dropped back to the page.
“He’s alive, clean, and resting. Looking better than he does most days. That’s all.”
Arizona studied him the way she might study a puzzling X-ray: posture first, then the edges, then the shadow in the middle that didn’t quite make sense. Everything about him – his bearing, his formality, the way he walked, talked, and looked – marked him not merely as a man who came to a hospital with a dire emergency. Far more likely, this was a man who had stepped onto a stage he didn’t trust.
She recognised the look in his eye, she’d seen it in her own — much younger — face any time their family moved to another army base as kids. Every time she left behind new friends and a school she’d only just settled into, having to reintroduce herself and deal with a new set of being teased for her name. She had Tim with her to survive the teasing, and if he wasn’t there then Arizona could defend herself well enough.
Now, that humiliation and fear, the displacement, it was all there in guarded green eyes. It was a mirror of how she’d felt, only multiplied by a thousand.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” She made sure her voice wasn’t judgemental, instead making it almost conversational as she straightened some papers on the desk for something to do with restless hands.
His eyes lifted again, sharp, narrow, and guarded. “What gave me away?”
“The fact that you looked like a rejected casting call for Pirates of the Caribbean was the first clue,” she said, humorously, then, more seriously, “but it’s more than that. I can see it is.”
Arizona paused as she tried to figure out what to say. She sighed and set down the papers, instead picking up a pen to twist around her fingers as she spoke again. “Your accent, your way of speaking... You didn’t flinch at your John’s trauma, but looked like the overhead lights were going to eat you alive.” She tilted her head, eyes holding his. “It’s okay. I’m not judging,”
Briefly, Flint eyed the lights, still wary, but no longer afraid. No more afraid of it than the rest of this mess. When his gaze returned to Arizona, he seemed like a man calculating a gamble – considering how much he was willing to bet on his next words and how much he’d be willing to lose if none of them landed.
“What would you say,” he began, pausing, thinking, considering her again before continuing, “if I told you we were from… another time?”
There was a pause. The words hung there, absurd and heavy at once.
Yep.
Approaching James Flint had been an awful idea.
All Arizona had to do was turn away and she’d probably never see him again, and that option sounded preferable. She knew that if she stood too close to James Flint, someone would get hurt. It was obvious to her, now that she’d been through so much, that all she needed to do to stay safe and happy was to step back and shut the hell up.
Still, something stopped her just as she went to turn on her heel. His voice… it was heavy with something like truth. She hated that she wanted, needed, to know more.
“Another time,” Arizona repeated slowly, leaning forward onto the nurse’s station and resting her chin on her hand. She didn’t quite know what he was getting at, and her eyebrows creased as she mulled over the words.
“The 18th century,” he said simply. “We were dying. And then? Then we weren’t. I don’t know how or why. But I woke up here, in your world. And so did he. And everything—” He gestured faintly, his mouth hard. “—is wrong. Humming. Bright. Odd.”
Arizona turned around and crossed her arms, still listening to him but not looking in his direction as she held the pen so tightly that it dug into her palm, trying to decide if she was talking to a patient in need of a psych eval or to a man too sane for delusion. It sounded unbelievable. She had no reason to take him by his word other than the sincerity in his voice, but that same sincerity was thick as concrete and just as heavy.
The hospital continued to work around them, personnel rushing past as a code blue sounded somewhere in the distance, too far away to be Silver. Arizona scoffed lightly and leaned back against the desk, eyes trained down. “You realize,” she said carefully, the words weighted. “That most people would say you were having a psychotic break.”
“Perhaps it would be easier to call it madness…. Perhaps I should. But men don’t invent pain like that. They don’t imagine the sound of a musket, the heat of blood. They don’t conjure the weight of a man they love dying in their arms.” His voice dropped, hoarse. “I felt the life go out of him. And then, God help me, I woke up here. With him returned to me.“
She thought for a moment, fighting the urge to run a hand over her face and groan all of her woes into her palm. God, life could never be easy, could it?
Arizona instead pulled in a hard breath, turning the words over in her mind and recalling how terrified they’d both been when she first met him. Silver had been unconscious, but Flint had been… untethered. Scared out of his mind, like a dog taken to a new home.
Why shouldn’t she believe him? Why shouldn’t she take him at his word?
Arizona chewed the inside of her lip, thinking it all over again and again. He sounded so… pained. Grief laced his every word. Grief for a man who should have died and didn’t, yet apparently did. She’d heard every tale possible from the kids on her ward: mermaids, aliens, pirates, so much fantasy, that her mind was open. Plus, she was too tired to really look into his eyes for the demons hiding behind them. It was easier to just agree and deal with the fallout.
But it wasn’t just agreeing. Some part of her, the maternal part that helped kids and made up stories with them, the part of her that cared for every human being to cross her path, believed him.
After a moment, she nodded. “Fine.”
“Fine? That’s it?”
There was a pause as Arizona thought again.
“You don’t look like you’re kidding with me,” she said finally, her eyes tracing the pattern on the hospital floor as a nurse walked past them with a stack of blankets. “I mean, if you are, you’re a damn good actor.” She laughed mirthlessly, turning to face him. She scanned his face, the lines and wear around his mouth and eyes. “You look… lost.”
“You don’t find it ridiculous?”
Arizona shrugged one shoulder. “What is ridiculous, anyway? I’ve lived more life than I should have. I’ve seen things… both miracles and tragedies that ruined families in the time it takes to blink, or to eat a crappy salad from the cafeteria. I’ve almost died…” she ran her traumatic life events through her mind and counted them. “Three times. The universe is a lot less orderly than we like to think it is. It’s unfair and unjust. I’ve seen people die from injuries they should’ve never had. I’ve had kids on my table start bleeding for no reason and never wake for their parents again. James, life isn’t a continuous line of cause to effect. There’s not always a reason, but there’s always a meaning if you just look for it.”
She ran a hand through her hair, in a braid tied into a bun on the back of her head. “What I’m trying to say is, I think there’s a lot more out there than we give the universe credit for. And if you say, with complete sincerity, that you are from the 18th century, then I believe you. Because we could either spend time arguing about it, or we can support each other.” She nodded sharply, signalling the end of her little speech.
Flint didn’t answer at first. They stayed in the quiet for a long, long moment, but not the kind that begged to be filled. It weighed them down. Settled into the bones.
At last, his eyes fell back on the papers, and he spoke. “I’ve commanded men. Ships. A revolution. And I’ve never asked anyone for help, not unless I had a cutlass to their throat. But this…” He gestured vaguely to the fluorescent lights, the hum of electrical machinery and the steady pulse of life far stranger than anything the sea had ever thrown at him. “This is another world. And I’ll see him live in it. Whatever it fucking takes.”
“You’ll need help, then,” Arizona said. Once the words were out, she cursed herself for never knowing when to keep her trap shut. Then again, she saw his shoulders relax just slightly at the words, and that was what prompted her to continue as she shifted her weight to her right leg and felt a dull ache settle in her hips. “Not just with the medical stuff, though I know it’s scary to see him like this, but with… everything.” The word left her mouth on a sigh. Then she carried on, not looking at him but speaking firmly. “You’ll need help, lots of it, with this century. With people. With phones.”
“Phones.”
“Phones.” Arizona nodded, glancing sideways and seeing his face crease in confusion. She hid a smile and waved a hand in the space between them, “you know what, we can tackle those later.”
“This world… You seem to know how to survive it.” Flint hesitated – thinking, calculating, assessing. “I need to know what’s real here. What matters. What threatens him. What doesn’t. I won’t lose him to something I don’t even see coming.”
“Alright.” Arizona said with a crooked smile, his protectiveness toward Silver reminding her of Callie’s fierce love. “We can work it out. When your John wakes up, we’ll put our heads together and figure out what the hell to do next. You’ll be okay, both of you.” Arizona patted his arm, then stifled a yawn into the back of her hand and laughed gently, apologising, “sorry, it’s been a long shift.”
Flint turned his gaze back to her. “You would help me?” The question was dubious, paired with a firm look.
“Yeah,” Arizona nodded, her mouth lifting at one side. “Why not.”
A pause. Short but there. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Wait until someone explains Wi-Fi.” Arizona nodded seriously, then broke into a fit of giggles at Flint’s expression – utterly astounded, like she’d named a new species of beast. “It’s no problem. I can only imagine getting dumped into the world three centuries after your time — I thought I was outdated when all the kids started dressing in all black and listening to music that sounds like grinding teeth and metal cutlery scraping across plates.” She paused, then groaned and threw her head back, “god, I sound like such a mom.”
Flint stared at her, head tilted slightly, as if trying to place her in some ledger – what column to put her in. Ally? Fool? Something in between the two? Or maybe just someone he could trust – for now.
“I don’t know what a Wi-Fi is,” he said slowly, “but I already hate it.”
His voice was almost disgusted and it made Arizona snort. She nodded, “that’s fair.”
She met his gaze and cracked a small smile, not receiving one in return but spotting something flash in his eyes like concern or trust. That was enough, for now.
Arizona was still smiling as she walked away, until the thoughts crept in.
What the hell was she doing?
Back in the ICU, the clipboard sat abandoned on the counter, the paperwork unfinished. Somewhere beyond the doors, Silver slept. Flint’s gaze lingered there, fixed in his direction, and for the first time since landing in this unfamiliar world, he didn’t feel entirely lost.
Instead of an end, it felt like a beginning. Something new and strange and fascinating.
[---]
Light. Too much of it. A blinding, colorless glare, bleaching until it seared behind his eyelids. It wasn’t sunlight – it lacked warmth, lacked life.
Noise followed it – humming, the thrum of something mechanical. The shrill insistence of a beeping pulse he didn’t recognize as his own. The sounds were not of ship or sea or storm; they belonged to some other world entirely, and they crawled into his head like insects.
Then distance. Vast and undefinable, as though his limbs had been pulled from him and stitched back in the wrong place.
And, at last, the weight. God, the weight. The usual ache of his missing leg, and in addition to that – something heavier, deeper. His body felt tarred, pinned in place, each limb unliftable, unreachable.
He tried to breathe in – couldn’t.
Silver’s chest spasmed, ribs bucking against the suffocating pressure. The air caught. No – not air. There was something inside him. A foreign object down in his throat, obstructing his airway – thick and rigid and long. Filling every inch of him with wrongness.
His whole body convulsed, instinct screaming louder than thought. His eyes flew open, panicked, vision splitting apart into streaks of sterile white, shapes above him making his head spin. His heart thrashed against his ribs.
The something down his throat shoved a synthetic breath into his lungs, stretching his chest, making him choke. His lungs didn’t want it. He didn’t want it.
No. No, no, no.
He gagged, throat tearing, eyes bulging wide, nostrils flaring as his hand, heavy as stone, began a slow, painful path toward his mouth. Fingers caught in the coarse thatch of his beard, slid clumsily to his lips – and then they met it.
The foreign thing. The obstruction. Shoved too deep inside him. Invasive.
Wrong.
Panic bloomed hard and fast.
He tried to call for Flint, but his throat convulsed around the obstruction, and a strangled sound tore out that wasn’t even his own voice anymore. His body contorted with discomfort and his mind screamed at him to fix this, to make it right, God, to just do something. Anything.
His fingers pried past his lips, slick with spit, scrabbling to get at this foreign thing, but it went all the way to the back of his mouth and further – like a serpent trying to slither into his stomach and make its home there.
Fear flooded his body, heady and powerful and all encompassing, rattling every bone and muscle. His body shook with it, but still he wrapped a fist around the material and pulled.
Agony.
The thing bit back. It wasn’t willing to concede easily.
The obstruction caught at the base of his throat, lodged cruelly against the flesh inside him, tearing at him as though it had fangs. He gagged violently, ribs sawing open with the effort. His eyes bulged, throat seizing, stomach lurching.
The machines surrounding him screamed. The beeping skyrocketed into a frantic alarm, rapidly increasing in speed. And still he pulled.
The light overhead flared, bleaching him blind. The sheets beneath him were too soft, nothing to hold on to. He needed out. Needed Flint. Needed to run away. Needed anywhere but here – somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, somewhere far, far away.
And if he couldn’t run, he would crawl, drag himself, tear his way away from this suffocating white hell.
Adjusting his grip on the slick tube, he wrenched harder. It hurt – hurt like hell. Pain flared as the serpent gave ground at last, dragging against every raw nerve, scraping along his windpipe. He tried to tear it out harder, more determined, more desperate. His beard tore as adhesive ripped free, taking skin with it. His lungs collapsed on themselves, shrieking for air, until, until, until—
Until he forced out a long breath and finally persuaded — no, not persuaded, but removed with brute force — the breathing tube out of his mouth with the air.
It slid free.
The thing expelled itself with a grotesque squelch, sliding over his tongue and leaving a trail of slime and blood. He gagged and spat, coughing like he was trying to expel a demon, hell, like he was vomiting up the devil himself. Maybe he was. Maybe every sailor’s superstition he’d sneered at had come to collect its debt, and this was the price.
Finally freed, the tube hit the floor with a wet clatter.
Relief crashed into him, raspy and false. He pulled in hacking breath after hacking breath, as if every one might be stolen back again. He coughed until his ribs felt split apart, retching on spit and bile. He swallowed hard against the feeling lodged there, convinced he could still feel it – the serpent, the demon, that unnatural, foul appendage forced into him might have been out, but its ghost lingered, prying his jaw open.
His throat throbbed, raw and burning. His lungs screamed, ragged, untrustworthy, every inhale a scrape, every exhale a fight – never enough air. His chest felt flayed open, as if something inside him had coiled wrong and refused to settle.
And, God, if mercy still had a place in this world, he begged to never endure such torment again.
Yet panic didn’t break. Freedom only unshackled a deeper terror. It tore through his chest like fire, boiling beneath his skin, setting his nerves alight. He was hot, hot, hot – too hot to think, too hot to breathe, gasping like a man suffocating in smoke.
Breathe, he told himself. Just fucking breathe.
But his body didn’t listen. It seized and fought and sputtered. Nothing felt right – not his chest, not his throat, not his skin. Fuck, not even gravity. Everything was off, like the world had shifted ten degrees sideways while he was unconscious.
Desperation took over. In an instinctive move, he slammed a fist into his chest, as if sheer force might beat his lungs into obedience, as if he could will air into himself.
What came instead was pain.
A spark of agony so blinding Silver thought he might pass out. For one frozen instant, his body forgot how to move. Like lightning had been bottled in his ribs and shattered outward, paralyzing, freezing his lungs mid-breath, making his mouth hang open in a stunned grimace. His hand stopped in midair like it had forgotten how to move.
“What are you doing? Jesus Christ!”
A man barrelled into the room – tall, broad-shouldered, his voice deep, the top of his head ginger, moving toward the miserable sounds of distress.
Silver looked up through the hair that had fallen into his eyes, doubled over in bed, curling in on himself, half-folded with pain. His chest and throat burned like barbed wire had been threaded through them.
