Author: Regency
Title: Come Away With Me
Pairing: Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe
Warnings: None
Summary: AU. On a late night walk along the beach, Serena is drawn to the sea by an irresistible swimmer and an irresistible song.
Author's Notes: Come squee about Berena with me on Tumblr at sententiousandbellicose!
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters, settings, or stories 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.
Serena takes a trip to the seaside to put her life in order. Her mother's death is a wound that while still tender is healing and she needs the time to regroup. At least that's what she tells Guy Self and all the others. She isn't convinced there's anyplace she could travel that's far enough away from Holby to give her peace of mind. She doesn't sleep, really, not even after oodles of wine and fine cuisine has filled her up to the point of bursting. Even the beauty of her coastal home away from home just leaves her cold. So she walks.
Tonight she is out strolling along the rocky, sandy beach at dusk. It's early to be calling herself sleepless but the previous four nights have given her reason enough to expect insomnia. She hasn't bothered to crack any of the novels she bought at the airport on her flight in; fiction isn't the escapism she needs.
The beach is largely deserted at close of day. The holidaying families have packed up blankets and picnics to retreat to friendlier, warmer environs than what's offered by the wind blowing in off the sea. None of that warms Serena, if she's honest. Nothing does.
She thinks she's alone and is happier for it. Happy enough. She can turn off her mind, tidy away her personality and brood. She's done plenty of that on her holiday thus far, been counting down the days until she has to put a stop to it, has to put her Deputy CEO mask back in place and get on with it. It being life. However much she isn't quite ready.
The tears don't well up out here, the gusts dry them half-born. Serena sniffles anyway, tightening her shawl around her to ward off the seasonal chill, only some of it attributable to the weather that's promised a downpour since the night before.
She's thinking of room service and unopened work email to fill the late night hours. Maybe a phone call to Ellie that will last precisely as long as her daughter can be convinced that Serena has anything of interest to say. She's thinking of the sleep aids her doctor prescribed that just might warrant a try while there's time for her to get used to them.
Serena might not mind sleep so much if not for the dreams.
She's just beginning the return journey up the rocky cliff face that houses her hotel when then the singing begins offshore.
She mistakes the voice for crashing water initially. It's low and deep, rough as though the singer's just dredged themselves up from the deep after getting caught in the undertow. Maybe they have.
Serena narrows her eyes trying to pick out the shape of an approaching schooner, perhaps a small sailboat. They're visible as far as the horizon when the sun is high, are as good as ghosts in the greying dark. No boats.
The moon's obscured by deep grey clouds signaling an oncoming squall. The air is heavy with it, sticky and damp. The water is still but for where it crashes upon the rocky outcroppings farther out and rolls onto the shore. And where a solitary figure cuts through the blue black surf on a backstroke, face turned, exalting, toward the moon as they sing.
Serena is transfixed.
Half a kilometer offshore, the distant figure swims the length of the beach in laps, each time she reaches the farthest border of darkness flipping over in a shimmer of shadows and glimmering…skin, is it? It must be, though it glimmers in the intermittent twilight like opaline scales running the length of their slender lower limbs. Their? Her, maybe. Serena thinks it might be a woman given the shape of their silhouette covered over with long hair, its color indistinguishable in the wet. She'd have to ask to be sure.
Whoever she is, she sings, tone powerful and unperturbed by her aquatic exertions. The moon peeks out to smile on a pointed chin and fine, smiling features. Her teeth are pearls, filling her mouth like chiseled moon fragments, semiprecious between her lips, precious to her tongue.
She swims closer.
She isn't any faster, Serena notes. She maintains her present course–past Serena, far to the rocks which enclose the bay, a flash of something glittering like sapphires in the sun and she returns, past Serena again to the opposite border. She does not once look to Serena but Serena little doubts she is seen. She feels it.
Whoever she is, she swims closer, lap by lap. She sings.
Serena draws her alpaca wool shawl snug to her chest and edges toward the foamy shoreline. To see better, she tells herself. To hear better, that's all, she assures. Her feet move, whatever the justification, carrying her inexorably forward as the still water begins to stir in the approaching storm. It doesn't rain, not yet, and Serena has nothing to fear from a chill.
But the swimmer, her svelte mermaid on the high seas. The clouds part to lay a spotlight on her, milky rays illuminating moon pale shoulders, a lean, graceful form, and limbs cutting so gracefully across the current that Serena questions how they could possibly be the same species, she and her swimmer. This woman lives in water, it loves her, whereas Serena can scarcely float.
And then her swimmer disappears.
As fluid as a seal, she rolls amid the waves and dips out of sight beneath the murky blue. No flickers of iridescent skin to tantalize Serena. No more opalescent smiles. No more song. She is simply gone, vanished, and Serena's breath stoppers in her throat as the seconds turns to minutes without her returning.
