A/N: Sorry for not posting this. Could have sworn I did though! Oooops!

Sarah and Caja xxxx

"Eddi, we need a GS consultant," Sacha decided, taking in the two sisters in front of him. One, the youngest, was perfectly fine, but the other had a badly ruptured spleen due to a rather nasty fall down three flights of stairs. "Right," he said as he pondered to himself before finally coming to a decision. "Eddi call Mr. Hanssen, please." she nodded and half-jogged to the phone at the nurses' station.

It was after only a few minutes that the Swedish consultant arrived on AAU, and the little colour that he had drained from his face at the sight that greeted him. After spending a minute to gather his composure he strode over to join Sacha and Eddi. He was mildly aware of noise around him then of something that he assumed to be the patient's medical records being thrust into his hands but, try as he might Henrik could see the woman's shaky hands and jerky limbs, her head twitching randomly. "This is Shayna Drew, and her sister Caitlin," Sacha introduced them. "And this is Mr. Hanssen. He's the Director of Surgery here at Holby."

Henrik nodded as he took the notes from Sacha. He was right. Brilliant. He had known about his own situation barely twenty-four hours, and already he was forced to stare his future in the face. This woman, the notes stated, suffered from Huntington's disease. At the young age of just thirty-one, she was trembling and twitching, often unable to make sense of things, with poor coordination, which was probably what caused the fall that damaged her spleen so badly.

He watched as the younger of the two sisters, Caitlin, placed a hand on Shayna's. Shayna threw it from her, glaring at her little sister. "Get away from me. Go on, get lost," she snarled. "You don't want to be here, so why don't you just go to hell?"

Henrik sighed inwardly as Caitlin's hazel eyes filled with tears. They reminded him of how Sahira's beautiful dark eyes had looked when she had found out…Caitlin pushed her thick, honey curls from her face, picked up her bag and gave her one last look before walking away. Eddi went to go after her, but Hanssen stopped her. "I'll deal with it," Hanssen said to her quietly, pulling her back gently towards Sacha and Shayna. He then followed after her, and found that she hadn't got out of the ward before she had broken down in tears. She sat on the floor, opposite the nurses' station, weeping into her hands. She had probably taken that sort of treatment for a while now, and it seemed that this was what had finally cut it, what finally got the better of her.

Chrissie had seen Caitlin fall to the floor in tears and was about to go and comfort her before Henrik signalled, in the politest way possible, to resume work and let him deal with her. He put out his trembling hand out and shook his head, before going to stand in front of Caitlin's crouched form. He looked down on her and realised that, as a child, he had been in exactly the same position – leaning against a wall with his head in his hands, crying his eyes dry – many times before.

Hanssen sat down next to her and pulled her hands away from her face. "She h-hates me," Caitlin sobbed. "Maybe it's because she's g-got it and I haven't..." she trailed off. Henrik shook his head sadly. He knew exactly how Caitlin felt about this, and he had been a seven-year-old child when his aunt finally took it upon herself to explain why his mother shrieked at him for the slightest mistake, why she bawled at him in front of his friends. That she didn't mean a word of it.

"She doesn't hate you," he contradicted her gently. "It's the disease. It sounds like a cliché, I know, but it's the truth." He felt a stab of empathy towards her. He understood why she would believe that Shayna hated her.

"I know that, I guess," Caitlin agreed with a heavy sigh. "We went through the same thing with Mum. I remember when I was fifteen, I tried to run off. Shayna came running after me and told me that Mum loved us. She told me she couldn't help it. It took a while, but I did accept that." She looked up at Hanssen's face. He seemed tired, and she saw his hands trembling slightly. "She's just so horrible sometimes that I wonder what she actually feels for me."

"Caitlin, listen to me," ordered Henrik sternly. "Shayna loves you. I know how it feels, and you will always doubt whether or not she does when she lashes out, but she honestly does love you."

"And how would you know?" Caitlin returned with a sad smile.

"Because my mother… because my mother died of the disease herself when I was nine years old," he answered her frankly. "I thought she absolutely despised me. It was only when she screamed at me on my seventh birthday that her sister explained to me that she didn't hate me like I thought she did." He heaved a sigh. So that was what Sahira had to look forward to, was it? Listening to him hurl abuse at her, making her think that he detested her?