His mouth scraped raw as he forced out a broken word. “James…?” he managed, voice like gravel dragged across stone, every breath like sandpaper on his throat.
But the hand that caught him wasn’t Flint’s. It was broader, colder, dressed in blue latex. It dragged against his shoulder as the stranger shoved him back against the bed. Silver snarled, twisting away, wrenching onto his side, dragging his body into a crooked curl as though that might be enough to shield him.
“I’m Dr Hunt, Owen. I’m looking after you – if you’d just let me—”
Silver didn’t hear the rest.
Because then he felt it.
Or rather, didn’t.
His left leg.
The weight of the peg – the familiar pressure, the hated balance he had forced his body to obey, the awkward drag he’d learned to live with – was gone. In its place: nothing. A yawning nothingness, emptiness wrapped in cloth, and the sudden, horrifying lightness of absence.
His lungs seized. His throat locked.
“Where—” he rasped, “where’s my leg? Where the fuck is it?”
His mind sharpened in an instant. The panic sliced through every ounce of sedative haze left in his body. His hand dove beneath the sheet, fingers scrabbling, frantic, needing proof, trying to confirm it was still gone and not somehow gone again, or taken by this stranger with sterile hands and eyes that seemed a little too close together.
The doctor’s thick eyebrows furrowed minutely, as if thinking over the question. Then his face relaxed, “oh, we removed it for you. Nasty piece of kit you had attached to you, there.”
Removed?
Silver’s pulse spiked, drowning out all sense. The monitor screamed, red digits flashing, the beeps doubling, loud and unbearable and ringing in his ears.
“You—” his throat seized on the word, choking it out, “you took it?” His voice cracked, shrill and broken, eyes wild. He gripped the edge of a blanket, yanking it aside as if that might lead to a more honest answer – as if truth could be uncovered by sheer force of will.
Owen’s gaze flicked up to the monitors, eyes widening as he looked back to Silver’s pale face and rushed out, “no, no, no – listen to me. We still have it,” he said, hands raised like he was attempting to handle a very terrified, very cornered animal.
Silver froze, trembling, panting.
“We wouldn’t dispose of it without direct permission, especially not since that man of yours out there threatened to gut my entire surgical team and… what was it?” Owen thought for a second, “oh yes. ‘string our innards from the ceiling like signal flags’ if we touched a hair on your head or didn’t keep it nearby for you.” He gestured quickly, pointing across the room. “It’s, uh, it’s just over there. With the rest of your clothes.”
But Silver didn’t hear the words. Not really. Panic was already surging up his spine like floodwater breaching a seawall, swallowing him whole. His lungs stuttered uselessly. Too fast. Too shallow. The taste of metal filled his mouth. His skin crawled, every nerve jangling, his body screaming with heat.
He couldn’t feel his leg. Couldn’t feel anything but the tearing pain in his chest and that absence, that damned absence below his hip – a void so profound it hollowed him out from the inside. The room swam, too white, the lights too bright, his heart beating madly, trying to tear through his chest, find a way out through his ribs.
“You gotta breathe, John.” Owen said, voice low and even as he crouched down to look up into Silver’s face. “Slow it down. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Focus.”
But Silver’s fingers only clamped around the bedrails, bone straining against skin, tendons roped taut, eyes wide and unseeing, his whole body locked in.
“I can’t—” His voice tore itself ragged. “Something’s – wrong. I can’t—!”
“You can.” Owen said calmly, “you’re panicking. It’s okay. I know, I know you feel a weight in your chest, like you can’t breathe, like something’s wrong, but it’s okay. Look at me. What can you see when you look at me? Describe me. Go on. Any words you like. Insult me. Swear. Do it.”
Silver’s eyes snapped toward him – red-rimmed, glassy, but focused. Barely.
“Who the fuck even are you?” His chest hitched as he spat out, words tumbling out between rapid breaths.
“I’m Dr Owen Hunt, I work in trauma. I treated you in our ER; there was an issue with your heart that we fixed.” Dr Hunt said, face even. “You’re okay now.”
“Okay is a weak fucking word. Where the hell is doctor Howell? Where – where am I?”
“Dr Howell…? Dr Howell isn’t here,” Owen paused, “uh, which hospital does he work at? Maybe we could contact him for you.”
“What?” Silver’s head jerked slightly, and he took a ragged, desperate breath. His vision was dimming at the edges, the pain refused to abate, but he felt more present, more lucid. His mind was able to latch onto fleeting memories – something to make sense of it all. “What do you mean he’s not here? This – this is Port Royal Naval Hospital, isn’t it?”
“Port Royal? I’m afraid it’s not.” Owen said patiently, frowning faintly, knowing that the drugs would have messed around with Silver’s mind. He was calm as he explained, “you’re in the ICU of Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital, in Seattle.”
Silver blinked. The words didn’t fit together. They slid around his mind like oil on water, bouncing uselessly, refusing to form a picture. Seattle? It meant nothing. It wasn’t a fort, wasn’t a ship, wasn’t a colony he’d ever heard muttered in taverns or shouted from quarterdecks.
“That’s… not possible. I don’t know what that is. Seattle. Is that a district? A Spanish garrison?”
“No. It’s a city. In Washington.”
“In… Washington…?”
Owen studied him, professionalism briefly overshadowed by wariness. “Okay,” he said slowly, as if speaking to someone concussed. “You’re confused. That’s normal.”
Silver bristled. Confused. As if he’d mislaid his mind like a dropped coin. He forced himself upright, muscles screaming, chest lancing with pain bad enough to momentarily black out his vision. Still, he dragged himself halfway up onto an elbow, his good leg drawing tight against the mattress.
“Where is James? He’ll explain it better than I can. He’ll – he’ll know what’s happening.”
Owen didn’t answer. Instead, he simply reached forward, hand out. His palm closed lightly on Silver’s shoulder.
Silver jerked away as though burned, the cannula line snapping taut, tugging cruelly at his skin.
“Don’t touch me,” he spat, his voice ragged, though it didn’t mean it wasn’t filled with venom.
Owen drew his hand back and held up his palms. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
But Silver wasn’t soothed. His breath came shallow and fast again, but his eyes were clearer now. Angry. Defensive. But beneath it all was an undressed, sickening terror.
“You expect me to believe that?” he snapped. “From a stranger in butcher’s whites, in a world where the furniture fucking screams at me, where I’ve got lines jammed into my body like puppet strings, and Washington is somehow a place and not the drunk bastard I knew back in Whitechapel?”
Owen stayed quiet.
Silver’s jaw worked, teeth clenched until his temples throbbed. “I’m not mad.”
“No,” Owen agreed. “But you’re scared. And sedated. And hurt.”
The words landed with more weight than either expected, and Silver’s retort died in his throat. He fell silent, but the room didn’t. The monitors beeped steadily.
Carefully, Owen stepped in again, reaching to check the cannula line that Silver’s flinch had tugged nearly out of place. He had to – it had been pulled taut from the IV stand during his panic. His fingers traced along the IV line, then ran down Silver’s arm and brushed across the crook of his elbow.
To Silver, Owen’s touch might as well have been shackles – clinical, cold, and intrusive. A stranger’s hands mapping his body without permission.
“Fuck,” Silver ground out, twisting weakly against the sheets as if he could writhe away from the pain. It bloomed beneath his sternum like fire eating through timber, searing every nerve it touched. Owen’s hand tugged the gown aside, and Silver caught a fleeting glimpse of himself – the mottled mess of his chest, yellowing bruises, purple splotches, and the heavy ache radiating just beneath the skin.
“Are you in pain?”
“What do you fucking think?” Silver hissed through clenched teeth, dizzy. The pain was more than pain – it was annihilation. His nerves felt like they’d been flayed and then set alight – like he’d been burned alive and someone had poured liquor over the wounds for good measure.
“Alright, well, I can give you some more medication. Are you allergic to anything?”
“Why’s it your business?” Silver snapped, spit thick in his mouth, nausea climbing fast. “I don’t want your fucking questions. I don’t want your drugs. I want James Flint. Bring me him.” His voice cracked. “Or get me the hell out of here.”
The pain made a mockery of his intent, but he fought anyway. He pushed against the mattress, tried to haul himself upright on one elbow, every motion detonating in his chest, his throat, his leg, absent or otherwise. His body screamed surrender, but his mind refused. Flint had seen him broken enough. He would not be reduced to this in front of strangers.
Owen’s hand braced his shoulder. “Sir, you can’t leave.” He turned his head, muttered something to someone just out of sight.
Then – cold.
A creeping chill spread through Silver’s left arm, blooming outward from the crook of his elbow like frost.
Silver froze. His eyes darted, glassy and unfocused but burning with sudden suspicion. “What did you just do to me?” His gaze fixed on the IV line, on the thin thread of fluid disappearing beneath his skin. His voice dropped. “What the fuck did you do?”
Owen’s voice was no longer deep, no longer caring – at least not to Silver. It grated like glass under skin, making a headache spark in his temples.
“I’ve just given you a mild sedative,” he said. “To help you calm down.”
But to Silver, it sounded like a death sentence.
His chest clenched hard, his eyes narrowed. The cold rush in his veins wasn’t calming – it was alien. Wrong. The betrayal of it rattled his ribs. Poison in disguise. He stared at his arm and the line
“You drugged me?” he said, voice shaking. He stared at Owen, wide-eyed, horror crawling up his spine like rats fleeing a sinking ship. His hand tore uselessly at the IV, nails scraping his own skin. “What the fuck did you put in me?”
Owen opened his mouth, probably to repeat his calm little line, but Silver wasn’t listening anymore. His ears rang with the high, unnatural shriek of machines and his own pulse hammering in his skull. Every word out of Owen’s mouth sounded like a lie wrapped in honey.
“No,” The sound forced its way from Silver’s throat – a whimper, a snarl. “No, no, no – fuck you.”
Adrenaline ignited in his veins, drowning out the fire in his chest. With a sudden burst of energy, he lunged upright – agony be damned. His hand shot to the IV line, fingers trembling, slick with sweat but stubborn. He yanked.
The cannula tore free from his arm with a sting and a spray of blood that splattered across the sheets. He barely noticed. Already he was dragging himself sideways, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, determined to get away from this room of humming lights and strangers with cold hands.
One bare foot hit the floor. The stump of his left leg hit nothing – no peg, no brace, just open air – and the moment his weight shifted, his balance failed him.
The room careened violently, tilting as if the floor had dropped out from under him. His stomach lurched. The machines erupted, alarms shrieking like a ship under siege.
Silver toppled sideways off the bed. His body hit the linoleum with a bone-deep thud that rattled his teeth. The side of his head cracked against the floor, bounced off it, a burst of white fire exploding behind his eyes before it collapsed into black, then a smeared gray that pulsed with every heartbeat. Voices rushed in, far away and distorted.
“Damn it – I need some help in here! Get me a gurney and a new IV kit, and call CT!”
Footsteps thundered. Hands seized him – some hot against his temples, others cold on his chest. Silver’s vision fractured: faces without features that leaned too close, hands that touched without asking. He tried to thrash, but his limbs felt heavy, far away. The pain was distant now, muted, as though it had been passed to another body entirely. His heart roared in his ears, then faltered. Slowed.
He thought of Flint. Flint’s green eyes narrowing, Flint’s voice cutting through the chaos, sharper than steel, Flint’s wrath when he discovered what had been done here.
The last coherent thought that shuddered through him before darkness smothered everything was: Flint’s going to kill this man.
And then the world tore itself away from him, leaving him with nothing at all.
[---]
Entering the attendings lounge on three, Arizona yawned and fixed herself a cup of coffee. Once she was properly equipped with a cup of the strongest coffee known to man, she sat down in one of the armchairs and winced as the socket of her prosthetic rubbed. She groaned and muttered to herself, all kinds of expletives she would be mortified if anyone overheard, but apt when it came to her feelings for her leg. She ran a hand up and down her left thigh through her scrub pants, solid carbon fiber beneath her fingertips as she pressed her palm in and procrastinated doing the one thing she knew she should do.
She sipped coffee and scowled at nothing for a while, feeling that irrational anger simmer beneath her skin at the disability she couldn’t help.
A minute passed and Arizona was still alone in the attendings lounge, so she grabbed some items from her locker and sat back down, slipping her pants off and releasing her leg — with a little extra difficulty due to swelling from the stress — to set it against the table in front of her. Then she rolled the socket liner off and ran both of her hands down her shortened thigh, palms cold against heated and angry skin. After a quick exam, she didn't see any blistering or rashes other than the usual swelling and heat, which was good, but it still hurt like a bitch.
“Damn,” she hissed through her teeth before she grabbed a soothing ointment from her bag and squeezed some into one hand, rubbing it between her palms to warm it before massaging it into her leg.
She groaned through her teeth but felt the cream start to work, cooling her leg and relieving a little of the pain as she wiped her hands on a cloth and swigged back a mouthful of coffee with a couple of paracetamol. Her eyes flicked around the room, hoping that no-one walked in as she grabbed a screwdriver just to tweak the anle joint slightly before placing everything she wasn’t using anymore back into a little pink bag titled the ‘Emergency Leg Kit’. It was a small pouch filled with the tools needed to adjust her knee and ankle joints, pain meds, soothing creams, a spare gel insert and band aids just in case of blisters.
Callie and Sofia had helped her set it up so it contained everything she needed, plus a painted rock from Sofia with a little pink shoe on it. Well, it was almost a shoe. Mostly a blob with a few black lines, but Arizona appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.
Arizona had just sat back to drink her coffee and let the ointment sink in when the door creaked open and Owen Hunt stepped inside, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked wrecked.
“I finally got the one with the beard to sleep, again. After a second damn CT,” he muttered gruffly, heading for the coffee pot like a man on a mission and not even batting an eye at Arizona’s legless state. “Had to sedate him for his first CT and then again to get him to calm down, after he managed to unhook his IV line and fall to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I worried he’d pull out the cannula still draining from his heart if he kept going, poor guy was so out of it; I think he hit his head when he hit the ground, hence the new CT. Luckily it didn’t show any changes.”
John Silver was always going to be a nightmare patient, doctors just knew when someone was going to struggle to lay there and accept help. Staying quiet, Arizona raised her eyebrows and tilted her head slightly to look Owen up and down. His scrubs were darkened with blood splatters and there were dark flakes under his fingernails as he ran a hand over his face and sighed, as if the weight of the world was resting on his shoulders.
Owen poured his cup, leaned back against the counter, and took a sip. “He said something… said he thought he was in Port Royal. And that Washington wasn’t a city, but a man he used to know. I think his memory is worse than we thought.”
That made her look up. “Port Royal?” she repeated, mind racing as she searched for long forced down geographical knowledge. When she found it, she fought not to gasp. Instead, when she spoke, her voice was scarily level. “Port Royal as in… Jamaica? Pirates of the actual Caribbean?”
