A/N: Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed :) Much appreciated. Hope this is an alright chapter - not entirely sure about the whole Jonny thing.
Sarah x
Serena wandered the corridors aimlessly, though she constantly avoided one certain hallway. She didn't know what to do. Just when all of this had begun to fade into the background of her life, that woman turned up and spun her world the wrong way around. She needed to forget. She needed something to dull the madness.
She looked around, finding she was on the ground floor. Just outside AAU. She swung the doors open with confidence she didn't possess, and looked around her. Michael was in the back corner, Gemma at bed seven, Chrissie at bed four, Sacha obsessing over the computer. She went to sit in Michael's office, remembering the things said and done here. How she'd backed into the wall, fearing Michael would hurt her and begged him not to. How she'd hugged the departed Eddi McKee, warning her to keep out of harm's way. Hanssen telling her to stay put and making the conscious decision to lie to him and go searching for her worst nightmare.
She opened his top drawer and found a bottle of whisky; she'd long since learned to tolerate the awful taste when she realised how hard forgetting could be. She knew it was wrong, but she couldn't very well walk out of the hospital without getting caught. The next option was getting drunk, and praying no-one found her.
She slipped the bottle under her arm, hiding it under her long shirt. She shut the door behind her, trying not to look as guilty as she felt. "Everything alright, Ms. Campbell?"
"Yeah, fine," she painted a smile on her face, out of nothing more than habit. "I'd like to speak to Michael though. It's quite important."
"Sure," Sacha smiled. "I'll just take over from him," he added, walking away. Serena hid the bottle of whisky under the mess of files at the nurses' station and turned to wait for Michael. It wasn't long before the cocky American approached her with a broad friendly grin.
"What's up?" he asked. She sighed and leaned against the desk, wondering how she was meant to explain it.
"Right," she groaned. "I thought – well, Ric thought – I ought to tell you before it gets spread around the county," she began. "Remember Fraser Pickering?" she asked.
"As if I could forget what he put you through," Michael said, his face twisted into an expression of total disgust.
"Well, his step-sister has appeared on Keller."
"Oh, the joys."
"And it transpires that she reported me missing in 1994," Serena confessed, searching his face for a reaction to this news. He didn't say anything so she kept speaking. "I never knew, but she told Hanssen. I think she was trying to prove that I was who she thought," she rambled on.
"So, what, your name is on the missing persons' register?" he asked, obviously confused.
"As Serena McKinnie," she explained. "With a picture of me at a party when I was twenty-five."
"Oh, I have gotta see this," he grinned. She glared at him and he immediately said, "Sorry. That was inappropriate."
"No, do you think?" she sneered sarcastically, not entirely sure why she was taking all of this out on a man who was always going to try and save her. "Look, the point is, I don't want to answer any ridiculous questions, alright? Not until I know the answers myself."
"You talked to this woman yet?" Michael asked. Serena didn't answer, mainly because she knew he didn't need to hear her say it to know. "Didn't think so. You know you gotta do it, right?"
She just walked away from him, leaving the bottle of whisky where she'd hidden it. She couldn't bear to hear another person try and tell her she had to confront yet another ghost trying to haunt her. She stalked out of AAU, deciding to go to Albie's and buy a bottle of wine and hide in the corner, contemplating her miserable existence. She'd made attempts at happiness before – marriage being the most misguided of her efforts – but nothing ever really stuck for her. There was always a reminder of the evil in every single person.
When she reached the bar, she asked and paid for a bottle of wine and a single glass. The young barmaid seemed worried for her, a lone woman ordering a whole bottle of wine in the afternoon with no intentions of sharing it with anyone. Serena knew her true intentions must have been blindingly obvious but she didn't really care much for what others thought of her.
She took what she bought to the table in the back corner, pouring herself a generous glass. She wanted it to wash today's shock and pain away, which it was doing perfectly well. But as it did so, quick film cuts from twenty years ago began to replay themselves in her mind, made hazy by time and alcohol combined.
She remembered the days of being a junior doctor, and early mornings and late nights and short skirts and binge drinking and getting lost on the wrong side of town. Her best friend, her flatmate, the fair, elegant Mariah Martin, by her side every day and night. Mariah, by that point, was a trainee nurse on the ward Serena was placed on, so as fellow girls at the bottom of the food chain, they'd inevitably found a bond and quickly became friends.
The clubbing and pub crawling, the insane food dares, the whole nights out where neither of them paid for a single drink themselves. The best of friends. Closer than sisters. In a time where Serena was removed from the safety of her family, Mariah had been her saving grace. Mariah's step-brother too. The kind brotherly love Fraser gave them both meant they never felt alone.
All that was fine and good until one night it all went wrong. Serena had been tired and uptight, revising for an assessment she was due to take the next morning. Eleven o'clock at night, she and Mariah had realised they'd not eaten since midday, so the young nurse had left Serena and Fraser to go to the nearest takeaway.
