Sorry this has taken so long to write. Had a pretty crap week and I needed to sort myself out, so I put this on the back burner for a few days. Thanks to all who read and review.
Serena can't move; she can't believe Zosia is telling the truth. After all, what could possibly bring Alan here, all these years later? "Are you afraid of him?" she distantly hears Zosia say. "He's seems a perfectly pleasant man. And he's got a wife and a son with him, so he's not going to hurt you."
"He's got a son?" Serena manages to ask, turning to look at the F1.
"Two," she smiles. "And a daughter, but she's living in Canada at the moment. Apparently she's an engineering manager in Ontario. He's very proud of her. His youngest son is still at high school, and his middle child, he's working on the North Sea oil rigs. He loves to talk about them." Serena takes in the news that Shayna's father has built a successful and seemingly happy family...it makes her wonder if there is something so wrong with Shayna and herself that he had felt the need to kill them, yet here he is with another family.
"A family of engineers," she whispers. "Figures." She remembers Alan always has been very good at technical building and the knowledge behind it, and she can recall he was the one who always helped her in physics until she got the hang of it – it's a subject she has always despised, even at school level.
Zosia smiles slightly and replies, "He's waiting in the relatives' room. Would you like me to fetch him for you?"
Serena doesn't even know if she wants to see him; she wants his answers but she's terrified of him. She feels weak for it but it's true. She fears him because she almost died at his hands, and because he made an attempt on their daughter's life. Shayna can't know he's here or even who he is, because he will terrify her as much as he terrifies Serena. Just as everything has been looking up, into her life he wanders, probably to shatter all the pieces she has put back together. She should have known there would inevitably be a spanner in her precious works. She just never expected that spanner would be him.
"Ms. Campbell?" Zosia says, but it sounds vague, quiet...like she's a thousand miles away. Maybe she is, because Serena doesn't feel like the girl is next to her. She's thirty-two years in the past, threatened and vulnerable, her life on the line. She's young and confused once more, seeing the madness in her boyfriend's eyes.
Sound, light and time stand still as she tries to work out which version of herself she is. Is she sixteen and terrified or forty-eight and completely in control? Or are they the same person residing in this battered, bruised body? Does she need her mother or is she the mother who is needed? Is she safe or is she on the run? She feels her heart hammering in her chest, unable to remain calm much longer. She's remembered now why he sends her into a paralysis of fear. She can't face him. Of course she can't. She doesn't even really know why she even thought she can.
The monitors beep a warning that her heart is beating too fast and her blood pressure is rising. "Serena, calm down," Zosia says gently. She feels Zosia's slim hand in hers and it reminds her that she's here, with Zosia, and not in a bedroom with Alan Cumberland. "If you don't want to see him I can tell him you'll make a full recovery but that you're not well enough to see him. OK?"
Allowing herself to be a coward, Serena nods and tries to calm herself, concentrating on Zosia's hand squeezing lightly on her own, knowing nothing can touch her in the safety of the ward. Keller is safe. She should know that – she runs the place, after all. She knows Sacha is actually a little bit protective of her, and that Zosia has a kind heart beneath the hatred she aims mostly at her father.
Here, she is safe. All she needs to do is say something and her friends and colleagues will do their utmost to keep her and Alan apart; she is admittedly intrigued as to how his life has panned out, but that doesn't mean she's got the courage to see his face again. She can feel her heart return to its normal state as she begins to let the fear wash away from it. She's here, on Keller, very much alive. Nobody can lay their hands on her with these people around her.
She wants Ric, her rock, to be here but she knows she can't call on him every time she gets a fright. He would never get peace. "I'm getting your daughters in," Zosia asserts. Serena doesn't expect her to get involved but then she does know Zosia has a sense of what she feels is right and wrong for people. "You need your family around you."
"No," Serena flatly puts that idea out of the equation. "They need to sort themselves out and they can't do that with me between them. They need Edward and Ric to help them, not me. They're not going to come in here until they're speaking to each other."
"Alright," Zosia sighs. "Yes, I can understand that. The last thing you need is the stress of being piggy in the middle right now." Serena smiles, knowing she's won the girl around to her way of thinking. "However, I do want you to get some sleep." Serena knows she's right, acknowledging the tiredness in her head and bones from shifting wards. She smiles gently and settles down; her body settles but her mind speeds up, rushing back and forth in time until she has no idea what decade, county, country, continent, relationship or life she is in by the time she closes her eyes.
Faces morph into one another...Ric to Edward, Edward to Alan, Alan to Shayna, Shayna to Eleanor, Eleanor to Adrienne. Then Adrienne changes and she's looking in a mirror, standing in a hospital gown, her pale skin bruised and battered. The room around her spins in a whirl of hazed colours, light and darkness dancing through each other, and she can just about hear it moving around her. She looks around at the wonder of the lights and she doesn't know whether to feel fear or amazement.
