Chapter Text
They had a rule, no calling during a shift.
They texted, it meant that Carina didn’t have to feel the weight of her heart when she saw her wife’s name appear on her phone screen, flashing through the million things that could have gone wrong on any given call.
When she admitted this feeling to her when Maya had only called to ask what she wanted for dinner, they agreed she could text her.
As long as she texted, she knew that it wasn’t life threatening, she knew that she wasn’t about to lose her soulmate like she had everyone else in her life.
Things were not so simple now.
There was the unspoken strain that remained until Carina finally snapped and did the last thing that she wanted, she left her home.
She went to live in a hotel, away from the woman she loved, just so that she no longer had to feel like she was being suffocated. It didn’t feel good to be alone, but it was better than the alternative, right?
Maya insisted that she was trying to get better, that she had done everything that had been asked of her, but she couldn’t just be another thing on Maya Bishop’s checklist. She wanted to be the most important thing to her, she didn’t want to fall behind a job or some other goal and she especially couldn’t bring a child into a relationship where they wouldn’t be their mother’s number one priority.
She’d experienced that with her own father. It may not have been his fault, but understanding that didn’t change her childhood. It didn’t change that when her baby brother was literally murdered, her father had failed to so much ask her how she was feeling.
She needed her children to have a mother who would think about their feelings and love them so unconditionally that they wouldn’t be treated as yet another responsibility in a never ending quest for perfectionism.
All of this culminated in Carina relishing in the chance to dive into her research.
She wasn’t on-call for the first time in weeks so she could just turn her pager off and immerse herself in her area of expertise rather than thinking about some distressed or injured pregnant woman.
Unlike the past, there wasn’t the underlying anxiety knowing that Maya was on shift, something that Bailey had informed her she would never get used to. She didn’t know her schedule so there was no reason to worry.
Her blissful pursuit of academia was interrupted by her phone ringing and she frowned in consternation as she scooped up the device.
There was so many things that it could have been, another emergency at the clinic, some Seattle-typical disaster that required every available physician at Grey-Sloan. These possibilities meant that she felt a burst of relief at seeing that it was only Maya that appeared on the screen.
It didn’t for a moment occur to her that she was flouting their agreement, that she could well be in a burning building at this very moment. Instead, all she felt was annoyance that the Lieutenant couldn’t seem to accept that she wasn’t ready to be ‘won’ back just yet.
That all she wanted was to be left alone so that she could figure out how she felt and then she would talk to her in as much detail as the supposedly enlightened woman could handle, assuming that she had been continuing to see Diane as she claimed.
With not a hint of the painful anxiety that would usually plague her in this scenario, she rejected the call and returned to her article. She glanced curiously a minute or so later as her phone lit up with a voicemail.
Her highlighter hovered atop the page as she considered whether Maya had ever left her a voicemail, but she ultimately dismissed it and turned the phone over with a huff after putting it in airplane mode.
She could do her work and then listen to it.
An hour later, the voicemail was nagging at her but she determinedly ploughed ahead, now typing out a proposal for some specific, but expensive, equipment. She had asked for space and wasn’t it her right to take it?!
Carina chewed at her lip, her fingers crashing across random characters as the door to her office burst open to reveal Dr Jo Wilson.
She expected a profuse apology but the Fellow just stared at her with wide eyes.
“Dr Wilson,” Carina breathed, “I would appreciate if you could knock…”
“We’ve been paging you and calling…” Jo sighed, deflating now that she was faced with her mentor.
Carina drew her eyebrows together and turned her phone over, turning off the mode that was blocking all communication. Instantly her screen populated with messages from the ER, missed calls and texts from Jo and Miranda as well as Ben Warren and Andy Herrera.
“What’s the disaster?” Carina sighed resignedly, surely there had to be something that hadn’t hit Seattle yet?
“A fire,” Wilson said slowly, as if it should be obvious.
“And is there a pregnant victim?” Carina replied, close to disinterested. Once she met the patient, she was sure that she would become very invested but in this moment she wanted to stay far away from the ER knowing that there was liable to be first responders there.
Wilson drew her eyebrows together, but something dawned on her and she stepped closer to the desk, speaking softly, “Carina…it’s Maya…” This knocked the breath out of older doctor in an instant.
She’d once read that anxiety was like putting yourself through your greatest fears twice, but she wasn’t quite sure that was true right now. During other phone calls, she’d been terrified thinking about all of the other things that could have happened, but this felt so much different.
Now she was imagining all of the ways that her wife could have been hurt and seeing herself rejecting what could have been her last call, her last chance to talk to her.
The fear forced her to stand, but it wasn’t to rush to the ER, instead she finally unlocked her phone and navigated straight to the voicemails.
“Carina…” Jo began, but she shook her head and held up a finger to cut her off.
She didn’t want to know more, not until she had heard Maya’s voice.
There were a few extra messages, but she scrolled straight to the oldest.
Her finger hovered over it but she soon pressed it, opting to play it on loud speaker so that she could drop the phone to the desk, not trusting herself to hold the device up.
The message was more crackly than most, but a pained groan made it through the line and tears pricked at Carina’s eyes. This was her wife’s reaction to having her call rejected!
This was followed up by a bout of coughing and what sounded suspiciously like scrapping metal. She wasn’t entirely sure, but there was also the hint of blazing flames, was she laying in them? Was she trapped?
“Carina…” Maya’s voice reached her through, “I…was really hoping you would pick up but I guess a message will have to…” She trailed off, exploding into a more coughs and then a yelp of pain. Was she impaled? Crushed? What was causing her so much agony and was she still in pain?
“Carina…” Jo said but she shook her head warningly, daring her to speak over her wife as if she couldn’t replay the message. The fellow clamped her mouth shut but maintained her worried demeanour, presumably having some idea of what the firefighter may say.
“I…” Maya’s voice struggled in the message, “My radio is broken so I don’t think I’m getting out of this one and I just wanted to hear your voice and to tell you… t i amo tanto piccola…”
The pronunciation was far from perfect, but it was more Italian than Maya had known before she left and it somehow succeeded in knocking the breath from her lungs all over again.
Maya didn’t help the phantom burn in Carina’s lungs as she continued, “I know you’re probably laughing at how wrong that was but…I love you Carina…I’m so sorry that I wasn’t very good at it I…”
The line went silent with a rattling breath and Carina scooped up the phone to make sure that the message hadn’t ended prematurely but she could still hear the ambience of disaster all around her wife.
The only thing missing was the laboured breathing.
It was promptly replaced by the worst sound that had ever breached Carina’s ears, the screeching of a PASS device.
She gasped as she dropped her phone again and Jo rushed over to end the message.
At last making eye contact with the other doctor, she asked wetly, “Dr Wilson…is my wife dead?”