A/N: HELLO. Just home from seeing my new boss. This should be fun. Let's not tell him he know my grandad though. I'm fairly sure Grandad would have pissed him off at some point ;) thanks to all of you who have read and reviewed this! I'm glad you enjoyed the first chapter and hope you like this one too!

Sarah x


Hanssen woke bleary eyed and slightly dizzy, Michael Spence standing over him. As far as he remembered, it was the American's day off, so something must have happened for him to be here. "What's happening?" he asked, attempting to sit up. He instantly thought better of it when he felt what he presumed were stitches pulling on his abdomen.

"Well, you're no longer in a position to call Naylor a one-kidneyed freak. Might come across as a little hypocritical," Michael joked as he skimmed through Hanssen's charts.

"You took out my kidney?" Hanssen demanded, not quite sure if this was one of Michael's jokes or not.

"Yeah," Michael replied, putting his chart down and sitting in the visitors' chair next to the bed. "It was killing you. Spewing out toxins into your body because it was dying. Kinda a good idea to take the poisonous organs out of your body." It made sense now that he thought about it, but Hanssen admitted to himself that he was currently quite slow on the uptake. "Oh, and you've got soft tissue damage in your right leg. How it's not broken I'll never know."

"Thank you," Hanssen said, for once sincerely grateful he had Michael's arrogant talent at his hospital. While the man was possibly one of the most irritating people ever to have walked this planet, he was undeniably a good surgeon despite his occasional naïve stupidity.

"Any time," he smiled. "You were lucky. Saw the state of your car on the news. If Serena hadn't stopped and got you out, you'd have been dead by the time she got help to you," he explained.

"Owing my life to Serena Campbell," Hanssen sighed. "Do you think she'll ever let me forget it?"

Michael grinned. "No. But she got a bit messed up herself. I'm gonna make her stay in overnight for observation and I know how that's gonna go down," he sighed at the prospect of forcing Serena to stay in hospital for the night. Hanssen could see Michael's point – she looked very pale and drawn.

"Like a lead balloon?" Hanssen suggested. He glanced over at Serena in the bed next to him, reading through files like there was nothing wrong with her, earphones in, blocking the whole ward out. "She may just hit you and make a run for it."

"Not on that leg, she won't," Michael reminded him with a nod towards the brace and plaster on Serena's ankle. "She's going nowhere." Michael's eyes followed Edward Campbell as he walked across the ward. "And Satan's on a double shift. She's gonna hate me."

"Satan?" Hanssen asked, slightly confused.

"Yeah. Edward. She calls him 'Satan.' Like I said, she's gonna hate me," Michael repeated. Serena's nickname for her ex-husband, Hanssen had to confess, was amusing; it actually made him curious as to what exactly happened between those two.

"Not as much as she hates me," Hanssen pointed out fairly.

"If she hated you, she would've left you for dead."

Hanssen remained silent, not wanting to dig himself a hole in front of the American consultant. He was, of course, eternally grateful that Serena had stopped to find him when she did. Michael was right – he owed her his life. He owed her even for the fact that she had kept an eye on him when it became clear there was something wrong with his car. He had heard a knocking from the front wheel, which, in his limited knowledge of cars, generally meant the steering was shot. The steering had been off for a while and he hadn't had the time to go to a garage and he had stupidly assumed it was nothing too major. She had stayed in front of him and watched. He had not known it was her, too distracted by the car and attempting to control it.

He watched as Edward sat down next to her and attempted to check up on her. In true Serena style she completely blanked him, and Henrik just had to smile slightly at her antagonistic approach to dealing with her ex-husband.

"She's not very nice to him, is she? Annalese is actually nicer to me than Serena is to Edward," Michael admitted, and Hanssen had heard some stories of how Annalese tended to make his life miserable by taking his children from him. "Makes you wonder what he did. Now, he, Mr. Hanssen, is someone she hates."

"I don't think she does hate him," Hanssen contradicted him, watching her intently pretend Edward wasn't there because she didn't want to talk to him. "I think she's keeping her hands clean of him." He wasn't usually one for talking about his staff, but the whole Serena and Edward (or 'Sedward' as Sacha Levy and Mo Effanga had fondly dubbed them) situation intrigued him – Edward was still breathing, for one thing, which was nothing short of a miracle.

"Whichever it is, I don't envy him."

Hanssen nodded in agreement having heard how she had stripped Edward down on AAU and frightened most of the nurses half to death while she did it. He had been on the receiving end of that side to her himself, little did Michael know, and could safely say even he was shaken by that switch she could flip between sweetly polite and almost murderous.

Despite the annoyance in her face, she looked really quite vulnerable and sweet.

"Right," Michael said cheerily. "I'm gonna leave you to rest. If you need anything, just ask."

"My laptop," Hanssen demanded. Michael didn't even need to speak for him to know he wasn't getting to do any work. He may have allowed Serena, but Serena was in a better condition than he was and she didn't doubt that she had threatened to knock Michael's head off his shoulders if he didn't allow her to work from her bed.

