Author: Regency
Title: SNAFU
Pairing: Bernie Wolfe/Serena Campbell, past Bernie Wolfe/Alex Dawson
Warnings: references to canon character death
Summary: While Bernie awaits her partner's return, she and Alex attempt to clear the air once and for all. But Serena is the silent third in their conversation and she makes all the difference.
Author's Notes: Come squee about Berena with me on Tumblr at sententiousandbellicose!
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from Holby City. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.
Bernie only responds to Alex's message because the house is too empty for sleep tonight. Jason is away with Alan per the encroaching norm and Cameron has gone off to Costa Rica with Morven. Charlotte remains distant, only approachable for light conversation about the weather and her upcoming bar exams. Bernie's other friends, what few she has, are preoccupied with their own busy lives. And Bernie has the dark house Serena left her and her own lonely self.
It's not much of a competition.
She meets Alex someplace far from her current stomping grounds, a pub that's dark enough to hide her face if that's something she wanted anymore. But Bernie is well beyond the point of hiding things, and Alex is hardly a secret nobody knows. This meeting won't be a secret. Those have a tendency to blow up in Bernie's face and her days are rife with enough carnage for her to be pleased at any damage control she can manage. This meeting is long overdue.
Alex is seated at a tall club table to the left of the bar, under a pink neon light that spells out the poet Sappho's name. Right. It takes Bernie about that long to peg the club as a lesbian hangout; she hadn't been paying much attention before. She thinks Serena would love it, the mood lighting aside. She loves any occasion to delve deep into this community she's found herself part of and to drag Bernie along on the many sapphic adventures that follow. Bernie may once have rolled her eyes at Serena's almost childlike enthusiasm toward all things to do with loving women, but what she wouldn't give to be pressed up against her partner on the crowded dance floor tonight, easily among the oldest in the place yet no less eager to be here. What she wouldn't give to be with Serena anywhere in the world right now.
Bernie tamps down on that powder keg of emotion she's been suppressing since Eddie the Pigeon took flight and Serena went away. One emotional morass at a time is about all she's got the stamina for nowadays. She can be effervescent at work or she can keep it together in her off-hours, doing both is off the table. The needs of her ward and her patients have made that call for her.
"Alex?"
"Bernie."
Alex unfolds herself from a graceful slouch against the dark paneled wall to greet her, and she's as striking as ever at first glance. Kind-eyed as ever. More so than Bernie still deserves, she's sure. I've done everything wrong, there. There's an awkward moment where they know they're meant to hug or kiss or something they've done in the past and neither of them is quite successful at suppressing the muscle memory that moves them to do it. In the end, they drop their hands, they don't touch. Alex keeps to her seat and Bernie takes the club stool opposite her.
Unexpectedly, their knees brush.
Bernie shifts so they don't again and feels disloyal twice over. This is the woman who saved her life, and yet...
"So, you called. I wasn't expecting that." She hadn't heard from Alex in months before her message came through tonight. Their parting on Keller had seemed rather final, until it wasn't.
Alex taps her long fingers along the neck of her beer bottle. Bernie can still remember when such a gesture got her blood up. "I'm the one who usually does the calling. I thought you'd have got used to hearing from me."
Bernie shakes her head and lets her fringe fall into her eyes to cover her look of unease. She's good at ignoring ghosts. Specters from her past rise to the fore all the time and she lets them pass unacknowledged. A news report on the television namedropping a fallen comrade. A headline on the home page of BBC News regarding her old CO. A remark in polite conversation about the province where she served. Bernie is good at leaving things alone, the more she used to love them the more necessary they are to leave unmolested lest she tarnish them. The army was once her life; now, it's only part of it. Best to leave it.
Alex Dawson was once her own private universe. Now, she isn't...So she let her go. Only she didn't quite, did she? Like her marriage for twenty years, Bernie left Alex in limbo and that needs to end.
Alex signals some unseen bartender at the rear of the pub who brings Bernie a tumbler of her favorite whiskey poured the way she likes it. It's only recently Bernie acquired a taste for red wine and it's only on Serena's lips that she loves it. She's lost count of how much only makes her happy with her best friend at her side.