Owen gave a tired, bemused nod. “Yeah. I almost expected him to call me a scallywag.” He laughed gently, then sobered up as he continued lightly, “I figured the drugs were still working their way out of his system. But he was… coherent. Not rambling. Very, very certain.” He paused, considering, looking for a rational explanation. He then shrugged and let out a half laugh, half scoff. “Maybe it’s just the trauma. Guy’s been through a lot and we’ve seen what injuries like that can do to the mind. We know, don’t we?”
Arizona nodded slowly, recalling her own issues after the plane crash and knowing that Owen was revisiting his bad PTSD episodes after he returned from Iraq.
“Maybe,” Arizona said, but her voice was distant, quiet with the sound of her thoughts whirring in her ears. “Or maybe it’s something else.” She searched for words, “there’s just something… off about them.”
Owen raised a brow in question, leaning more of his weight against the counter.
“Not wrong, per se,” she clarified before he could get the wrong idea. “Just… misaligned. Like they’re slightly out of sync with everything around them. The language they use is outdated, how they hold themselves… like they’ve got somewhere important to be, or they’re just used to bossing people around.” Arizona paused, “also, did you notice the smell?”
“They smell bad, Robbins. Doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.”
“But it could.” She argued lightly, “those men have never even glanced at a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo, let alone washed with it. They smell like gunpowder and sweat and salt, like the ocean. Like a…” Arizona fought her throat, avoiding Owen’s eye as she drank a mouthful of coffee and said firmly, “like pirates. They smell and act and speak exactly like… pirates.”
“What?” Owen seemed vaguely amused, as if playing along with a game. “Like, cosplay?”
“No,” Arizona said, “I think… I think they’re actual, living, breathing, pirates.”
Owen stared at her like she’d grown a second head. Then he scoffed, “you really think that?”
“I don’t know!” Arizona snapped, then pulled in a breath, “Owen, I do not know. But I don’t think they belong here.”
“They’re hardly from another century, Arizona,” Owen said gently, like one might speak to a psych patient about to bolt at any moment. “Time travel is not a thing.”
Feeling mildly patronised, Arizona glanced toward him and then away, biting the inside of her cheek. “I’m aware of that.” She busied herself with putting her leg back on. “All I’m saying is that they seem out of place and might need a little help.”
Owen snorted. “Well, if they are pirates, they picked the wrong century to wash up in. No rum, no ships, and certainly no leniency from the chief of surgery.”
Arizona chuckled under her breath, but the sound was hollow. Her brow was furrowed in thought as she settled her prosthetic into place, adjusting the knee joint automatically. The word pirates still clung to her tongue like garlic: it wasn’t leaving anytime soon.
Owen drained half his mug in one long pull and set it down with a quiet clink. “You don’t actually believe it. Do you?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Arizona murmured, tugging her scrub pants back into place and shifting to a more upright position. Her voice came out slow and measured, truth in every word despite her hesitance. “I’ve seen people fake a lot of things in my time, Owen. Hell, I’ve done it myself. We all have. But, these two? They’re not faking.”
“So what? You really think they just… dropped out of the past?” Owen scoffed, starting to wash his hands in the sink, nail brush scrubbing the blood out from under his nails.
“I think they’re survivors,” Arizona said slowly, sipping her coffee. “I can see it. Of what, I’m… I’m not sure yet. But I think the universe spat them out here, in our ER, for a reason. And I don’t think they’ll make it if someone doesn’t help them figure out how to live here.”
She set the cup down with more force than she meant to, feeling the ache in her leg radiate through her hip, her spine, up into the tension already blooming between her temples.
She didn’t know what she was doing, but she was already doing it. And Arizona Robbins didn’t half-ass a job.
“And I guess,” Arizona added as she repacked her leg kit, “for some reason, that someone’s me.”
Glancing back over his shoulder, Owen simply looked at her. “You’re insane, Robbins.”
Maybe she was insane. Maybe it was all a ploy to scam her. Maybe she’d end up on a true crime podcast. But Arizona Robbins would not be Arizona Robbins if she couldn’t muster a little grace for two battered, time-lost gay men who looked like heartbreak in boots.
Shoving her bag back into her locker, Arizona flashed him a trademark dimpled grin. “I’m helping people who need help. Like I said I would when I put on this white coat. Get on board or get out, Hunt.”
Still watching her like she might be having some kind of stroke, Owen sighed, “as the Chief of Surgery, I cannot recommend–”
“Then don’t,” Arizona chirped, cutting him off. “You saw and heard nothing, Chief Hunt. I’m busy charting.”
Owen pinched the bridge of his nose. “Robbins–”
“Charting!” Arizona singsonged, striding from the room.
As soon as she left, her smile fell. But she was damn well going to try and find out what the hell was going on with those men. The men that fascinated her with a morbid kind of intrigue, like when one looked at a car wreck. It was all going up in flames, warped metal and screams, but it was impossible to tear her eyes away.
Arizona had survived worse than a car wreck in the shape of two pirates.
So, yeah. She was going to do more than just look – she was going to be the one diving into the chaos, just to see if there was any hope of pulling them from the wreckage.
Notes:
Q:
Flint giving Arizona his big, sad puppy eyes and it actually working is one of my favorite parts here, lol.
(not including Silver extubating himself – that was badass!)
SILVER IS SO STUPID, MY GOD.
That would literally be my reaction too, though. Alien technology? Count me out.Here’s a gay ass gif of gay ass birates just because:
FreakingPlane:D
What on earth is Arizona getting herself into? After everything that’s happened in her life, you’d think she’d try and lay low, lol. But nope, she just has to throw herself into the middle of some misplaced pirate dramatics, because she’s an idiot. (But we love her dearly, despite her insatiable need to stick herself into all the drama without giving it a single thought)Feel free to drop a comment or a sneaky kudos if you’re having as much fun as we are. This fic is insane and we can’t wait to share more of it with the unsuspecting Black Sails and Grey’s Anatomy fandoms<3<3
Chapter 3: You like pirates?
Notes:
In this chapter: Callie appears! Arizona lies! Lesbian fluff and angst! Then Flint squares off against a vending machine, and Silver is… high…? (and very sad 💔)
Just a couple of Callie gifs to set the mood, and also because I find her hypnotising. I mean, just look at her face! Funny how these gifs are eight hours long. Each.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After the emergency in the pit, Owen took over Silver’s case and Callie went to her ward for rounds, then came home. She was exhausted as she fumbled her keys with the lock to their house and stepped inside, dropping them with a clang into the paper mache bowl by the door, courtesy of Sofia’s art class. It was a mangled, disaster of a project: coated in glitter that stuck to everything and got everywhere — like a rapidly spreading virus, Callie thought dryly — and painted bright pink, but they both secretly loved it.
Callie grabbed herself a bag of chips and settled in front of the TV to wait for Arizona to return home, excited to spend some time with her wife after being on awkward and overlapping shifts for the last week. Before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep on the couch, bag of chips still in hand.
She startled awake a little later, blearily checking her phone for the time and raising a mildly worried eyebrow at the time. Arizona should have been home by now. Something uncomfortable sparked in her chest but she ignored it – it was a familiar panic to her now, wondering about Arizona’s whereabouts constantly.
“Don’t panic.” She muttered to herself as she stood shakily to her feet. The speaking aloud calmed her a little, but the maw in her stomach sloshed with concern that was still nauseating. “Surgery ran long,” Callie continued mindlessly, folding the chip packet over itself and shoving it into a drawer. “You know how it is.”
Still, ten minutes later there was no message from Arizona. No text, no email, no voice note, no nothing.
There was no, ‘Sorry I’m late, I’ll make it up to you by picking up pizza!’
No, ‘Alex was being an ass, I’m on my way.’
No, ‘so sorry but a kid’s started dying, I won’t be home later. Try not to miss me too much!’
No, ‘I love you, pretty lady<3’
Callie chewed her lip, staring at her phone screen. An image of her and Arizona’s wedding was her screensaver, smiling faces almost mocking her as she opened Arizona’s contact and looked at the picture of a butterfly that signified an incoming call from her wife. Her thumb hovered over the call button, but she didn’t want to disturb Arizona if she was elbow deep in some sick kid’s gut. Instead she made herself take a breath. A long, soothing breath that calmed her pounding heart.
She made herself do something and busied herself by cleaning the living room from top to bottom, wiping counters and dusting framed pictures until it was an hour later and the place was spotless.
Breathless and with lemon surface polish clinging to her skin, Callie stood in their empty house and chewed her lip, the silence mocking her. The tap dripped. The fridge hummed. All noises that she was used to and could filter out in place of wishing for uneven footsteps or the sound of Arizona singing tunelessly in the shower.
Callie knew that she was being daft. That there was a reason Arizona was late. That the pure anguish she’d felt when Arizona was lost in the woods was a sensation she would never relive. But, somewhere inside her, it lingered. The fear of Arizona dying or never coming home pricked under her skin like stinging insects, despite her attempts to hide it under a bar of good quality dark chocolate.
Unable to take it any longer, Callie dug out her phone and pressed call. She listened for a moment, then heard a familiar tone ringing outside, accompanied by a loud, ‘crap!’ and a cracking sound.
So relieved she thought she might pass out, Callie let out a half laugh and walked forward to open the door. With her hand on the handle, Callie schooled her face to greet Arizona with a raised eyebrow and a stern glare. She pulled the door open just as she heard the jingle of keys, making her image all the more intimidating by crossing her arms.
“And where have you been?” Her voice was sharp, but there was an obvious fear hiding under the mask of indifference.
Arizona, who had been hastily picking up her dropped phone, froze with her keys hanging from a finger. Then she slowly lifted her head to meet her wife’s eyes, dark and flitting with humour beneath her disgruntled mask. She knew she was late, and she knew how Callie hated it. She could see it in the tightness around Callie’s mouth, the relief in her eyes.
“Hello.” She said awkwardly, straightening up and blowing a rogue lock of blonde hair out of her eyes as she slipped her phone into her purse. She straightened her long, black coat and started rambling, “I know, I know I’m late and I meant to text you but I just got so distracted, and I know it’s our first night together in weeks and I’m super excited to spend it with you but there was this case and I just—”
Callie cut her off by leaning forward to kiss her, right there on the doorstep.
Arizona squeaked, not expecting that reaction, but melted against her wife as soon as she tasted the dark chocolate Callie saved for special occasions on her tongue.
Callie’s arms wrapped around her and hauled her inside, then swiftly pulled back and smirked as she smoothly turned Arizona around, kissed her neck, and removed Arizona’s coat from her shoulders. She then swung around to hang it on the hook in one smooth motion. It was a practiced action, but it made Arizona swoon every damn time.
Trying not to look like her brain had turned to soup the moment Callie touched her, Arizona cleared her throat, “sorry I’m late.”
“I was only just starting to think that you were dead,” Callie said seriously, dropping the façade and letting out a sigh as she took Arizona’s purse and set it on the table in the hall.
“One text, my love. Just one, so that I know you’re not laying in a ditch somewhere.” She stepped forward and took Arizona’s upper arms in both her hands, tilting her head as she looked into Arizona’s face.
Arizona looked up into brown eyes, seeing fleeting worry dance within them. She knew how Callie felt about not knowing where she was: not to the extent of possession, just in the way that a wife who’d been alone for four days while the love of her life rotted beside a crashed plane was allowed to worry.
Ashamed of herself, Arizona swallowed. “I’m sorry. I know.” She tilted her head, “I’m back now.”
“And I’m not letting you go now, not when there’s so much to do.” Callie muttered, curling her arms around Arizona and pulling her close.
They stayed there for a while, letting their tension dissolve, until Arizona asked into Callie’s shoulder, “what do we have to do?”
Arizona’s voice was adorably muffled by Callie’s shirt, and Callie chuckled softly, “well, first off, I thought I’d make you chicken piccata. Maybe light a candle or two – I am a sickening romantic, after all. Then we could pretend to watch a movie while we make out like lovesick teenagers, and then… well, I’m not planning on letting you go for the rest of the night.”
Pulling in a deep breath, Arizona leaned back to meet Callie’s gaze, her eyes shining with care and love. Arizona let a blinding smile break out across her face, “I like this plan.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.” Arizona nodded. Then her brow creased minutely and she sniffed the air, a tiny smile playing around her mouth, “have you been stress cleaning?”
Callie rolled her eyes, “don’t expose me like that. Just enjoy your pristine living room.”
“Maybe we could both enjoy the pristine living room,” Arizona murmured, “seeing as Sof’s at a sleepover at Meredith’s with Zola. We did buy the memory foam couch for a reason, and it’s not because we’re old and have back issues.”
Callie chuckled, “we are old, and we do have back issues.”
Arizona paused, “okay, yes. But that’s beside the point. What I’m saying is that the couch is damn comfortable, and so are you.”
“I’ve already had a nap on that couch this afternoon,” Callie said, absently twirling a lock of blonde hair around her finger. “And I vacuumed all of the crevices, so I’m up for pretty much anything.”
“I caught a nap in an on-call room before I was paged and… distracted.” Arizona said slowly, “so I am also up for anything.”
Callie smirked, then left a kiss on Arizona’s cheek and trotted to the kitchen, humming under her breath and making sure to add a little more sway than usual into her hips, just to rile Arizona up for later.
Arizona huffed and followed her, trying to tamp down the heat in her chest so that they could eat dinner. When she got to the kitchen, Callie was already humming to herself and gathering ingredients for her favourite dish, putting an instant smile on Arizona’s face.
When Callie turned around, bottle of olive oil in hand, one of her eyebrows rose at Arizona’s stupid grin. It was goofy but chock-full of love, shining in every smile line around her eyes and mouth as she stood, leaning on the doorframe.
Callie set the bottle down with a clink and lifted a brow. “Finally lost the plot, Dr Robbins?”
Jerking herself back to life, Arizona coughed abruptly and smiled sweetly, “never. Just… admiring.”
Also trying not to stare at the goddess she was married to, Callie grabbed an onion and snorted, “stop admiring before you distract me from my cooking.”
Smiling Arizona pushed off the doorframe and nodded with a salute, “yes, boss. How can I help?”
“Can you get the chicken from the fridge while I chop the veg?”
“You got it.” That smile didn’t leave Arizona’s face all evening, seemingly contagious when Callie was exactly the same.
No thoughts about the two men, two idiotic men sequestered somewhere within the walls of the hospital they co-owned, crossed either of their minds.
[---]
The vending machine.
Might as well be one of man’s strangest inventions. It loomed at the end of a hallway – glowing, menacing, taunting Flint with its mechanical light, incessant humming, filled with strange, colorful packages, daring him to approach, to test his luck against it. So he stood before it, frowning deeply, hands behind his back like he was inspecting a weapon he didn’t yet trust.
He’d watched three people feed it already. Watched them insert something – a card, coins, or a small slip of paper – press a few buttons, and be rewarded with a prize. The machine – the vending machine – made soft noises and then dropped its bounty. The stuff clattered down into the tray with all the dignity of a coin tossed into a gutter. And yet the supplicants had bent to retrieve it with reverence, as though the offering were sacred.