Whoever she is, she is real, and she cannot breathe under water. This may constitute a medical emergency.
Serena forgets the weather churning about her and abandons her awe to scramble in her trouser pockets for her mobile. She isn't a strong enough swimmer to risk a rescue dive, but if she can get the hotel to send someone, her swimmer may stand a chance. She is dialing and peering desperately into dusk, trying to pick out the woman's languid backstroke from the increasingly hectic tide. But there's nothing. No swimmer. No song.
The moon has ceased to cooperate. The storm is rolling in. The wind grows unforgiving, ruffling Serena's clothes and blowing the heaving clouds en masse across the sky. The stars have gone out. The moon has gone in. The hotel refuses to send anybody on account of the storm and the desk clerk urges her to bring herself in out of the rain that's begun to patter upon the mealy brown sand and her shoulders, her worried, grieving face.
She's sure nobody could survive underwater as long as her swimmer has. It's been six minutes. Hypoxia would have rendered her unconscious by now. Brain death would be imminent. Serena waits. She'll wait a little longer. The hotel isn't set far up from the shore. There are lifeguard stations she can take refuge in if it comes to it. She will wait. She's waited longer with less to gain.
It's the singing that draws her farther from the guttering lights of the hotel to the dark of the storm. Serena has never liked storms.
Somewhere out there her swimmer still sings. Serena can't distinguish the words or the language from her vantage point, she only recognizes it as beautiful, as haunting, resounding behind her breast and burrowing deep inside the chambers of her heart. It cuts and she bleeds and there's no blood to show for it. She rubs her stinging eyes against wind and rain and tears. She calls it sympathy for a stranger, but the part of her she is paying no mind wonders if she isn't displaying sympathy for the devil. Who else could keep her here against all reason?
The singing grows with the wind, on the wind, and enshrouds her in its melody. She can't discern a word of it, only comprehend its message. 'Come away with me.' It even calls her by name. 'Serena…come away with me.' It isn't kosher. The storm. The swimmer. Her failing instincts failing her spectacularly. She is nothing if not sensible.
A stabbing streak of lightning startles her back from where she is in the bay up to her knees. She can't remember taking her first step into loamy waters. She meant to go back the way she came. She will. Lightning bodes well for no one.
She is turning away quickly, good sense, reason, self-preservation reasserted when the clouds pour a handful of twilight upon the water ahead. There's a figure there. Shadowed and treading water, her silhouette nigh on unfathomable in her new position, her swimmer watches Serena turn to go. But Serena cannot go.
She calls Serena's name again, more clearly and now Serena is certain her name was part of the song all along.
"Are you okay? Do you need help? Do you need…" Me, is how she longs to end that. Has no reason so to do.
Her swimmer sings. Turns up to the gauzy moonlight like it's the warmest of sunny days. The dank rays reveal a streak of effervescent markings along her hairline, outlining her thin, red mouth and high, pink cheeks, every bit as similar to scales as they first appeared.
She calls Serena's name. She is louder than the storm. Her lips don't form the word as it sounds. Serena wonders whether her name is what her swimmer is saying at all, yet it is all she hears.
'Serena…come away with me.'
Her eyes are dark as the deepest pit of the earth, as dark as oceans deep. They are as dark as where undoubtedly she lives, yet some ruinous part of Serena longs to read their depth as sweet. Her swimmer calls her name. Her swimmer sings for her. Her swimmer wants her. The compulsion to take that nameless desire as love is overwhelming. Serena has only ever wanted to be loved.
Her swimmer beckons, thin lips angling up as Serena begins to heed her.
"What do you want from me?" asks Serena, cautious by nature, fearful of being burned. What is a myth but a story and what is a legend but a cautionary tale? Serena's heard them all.
Her swimmer beckons once more, long fingers curling urgently to welcome Serena to the water.
Serena staggers toward her outstretched hand. Her swimmer is safe. She must be. Maybe she'll keep Serena safe, too.
"What do you want?" she asks again. She crosses her arms, buries her hands in her armpits to keep from reaching out.
Eyebrows descending in scowl, her swimmer sings her name again and again, the same key as each repetition before. There isn't any variation, no true intonation. It is an echo, not a declaration of love. At the revelation, Serena retreats, speedy and unsteady in the cloying sand. These kitten heels are not meant for walks on the beach; she should have changed.
Her swimmer follows, for the first time showing agitation at Serena's refusal to comply. Amid the gloom and the rain she is attractive, mysterious, but in full splendor she is magnificent and terrifying and much older than she appears.
She cries out for Serena. No echo that reverberates in the soul like a love spell but it strikes her just the same. She stops. Her swimmer treads water, no longer preternatural in her grace. She flounders. She opens her mouth and nothing comes out. Distress is written on her face. Loneliness is etched in its deep, weathered lines, the same lines Serena reads in her own reflection. She does not want Serena to go.