He put his strong arm around the woman's shoulders, pulling her closer to him. It was unusual for him to do so, but he had felt the same pain as she did, and he knew how agonising it was to doubt how your closest family felt you. He could feel her sobbing against his chest, her head resting jut under his chin as tried to cling to some kind of comfort from someone who truly understood what she felt. "How do you know you don't have it?" he asked her gently.

"Shayna and I made a pact when I was eleven and we knew Mum really was going to die from this," she began. "We decided that, as soon as I turned sixteen, we would both get tested. She was nineteen by then, and Mum was at the stage where she couldn't do anything for herself anymore." She noticed his shaking hands again and it occurred to her that maybe he was ill with the same disease as he big sister. "You have it, don't you?"

"Yes," he replied. "I have it. Just like my mother before me and her mother before her." He pushed Caitlin up gently until her back was straight. He helped her to her feet and she looked up at him with a kind of gratefulness he was not accustomed to. Something he had only really seen in Sahira's eyes before. "Do you forgive Shayna?" he asked her softly.

"Of course I do," she replied with a sad laugh. "How can I not?" Hanssen nodded and guided her back to her sister, back to the surprised faces of Sacha and Eddi. Caitlin sat in the chair next to her big sister's bed.

"I'm sorry," Shayna mumbled, looking at Caitlin's tear stained face. "I didn't mean to."

"I know that, Shayna. I know," Caitlin replied, kissing Shayna's head. Sacha smiled with Eddi, but Henrik could not force his face to join them. He knew that, whatever he said to Sahira when he got to this stage, she would always forgive him. Like Caitlin had pointed out to him, how could she not?

Henrik then went back into his Director of Surgery mode, explaining that, while he was allowing Mr. Levy to perform this procedure, he would be the supervising consultant. That she would be perfectly fine once the splenectomy was completed. He bade the four of them goodbye and headed to the exit.

He walked straight into Chrissie Williams, who gave him a look of concern. "Are you alright, Mr. Hanssen?" she asked him. "You look a bit pale," she commented.

Nothing to do with the fact I just stared my future in the face, he retorted sarcastically in his head. He could not help letting it show, just a little. There was, after all, only so much that one could keep hidden from the rest of the world. And considering that he had just found out he had Huntington's disease, and that the person closest to him was the victim of repeated violence, he thought he was doing rather well.

"I'm fine," he finally answered her. She looked his face over again, this time taking in the dark marks under his eyes, the strange greyness of his skin, and the general exhausted look about him. It was clear to her that this was a man who was not fine. This was a man who was pretending there was nothing wrong when nothing was right.

"You dealt with Caitlin Drew very well," she told him, turning to look at the sisters from the corner of the ward. Shayna was twitching and jerking while Caitlin gripped her hand tightly, and appeared to be singing a song quietly to calm Shayna. "I don't know if I would cope if I was in her position."

"I'm sure you would," he assured her in a rare moment of mildness. "You might get angry once in a while, but then you would remember that they can't help what they say. You would always forgive them, because you know it's always the disease." He gazed at Shayna; she reminded him of what his mother was like when he was little. Like Shayna, she twitched and shook and jerked her limbs involuntarily, and she screamed at him out of the blue, sometimes terrifying him. "It was always the disease," he said sadly to himself.

As he walked away from Chrissie, heard Sacha approach her and ask her, "Is he OK?"

He very distantly heard her reply of, "I don't think so. He looks so tired."

To be honest, Henrik couldn't care less about what the others thought they knew. After all, this was the hospital where everyone gossiped about everyone else, rarely getting the facts right. He did care, however, about what Sahira would have to face; that is, if she was still serious about living with him. Henrik smiled outwardly as he recalled the look of shear shock in Sahira's eyes when it had accidentally slipped out that he wanted her to move in.

Still though, he couldn't shake the feeling that if even Chrissie Williams, who he only saw about three times a week, had noticed his decline, then it wouldn't be long until others would start to query, until questions would soon have to be answered. He had,though, found a kind of hope and a kind of sanctuary in these times. He had found a thing that seemed to make the whole world seem better, someone to make everything seem alright. And he had found it in Sahira.

Hope it was alright!

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Sarah and Caja xxxx