A/N: This is quite sad, even for me, so I hope it doesn't upset anyone. And thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed!

Sarah x

Hanssen looked at his watch. He had been sitting there an hour. She had said nothing to him in that time. Not a single word. And it worried him. Forty minutes ago, she had opened her laptop and was borderline obsessively typing away.

"Are you going to speak?" he finally sighed, his head in his hands as he grew more and more tired of her attitude. She was silent; she wouldn't even look at him. "I'll take that as a resounding no," he sighed.

He realised now that he had gone about it wrong. After internally working it out in his mind, he had still managed to sound incredibly harsh and unfeeling. He almost wished she had slapped him. He felt he would have deserved it; he had known there was a chance that it was a sensitive subject, and still his brain had not processed the question before he said it. And so here he sat on her office floor, ignored by Serena and feeling like an idiot.

"I know that sounded coarse," he admitted into the silence. "I didn't think." Still nothing. This was driving him mad and he knew she was doing it deliberately in the hope he would go away and leave her alone.

It was obvious to Henrik that she didn't have the energy to fight him on this. She had energy – plenty of it – but not enough to fight him. And that just left ignorance as her only weapon. The silent treatment. She was returning the cruelty, and he couldn't really blame her. He hadn't gone about asking her in a very sensitive manner and now it was blatantly obvious that he had wounded her.

He watched her intently; she was carefully avoiding looking at him. Her fingers were typing rapidly, like she was using the clacking of the keys to distract her from his presence on her floor.

There was a knock on the door, and Michael Spence stepped in, his gaze falling onto Hanssen. "Um, you do know Mr. Hanssen is sitting on you floor, don't ya, Rena?" he asked happily.

"Don't ask, Michael," Serena sighed. "Just don't bother. And stop calling me that!" she ordered him. Henrik knew Michael wasn't going to stop calling her that, and he knew Serena didn't really care. She was just trying to maintain her appearances.

"OK, OK!" Michael exclaimed. "Jeez. Somebody needs to go on the happy pill."

"Funny," Serena snapped, not looking away from her screen. "What did you want?" she demanded. He handed her a form, presumably for her to sign off on surgery. She scanned it and signed it, but Michael didn't leave.

"Is everything alright?" he asked them cautiously. Hanssen didn't speak for fear of making matters worse, and Serena didn't either. "Serena?" he persisted. "You could cut the atmosphere with a knife."

Henrik watched as she thought about how to get rid of the American. She finally said, "I'm a big girl, Michael. I can handle the Grim Reaper and all his many failings," she drawled. "Sensitivity being one of them."

"What?" Michael asked, his face and voice full of pure confusion.

"I'm sorry! Alright? I am sorry!" Hanssen exclaimed, finally at his wit's end with her obvious torment and merciless ignorance.

"Hold up," Michael said, raising his hands. "What have you got to apologise for?"

"Get out, Michael!" Hanssen and Serena shouted together, both annoyed with his attempts at intervention. Michael was taken aback at their aggressiveness as they both grew more and more frustrated with him. He did leave but not before he gave them both a worried glance; Hanssen knew Serena's time on AAU had made them fairly close. Close by Serena's standards, at least. He knew Michael was quietly protective of Serena now, hence the reason he was the only person in the hospital who got off with using her pet name.

"Serena, will you please just say something to me?"

She didn't reply. She was torturing him now and there was no doubt in his mind that she was doing it on purpose. She had to realise that he hated it. She was acting as if he wasn't there, just a part of the wall he was leaning against.

She closed her laptop and he realised she was about to leave; he got to his feet and beat her to the door, blocking her path so she would have no choice but to talk. "Move," she snarled up at him. He stared down on her and watched the anger bubble to the surface. "Bloody hell!" she growled. He felt a blow to his chest as she hit him. She did it again in an effort to force him away from the door. Again and again, she battered his chest until he caught her wrists and stopped her.

He met her eyes and saw there was something seriously wrong. There was something ghostly about her stare.

Adding to this ghostliness was the fact that her face had drained white.

"Henrik, get out of my way before I seriously hurt you," she warned. She meant it. He could tell from the way her face was slightly contorted in anguish and wrath; she really had been hurt by what he had said. Of course, that meant that, not only had he said it the worst way he possibly could have done, but the answer was not something she liked to share.