Serena twists the hem of her shawl between her hands where it quickly begins to fray. Her swimmer peers at her through the riot of her fringe. It's a deeply burnished gold.
"Don't you have a voice of your own?"
Her swimmer shakes her head, chin disturbing the current whirling about her paddling limbs.
This is all the height of ridiculousness, playing chicken with lightning for a gorgeous fool in face paint. Serena has heard her, seen her speak, yet somehow she knows that her swimmer cannot speak. Not properly. As impossible as this night is beginning to feel, Serena has a duty to help and her swimmer is in need of that, if nothing else. "Do you know sign language?"
She indicates she doesn't. Which is fine given Serena doesn't know it either.
"Do you have a name?"
She borrows a voice from the sands of time. "Berenice…Bernie."
Serena wonders who the first Berenice was and what became of her.
"Hello, Bernie."
Serena smiles at her. Bernie smiles back.
"What do you need, Bernie?"
Her swimmer does as she has before, her strange ventriloquist repetition of Serena's name that begins to ring of Serena's own voice the more she hears it.
"Why me?"
Bernie parts her lips and pronounces in a voice that cannot be her own, "I see the moon and the moon sees me. The moon sees someone I'd like to see."
She's some odd stripe of mimic, stealing words out of the air and re-purposing them for her own ends. Serena would fear her, should fear her, but she looks so sad, diminished as she is by the sheer vastness of the sea.
"Why me? Is it because I'm alone?" She shuts her eyes. "Of course it is. Somehow I'm always alone." Easy prey for whatever Bernie must be. Mermaid? Siren? Something worse?
Bernie ducks lower in the waves, only her eyes and hair clearing the waterline. She looks at Serena, bottomless eyes sympathetic and dark and inhuman and stunning in their impossible humanity. Her swimmer opens her mouth and there can be no question it is Serena's voice speaking this time. "I'm…always alone."
"So you thought we could be alone together." Serena swipes rainwater from her face. The storm is dying as quickly as it was born. Bernie's doing? She wonders. She raises an eyebrow at Bernie's silence. "I've had worse offers."
Bernie smiles, sharp as battered sea shells and lethal no doubt. Otherworldly. She is many species of beautiful.
"I'm afraid I don't swim." Never mind her sodden clothes and stained trouser legs that rule her a liar. For the promise of her swimmer she would have. If she is careless, she still might.
Bernie kicks to the surface, exposing lithe, densely muscled arms once more and sand flecked shoulders. She purses her lips. Serena waits. She can wait.
Slowly and then faster, Bernie begins to twist in the surf like a diver shucking a suit. She glows. The water churns aquamarine and gold and foamy, bubbly white before it gurgles and hurls her free upon the sandbar.
Serena waits, ignoring every primal instinct telling her she should run. She's never been very fast anyway.
Bernie rises from her wet sprawl onto shaky legs. Long, long legs that the moon must adore for how they wetly reflect its image. Serena is surprised by them for a moment; she half expected to see…well, a tail. Instead, she's treated to much, much more.
Her voiceless swimmer is incredible in every sense of the word. The phosphorescent discoloration to her skin and her pupil-less eyes set her apart, though she could so easily pass for human and out of water she shudders in the cold.
They waver together.
Finally, Bernie reaches for Serena, sways into her body for the warmth her strangely strangely beautiful ensemble of seaweed, black pearls, and shells cannot provide. They cling to each other in the sodden, humid aftermath of the storm and trundle up the beach arm in arm. Bernie won't stop staring at Serena and Serena cannot stop gazing at Bernie. To her mind, only one of them merits the infatuation.
Bernie cannot quite sing, but she can bewitch and she does when she is lonely. Serena can sing as she does when she is happy. Her swimmer hugs her close, swaddled together with her in her damp shawl as they approach the shuttered hotel entrance. Lamps burn a cheery welcome as they climb, like lighthouses awaiting them on a farther shore. Bernie slows, hesitant to leave her watery dwelling for pastures new; she needn't use words for what defensive body language telegraphs just as well.
Serena nuzzles her shoulder, an instinctive act mean to soothe. Bernie shudders, shuffles closer to return the tentative caress, rubbing her clammy nose into side of Serena's neck. When Serena shivers the cold is not entirely to blame.
"Come with me, Bernie. Come." She takes Bernie's hands in her and pulls her toward her room and away from prying, curious eyes. This isn't the sea; Serena will do the safekeeping here.
Serena sings to soothe the fear radiating from the impossible, ancient creature discovering her legs at her side. She sings for the greatest story she can never tell, for who would believe her? She sings for an end to loneliness in the deep blue sea, for Bernie. Serena sings and the siren follows.