As Michael walked away, Hanssen leaned back. He felt weak and odd, and was trying to get his head around the idea that Michael Spence had removed one of his organs from his body before it killed him. It was a lot for him to take in, and taking things in was not his forte. He usually just left those kinds of issues and told himself they were not an issue. He briefly wondered how long he could block all this out before it caught up with him.

He looked around and saw Edward walking away looking resigned to Serena's mood swings. As soon as her ex-husband and current source of irritation was gone, she yanked her earphones out, turned to Hanssen and said, "How are you feeling?"

Taken aback by her concern, he replied, "I'm fine."

"Broken record again!" she exclaimed, chucking her files onto the table. "What did Michael do to you?" she asked.

"He took out a kidney."

"Oh. That's not so bad," she allowed. He saw in her face that she had been expecting – perhaps dreading – much worse than a damaged kidney. And to be fair, he was well aware that it could have been much worse.

"You do realise Michael plans on keeping you in tonight?" Hanssen warned her in advance that she was about to be chained to the bed. Metaphorically speaking, of course. "And Satan is on shift tonight." She gave him a withering look. "Why is Michael insistent that you stay in?"

She sighed and answered, "When I came to get you I fell down the hill. That's how I broke my ankle. And I hit a rock or two on the way down, so he's worried about my internal organs. Oh joy," she grinned sarcastically. She glanced at Edward, who was standing at the nurses' station chatting to an animatedly happy Chantelle Lane. "If I commit murder tonight, you'll cover for me, right?"

"Why haven't you sacked him yet?" he asked her. Upon finding that he had inadvertently hired her ex-husband, towards whom she still felt some anger, he had half-expected the man to be gone by the end of the week. But she had persisted with him, as if determined to not let him win whatever kind of twisted game they spent their lives playing.

She gave a girlish laugh. "Because it would look like I sacked him out of personal grievances. Which, to be fair, would be perfectly true if I were to get rid of him. And it's good to have the upper hand for once," she admitted with a little smile.

He smirked to himself; he should have pegged Serena as the type to enjoy finally having something over the person who had hurt her. Hanssen didn't doubt that, however much he knew she would deny it, Edward had in fact hurt her. "He's not that bad, you know," he allowed, having had a couple of conversations with the man.

"Yeah. If you're not married to him."

He could not refrain from chuckling. It was unusual to hear Serena sound childish over something she was bitter about. He watched her wriggle herself under the blankets with difficulty, groaning slightly in pain. Hanssen was suddenly thankful for painkillers, knowing that both he and Serena would have been in much worse pain than they were now without them. She lay on her uninjured side so she faced him. Why was she deliberately talking to him?

"Thank you," he finally found himself saying. "For coming back for me. Michael says that if you had gone for help I wouldn't have survived until it got to me. So thank you."

"You actually think I would've just left you there?" she challenged what he had been fearing was written all over his face. He was finding control more difficult to retain under medication and physical exhaustion.

"You hate me," he replied simply with a slight shrug of his shoulders. He would have thought it was obvious, since she frequently displayed antagonistic and infuriated behaviour towards him.

Serena laughed into her pillow. "Of course I don't hate you!" she giggled. The painkillers, Hanssen decided, had gone to Serena's head. "You get on my nerves, definitely. But I don't hate you." Her eyes were sparkling – again, it was probably the drugs making her hazy – and her smile was wide.

"You know," Hanssen sighed. "If you had left me and I had died, you would have most likely got my job."

"And I would never have been able to live with myself," she confessed. "Don't dwell on it," she advised him. "You're not dead. You're alive and you're in danger of me slapping this nonsense out of you," she added.

He let out an exhausted groan. "What a day," he moaned to himself. "This is not how I planned to spend today."

"Yeah, I wasn't planning on being stuck in a hospital bed either," Serena smiled, obviously trying to keep both their spirits. "It'll be OK, I guess. It's only one night. For me, anyway," she added. "Though I'm still going to make Michael feel two inches tall," she winked. "Just for the fun of it. Nothing more enjoyable than winding up the American." She paused. "Actually, there is."

"What?"

"Winding up the Swede."

Hanssen just gave a quiet laugh with her, oddly grateful he had her to speak to. Otherwise he thought being confined to Keller would have driven him slightly mad. He was not her favourite person, and she was not his, but she was someone to speak to; she seemed to have put the hostility aside just for the moment, so they could keep each other company.

She reached up to the bedside table and took down a chocolate bar, snapping some off. She carefully threw it to him. "Why are you being..." Hanssen struggled for the right word.

"Nice?" she supplied for him. He nodded. "Because you look like hell. Even I can't be mean to a man who looks like that."

"Charming," he commented. She laughed sweetly again and fumbled on the bedside table until she found her phone and started tapping away at it. She was a strange woman.


Hope this is OK!
Please feel free to leave me a review and tell me your thoughts!
Sarah x