A/N: OK. Advanced warning: I may have made this too sad and angsty for other people's liking. I've learned what I cry at (usually nothing) and what others do are two totally different things. And thanks to anyone who is reading and reviewing - it's always much appreciated.

Sarah x

A month later, Serena found it surreal that she was in the same situation Sacha Levy had been in all those years ago, though with more turmoil and heartaches woven in between. Rachel's leukaemia and Sacha's determination proved to be the bullet that ended his marriage to Chrissie, much to everyone's surprise.

Sitting with a frail-looking, sleeping Anya, she realised that the chemo wasn't going to take the second time around with such dismal result the first time. Their best option was a bone marrow transplant. That meant she had both herself and Eleanor tested. That meant potentially tracking down Adam Cross.

She stroked Anya's long dark hair away from her pale sleeping face; she was still in a state of shock from all of this. The young girl who loved to sing and dance with her dad and cook and fix things with her mum was gone, replaced by a sick child who struggled to get out of bed some days. It broke Serena's heart to see her youngest daughter like this.

Her oldest, Eleanor, visited when she could. When being an F1 two hundred miles away allowed it. Serena held no ill-feelings over that. She knew it was beyond Eleanor's control and did not expect her to pack in her career for something she could do very little about except wait.

Henrik was taking things badly. He never said as much but his silence was deafening. When he visited Anya, she could see he was forcing himself not to crack. The night they had received the diagnosis of leukaemia, she had heard him cry in bed. She hadn't said anything, knowing it was a task and a half to comfort Henrik with emotions when he functioned on sense and logic, but had let him turn around and put his face into her neck until he was all cried out and was as exhausted as she was, all the while holding onto each other like they were going to be ripped violently apart.

"Mrs. Hanssen," a nurse said behind her. Serena turned around, every fibre of her being aching with stress, anger and tiredness. "Why don't you go home, hmm? She doesn't wake up during the night and you need a decent night's sleep in a decent bed next to your husband."

Serena smiled to herself; she had come to like this young nurse in the past month. She was good with the children and straight to the point with the adults, looking out for the welfare of all concerned.

"Yeah, alright," she sighed reluctantly, knowing the young nurse with the pink streak in her jet black hair was talking total logical sense. She picked up her bag and coat and kissed her daughter's forehead. "I love you, sweetheart. I'll be in with Daddy to see you tomorrow." The nurse patted Serena's arm as she passed towards the door.

In a wave of desperate exhaustion, Serena stopped on the stairs, sitting on the sixth step with her head in her hands. She was lost. Henrik was distant when they ever saw each other, which was less and less these days. She felt isolated and shattered. She felt like her family ties had been unwillingly severed. And every time she saw Anya, she had to fight back the tears and appear positive and strong in front of her, but Serena could not deny what the doctor in her told her: that her daughter was dying and there was only one thing she could possibly do about it.

She resigned herself to her painful debilitation and stood up, her knees aching and reminding her she was not the same woman she was a decade ago.

She drove home slowly and carefully, only noticing now that it was only seven o'clock. It felt like midnight already. So, actually, Henrik would only have been home a little over an hour, if even that. She hoped she could just sit with him for the first night in weeks, both of them awake rather than one of them always sleeping when the other got home. They were both tired beyond belief, their days filled with work, looking after and visiting a sick Anya, and trying not to let the sleepless nights beat them.

She felt a lump in her throat and realised with some discomfort that she hadn't actually cried since the night Anya had first taken ill. She was too cold and numb to cry.

Walking through her front door, she found Henrik in the kitchen. He turned to face her, looking as drained and exhausted as she did. "How is she?" he whispered.

"No different from yesterday. Chemo's still not taking," she replied, choking on that last word. Accepting she had finally broken, she had no second thought about dropping her handbag and walking straight into Henrik's arms. His arms held her tight into his body, rubbing her back in an effort to soothe her. "What are we meant to do if me and Eleanor don't match her for bone marrow?" she asked into his chest. "I don't even know where he is. All I know is he got released."

"And you expect him to donate a part of his body into a daughter he created through drink, drugs and violence?" Henrik reasoned, speaking into her hair.

"It's worth a shot."

"I don't like the thought of him being near you," he admitted. It was the first time he had admitted such a thing, and it broke the dam to let the flood of tears free. "Shh," he hushed her quietly. "If it comes to it, we'll find him."