"You never got in touch," Alex says to breach the silence Bernie hadn't noticed fall. It's so quiet at home without her family that the quiet simply follows Bernie's out, some loyal pet to befriend her solitude. She inspects her top shelf drink for imperfections she won't find. Alex knows her, knew her too well.
"There wasn't time" is what she gives as her terrible answer, and she closes her eyes, guilty again. So much of their relationship was about guilt; she can't seem to break the pattern.
"It's been over a year," Alex counters. "You've divorced. Settled into a new flat and a new job and there wasn't time." She scoffs, the fine sand grit of her voice only compounding the accusation, "Don't lie."
Bernie musses her hair, tucks her fringe behind her ears to show her face. Time to be the woman she always wanted to be. "Okay, I won't. If you know all that, you know I'm seeing somebody."
"I know you left her like you left me."
Bernie blinks rapidly to hide her instinctive flinch. She had, hadn't she? Left Alex in the lurch. And then when given the chance to reunite she'd turned her loose without so much as a genuine fight. She'd given up ground on them before she opened her eyes in post-op.
"I came back for her," she says instead, because at least she's worth that much. Kiev hadn't taken her heart; she'd left it in Holby on AAU in the hands of another woman she'd brought to tears. The greatest woman she knows.
"And now she's left you." Said so bluntly it strikes Bernie right between the ribs, right where Alex likely intends. Bernie drinks to numb the soreness the jab leaves.
"She-she lost her daughter and it blew her world apart. She needs time. I don't mind waiting."
Alex takes a pull from a brown bottle of Guinness. Bernie can hear the gears turning as she drinks. Alex shares Bernie's habit for keeping mum until silence becomes the danger. That they made a go of it at all is a miracle when they only seemed to communicate in traded glances and daring touch.
"That's new. You used to have to have what you wanted right away or never." Their intimate encounters were always that way, frantic, passionate, desperate in the moment. When death is an ambush or drone strike away at all times, when 'never' is inevitable, immediacy is a matter of reason, and Bernie has always been a reasonable woman when it came down to it.
"People change. We have to, to live."
It isn't any wonder Alex doesn't recognize her as she is. From the moment she set foot in Holby she's been in the process of becoming someone new. A woman distinct from the soldier who had loved her, unrecognizable as the wife and mother who had stomped down for decades on the panicked dissonance between what society demanded and what her heart desired. Bernie still aches but for different things now, and different people.
She is suddenly, painfully cognizant of how Serena must have felt in the days before she left Holby: Everyone else is getting on with their business and none seem to understand that her pain is too great to ignore, that she can't just get on it with it. For Bernie, there's a Serena-shaped hole in her routine panging like a nerve stripped raw, and for everybody else it's just Tuesday. For Alex, it's just another day.
"So you changed for her."
"I changed for me," she emphasizes, "and I became someone she thought she could love. She did. Does. I hope she does." Bernie turns her tumbler slowly to catch the pink light in the sculpted glass. Serena would tell her to drink up because she wanted to dance. Serena would be sat side flush to side with her, their thighs pressed too close to permit a breath to separate them. That's the legacy of them together: constant, loving contact. Bernie is haunted by it now she can't have it. So this is what it means to be bereft.
"It's not any kind of fine romance, I'll admit. We're a mess. We have been from the start. Probably wouldn't know what to do if we had one normal day, us. You know how it is, situation normal-"
"All fucked up?" volunteers Alex. SNAFU was the order of the day out there.
"That's about the size of it." She smiles anyway. Thinks Serena might too if she were here.
"And you're okay with that? Being a mess with her?"
"I wasn't at first. I wanted to do it right. To woo her like she deserves. She's so special and I'm...nothing like that."
"Don't say that." Alex covers her wrist with her hand. A year ago Bernie would have killed to have Alex touch her again. What a difference a year makes.
"I'm not. Not compared to her. I wanted to be so much better for her. But I'm just me, a bit rubbish, scared. A coward sometimes." While Serena tries to be so brave.