She hears a cry, a baby's cry, and she turns on her heel, her mind working on sheer instinct. An old cot her father made stands at the wall, pink blankets and a little teddy bear in beside a baby. Serena's daughter. She turns to the mirror again for only a moment; she's sixteen, dressed in jeans and a sweater, her hair long and wavy. She picks up the baby and hushes her; if she's sixteen then the girl she holds now must be Shayna.
When Shayna doesn't stop wailing, Serena freezes up. Her mother will know what to do, so she sets Shayna gently back in her cot and runs down the stairs for her mum. "I'll just put this away and I'll be up in a minute, Rena," Adrienne tells her. With a sigh of relief Serena trudges back up the stairs; as much as she loves her baby girl, motherhood is exhausting, even with her parents' considerable input.
When she reaches the bedroom, she smiles as she sees the familiar figure of her loving boyfriend, standing over the cot. The baby is quiet, and Serena's heart leaps into her mouth when she sees why; he's holding a pillow down into the cot. Serena rushes over and knocks him away with all the force and strength her body possesses. Breathless, she shouts at him, "What the hell are you playing at?!" She stares at him and sees his eyes consumed in some sort of madness she's never seen before. He doesn't speak, and she wonders how he even got in here in her slight absence. It's then that she sees the open window, the sunlight and fragrant breeze flooding in. "You climbed in the window?! What's wrong with the front door?"
Again he remains silent but a flash crosses his eyes, and his faces contorts in rage, his hands bruising into her arms. She wrestles against him but in such close contact, her slim sixteen-year-old's body is no match for his adrenaline fuelled strength. She puts her foot forward, her heeled boot kicking his shin, knocking him back in shock. She dances around him, taking him as far away from their daughter as she possibly can.
He draws himself to his full height and advances towards her as she backs away from him. She feels the edge of the window sill against her lower back and wonders what on Earth has got into him. "Alan, stop," she calmly orders him, but it's clear he's not going to. What's happened to him, her loving, caring, adorable boyfriend?
She finds she's sitting on the window sill when he reaches out for her upper arms, gripping them tightly and pushing her back. She grabs onto the frame of the window for dear life, the stray splinters of wood digging into her skin.
There's only one thing left to do: scream. It may just save her life. "Dad!" she screams through the house, through the open door. "Dad, help me!" She feels the wind on her back and is acutely aware of the drop to the concrete patio below.
Ric strides back onto Keller with little patience for his own forgetfulness; the files he had meant to take with him to AAU are lying at the nurses' station, ready to be knocked over by Zosia March's elbow as her attention is absorbed by a yellow sticky note she stares at, caught between her thumb and index finger. "You look like you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders," he comments, scooping up the files before she can knock them over.
"Hmm," Zosia replies. "Someone came to see Ms. Campbell. She said she couldn't see him so he left this phone number in case she ever changes her mind. He seemed quite desperate to see her, really."
Ric says nothing, not wanting to say the wrong thing. Of course he wonders why a man would ask to see Serena, but it's not really his place. She's had a life before now – probably several lives – and he knows they will occasionally overlap. So when he does speak, he says, "He's probably just a university friend or something."
"She seemed a bit-" Zosia begins, but she is promptly cut off.
A scream splits through Keller, shattering the air into a million broken, stunned pieces. The rest of the ward falls silent, only making the terrified sound seem louder and shriller as it echos through the still and shocked atmosphere. Ric turns to the direction from which the noise comes, and finds it's an unconscious Serena making the racket. "Dad!"she screams out.
Ric runs to her, his hand instinctively falling gently onto her face. "Serena," he says. "Wake up!" Still sleeping, she screams again, and this time he shakes her shoulder as he repeats, "Wake up, Serena!"
Her eyes open suddenly and she moves with a start until she realises it's him ad not whoever she's been dreaming of. "Ric," she breathes out. He exchanges a worried look with Zosia, who stands on the other side of the bed with a concerned and slightly frightened expression, obviously shaken by Serena's loss of control while she was sleeping. "What's happened? Shouldn't you be on AAU?"
"AAU can wait," Ric dismisses her worries. "You need me right now, and Raf can hold the fort a while longer."
"Who says I need you?" she asks him, her eyes defensive and darker than usual.
"Your screams," he tells her, his answer simple and true. He sits down and nods to Zosia, who willingly leaves them, looking like she can't get out of there fast enough. "Serena, you're going to have to let me in. What's happened?"
She stares at him and he knows she wants to tell him everything, but she's struggling to explain it or even get the words from her heart to her mouth. "You don't want to know," she whispers to him, but it's clear in her eyes that she wants him to listen, and to want to be there for her.
"I want to know."
Reviews/comments welcome.