She wrapped her arms around him. "I love you," she said.

"I love you too," he answered her. "We will get through this," he promised her. "We always do." He pulled away from her and took her hand, leading her to the living room, taking a familiar CD and putting it in the Hi-Fi, picking track number four.

"'Western Wall,'" she mumbled, recognising the quiet acoustic guitar. He put his arms loosely around her waist, her arms loosely around his neck, and danced with her gently around the cleared end of the living room. She revelled in the man she had married, and his soft quirks and hopeless attempts at romance. "And I've got a heart full of fear; and I offer it up on this alter of tears," she sang along softly, seeing why he picked this song. It was a song of strength and faith, both of which was rapidly waning within her. "Red dust settles deep in my skin; I don't know where it starts or where I begin; it's a crumbling pile of broken stones; it ain't much but it might be home; if I ever loved a place at all, it's the Western Wall..."

He gently wiped the tears from her face as it reduced her to crying once more. He kissed her gently and she put a hand on his face. She had almost forgotten how it was to feel close to Henrik. This situation was in danger of ripping them apart, just like they had watched happen to Sacha and Chrissie. Serena thought she and Henrik were stronger and tighter than that, but she was beginning to doubt her own courage.

It was not the first time she had cried kissing him, and she knew it was unlikely to be the last. She loved this about him. He snapped her out of her auto-pilot state. He reminded her she was alive and not merely surviving this life. And after a month of being in a trance-like state, barely thinking or feeling, she needed that. She needed him. Yet again, she needed her husband like she needed oxygen as she pulled away from him softly.

She stared him in the face, his expression unreadable. She knew he felt the pain she did; he was just better at hiding these things for the benefit of others. She sat on the sofa with a sigh, yanking her boots off and pulling her feet up. "Why us?" she murmured. "Wasn't it enough that we suffered before?" she demanded, referring to the torturous months she had spent carrying Anya, when Henrik first made it clear he intended to be whatever she needed. "Wasn't it enough that I had to rebuild myself to give her a decent life?"

She did not usually speak of the initial struggle it had been to keep herself together immediately after she gave birth to Anya; she felt ashamed of the way she had had to fight to be a good mother to her own child. If it wasn't for Henrik, things may have gone so differently.

"It's a test," he replied, sitting next to her. "Life is just a test of our will and courage. It's a test of how strong we are as individuals and as a unit." Of course, Henrik had the answer. He always had the answers. But there were some things even his wise words could not heal anymore. There were things battering her from the inside out that he couldn't see.

Their eyes met and she kissed him hungrily, wanting to remember what it was to feel alive. She knew he had sensed this earlier when he had kissed her so softly; he had a knack for knowing when she needed him, even if he couldn't always see everything she hid from him. His hands slid under her black shirt, his hands on her bare waist. The electric feeling he elicited in her never faded over the years they spent together.

She crawled closer to him, kneeling next to him, and felt his arms wrap around her. She climbed onto him and kissed him desperately. She felt the same desperation from him even in the way he pulled her as close to him as he could. He never could tell her the full extent of his agony, but he knew how to show her the anguish she knew was flooding through him; Anya was not his blood, but she was his child more than she was Adam Cross'. When Anya hurt, Henrik hurt. It was as simple and as agonising as that.

She scrambled off of him and onto her feet, holding her hand out to him. He looked cautious. He always knew when she was using passion to avoid feeling the pain of her life. But he needed her as much as she needed him. She could always tell when he needed the reminder that he was human and therefore fragile.

His hand fell into hers and she gave him a sad smile before she slowly led him upstairs and kissed him softly but passionately at their bedroom door. His hand drifted to the handle, the other unbuttoning her shirt. With every touch, he dulled one ache in her, but dredged up another from her haunted battlefield of ghosts. It was reminiscent of the desperation to have him love her the night Eleanor had exploded in the hospital, revealing Serena was pregnant.

With every despairing kiss they added another ghost to the battlefield they shared the front line in. She felt her shirt fall from her shoulders onto the floor and she undid the first few buttons of his and pulled it over his head.

She did not pay attention for a minute or two, lost in a pit of darkness in which Henrik held the only source of light left, and before she knew it, he was pulling her gently onto the bed, his hands diluting her pain without bringing back her numbness.

Hope this is OK!
Please feel free to review and tell me what you think!
Sarah x