"You're not." Her comrade under the rest of it, Alex is still defending her.
"I can be, you know that." Bernie rubs a thumb through a ring of condensation gathered on the tabletop. "She didn't mind. I ran from her and she didn't mind. She just listened and heard me and took me back when I came home. She just wanted me to come home and to never go again. It's the easiest promise I've ever made." Serena left that striped blouse behind when she packed and Bernie sees it in the closet whenever she goes to dress. She can recall Serena's tremulous welcoming smile with perfect clarity despite the pained scowl that's long replaced it. Serena had forgiven Bernie before she set foot in the hospital after Kiev. "Maybe I love her because she makes it so hard not to. I don't know the rhyme or reason, I don't properly care. I just love her."
Alex sniffles audibly. She's sat back as far from Bernie as she can without leaving the table. Her eyes remain the greenest Bernie's ever seen and she's seen a fair few since that IED blew her sky high. Bernie still cares enough for Alex to hate seeing her cry. Alex is as stoic as Bernie in theater, as steadfast as she in the face of oncoming enemy fire. Alex survives as well as Bernie can and takes her lumps with her scars with grace and gallows humor. She is everything good Afghanistan had to offer her in another life, and for somebody else Alex is perfect. But Alex isn't Serena and it's Serena Bernie wants in this life, no exceptions.
Alex finally withdraws her hand. "You told me you'd never felt the way you felt with me. You said it for years."
"I meant it. Alex, none of what I told you was a lie. I didn't have to lie because everything I felt was real."
"So what changed!? What's stopped you from loving me anymore?"
"You know that isn't how it went. I just-after I was injured, I decided that what we had wasn't enough to justify sacrificing my family when they'd been so good to me. Marcus was so scared when I got hurt, and he tried so hard." It's all old ground for them, an explanation that fails to live up to the magnitude of the betrayal.
"Like I didn't try, Bernie. Like I didn't give up my commission to be with you." The pinkest, gruffest of all the elephants in the room.
I never asked you to do that! rushes through Bernie's head but she's got tact enough not to say it. The understanding had lain between them unspoken that if things weren't as they were they would be together. Alex had taken the initiative and Bernie had reneged. Bernie's feelings had altered and Alex had suffered for it.
"I know it was rubbish. None of it was fair on you. But whatever I did somebody was going to be hurt and I had a responsibility to limit the hurt caused to my family. They were my priority over anything else."
"Over me. I get it."
"No, over both of us. I put you last, I grant, but I wasn't exactly making my own happiness paramount, either. I gave you up and that wasn't easy."
"So why is it easy now?"
"Because I am making my happiness paramount now and that happiness is with Serena." In laughter and in grief, that's who she wants beside her. Bernie knows that with certainty.
"Even when she isn't here?"
"She's always here to me. Call it romantic or foolhardy, you wouldn't be the first. I love her. I lived without her having had her as part of my life-never again."
"Never?"
"Never."
It isn't fair, is it, everything she and Alex meant to each other and all Bernie can talk about is the woman who isn't here. Serena is not their story, but she's integral to Bernie's now and Bernie could talk about her without cessation for days.
Alex drinks her Guinness down the last and signals for another. "It's all a mess."
"We can operate in a mess, can't we? War's just an organized mess. Civilian life's got almost nothing on that." Burying her partner's daughter, operating on her surrogate son. Living in that beautiful, empty house without even the promise of tomorrow, only the hope of it. Civilian life can be just as much hell, and Bernie will weather it.
"Would you ever go back?"
"Short of a new war breaking out, I doubt it, no. I'll always love it, being a soldier. The army was the family I needed to make me the person I am. But it was a haven from reality, too. Gave me somewhere secure to run when the real world closed in. Only you can't live in a bubble like that and expect to have something to come back to unless you nurture what's at home. I didn't, back then, and the worse it got the harder and faster I ran. I finally have a life I don't want to run from. I love the army, Alex, but I don't need it anymore."
"Or me."