Simple enough, in theory.
Except nothing in this time was simple.
He’d only been there three days, and he hated every second.
He stepped closer, peering in, scowling at the rows of prizes trapped behind glass. Bright packages stared back at him, all different shapes and sizes, some painted with smiling caricatures, others aggressively neon, like warnings rather than invitations. Everything was sealed. Shiny. Processed. As far from bread pulled from an oven or fruit cut from a tree as Nassau was from this strange, antiseptic palace of the sick.
Flint glanced down at the card Arizona had given him earlier when they passed in a hallway – a hospital meal voucher. She’d slipped it into his hand without ceremony, and said, “You don’t want to keep stealing from the nurse’s station. It’s bad optics.”
He fed the card into the slot the way he remembered. The machine beeped. A green light flashed. He flinched.
Then came the codes. Letters and numbers scattered across the keypad, coordinates to an unfamiliar map. A paper on the machine offered instructions and combinations, but it might as well have been in Latin. He studied it, jaw set, thumb hovering uselessly over the buttons.
“Press B7 if you want trail mix,” came a voice behind him – amused. Light. Feminine.
He didn’t turn around. “I don’t know what that is.”
Smiling softly at this man who knew so little, Arizona stepped up beside him. She was back at the hospital for an early page and had a coffee in her hand from the cart outside, on her way back down to the PICU when she saw him standing there, staring into the vending machine like it had slapped him. His hair shone red under the fluorescent light and his face was deeply lined, and she couldn't leave him there like that.
Arizona pointed, patiently saying, “nuts, dried fruit, a few chocolate chips if you’re lucky. Not the worst thing in there. Pretty familiar. Not too sweet, not too weird. You’d hate the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
Flint gave her a side-eye, brows lifted in suspicion, then turned back to the glowing array. “I saw someone get something in a red bag. They looked pleased.”
“That’s because they’ve burned off all their tastebuds.” Arizona grinned, remembering her brother’s love for spicy food, whilst she’d never been able to handle it. He used to tease her endlessly, and she recalled smacking him about it more than once.
He scanned the rows again, squinting. Finally, he spotted a small, unassuming brown packet. Clean lines. Simple label. A picture of almonds and raisins. Somehow, it seemed the least suspicious.
“That one?” Flint checked, just to ensure that he wasn’t about to get something awful.
“That one.” Arizona confirmed, “B7.”
He pressed the button. The machine whirred, coughed, and the bag dropped with a satisfying thunk.
He retrieved it carefully, like it might explode.
“Congratulations,” Arizona said with a comforting, crooked smile. She felt strangely pleased with him. Almost proud. She quickly shook that feeling out before it could manifest into something tangible, and quipped, “your first successful interaction with capitalism.”
Flint shot her a dry look. “I prefer bartering. Or theft.”
“I figured.”
He tore open the packet – the scent was vaguely earthy, sweet, not unpleasant. He tried a raisin, chewed, eyed the bag. “I’ve had worse.”
Scanning his face — hard lines, sharp angles, scars — Arizona nodded with a tilt to her head. “You really have, haven’t you.”
Flint opened his mouth – whether to agree, deny, or to let the moment pass with the contemplative silence it deserved, when a loud voice he’d know anywhere echoed in the hallway.
“James!”
Arizona straightened instantly. The voice was familiar now – she’d heard it babbling feverishly while sedated, quicksilver-fast even when muttered in pain. John Silver. Sharp eyes snapped toward the end room in the recovery ward, where he had been moved a day ago when they needed the ICU room for an emergent trauma. She was on high alert instantly, checking her pager to make sure she had a little free time to check on a man she couldn’t help but want to see.
Flint reacted like an animal who’d heard its mate’s cry. His spine snapped taut, his head turning, his entire body alert. His grip tightened around the trail mix until the bag crinkled loudly.
“James! James, ooh—! I can’t find the ground! I feel like – I’m a wave! I’m an ocean wave!”
Flint didn’t run. Running wasn’t his way. But his strides down the corridor were long and quick, faster than a march, faster than anyone who didn’t want to reveal panic should move. Arizona followed toward the room where Silver’s absolutely bewildered voice was coming from, keeping pace despite the twinge in her left thigh — that was normal, and she could tune it out easily.
Even so, they reached the door at the same time.
“The wave doesn’t stop, James. The wave keeps going – and I’m the fucking wave!”
Inside, Silver was upright, somehow, in bed, sweat-slicked and wide-eyed. He was shirtless, chest mottled with healing bruises, a large square bandage covering the injury to his chest where the needle and cannula had made a path for the excess blood to leave his body. One arm gestured madly toward the ceiling, toward the window, toward nothing at all.
The moment his eyes landed on Arizona and Flint in the doorway, his face split into a grin too wide, too bright, beaming at Flint’s sudden appearance.
“There’s no ground, James! I’m a wave, the sea, the goddamn sea – and you’re the boat! You have to float or I’ll pull you under—”
“John.” Flint's voice cut across the room. It was him. Unmistakably. “Stop.”
Silver froze mid-gesture, arm sagging as if suddenly too heavy to command. His brow knotted, eyes locked on Flint, chest rose in heaves, but the torrent of manic words guttered out, leaving only ragged breathing. His mouth stayed open – thankfully, no new metaphors emerged.
“I’m here.” Flint crossed the room to the side of the bed. He didn’t reach for Silver immediately. Flint knew better than to grasp at a drowning man too soon.
Silver blinked, rapid and unfocused, pupils like black oil under the harsh hospital light. “The lights,” he whispered, words breaking, “they’re wrong. And the air’s too sharp. I can’t… I can’t breathe right.” He tugged at the IV in arm with clumsy fingers. “They put things in me again.”
“I know.” Flint sat on the edge of the bed, slowly.
Silver swallowed thickly, still under the loosening effects of the drugs. Tears glazed his eyes but clung stubbornly to the rims, held back by sheer pride. His voice was hoarse. “Feel like I’m drowning. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
Flint reached out and gripped his wrist, grounding him with simple, human weight. “You are.”
Silver’s eyes snapped to his, wide and desperate, clinging to the words as though they were the only plank in an endless sea. “I am?”
“You are.”
Silver swallowed, lips trembling. “And you?” It came out almost childlike, his whole body tense with the terror of the answer.
“I’m real too,” Flint reassured without hesitation. “And I’m not leaving you. They could burn this whole cursed world to ash and I would still be here.”
Leaning against the doorframe, Arizona watched the two men interact with an intrigued tilt to her head. The way they grasped each other — as if checking the other was still alive, still tangible, still there — left her with a strange feeling in her chest. As if cementing the fact that the men weren’t from her time with the processed food, over complicated technology and half melted ice-bergs. As if she was finally realising that those men, those rough, abrasive, terrified men, came from canvas and gunpowder smoke, from the kind of grief that didn’t lead to therapy, only whiskey and vengeance. Just like Flint had said.
Arizona knew feeling out of place in somewhere you were meant to know. She knew feeling out of place somewhere she’d never been before. She even knew feeling out of place in her own skin. (Boy, did she know that one.) But there had always been something similar, something familiar for her to latch onto in those situations. Whether that was Tim, roller skating with her father, music she could carry from place to place or — later in her life — Callie and Sofia, Arizona had never felt completely disconnected from reality. She always knew where she belonged, the people she belonged with.
But Flint and Silver? They belonged only to each other. Nothing else had survived the transit with them. No anchors, no maps, no familiar points on the horizon. They were all they had. And that was it.
She could only imagine how awful it felt. It made a pang of something shoot up her chest, something tugging in that way only someone who’d taken vows to do no harm and had raised a child could feel. Arizona felt the weird, maternal urge — that urge she thought she’d never feel before she met Callie and now wouldn’t change for the world — to comfort, to educate, to… protect those men.
“How’s your leg, John?” Flint asked at last, breaking the silence. He ran his thumb across Silver’s wrist and palm gently, the repetition of the movement meant to ground him.
Silver blinked, sluggish, as if the question had come in a language he didn’t quite know. He glanced down at the blanket covering his body, then to his gauze-wrapped stump – the place where flesh stopped and pain usually began. His brows furrowed.
“My… leg…?” he murmured, bewildered. “I don’t know… I don’t think it hurts. I don’t think it’s… anything.”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
Tentatively, Silver shifted under the sheets, as if bracing for the familiar knife-twist that always came when he dared move. But it didn’t come. His jaw slackened, his face loose with stunned disbelief. “No,” he said, almost to himself, then again, louder, “it doesn’t hurt.”
There was no fire in the bone. The throb in his hip, the sense of a twisted missing limb dragging beneath him – it was gone. All of it. What remained was… nothing. Stillness. Not wholeness, never that. Absence, but not agony.
“I don’t know—” he swallowed hard, his hand flexing against Flint’s, “it just doesn’t.”
“It’s the modern day pain meds,” Arizona interrupted quietly, a small smile playing around her mouth though her eyes were serious. “They’re good. Sometimes too good, but we won’t let anything happen to you with them.”
Two sets of eyes turned to her, Flint’s sharp and suspicious, Silver’s glazed and lost.
Arizona took a step into the room to explain. “They can be… addictive. But the doctors here are very good at rationing them – you’re on a medium dose right now – and they’ll get you off them before you get discharged.”
“I didn’t know…” Silver’s eyes fluttered, unfocused, and he wet his lips. “Didn’t know it was possible to forget it… the pain.”
Arizona nodded with a brief smile, “I know. It’s a modern day miracle.”
She didn’t say the rest.
She didn’t want to disclose — or even really think about — the issues she had struggled with after her own amputation. The mood swings and the anger she felt when she forced herself to stop taking opioids for her pain because she hated them so much. The opioids she’d taken, oxycodone, they were strong. Almost too strong. They made her feel disconnected from reality, like her body stayed in place while her mind stepped back. Made her angry. Made her mind fuzz and her pain melt into a feeling like she was trapped underwater.
She’d weaned herself off them too early – without telling Callie – and hidden them in the back of a cabinet in a tin that used to hold some type of candy. Then, she’d regretted it minutes later when her pain morphed into uncontrollable anger, as it always had back then. Anger at who else than Callie. Beautiful, patient, committed, salt of the earth Calliope Iphigenia Torres.
But she hadn’t retrieved them. Even when she wanted to down them all after the cheating, she hadn’t. Because she was a parent. Still, the temptation was there – the need for meds, for a release, just to feel like she was someone else for a short time. She should have thrown them away. But she hadn’t. And now she wouldn’t.
Arizona wanted to save Silver and Flint from that heartache: they didn’t need it on top of everything else. She knew how damaging such strong medication could be.
“We can prescribe them to you to help, and there might even be surgeries out there to correct your nerve function. I know someone who could do it for you.” She said, breathing in and managing a shaky smile that she hoped came across more sincere than it felt. “That’s down the line. For now… just breathe, John. Let yourself rest. Recover. Okay?”
Silver nodded, but it was sluggish, reluctant. The kind of nod you give when you’re agreeing to something you don’t fully understand – a half-hearted assent of a man too wrung out to argue, too dulled by exhaustion to resist. His eyelids sagged, and the lines of pain in his face were smoothing out just a little.
“Tomorrow,” Arizona said, “I’ll schedule a consult for you with an orthopedic surgeon. For a few days time, when you’re stronger. There’s someone here who’s…” she fought the smile threatening to creep up her face, “the best. She’s brilliant actually. If anyone can help you understand what’s possible with your leg – with prosthetics, pain management, nerve realignment – it’s her.”
Silver didn’t respond. His lashes fluttered, already drifting somewhere Flint couldn’t follow.
Flint, interested in her suggestion, nodded. “He would appreciate that. Thank you.”
No sound came from Silver – no protest, or sarcasm, not even the half-joking bite he always carried in reserve. Nothing. And with him, silence had never meant peace. It meant something vital was dimming, that the fire was gone. Or buried. And that absence was worse than rage.
Flint felt the ache of it settle like lead in his ribs. He remembered the packet of trail mix, and reached into it without looking, hoping that a small treat might lift Silver’s spirits – he was out of it, but Flint could make sure he wasn’t completely miserable. He plucked out a raisin and offered it to Silver with the same insistence as before.
Slowly turning his head, Silver regarded it as though it were a jewel dredged from the deep. Flint gave him a look. Reluctance flickered across Silver’s tired face, but he relented. He took it between his fingers and put it into his mouth. Then chewed slowly, contemplatively, savoring, and swallowed.
“Good?” Flint asked.
“It’s alright…”
Flint nodded, satisfied with the answer.
Another raisin, another offering. This one Flint fed him directly, pressing it gently to his lips. Silver didn’t resist, merely sighed and complied. Silver sighed and let him.
There was something about the care between them – not fragile, but earned. They were not men who’d ever been taught to hold someone gently. Even so, they were teaching themselves the language of it with raisins and clasp of steadfast hands and too many IV lines.
Arizona stepped back from the doorway and let them have their moment without witnesses. She would check on them again soon. But for now, they had what they needed – each other.
[---]
Lo and behold, even Arizona’s dreams had pirates in them now. God, they were infiltrating her very thoughts — just when she thought they couldn't get more infuriating.
But the pirates stuck in her head weren’t like the ones she saw on TV. Not like the films she used to watch with Tim, the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow kind with parrots and cutlasses. Rather, the weary, war-drenched kind. Blood in their teeth, ghosts in their eyes, grief strapped like a weapon to their belts.
Again, Arizona was near to sleep when she jerked back into consciousness with the barest hint of make believe gunpowder clinging to her nose. She couldn't take her thoughts away from the sea, of creaking ships and flags that flapped in a howling wind. She thought of two men, haunting her sleep like they haunted her waking hours.
In all honesty, she was annoyed that they were lodged in her head. She could feel that she was on the precipice of another large, life-altering event, and most of her brain was telling her to walk away. But she didn’t. She thought of them, alone and misplaced, and wanted to help them.
So, as she lay at night beside her wife, hands linked while she tried to will her thoughts into silence, the words tumbled out anyway.
“Hey, Calliope, you like pirates?”
They were both laying in the dark, half asleep and already drifting.
Of all the things Callie could have been expecting when Arizona was restless and shifty — a telltale sign that she was thinking hard and trying to force her brain to be quiet — it wasn't that.
Confused, Callie arched a brow into the darkness and whispered in a voice already hoarse with the prospect of sleep after a long shift. “Uh, I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about it.”
Though Arizona had tried to keep the words in, they somehow escaped anyway. She continued quietly, voice quick, “if I was a pirate that had a very unfortunate accident and lost my leg and it had horrible nerve damage and even the healed residual limb looked like it had been ripped off by a shark, would you be able to fix it?”
A pause. Thick with confusion and exhaustion.
It was too late for questions like that. Callie considered it for a second, running her tongue over her teeth. Then she said in a calm, confused voice, “depends on the extent of injury.”