She recalled how Fraser had come bounding down the stairs, asking where Mariah had gone, and how she'd answered with nothing more than her destination, concentrating too hard on her studies to give any more information without losing her train of thought – the twenty-six-year-old Serena McKinnie had not been as disciplined as Serena Campbell all these years later.
The clothes she'd worn that night had been nothing special; leggings and a jumper, her hair in a scruffy, loose knot, the shorter strands framing her pale, tired face. She remembered him telling her she was pretty, and her ignoring him, trying to concentrate on what she was reading.
The line being crossed. Him touching her face from the sofa as she'd been keeling on the floor over the coffee table. His strong hands on her arms. Her telling him to stop. Trying to throw away his grasp. Being dragged up by the elbows, protesting the whole time.
"Ms. Campbell?"
A man's voice, heavily accented, pulled her from her past, and she realised she was drunk. The bottle was empty. She looked up and vaguely recognised, with a sense of deja vu, Jonny Maconie standing over her looking troubled beyond his years.
"You do realise you missed your theatre slot and half the hospital's looking for you?" he asked, and she saw that concerned look on his face yet again. "Oh, for Christ's sake," he sighed. "You're drunk, aren't you?"
"Hmmm," she groaned, finding herself incapable of stringing a proper sentence together. "Maybe."
"Of course you are," he said. "Come on. Time for you to sleep this off. Come with me."
"No," she replied as he tried to help her to her feet, pulling her arm from his gentle hand.
"You really think I'm going to hurt you?" he challenged her with the knowledge he wouldn't have got within a million miles of Jac Naylor had the defensive redhead perceived him as a danger to her safety. "Come on, Serena," he ordered her with her first name.
"Ric," she managed to say, but she couldn't work out her words to say what she wanted. Her alcohol-confused brain was working at a snail's pace.
"Do you want me to get him for you?"
"No," she said.
"Alright," he sighed, helping her to her feet. "I'll sweet talk Jac into letting you sleep in the Darwin on-call room then."
He helped her back to the hospital, sneaking her up to the lift, and getting in, leaving them alone for a short while. They got out at the sixth floor and Serena felt Jonny guide her to the on call room, but not before they were caught by the ever-watchful Jac Naylor. He sat her on the bed and closed the door before leaving, but she still heard the conversation that followed.
"What's going on, Jonny?" she heard Jac demand.
"You know how Hanssen told anyone who wasn't needed in theatre or on the ward to look for Serena Campbell? I found her drunk at Albie's."
"How drunk?"
"Drunk enough she can only say the words no and Ric."
"We'll have to let her sober up," Jac's worried voice sighed. "Hanssen and Ric can't get to know. And she needs a babysitter."
"Tara?"
Jac laughed and said, "No. Serena would eat that one alive. You'll have to do it. I can get Mary-Claire to cover you."
"You are kidding?" Jonny almost yelped. Serena was almost amused; why was everyone scared of her when she was too intoxicated to be frightening? "She doesn't like me."
"That doesn't matter. You just have to get her to sleep and keep an eye on her. Something must've happened. She was doing so well up until now."
"You don't think she's been attacked again, do you?"
"No," Jac said cautiously, "but I do think she's been spooked again."
"And you want me to look after her?!" Jonny argued with his girlfriend. "Wouldn't a woman be better?"
"No. You're the best person for it, Jonny. You're sensitive enough but you won't let her walk all over you. Please, Jonny," Jac said.
Jonny, caving at Jac's pleading tone, groaned and said, "Fine. You owe me."
"Thanks."
The door opened and Serena blearily met his eyes. "Right, Ms. Campbell," he sighed. "I've been assigned babysitting duty. And I'm afraid it's either me or Tara Lo, and she'd be positively inept at this."
He bent down and unzipped her boots before standing her up to get the covers from underneath her. He sat her down, swung her legs around. Her head fell onto the pillow and he pulled the duvet over her, right up to her chin. She felt her body succumbing to alcohol. She felt tired, lifeless and yet terrified. She should have known alcohol only made everything worse in the end; she was drunk and she was still scared out of her mind.
Jonny pulled up a chair next to her and sat down, reaching out and brushing her hair out of her eyes. She looked at him, making out his unsettled expression and worried stance.
She began to fall asleep, alcohol taking her body over at last, whether she liked it or not. The last things she heard before she finally dropped of was Jonny's deeply Scottish voice singing her to sleep.
"Now you search the open evening sky, trace the memory in your eyes, for the prophet's hard rain and deluge lies in tears around your door; once there were trees and livestock here," he sang, and she found his deep voice calming. "A mother's love, the warnings clear; you chose to turn away from fear, breathing free," he continued, his hand stroking her cheek lightly. "Once in a lifetime, you live and love; once in a lifetime, you die; once in a moment, the sun goes down; protect and survive, protect and survive."
Hope this is OK!
Please feel free to review and tell me your thoughts!
Sarah x