"It isn't a matter of needing you or not needing you. You know things about me that nobody else does. That's what makes you one of my best friends. That makes you special."
"Not as special as her." Alex closes her eyes as Bernie screws up her face. "Sorry. I really thought I was ready for this."
"I don't think anybody can be ready for something like this until it comes."
"I'm the one who called."
"You've called loads of times and I haven't answered. I'm sorry the news isn't better."
"No, god, don't talk to me like a patient, I can't bear that. I knew the score and I took a chance. It didn't land." Alex grabs a club napkin to wipe up the glass rings on the table, her jaw clenched on all she isn't saying. It was she who had done all the pleading last time, what use is a rehash?
"Would it be pushing it to ask if we could stay friends? I haven't got as many of those as I could use."
"Not now, but maybe someday?"
I've ruined too many friendships, Bernie remembers saying. Here's one more for the pyre. She buries the ashes of her regret in the same shallow grave as the others and allows herself to grasp Alex's meager olive branch.
"I'll keep the light on for you." Bernie gathers her bag, feels like there should be more to say on closing forever such a crucial chapter of her life. In the end she can only wish Alex well. "Take care of yourself."
"Good luck with her...Serena, I mean. I hope she comes back."
"Me, too."
"What if she doesn't?"
Bernie purses her lips. She can't pretend hasn't lain awake pondering the same question. "Then, I'll go find her. I don't accept that I've waited this long to have her in my life just to lose her. I refuse to accept that. I won't." Bernie's fought this far, she'll fight all the way to hell if Serena gives her so much as a sign.
"Lucky girl."
"On our best days, I'm pretty lucky, too." She takes a chance and squeezes her old friend's shoulder. "Goodbye, Alex."
"Bye."
Alex's parting smile will stay with her a long time.
When Bernie frees herself from the soft bustle and throb of Sappho's Retreat, she hears her mobile ringing in her pocket: Vivaldi's Four Seasons. She's never picked up a call so quickly.
"Serena, hi. I was just thinking about you." And missing you and counting the days since I heard from you. But no pressure. She isn't pining more than the normal amount.
"Really?" Serena manages to sound surprised. "I was just thinking of you."
"Only good things, I hope."
"Always. Tell me, what are your thoughts on Madrid?"
"My Spanish could use some work, but I love Spain in theory." It's got you, hasn't it? Serena's always tipping her off about where she's hung her hat when she calls.
"Good, good. Care to take a mini-break anytime soon? Say, this time next week? I know a very attentive tour guide with a spare bed in a four-star hotel who'd be glad to show you the sights."
"I don't know, I'd have to do some research. Can't trust just anybody out there these days. They'd have to be a reputable sort."
"Damn, that's me right out. I'm positively indecent."
Bernie tuts playfully, thinking of all the indecent things she and Serena have gotten up to together. "Perhaps I ought to bring a chaperone to keep you on your best behavior."
To Bernie's delight, she purrs, "Now where's the fun in that?"
Bernie warms all over. Flirty Serena has been well-missed.
Serena drops her teasing tone, though the eager familiarity remains. "There's a flight out of Heathrow Monday morning, about 7:30. Can you make it?" Bernie is already mentally composing her leave request to Hanssen.
"You try and stop me."
Serena exhales audibly over the phone as if she'd thought Bernie might actually refuse her. "Thank you."
"I can't wait to see you."
"Hmm, you ought to see some of the lingerie I've picked up on my European holiday. Now that's a treat worth waiting for."
"You could dress in a wheat sack and still look a treat to me."
There's a momentary pause and Bernie wishes she could see Serena's expression to know if it's as soft as she sounds when she replies, "Smooth talker."
"Only for you. Now are there any handsy Spaniards I need to take care of when I get there? Perhaps some shopkeepers at the lingerie boutique who had a bit too much fun taking your measurements?"
"Oh no, Ms. Wolfe, the only person you're to manhandle on your arrival is me. I've missed your bedside manner."
"I'll make sure to keep my hands warm for you."
Bernie walks off into the night plastered to her mobile and smiling like a loon.
She doesn't look back once.