Arizona didn’t reply, just nodded. At that, Callie was suspicious, propping herself up onto one elbow and looking down at her wife. Arizona’s face was shadowed, only just visible in the darkness, but Callie could see that she was chewing her lip. That was a tell-tale sign of Arizona’s head going too fast for her mouth. Callie said slowly, “you know I can’t do jack without scans.”
“Hypothetically, of course.” Arizona added, staring up at the ceiling. She tried to put a smile into her voice to get Callie’s scrutiny off her, but she didn’t know if it worked. At all.
“Hypothetically.” Callie echoed, brows low. “Arizona, are you trying to ask me something?” She narrowed her eyes. Arizona thought she was great at lying, but in reality she was as subtle as a meat cleaver trying to perform a splenectomy.
“What? No.” Arizona said unconvincingly, hoping the darkness hid her unease. She smiled and leaned up to kiss Callie’s cheek, “just a late night question. A game.”
Despite her suspicions, Callie relented. She was too tired to play Arizona’s games, even the unmentioned ones that Callie could sense between them. She hummed quietly and asked, “okay, uh… how bad is it?”
“Super bad,” Arizona said, “scar tissue and nerve damage everywhere you look.”
Trying to conjure an image, Callie winced, “I honestly don’t know. I mean, maybe?”
Arizona nodded slowly, “cool. Just because I saw a clip of this pirate show earlier, one of the kids on my ward likes it, and there was a guy on there with a crappy leg. Hacked off after it was bludgeoned with the back end of an axe.”
“Oh.” Callie said, yawning into the back of her hand, too wiped out to look too deeply into her wife’s tone as she settled back into the pillows. “Right.”
Arizona continued quickly, “and I was just thinking, ‘I bet Callie could do better, even with the tools they had back then, because she’s an ortho goddess with magical hands.’”
Callie laughed tiredly, “you know how to make a girl feel special.”
“Because you are special.” Arizona argued lightly, scooting closer to her wife and curling into her side.
Kissing Arizona’s temple, Callie murmured, “you’re cute when you compliment my talents.”
Arizona hummed, pleased. “You’re hot when you show off your talents. Plus, I love your arms.”
“Sweet talker.”
“You know it.” Mumbled as she drifted into sleep.
“I love you.” Whispered.
“Love you too, Calliope.”
Notes:
Q: Oh, domestic lesbians, how I love you… I simp for Callie just like Arizona does. They are so <3 Also, it’s entirely plausible that Arizona saw Black Sails S2 in universe…:DD
Poor Silver is having an existential crisis… I mean, who wouldn’t? And he’s baby, and in a situation 3 And Flint has been quite successful in keeping it all in so far:)
FreakingPlane: God, I love them all so much. They’re all idiots. The domestic calzona scenes are some of my faves, before all the drama between them starts! (Yes, it gets more dramatic from here on out, buckle in, hehe). The pirates are adorable when they’re soft, and basically everyone here is a little bit dumb. That’s probably why they work so well together! At least, I hope they do. They do to me:D
Next up: IT’S LEG TIME!!!
Silver’s leg gifS for reference:
Chapter 4: No Attempting To Bite The Doctor
Notes:
In this chapter, Silver is a stubborn bastard, Flint's annoyed, Callie's annoyed, and Arizona's trying (and failing) not to look criminally suspicious.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The wheelchair squeaked slightly as Flint pushed it down the hallway, hands steady on the rubber grip. It moved with such unsettling ease, smooth and quiet.
He wasn’t used to things with wheels unless they were cannons or belonged on ships. Back then, in his own time, wheels burdened things. They carried powder or corpses or barrels of rum. But this… this machine had a lightness to it. Precision. It turned with the slightest angle of wrist, answered him like a well trained helmsman, all smooth glide and perfect pivot. It was efficient. Undeniably clever. The kind of thing you could never build by candlelight or with blistered hands on a rain-slick deck.
Flint was unquestionably impressed by it.
Because here it was: compact, maneuverable, reliable over hospital linoleum. It moved with none of that bone-rattling jostle of a wooden cart. It required no brute force, no second man to lift or carry. You could move someone – carry their entire weight – and barely lift a finger.
It was, all things considered, an excellent invention.
And yet, something in him resisted it. Not the chair itself, but what it represented.
Dependency. Surrender. Ease for things he had never imagined could be easy.
He’d spent a lifetime toughening himself up. He’d carried wounded men through cannonfire – men he loved and men he hated but found useful. He’d lost too many who bled out on bad legs, on torn tendon and shattered bone, because there’d been nothing like this in their world. Nothing but crates and desperation and the kindness of those strong enough to carry you.
This chair would’ve saved lives, back then.
And now, here, it would carry Silver – the same Silver, his Silver, who once commanded everyone on deck, got everyone in order with one leg, one knife, and unchallenged authority. Silver, who never asked for help, who still winced when someone touched him too gently.
Flint doubted he’d be grateful.
But he would be relieved. And that, in this world, felt like its own kind of luxury.
He glanced down at the chair again, the wheelchair, and rolled it forward. It was no defeat, he told himself. Rather, a vessel. One more tool in this strange world they’d been forced to navigate.
And damn it – it turned like a dream.
Flint maneuvered the wheelchair into Silver’s room. The wheels creaked softly over the threshold, then glided to a halt beside the hospital bed.
Silver sat at the edge of it, one leg dangling, the other half-swaddled under a hospital sheet. His white-knuckled hands were braced on either side of him, fingers curled against the mattress like he might launch himself backward at any moment and disappear into the floor if he could. His hair was still damp from a recent unwanted bath, sticking to his forehead. Everything about him was coiled. Defensive.
He didn’t look at Flint.
Head turned to the window, he stared out of it, jaw hard, the muscle twitching faintly as though it hurt to keep the silence. Beyond the glass stretched a city that never asked for men like them, a place that had paved over their kind centuries ago and scrubbed the memory clean. A world that had never known them and never would.
“I don’t want to see her,” Silver muttered. His reflection warped faintly across the glass, pale and tired. “This doctor. Frankly, I’ve never seen a woman doctor until—” He broke off, lips curling faintly in mockery, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“She’s not going to harm you,” Flint said.
He didn’t add the truth – that he’d cut through anyone who tried. Still, he didn’t answer the itch to comfort. He leaned slightly on the back of the wheelchair, holding himself together, mentally preparing to deal with difficult Silver.
But Silver only let out a bitter, hollow laugh. “What she’s going or not going to do doesn’t matter. I don’t care.” His eyes turned away from the window and fixed on Flint. “I just want to go home.”
“We don’t have a home here,” Flint said, unsparing. It was fact. Flint rarely bothered with white lies when truth would do.
Silver’s jaw flexed again, grinding on some half-formed argument. But no words came. He knew.
“I’m not—” he began, then stopped. His hand moved toward the crutches leaning on the wall and gathering dust, then hesitated. It hovered in the air like he’d forgotten how to complete the gesture. He didn’t reach again.
Flint didn’t miss it. He never missed anything. His eyes tracked the movement and stayed on him. “You’re not strong enough yet,” he said, “or too proud.”
“Fuck you.”
“I didn’t say it was a flaw.” Flint gestured to the wheelchair with one hand, calm, as if they hadn’t just come close to another emotional meltdown. “You’re getting in this. You’re going to see the doctor. And you’re going to let her do what she will.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Defy me if you want. Your strength’ll give out before my patience does.”
For the first time, Silver’s eyes narrowed, sharp with suspicion; he didn’t believe that. Flint could see the way his lips parted, the tongue pressing against his teeth, the almost-words sitting ready to call him a liar. But Silver didn’t say it.
Instead, Silver shifted, swinging himself toward the edge of the mattress too fast, reckless in a way that made Flint’s shoulders tense. His foot hit the floor; his breath caught in his throat as the weight landed unevenly, cruelly, on a body that no longer knew how to bear it. For a moment, Flint thought he might crumple right there – just from the act of lowering himself to the floor, losing the fight with gravity.
But collapse never came. Silver forced himself upright with sheer will and obstinacy, teeth tightly clenched. His eyes burned with effort – not just against the pain, but against humiliation, against the endless indignities this world kept demanding of him.
Flint didn’t move a muscle, watching. He didn’t intervene. He knew better.
In a moment, Silver lurched forward, dragging himself the short distance toward the chair and lowering into it with all the grace of a man climbing into his own coffin. The impact rattled through the metal frame, his fingers clamping onto the armrests as though the chair might fail him too. When he finally settled, his chest heaved, his face slick, but his mouth remained clamped shut against any admission of strain.
Flint walked around behind him, rested his hands on the groups again. The wheelchair creaked.
“You made it,” Flint said.
Silver didn’t look at him. “Go to hell.”
Flint smiled faintly. “I think we already did.”
Then he pushed the chair forward, its wheels squealing faintly as he steered them toward the exam room.
Silver loathed it. Hated it with a depth so sharp it stung bone. Seethed like no one had ever seethed before. Every breath tasted of it. Every heartbeat carried it.
This was no dream he could wrench himself awake from, no storm to outlast, no blade he could parry. There was no end, no mercy in sight. Everything was wrong, still wrong. And it didn’t dull. It burrowed, deeper and deeper, grinding into marrow, colonising him with its putridity.
Even the corridor outside his room conspired against him – too clean, too bloodless, sterile in a way that scraped at his teeth. The walls were an unnatural white, humming faintly with the current threaded through them, electricity coursing unseen like a ghost running under the skin of the building. Beneath the wheelchair, the floor ticked with each seam of linoleum, a hollow click, click, click.
How was he supposed to exist in this? To adapt to it, bend to it? This strange new century with its humming lights and antiseptic stink was so far removed from the life he knew – sand so hot it seared his soles, the eternal swell of the sea, the sour reek of rum and the acrid smoke of gunpowder – that part of his mind simply refused. It balked, dug in its heels, and insisted it was impossible.
Had it all truly gone to ash? Nassau, the war, the tenuous alliances that had cost them blood? Did word of their “deaths” reach the West Indies, whispered down the tavern lines – Captain Flint and Long John Silver, matelots, scourges of the sea, gone to whatever hell men like them earned? Were they mourned the way men there were always mourned – quickly, without reverence, a shrug toward the grave before the world surged on and left them faceless in its tide?
Now, in this gleaming prison of glass and linoleum, Silver would lay awake if the nurses withheld their sedatives. Staring up at the ceiling, he recited names like prayers against forgetting. Colin. Dobbs. Garrett. Howell. De Groot. Hal Gates. Billy – God, Billy – his tongue tasting the bitterness with every syllable. Bastards, most of them, thieves and killers, some already rotted long before he himself had gone down. But he wouldn’t let the names be stripped away from him. He clung to them, because what else was there?
And yet, the question persisted – had they been forgotten in turn? Did the world erase them as easily as chalk washed from a slate? Were he and Flint condemned to drift now in this century – nameless, unbelieved, their past reduced to fantasy in a world too modern to care?
The thought was suffocating. Bleak didn’t cover it.
But the world never stalled for a man’s misery. It marched on, indifferent, and all Silver could do was endure it in increments, one loathsome step, or a wheel-turn, at a time.
Every muscle in Silver’s body was stiff; his arms were crossed like a barricade, one hand gripping the inside of his elbow too tightly. His jaw was clenched, back straight, shoulders tight against the backrest. He didn’t try to appear dignified – there was no point in that. But he still couldn’t let himself look weak.
In spite of his best efforts to seem unbothered, Silver’s eyes kept flicking. They skittered constantly, restless, hunting exits, distractions, threats. From the blinking fire alarm above the doorway, to the nurses in their sea-colored scrubs who walked past without noticing him, to the fluorescent ceiling lights that buzzed like hornets in a hive. It was unnatural. All of it.
Too clean, too precise, too indifferent.
“You’re scowling at the lights,” Flint said from behind the wheelchair. “They’re not going to break first.”
It wasn’t like him to waste breath on small talk, but Silver refused him all the same, lips pressed tight.
“You’re not being dragged to the gallows,” Flint added after a moment. “You know that.”
Still, silence.
The sigh from behind him carried patience worn thin. “Would you prefer I hum? A shanty might—”
“Don’t fucking start,” Silver cut in, shifting minutely in his seat. “This whole corridor stinks of suffering.”
“That’s accurate,” Flint allowed. “Though I’d have expected something more lyrical. ‘I’m the fucking wave’ had more flourish.”
“Do you ever shut up?”
They rolled forward. Every inch of progress made Silver’s stomach tighten. His leg throbbed faintly in rhythm with the wheels. Phantom aches crawled up through bone that wasn’t there anymore. The automatic double door hissed open in their wake made him flinch – barely, but enough for his pride to sting.
He loathed the feeling. Loathed the tilt of the world that made him prey in someone else’s arena. Hated how people towered over him, barely glancing down, dismissive in their gloved, busy hands and plastic shoes. To them, he was already an entry on a chart, a malfunctioning cog in their great indifferent machine, ready to be catalogued, adjusted, put back in its place.
He hated being this low. The indignity of looking up. The exposure of being seen when he had no power to dictate how he was seen.
It reminded him of too many things he hadn’t worked hard enough to forget. Things dragged up from the deep, things he had shoved down, things he had gutted himself to bury – what he wasn’t anymore, what he’d maybe never truly been. Strength that could not splinter. A body that bent for no one. A man impossible to break.
Lies, all of them.
The hallway ended in a fork and split off in two directions. Flint didn’t pause to deliberate. He took the left with the same unerring certainty he had once brought to reefs and shoals; he’d memorized the layout already – a navigator even here, in the sterile white hallways that reeked of antiseptic, not just in the salt smelling sea. It was the same instinct that had carried fleets across oceans, now reduced to ferrying one broken man through a so-called house of the sick.
At last they made it to the exam room. Flint guided the chair into place effortlessly, angling Silver beside a broad, metal-edged table. It stood at an uncanny height – low enough that he could be lifted onto it with ease, yet high enough to suggest exposure, display. A stage disguised as furniture, built for strangers to study his body like a specimen.
Silver eyed it like it was the gallows.
Flint came around to the front of the chair, rested one hand on the backrest, the other casually in his pocket.
“Alright,” he said. “Up you get.”
Silver didn’t move. His eyes remained locked on the table.
“I said, up.”
“I heard you,” Silver muttered, low and flat.
He shifted, preparing to stand – but he did it too fast, too angrily. The momentum buckled halfway through, and he caught himself on the armrest, hissing between his teeth.
Flint leaned a fraction closer on instinct.
“Don’t touch me,” Silver snapped, sensing the way Flint’s hand had moved.
Flint held up both hands, palms out. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Silver pushed again, slower this time, inching forward on the chair like a man scaling a cliff with no rope, no grip, and no faith in the ground below. His left leg dragged slightly; he felt dizzy, his balance was shit, and he knew it – which made the whole thing worse.