"No," he replied sternly. He wasn't going to be beaten by her. Especially when her beating him wasn't in the good interests of either of them. He had thought the car accident had been the one real trauma in her life. What if he had been wrong? What if it was just the tip of the iceberg?

He had not released her hands. She would only have started hitting him again, or tried to move him some other way. "Henrik, please," she said. Her eyes were shining again, but not with playfulness and wickedness. It was a haunted radiance shining in her eyes. There was something she had tried to leave behind her, and he had just dragged it up in the clumsiest possible fashion.

It was that ghostly look that made him pull her into a tight cuddle. He hated to see her pained, and knowing he had brought up the cause just made things infinitely worse. She struggled against him but he just held her tighter in the knowledge that, whether or not she cared to admit it, he had caused her pain and he was deeply sorry for it.

"I'm sorry, Serena," he told her quietly. "I didn't mean to upset you."

She stopped struggling and let her arms slip around him. She had accepted his apology at last. He put a hand on the back of her head and held it to his chest. "Please, just tell me," he said, sharply aware of the pleading note in his voice. She shook her head and he sighed. He already had his suspicions about it. He didn't want to believe it, but he was starting to think the injuries might have been deliberate. It was the only reason he could find for her being so defensive over it.

He put her at arms' length and attempted to read her guarded face, to no avail. Instead of trying to talk it out of her, he decided to try something else. If it worked, very good. If it didn't, though, it was probably going to earn him a fairly hard smack.

His hands dropped carefully from her shoulders, down her arms to her hands. Her shaking hands. Since when did Serena Campbell tremble? He gave her a look of warning which she seemed to accept and took the hem of her top in his fingers, slowly lifting it to reveal her pale stomach. The thin white scars were far more visible under the bright light of the office than in her dimly lit bedroom. There were more of them than he had originally thought.

She looked up at him, and he met her gaze only briefly. "Henrik," she whispered with a trace of a warning in her tone. He traced his fingers over her skin, feeling the raised lines. She turned her head away from him and stared at the wall. She couldn't even look at him. They were sprawled across her skin right up to her ribcage, just below her bra.

He saw her face – only the side of it – and saw her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

"There are so many," he whispered. The tears spilled over and she angrily wiped them away. He couldn't comprehend how much pain they must have caused her at the time. "How old are they?" he asked her. She bit her lip and tried to stem the flood of tears, still refusing to look at him. "Serena?"

She breathed deeply for a moment; he felt her diaphragm move under his hand. "Thirty years, give or take," she answered him, though her voice came out in little more than a whimper.

She had been a teenager when this happened. The unpleasant feeling he had before now was growing. "Just tell me the truth," he said. He was dreading the answer. He finally asked the one question he did not want to ask her. "Serena, did you do this to yourself?"

She would not look at him, and he realised that she was ashamed. He didn't need her to speak to confirm it; her face told him it was what happened. She started to properly cry, her breath catching in her throat as she kept almost choking; her face had tears streaming down it and he now saw that, like the car accident, she had never spoken of this.

It made him wonder how she had managed to hide it for thirty years. Was she just exceptionally good at hiding it? Or had others seen it and not cared enough to ask?

He couldn't understand it. She had slept with him knowing he would see this. Was it just that nobody had asked before and she assumed he wouldn't bother either? But he wasn't her ex-husband and he actually did care. He cared about her more than he ever thought was possible and to see her like this broke his heart.

He put her top down and let his hands rest on her upper arms. She still didn't turn to look at him. It was almost like she was scared to see what he was thinking. What he thought of her.

"Oh, Serena," he sighed. He could see in her face that she expected him to walk away from her now that he knew the things she had done to herself, but he didn't want to walk away. He wanted to know why. He wanted to know what drove her to do it.

Bearing this in mind, he took a step towards her and put his arms protectively around her body. She flinched slightly at his touch, obviously surprised at his reaction. And then she cried. And cried. And cried. And he held her with all his strength. This was the secret she had been keeping all this time. The crash had only partially screwed her up; her teenage years had done a bigger job on her.

He pressed his face into her hair. "Ssh," he whispered to her softly. "It's alright."

What else could he do?

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