Somehow, he forced himself upright, just barely, and turned to face the table with all the solemnity of a man about to duel it. It stood there, expressionless, indifferent, daring him to fail.
“I’ll do it my way,” Silver said. “I’ll get on the fucking thing, but if you so much as breathe in my direction, I will bite you.”
“Charming,” Flint murmured.
Without another word, Silver set his jaw and leaned forward, hands clamping onto the edge of the exam table. He tried once – pulled himself up a few inches and grimaced, the muscles in his arms trembling with the effort. It was just enough for hope to turn cruel.
Then his stump knocked hard against the metal edge.
Pain exploded through him. His arms gave. He lurched, stumbled, then dropped back into the chair with a thud that rattled through the floor. A hiss of pain. A noise that was too close to a whimper. And then silence.
A silence worse than shouting.
Silver didn’t move again for a long moment. His breath came ragged. He didn’t try again. The chair creaked under a minute shift, but it was the kind of movement meant to look like nothing, to cover the fact that he’d stopped.
Flint tilted his head. He didn’t push, he knew not to. But the patience in his stance was wearing thin. He wasn’t frustrated, but he knew this pattern, this rhythm. He’d lived through it with Silver before – the moments before refusal, the defiance that always, eventually, tipped into surrender.
But knowing the shape of it didn’t make it easier to endure. Silver still had to get on that table. And it had to happen before the doctor walked in and witnessed just how much he couldn’t.
Silver’s eyes stayed fixed on the thing like it might somehow leap up and throttle him. His hand twitched once on the armrest of the chair, then again, and then stilled – clenched into a fist on the padding.
“I’m not doing it,” he muttered.
“John.”
“I said I’m not doing it!”
“You’ve said a great many things,” Flint replied, unmoved. “You also said you’d never wear a shirt with buttons again, and yet—”
“This is different,” Silver snapped. “This is a fucking performance. This is lying there half-naked so some stranger can prod at what’s left of me like I’m a freak in a circus.”
“She’s not here to laugh at you.”
“You don’t know her!” Silver snapped. “And besides—” his throat worked, his jaw flexed, “I don’t trust a woman doctor. I don’t. So, I’m not doing it. I’m not stripping down and putting on a fucking show.”
Flint let the silence stretch a moment, long enough to steady himself, before releasing a controlled breath through his nose. “If you’d prefer to make a true spectacle of yourself,” he said evenly, “then refuse. Flail about. Wrench something. Embarrass yourself. I’ll even clap.”
Silver glared at him. “Fuck you.” His hand slammed against the armrest, nails biting into the vinyl. “It doesn’t even matter. None of this—” His words collapsed before he could finish the sentence. “This world isn’t real. It can’t be. I don’t know what a CT is, or why every bastard here dresses like they’ve been dipped in the same vat of dye, or what those machines did to me while I was unconscious—”
His voice faltered. The fight in him buckled under the memory – the hiss of apparatuses, the burn of plastic in his throat, the endless humming, wires running into his veins, his body turned stranger than it already was. His gaze dropped, blazing fury traded for a hollow kind of retreat.
“And yet,” Flint said quietly, “you’re still whole enough, and real enough, to be a constant fucking nuisance.” A feeble scrap of reassurance, contained fully behind his usual shield.
Silver’s lips twitched as though he might smirk. But just as quickly, the expression vanished.
Flint could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his nails dug into the armrests of the chair. Not pride – not exactly, not entirely. There was fear in it too. Shame. The shame of being lifted. Of being made small. Of needing.
Carefully, Flint stepped closer, knelt slightly beside the chair, lowering himself down enough so that they were level. Equal ground, if only in posture. Not yet help.
“Look,” he said, quieter now. “I’ll make you a deal.”
Silver’s eyelid twitched. “Unless it ends in someone’s murder, I’m not interested.”
“It ends with me holding your hand,” Flint countered evenly. “Through the whole damn thing. No commentary, no clever little asides. You can squeeze the hell out of it, break the bones if you want.”
Silver blinked. “What.”
“You let me put you on this table and then get through this appointment without dramatics – no yelling, no throwing things, no attempting to bite the doctor – and you can do whatever the hell you want to my hand.”
There was a pause. Silver’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bribing me. With your hand.”
“No,” Flint said. “I’m offering incentive. It’s a modern motivational tactic.”
Silver didn’t laugh. But the corner of his mouth did something suspicious.
“You’ll do that,” he said slowly. “Sit there and be quiet and let me crush your hand.”
“If it helps,” Flint replied, not a hint of irony.
Silver huffed, groaned, laughed a resigned laugh, and turned back to the table. This time, he didn’t reach for it on his own. He hesitated, not long, just a breath – but it was enough.
Flint moved before the protest could start again.
“Wait,” Silver said under his breath, not quite looking at him. “Don’t—”
“I’m not carrying you,” Flint reassured. “I’m helping you not make a fucking scene.”
His hands didn’t seize or command. One found a spot on Silver’s back, the other braced at his elbow. Just there.
Silver tensed, but he didn’t swat him away. He let the guidance come, gritted teeth and all, and between them they managed the transfer – Flint’s shoulder beneath his arm, shifting their balance as if they’d done this a thousand times. Without spectacle, oddly enough, and without stumbling. A slow, joint effort.
The edge of the table met Silver’s hip. He grunted, shifted again, and with a final grimace, he half-sat, half-rolled onto the exam table. He landed on his side, breathless, wild-haired, cheeks flushed from effort.
“I’m here,” he panted. “Now I want it on record that I hate everything about this.”
“Duly noted,” Flint said. “Also, impressive. Though – for the record – that was almost graceful.”
“Fuck off.”
“You’ll think differently when it’s over.” Flint leaned over him and pressed a kiss to Silver’s temple, as if to seal the argument shut.
Boneless, Silver closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the wall with a sigh.
A knock sounded at the door. The handle turned.
Flint straightened smoothly, fingers slipping from Silver’s skin like rope loosed from a cleat, hands sliding into his pockets again – mouth neutral, eyes sharp.
Showtime.
[---]
Arizona had been hovering all morning. Callie kept catching glimpses of blonde hair and blue eyes before Arizona shoved her nose into a chart and sidled off down the hall like a kid with their hand caught in the cookie jar. The metal leg meant that her ‘sidle’ was more of a scuttle, like a crab caught thieving, and she could never move past enough to get out of Callie’s eyeline before she spotted her.
Even while Callie was preparing for her second consult, Arizona was hovering — scribbling something into a chart at the nurse’s station like she was plotting a bank heist. Or, if she wanted something a little more Arizona Robbins adjacent, a donut shop robbery. Callie could just imagine Arizona stealing a tray of freshly cooked pink glazed donuts, threatening anyone who got in her way with a fresh CC of epi, ready in a needle.
It confused Callie. Arizona was her own woman, they both were, and they weren't in the habit of spying on the other. They never had been. They weren’t the kind of marriage that accused the other of infidelity or lying – though there had been plenty of that in their time – and they weren’t the married couple who just had to be within range of the other or risk spontaneous combustion.
It put her on edge. She never liked when Arizona started acting suspicious, because it meant she was hiding something. Her face had always shown her true feelings, even before Callie knew her well enough to map every freckle across her nose and every new scar on her forehead.
Those thoughts haunted Callie just a little, every time she saw Arizona doing her weird little ‘sidle-scuttle’ off down the hall, so when she saw Arizona standing at the nurse’s station on three, she just had to approach her.
“What are you doing?” Callie walked up behind her and made her jump.
Mildly startled, Arizona looked up, one hand lifting to smooth down her white coat, immaculate blue scrubs beneath. “Uh, I’m charting.” She smiled — fake, proven by the dull in her eyes and the tightness in her cheeks.
Callie’s eyes narrowed as she peered at the chart and back at her wife, stepping closer and cornering her against the desk. “That’s a grocery list.”
She crossed her arms and glowered at the woman she knew better than anyone, face deceptively flat. She was scanning every inch of Arizona’s body language – the flicker of her eyebrows, the way she was blinking slightly too fast, knuckles white as she gripped her pen.
“Is it?” Arizona asked, looking down at her paper and raising her eyebrows at what she found, as if surprised by her own handwriting. “So it is. Well, we do need eggs. And I’d like another bottle of my favourite wine. You eat an astounding amount of eggs, did you know that? I’ve never known someone eat so many eggs.”
Callie stared at her, counting the ridges of her teeth as she ran her tongue over them.
“I’m not judging,” Arizona continued, rambling now, trying to change the subject from her intensely suspicious behaviour. It wasn’t like she wanted to act like some kind of escaped convict, she just wanted to keep an eye on Callie because she knew she’d be mad. Arizona couldn’t stop talking. “I like eggs too, they’re great in all kinds of things. Omelets, cakes, pasta sauces—”
“Stop talking about eggs.” Callie cut her off with a swipe of her hand through the air between them.
Arizona quieted immediately, spotting that look in Callie’s eye — a dubious and vaguely concerned glint that Arizona knew was to be paired with a raised eyebrow in the imminent future.
“You’ve been following me around this whole morning.” Callie stated, crossing her arms. “Why?”
A pause.
“If I say it’s because I miss your pretty face, will you believe me?” Arizona tried, using her most flirtatious tone only to receive a huff in return and that eyebrow she knew she’d see. She clicked her tongue, giving in. “Okay. Uh, when’s your consult?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Who’s it with?”
Callie thought for a moment, “it’s a routine follow up on Frank Warner’s hip replacement.”
Arizona nodded sharply and started walking off, sliding out of Callie’s attempted cornering. “Yeah, no it’s not.”
Hurriedly following Arizona, Callie prodded one finger into her wife’s spine and asked, “what the hell do you mean, ‘it’s not’?”
“I may have wiggled your schedule a little to get in a patient. Frank Warner’s coming in at three.” Arizona said quickly, sidestepping a nurse and rolling her shoulders to be rid of the shudder Callie had initiated with her poking finger.
“You messed with my schedule?” Callie asked incredulously, grabbing Arizona’s arm and stopping her in her tracks, then hauling her into a nearby storage cupboard and shutting the door behind them with a slam. “What the hell, Arizona?”
Arizona pulled her arm free and grabbed Callie’s hand, turning to meet her eyes in the half light, just as there was a flicker and the automatic lights activated. “I know, I feel awful and was waiting for you to notice on your own — that’s why I was…” she searched for the word and found it with a small smile, eyes flicking anywhere but her wife’s face. “Lingering.”
Callie’s face was the picture of irritation as she looked down at Arizona and worried her lip between her teeth just for something to do that wasn’t blow up at her wife for… whatever it was she’d just done.
“So… who am I going to see?” Callie asked slowly, head tilted. After a second, her eyes widened, “it’s not another childhood friend I won’t be able to save, is it? Because Nick nearly broke both of us even though it was kind of his own fault the cancer had spread so far—”
“No, no, it’s not.” Arizona clarified quickly, stopping Callie’s ramble. The mention of Nick made her heart clench – the memory of being unable to attend his funeral because of her recent amputation was still a bitter one. She watched Callie’s face, the lines around her mouth and eyes, and her insides felt all wrong. She knew that was what happened when she lied to her wife.
Arizona swallowed and ran a hand through her hair, trying not to show that she was rather disappointed in herself. “It’s… uh,” she started, trying to remember what the hell had been up with John Silver other than the leg. She snapped her fingers when she recalled it, and said, “you remember the guy you intubated in the ER a week ago? Cardiac tamponade and a peg-leg that looked almost medieval?”
Callie saw a damn lot of patients, so it took her a moment to catch up with who Arizona was talking about. Her face creased as she fought to recall it, staring at Arizona blankly.
“Ginger, yelling guy’s husband?” Arizona offered helpfully, her mouth doing something awkward.
Then it came back to Callie. The smell of them, the feel of his beard through her gloves as she held his jaw still for the laryngoscope. Flint screaming as Silver was given a paralytic and fell limp in her arms.
“It’s him?” Callie’s brows dipped together as she pulled the chart from beneath her arm and flipped through it like it contained all of earth’s secrets. Her eyes found the name, scrawled on the top of the page above all of his medical notes, and she asked, face creasing, “John Silver?”
“Him.” Arizona smiled tightly, “your soonest consult was in a week, and with the state of his leg…” she waved a hand around, “I just think you should see him sooner than that. Nick Warner won’t die because his appointment has been pushed, I checked his labs and they were all properly in range.”
Callie felt her eyebrows crease as she looked at her wife. Arizona looked suitably ashamed of herself, but it didn't stop the niggle of past pain that reignited in her chest. She bit her lip, trying to work out the correct words, then found them.
“But… why? Why do you care about this guy enough to go behind my back about it?” Callie asked, hurt. “We’re meant to talk things through, Arizona. That’s what the therapist said, and we’ve been doing so much better.”
Her voice was a small, delicate thing — a tone that made Arizona’s stomach feel weird in that way she hated — and didn't fit her usually boisterous, loving personality at all. It was that voice Arizona had heard the night she cheated with Lauren Boswell.
The voice, laced with agony, that whispered, “apparently I lost you.”
The way the words had spilled like oil between them, somehow more wounded and agonised than anything Arizona had yelled leading up to it.
And they still haunted Arizona every time she let her mind wander back to her actions in that damn storm.
Callie hated when her voice sounded small. Hated that Arizona could still make her small and insecure. She hid those feelings behind a firm gaze and cleared her throat, ridding her voice of its lingering waver.
“Sebastian said that we need to be honest with each other.” Her voice strengthened and she stood a little taller, refusing to let this take a single inch off her height. Too many times she had been shortened under grief and loss, and she would not allow it to happen again. She held Arizona’s gaze and said sternly, “you know that.”
When Callie spoke again, she pulled Arizona from her resurfacing guilt. She looked away, shame written in her eyes. She swallowed, replying honestly, “I’m sorry. I know. You’re right.”
“I am.” Callie nodded.
Then Arizona met her eye with a pleading glance, and Callie sighed, “what?”
“Are you still going to go and see him?” Arizona chewed her lip, “because he really needs your help and I don’t think a lesser orthopedic surgeon would touch him with a barge pole.”
Callie closed her eyes for a brief moment. She could see what Arizona was doing, and couldn't help but be mildly annoyed that it was working.
“Are you trying to bribe me into seeing your amputee with flattery, Dr Robbins?”
Arizona paused, “is it working, Dr Torres?”
Opening her eyes just slightly, Callie tilted her head. “You know all you have to do is bat your eyelashes and I’d give you a kidney.” She groaned and prodded Arizona’s nose, “god, you are a nightmare! You are so lucky I love you.”
“You’ll do it?” Arizona checked, her body flooding with relief. “Really?”
Callie scowled. “I’ll do it.”
Arizona clapped her hands together and grabbed Callie’s lapels, pulling her in for a swift kiss. She murmured against her lips, “thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Callie pulled back with a roll of her eyes, though there was a quirk at the side of her mouth. “You owe me.”
Arizona nodded, “I do.”
“Like, big time.” Callie ran her hands down her coat to straighten it, chart tucked back under her arm.
“Which kind of big time?” Arizona checked, “like, home cooked dinner and a movie kind of big time, or get out the stuff from the box under the bed kind of big time?”
Callie considered for a moment, her hand resting on the door handle. She glanced back over her shoulder and winked, “surprise me.”
While Arizona was trying to not look as flustered as she felt, Callie opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Arizona followed her and they both walked in the same direction as Callie said casually, “you never told me why you’re so invested in these guys.”
It was a careful statement because it wasn’t a question. Somehow, it was still phrased in just a way to make Arizona feel prompted to answer.
Arizona shrugged one shoulder, trying not to give too much away while still staying in the same realm as the truth. “I see myself in John and I see you in James. They’re…”
Out of time? Mildly murderous? From the 18th century? Pirates?
She settled on, “…struggling. John needs a better leg and some pain relief, and James needs the reprieve of seeing his man in less agony.”
“Alright.” Callie said as they approached the exam room, “I understand.” She turned to look into Arizona’s face, saying seriously, “I will do my best. But I cannot turn water into wine, okay?”
“I know. But you can perform orthopedic miracles.” Arizona said softly. “Rock it, Dr Torres.”
“Always, Dr Robbins.” Callie grinned, then asked, “hey, you want to come in too? If they know you they might be comforted.”
Arizona shook her head, “I think it might be a push for John to show you his leg, I’m sure he doesn’t want an audience. If it were me, I wouldn't want one either — it’s a very personal thing, showing someone a part of you that doesn’t feel quite right. Especially because he’s in pain and he’s definitely a stubborn one.” She laughed softly. “Besides, I’m only charting, so I’ll hang around out here in case I’m needed.”
“You mean writing our grocery list?” Callie chuckled when she saw heat rise in Arizona’s ears. “Okay. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“See you.” Arizona kissed her cheek and then stepped back, watching Callie straighten her back and knock on the door before twisting the handle and pushing the door.
Notes:
Q: Flint in 2015: nice pens (cope), nice wheelchairs (cope), nice mobility aids for my man (cope) : )
Silver in 2015: NOTHING IS REAL, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.FP: The lesbians are good when they’re good (despite the slight amount of lying going on...) and awful when they’re bad, so make the most of the cuteness while you can 👿…
What? Who said that, this fic’s full of happiness and laughter, right? No angst at all, RIGHT????
Chapter 5: The Leg Consult
Notes:
Q: Alternative chapter title: MISOGYNY?!! (not cool, Silver.)
Three bisexuals walk into an exam room. You won’t believe what happens next.Suspension of disbelief will be vital for this one. Pretend there are no issues or questions about insurance, social security numbers, and all that other nonsense about functional American society.
FP: this chapter makes me happy. Callie has no idea what she’s getting into…
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The door opened with a click and Callie stepped into the exam room, chart in hand, like she owned the very air around her. Her confidence was something she’d had to work hard on. When she was the weird kid in the back of the class that ate her hair, she had none. Now, she knew her self-worth. And she knew that she was damn good.
That was why her back was straight and her demeanor was sure, chin held high and a smile on her face, carefully honed to soothe even the most dire of patients. Callie’s sneakers thudded gently on the floor as she closed the door behind herself, the click of the latch sealing her into the room with Arizona’s John Silver.
When she turned around, already poised to introduce herself, her eyebrows rose just a little. She had expected many things – a nervous patient, a bristling man, even someone who’d throw a sarcastic wall up before she got within arm’s reach of his leg.
What she didn’t expect was the intense heat of suspicion that hit her the moment Silver’s eyes landed on her.
He was already on the table – propped up on one arm. His hair and gown were in disarray, she noted, a clear sign that he had struggled to get up there.
Callie’s eyes flicked up to the figure beside him – tall and impassive, face hardened into a mask.
James Flint.
Callie remembered him, shouting in the ER as Silver tried to die in her arms. The stark contrast to the panicking husband she’d seen then and the statuesque man before her didn’t go by unnoticed, but she didn’t mention it.
He stood beside Silver, too close for casual, too composed to be flustered. His hand had just pulled back from Silver’s shoulder. Callie caught the microexpression in his face – not relief, exactly, but something tragic and private, quickly smoothed over when he noticed her presence.
She’d seen looks like that before – a man perpetually returning to that liminal space between survival and surrender. Trauma. She filed it away without comment.
“John Silver?” she asked, stepping forward and letting the door close behind herself. She glanced down at the chart and then back up to his face with that same charming smile saved for patients. “I’m Dr Torres. I’m the orthopedic surgeon who’ll be examining your leg today.”
Silver didn’t answer, just stared. Like she had ketchup on her shoes. And pants. And face. Like she was wrong, somehow, despite having been present for barely a minute.
Even so, she let the pause hang.
One beat.
Two.
Flint cleared his throat – a warning rather than encouragement.
Silver’s voice, rough and clipped and so fucking unhappy, came at last. “So, you’re the doctor?”
“I am.” Callie replied. Her voice was measured as she looked between the men. “I’m better than just a doctor, I’m a good doctor.” She smiled, hoping some confident humour would settle between them and break the tension. She wasn’t sure if it worked.
“A woman.”
Callie blinked, eyebrows twitching at those two words, spat like something foul.
So that was the kind of man John Silver was. At least it wasn't an issue — Callie was well versed in making her personality big enough to overcome any sexist comments. Had spent years being the four percent of female orthopedic surgeons. Had been looked down on by her peers until they saw her at work, and then seen them fighting their pride down to complement her quick hands and precise surgical technique. She knew how good she was, it was only a question of getting Silver to see it that way.
As it was, she smiled tightly and held his gaze. “Yes. That’s not a disqualification.”
Silver scowled. “It fucking well would’ve been where I’m from.”
Callie breathed in. It stayed in her chest for a moment until she spoke in a clipped tone that wasn’t venomous, just bordering on sharp and barbed. “Well, I’m the best orthopedic surgeon on this side of America. You’re not going to find someone better than me.”
Men like Silver needed a firm tone, and Callie had been through too much bullshit to let him speak down to her in such a way.
She stood to her full height and smoothed her hands down her white coat, then smiled tightly, the chart under her arm pressed to her side.
“Can’t you get me a real surgeon?”
Callie held in a scoff. Held in the expletive at the back of her throat. Let her professionalism settle over her like a calming wave. Let out a calm, barely restrained, “I am a real surgeon. Over a thousand hours of OR time under my belt. Fixed countless fractures, countless injuries similar to your own that other surgeons don’t dare touch.” Her eyes narrowed just the smallest amount, “I’m as real as they come.”
Flint’s jaw ticked. Composure fractured. But not crumbled. “She’s good, John. Look at her.” His hand returned to Silver’s shoulder.
Silver didn’t shrug it off, but he did ignore him. “I’d rather not be here.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t. Let me help you, and you can get out of here,” Callie said, stepping forward firmly. She met his gaze and held it, daring him to look away first. “I’ll need to have a look at your leg, but I won’t touch it yet. Promise.” She tilted her head a little.
“I don’t want to show it.” He shifted on the bed, eyes hard and focused as they bored into Callie’s.
“I know you don’t.” Callie said, setting her chart down and snapping on a pair of gloves for something to do with her hands, and to make Silver feel less observed by keen surgeon’s eyes. “I also know that it hurts like a bitch. And I could help you with that, if you’ll only let me.” She pulled up a rolling stool and sat down on it, keeping eye contact with him as she sat on his level. He was scared, and Callie could see it.
“You don’t know what you’re asking—”
“Just let her look,” Flint murmured in Silver’s direction. He moved his hand downward, first across Silver’s bicep, then down to his wrist, stopping over his knuckles, just short of squeezing his hand.
A tether.
Silver stopped and didn’t move immediately. He stared at the wall, then at the floor, then at his doctor like she’d engineered this situation to humiliate him. She simply looked back — quiet, observing. He stole a glance at Flint before meeting her eyes again, stubbornly determined.
“This is indecent,” he muttered.
“No,” Callie said, keeping her voice low and unassuming. “It’s medicine. It’s me helping you feel more secure in your skin. It’s you accepting my help because you’re in agony that I may be able to alleviate.”
The words were practiced but seemed to land somewhere meaningful.
“It’s still indecent…” Silver said. “And while you are, begrudgingly, quite attractive for a woman doctor—” He cast a brief, sarcastic glance at Flint. “—the ginger over here is my partner, and I don’t think he’d much appreciate—”
“John,” Flint said without raising his voice, but it landed like a stone dropped in still water. Silver didn’t look at him because he didn’t have to – he felt the intensity of Flint’s stare.
“Maybe it is. Indecent, I mean.” Callie said with a light shrug. “But all I’m asking for is a look. Ten seconds, no touching. And while I appreciate your compliment,” she felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth, “this is purely clinical. Plus, I am also happily married. Now, can you show me your leg?” She shifted the topic back to him and watched him expectantly — her gaze heavy but not overbearing.
Silver’s jaw tightened, his eyes darting toward the door as though some miraculous escape might open up. Then came the huff. Then the muttered string of obscenities under his breath, so low they barely registered, before he jerked the hem of the gown upward with an irritable grunt.
The fabric bunched just above the scar line. His stump was exposed – raw, inflamed, the skin mottled with angry patches of red from weeks of misuse, neglect, and pressure where none should have been. The scar itself was crude, ugly, a vestige of bone saws and rum and leather straps, of survival ripped from death by sheer brutality.
The second Callie’s eyes fell on it, she made sure her expression stayed even. Still, her breath hitched. Just once.
The trauma he must have experienced, the nerve pain he must feel daily, the pressure sores, the scar adhesions, the disaster of someone left to adapt without guidance – it made her feel for him deeply. Her mind started racing with scans she needed to take, where she needed to check, how she could fix the evil state some doctor had left him in, how she could teach him to look after himself properly.
Callie’s expression didn’t change. But Flint saw it – the faint shadow that crossed her face for just a second. Professional concern. Not pity. An understanding of pain poorly carried. The want to rework the load.
Silver’s hand twitched, restless. Flint shifted closer, his own hand sliding into place. A promise fulfilled. He let Silver grip it – hard and desperate.
“Okay. Thank you for letting me see it,” Callie said after a moment, sincere. “I know it’s not easy, and I appreciate the effort taken.”
“I didn’t let you,” Silver grumbled. “And it was no effort,” he added quieter.
Flint smiled faintly, and his thumb pressed into Silver’s palm. “He means you’re welcome.”
Callie laughed softly, just a small, low sound from her chest. Not mocking, not unkind, just… considerate.
“I know,” she replied, meeting Flint’s eye and seeing a reflection of herself after Arizona’s amputation within them. Standing by, unable to do anything but what was allowed. Not wanting to overstep, but pushing anyway because they had to. Because whoever they were looking after – Arizona, Silver, Silver, Arizona – had lost how to push, to fight, for themselves.
She looked away, something pulling in her chest at the eerie mirror image. Despite all of her work with amputations and the resulting amputees, it never got easier to see her own personal life laid out, bare before her over and over. Sometimes it sickened her. Sometimes it was easier. Sometimes she felt nothing at all and sometimes she found herself holding back tears in empty on-call rooms.
Callie cleared her throat, “I meet with a lot of amputees in all kinds of states of mind. I’m not easily ruffled anymore.” Her smile was small and crooked, but it was easy — familiar — as she looked between them. Like they were some kind of dysfunctional family instead of three people drawn together by trauma and coincidence.
Silver didn’t respond. But his shoulders dropped a fraction, a sliver of tension bleeding out of him. Callie noticed and decided to push for him, if only a little bit.
“Now, how would you feel about me doing a physical exam?” She asked patiently, noticing his posture change and making the most of his brief vulnerability — if it could be called that instead of ‘being a stubborn ass until your pain hits too hard and you have to let people help’.
Callie shifted on her stool slightly, settling her feet against the floor. “I would rest my hand on your leg and press gently, just to get a feel for your nerve damage and how much scar tissue you have. It wouldn’t take too long.” She explained, holding his gaze and hoping the truth was visible in her face.
Silver shifted – not toward her, but just slightly away. Not enough to be truly defiant, just enough to keep distance, to remind them both he was still holding the line. A warning. His eyes returned to the floor, then briefly to Flint and their intertwined fingers, then back to the floor again. He was quiet, his whole body read like a fuse waiting for the flame.
“My hands are warm,” Callie added quietly, just to fill the silence. She knew that this was a big decision and wanted to let him feel secure enough to make it.
Silver swallowed hard. “I don’t want anyone’s hands on it,” he muttered. “Not after—” He cut himself off. “Just not like that.”
Callie nodded, “I understand.”
Part of her wanted to ask how it had happened. Who had done it to him. It wasn’t in his medical notes. No when, where, how. All she could tell was that it had been years of his leg being gone, if the scar tissue, damage, and contractures told her anything. She wanted to know the name of the doctor who had done this to him. But she knew, somehow she just knew, that he wouldn’t tell her if she asked. That he would lock up and never let her near him again.
“Let her try, John,” Flint murmured. “You’ve come this far.”
“How about you look at James, and he speaks to you, distracts you, while I complete my exam. You don’t have to watch me, I know it’s a weird sensation.” Callie offered, willing to try anything if it would allow her to try and help this man. She understood why Arizona felt compelled to help them — they were weirdly endearing, like stray dogs. Feral, smelly, goofy smiling stray dogs. The kind you don’t want to like, then find yourself looking for.
Silver’s jaw twitched. He was breathing through his nose, slowly, like every breath cost him.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” he said, bitter. “The pain, or the way everyone looks at me – like I’m already a broken fucking thing. Just… broken.”
Callie watched him. She knew that feeling — that feeling of being broken — but didn’t know if she would be right to bring it up. Her own accident had left scars, yes, but scars that faded. Muscles that healed. Nerves that found their function again after three months of PT. His would not.
His eyes were dark. Unseeing. Half-lost in some place she couldn’t follow.
After a moment, Callie decided to just go for it. If anything, it might make her feel more human to Silver and Flint. So, Callie said quietly, “I know how it feels.”
Before he could snap at her, she continued — not rushed, just fast enough that Silver couldn’t cut her off. “I know because I’ve been hurt before. I’ve had to have surgery before, surgery that took me months to recover from. Surgery that had my child ripped from me before she was ready. So I know what you mean — in my own way.” She quickly added, not ready to face Silver’s inevitable ire at their injuries being nowhere near the same.
“I know the looks of pity and disdain, the looks of people who are trying to find something to say and just… can’t. When they fall into silence and smile that smile — you know the one — the one that says, ‘I’m sorry that happened to you, but I’m damn glad it didn't happen to me.’” She straightened her back and cracked her knuckles for something to do with her hands. “I healed. And I know you never will, not really. Not entirely. But if I can help you, whether that’s with surgery, physical therapy, a new prosthetic, then I can help you heal a little too.”
Callie swallowed and straightened her back, hoping against hope that it was enough for Silver to view her as a human. A human who had been through stuff, just like him, and a human who could help.
Silence.
Then, slowly – like dragging a boulder uphill – Silver moved, shifting back toward her.
“Fine. But no poking unless I say so.”
“Deal,” Callie said, slipping on a fresh pair of gloves.
When she finally reached for him – without any sudden movements, like she was handling a startled cat – her hands weren’t ever rushed or uncertain. They were the hands who had done this hundreds of times, after all. She rested her palm lightly along the outer side of his stump, feeling the shape of it through the taut, uneven skin.
“Tell me if anything feels sharp, hot, or just wrong.” Callie murmured, moving her hand down.
The skin was hard and calloused, even through her gloves, and she found her face wrinkling in concentration as she felt around, trying to work out his anatomy. There was no evidence of a muscle flap covering the bone, which must have hurt a ton — there was bone and then there was skin. It would never be enough cushioning, despite the thick scar tissue. Brutal, careless surgery. A butcher’s work. She swallowed back the sting of anger.
Despite allowing her to touch, there was tension in Silver’s whole frame, like a tightly wound spring ready to snap. But he didn’t flinch.
Callie moved her thumb — careful but deliberate. “Here?”
“No.”
She moved her fingers along, feeling around the edge of the scar and watching his face for any signs of discomfort. “Here?”
Silver hissed through his teeth. “There. Yeah.”
Callie nodded, filing the findings away in her head and winding through every possibility for pain in that specific location. “Could you describe the sort of pain you're having? Burning, stabbing, prickling?”
“Feels like someone shoved a red-hot dagger up my fucking leg and decided to stir.”
Unimpressed, Callie hummed, “mmhmm. Okay.” She moved her hand again, “anything here? Any sensation at all?”
Silver grimaced. “Nothing. Can’t even feel your hand.”
Nodding again, Callie said, “okay.” That wasn’t good – it made Callie’s orthopedic hackles rise.
There was a pause, and Callie sat back just a little.
“Okay, there’s evidence of your bone almost coming through the skin because your surgeon didn’t use your muscle to cushion where the bone ended. I don’t believe he rounded the end of your tibia either, it’s a hard ledge under your skin and that’s why you’re in so much pain when you apply pressure to it. It’s basically a never ending bruise. I can fix that for you with a muscle flap revision, which will cover the end of the bone. I can also round off your tibia so the pressure hurts a little less,” Callie said, orthopedic mind running and focused. “I think you’ve got a skin lesion just along the edge of your scar, too. We’ll need to clean it, but it doesn’t look infected yet.”
He didn’t answer, but his fists had unclenched. Her voice was sure, and he was struck by the fact that, God, she really did know what she was doing. He didn’t know half the words she’d just used, but the certainty in her tone, the authority in her hands, made something shift in him despite himself. She spoke as if this wasn’t grotesque, wasn’t beyond repair. As if his ruin was simply… technical. Correctable.
“There’s definitely some nerve damage,” Callie continued. “You’re completely numb in some places and have burning pains in others. It’s not great, and I’ll need some scans and tests before I can formulate a plan, but you’ve got more muscle retention than I expected, despite the uncovered bone.” She said with a small smile, carefully optimistic, “That’s good. You’ve been working the muscle, that means we’ve got something to work with.”
Silver let out a breath like he’d been punched. “You talk about it like it’s ordinary.”
“It is,” she replied, raising an eyebrow and smiling at him with a pleased shine in her eyes. “To me.”
Silver glanced toward Flint. “Fuck,” he muttered, accusingly, “she’s good.”
“I told you,” Flint whispered back and almost smiled, squeezing Silver’s hand.
Secretly pleased, Callie pulled back to peel the gloves off, disposing of them in the waste bin before she made a few notes in his chart. “That’s enough for today. We’ll start small. We have to clean that lesion, and I’ll find you a list of exercises because I think you’ve got a lot of tension in your muscles. Pain management next.”
Silver nodded once. Still wary. Still stiff. But something in him had started to yield, even if just a little. He didn’t trust her. But it was ceasefire. A pause between volleys. For now.
Callie’s eyes tracked the chart, but her mind hadn’t let go of the image of his ruined stump, of scar tissue and negligence. She still wanted to know who had done this to him. So, without looking at him and scratching the paper with her pen, she asked quietly, “what’s the name of your surgeon? The one who cut off your leg. It’s not on your chart. And, actually… we seem to be missing quite a lot of your medical history.”
Silver didn’t react, but the muscles of his jaw grew rigid. Then he spoke through gritted teeth, “His name was Howell. John Howell. A good man. Better than most. I suppose he’s dust by now, like the rest of them.”
The name lingered.
He hadn’t said it aloud in… centuries now, if this mad world’s clocks and calendars were to be trusted. Howell. The doctor who had sat beside his bed with tired eyes and a steady hand, who had forced him to eat when he hadn’t wanted to, who had listened when the pain made him insufferable. A man who had known how to laugh, softly, when Silver made some bitter joke about being half a man, and who had never once called him cripple.
God, what he would give to hear Howell’s voice again. To smell the tang of saltwater and spirits in those cramped quarters. Even the rough scratch of the sheets, the creak of the cot, the rattle of shutters in a Caribbean squall – all of it felt like home compared to this humming world.
It had been a miserable existence then, but it was his. His normal. He knew the rhythms – the endless scrape of crutches on stone, the sting of cold water on raw skin, the constant shadow of shame tempered by the fragile dignity Howell had allowed him to keep. Here, he had none of it. Not even the dignity of being known. Howell was gone. Madi was gone. Billy. Max. Rackham. Nassau itself. All ash.
Silver swallowed against the ache in his throat and looked away, as if by fixing his gaze on the sterile white wall he could stop himself from drowning in ghosts.
The pause stretched, and Callie knew better than to pry any more than she already had. She could see that his mind had wandered past where she was allowed, so she fell quiet and simply nodded. Then she was signing the prescription slip with a quick scrawl of her name and tucking it into the chart, chewing the tip of her tongue in thought as her eyes scanned the hurried words.
“Do you have an email that I can send your exercises to?” she asked over her shoulder, casual as she gently shifted the topic.
Flint stilled. His hand froze on the backrest of the chair. Slowly, his gaze flicked toward Silver, who was staring at him with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a harpooned shark – loss and confusion under anger and fear.
After a second, Flint answered slowly, “no…?”
Still marking the last few things down into the chart, Callie hardly heard the bewilderment in Flint’s tone. She turned around and recalled Silver’s hospital gown, then snapped her fingers with a quick laugh, “ah, you’re still a patient! Sorry, busy day. Okay, I'll have an intern drop off some exercises to your room, and I’ll try to pop by to run them through with you later. You might end up with an intern if I get pulled into a surgery.”
She spoke quickly, modern lingo passing her lips like water as Silver and Flint fought to catch up.
“That’s all I need for today,” she said with a nod and a smile. “You did great. I’ll put an order for imaging and I’ll get a resident to come and wash out that lesion, which they can do back in your room. We’ll start building a plan, I’ll be there to help you with the scans I need to get.” Then, walking toward the door, she added, “I’ll have a nurse or an intern come by in a bit to wheel you back to your room.”
“I can wheel him,” Flint said, resting his hand on the back of the chair.
Callie paused, glanced between them, and offered a nod and a half smile. “Alright. Thank you. Take care, guys.”
She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, as confident as ever. She inhaled deeply, antiseptic tang hitting somewhere in her sinuses and making her sigh with a grin. She felt pretty good about what had just transpired in that room, all things considered.
The door clicked shut behind her and she began walking to the nurses station. Glancing around for the familiar form of her wife, she caught Arizona waiting a little too casually nearby, thumbing something into her phone but clearly listening. Callie arched a brow, tucking the chart under her arm as she squeezed some hand sanitiser into her palm and rubbed it in.
“Hello,” she greeted, keeping that eyebrow up just to see Arizona squirm.
Arizona grinned sheepishly. “Just… being available. Standing here, for… for very little reason at all.”
Callie gave her a look as her hands dried and she set her clipboard on the nurse’s station, quietly asking a nurse to file it away before she turned back to her wife. “You’re a crappy liar, Dr Robbins.”
“Damn lucky I’m a good surgeon then, huh?” Arizona pushed off the wall and linked her arm with Callie’s before dragging her off down the hallway. She’d heard Silver’s initial reluctance but then it had gone mostly quiet, so she was feeling carefully optimistic.
“How’d it go? What do you think?” Arizona peppered Callie with questions, “can you fix him?”
Callie glanced at Arizona, who was watching her expectantly. She rolled her eyes, “I can certainly try. His fibula is completely gone, must have been decimated and removed at the knee when his amputation was performed, but his tibia is still there and quite rough on the end. It’s a proximal transtibial amputation, and honestly I’m surprised he can use his knee at all. Surprised he didn’t lose it all to infection or necrosis.” Callie shook her head, “it must be excruciating. The end of his bone was never rounded off — at least, not well — and it’s digging into his skin from the inside. No muscle flap either. I’m surprised that his bone hasn't worn through the skin and been exposed to the open air.”
Arizona fought the urge to writhe in her clothes. Her own amputation had been performed beautifully, and the end of her femur was sheared to be rounded to avoid exactly that complication. She didn't even want to imagine the pain he must be in — she was in enough pain constantly without that sort of thing too.
Callie noticed Arizona’s shudder and hummed, “sorry, I know leg talk gets you weird sometimes.” She smiled softly and squeezed Arizona’s hand. “I don’t know where he had it done, but they certainly didn’t know what they were doing. Apparently his surgeon’s dead, now.”
Arizona’s eyebrows twitched. Crappy leg, dead surgeon, she was only getting more convinced of their pirate origins.
Callie was oblivious to Arizona’s inner thoughts. She was reluctant, but she said, “you did a good thing getting him in quickly.”
Still waving away her lingering disgust, Arizona’s face lit up. “Go on Calliope, say it.”
“No.”
“Say it!” Arizona singsonged, tugging at Callie’s sleeve with a smirk. “You know you want to.”
Callie span on her heel to face her wife, a traitorous smile threatening to break her put on scowl. “You were right.”
Arizona pumped her fist in the air. “Yes!”
Callie rolled her eyes at the childish display and ran a hand over her face. “If you ever change my schedule again, I’m divorcing you.”
Still, Arizona grinned — it was a threat, but not a viable one. They were past all that now. She said, “never again.” She leaned up to kiss Callie’s cheek, “you’re the best.”
Callie’s scowl broke and she fought a smile from her lips. “I am.”
Pleased, Arizona laughed to herself with a happy smile. “I was right.”
“I hate you.” Callie muttered, her pager going off in her pocket for a desatting post-op patient. She cursed, “crap, I gotta go.”
“You run, Dr Torres,” Arizona replied with a smile as Callie kissed her quickly and then turned to rush off down the hall. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called after her wife, “I love you too!”
Arizona watched Callie disappear and let her smile slowly fall, though the happiness was still there. Silver had a long road ahead, but it had started and Callie thought she could help. That was a good thing, Arizona decided, as she marched down to the pit to scope for trauma patients.
[---]
Back in the examination room, Flint steered the wheelchair toward the table – controlled, as if sheer composure might ward off indignity. He angled the chair close, already reaching with the intention of helping Silver transfer back into it.
But resigned, Silver exhaled, then braced his palms against the edge of the table. With a grimace that pulled at his jaw and a grunt torn from his throat, he slid himself forward and down, landing in the chair. The movement was clumsy, graceless, but undeniably his own – as though he had been calculating this exit since the moment Callie laid hands on him, and now, at last, executed the plan.
Flint remained close, one hand hovering, not quite intervening. When Silver’s body stilled, he rested his palm against the fabric over his man’s skin, his thumb rubbing small circles over the jut of his shoulder blade. “You did well.”
Silver let out a derisive snort, the corner of his mouth curling. “Don’t start.”
“I mean it.”
Silver turned his face away, but the absence of a shrug was damning. He didn’t pull from the touch, didn’t spit some bitter quip to drive Flint off. He accepted it. God help him, he accepted it. And that in itself felt like a defeat.
What had he accomplished, truly? Sat still and let a stranger’s hands crawl all over him, poked and prodded like livestock. Endured humiliation, the sterile gloves. Endured being treated like a problem to be solved rather than a man. All to keep his place at the table – to keep the steady drip of their miracle poisons flowing into his veins.
It wasn’t clever. No well-placed word, no twist of the knife in someone’s mind, no ploy or escape route spun out of nothing but tongue and nerve. There was no leverage here, no stage to turn in his favor. He had played the part of a compliant patient because there was no other card in the deck.
And he hated it.
Had he fought – resisted, spat, made them fear him – they’d have stripped him of everything. No morphine. No anesthetic to dull the fire chewing through what was left of his leg. They would have left him to grind his teeth through it, as he’d done before, as he knew too well how to do. He could survive that, yes. He had. He would again. But the thought of being cast back into that hell, with relief so close now, with miracles they handed out like bread, was intolerable.
So he played along. He bowed his head and let them think they’d won. And inside, he burned with the knowledge that this, more than losing a limb, more than crawling through dirt to live another day, was the truest degradation: compliance. Submission parading as pragmatism.
And worse still, Flint saw it, and Flint praised him for it.
He rubbed absently at his ruined thigh, the ache flaring again after the examination, pain blooming hot and sharp beneath the scarred skin. His voice was flat. “I want to go back to the other bed. And then never speak about this again.”
Flint released the brake, and with a quiet tug set the chair rolling toward the door. He did not answer, but the pride radiating off him was unmistakable – pride that Silver had endured, had not faltered, had secured what he needed. Pride that, in Flint’s eyes, counted as victory.
Silver said nothing more. But neither did he resist the ride.
Notes:
FP: So, Callie’s had her hands all over Silver’s leg and still hasn’t twigged that he’s a pirate lol. I’m sure she’s thinking of trying to find Silver’s surgeon so that she can strip him of his medical license. Shame that he’s dead. …rip howell
Two icons striding the halls of Grey-Sloan-Memorial-Hospital ✨
Q: gays vs lesbians, the age old fight… hopefully it won’t carry all the way to the Robbins-Torres home, hmm?:) (they actually did pretty well here! But the peace won’t last, it never does…)
I love how Silver’s literally doing everything to get out of it and then eventually lets Callie touch him anyway. I mean, I’m weak for her too, so I get it:D
Also, no Howell slander! In this plane-q household, we love Dr. Howell <3
Poor Silver, though… having to go through all this for the sole crime of me loving him so much:)
Leave a comment if you want to chat about these little idiots! Or drop some ideas! Maybe we’ll get inspired and use them:D Thanks for reading, everyone!
TheTheoryOfLife on Chapter 1 Sat 23 Aug 2025 09:55PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 24 Aug 2025 12:17PM UTC
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