A/N: So. Happy New Year. Thanks, as always, to everyone who is reading and reviewing :)

Sarah x

Serena watched Ric intently as he stood before her; what was he playing at? Why did he persist with her every time she tried to walk away? She stepped back from him when his stare started to burn through her, realising with great discomfort that he saw more than she wanted him to see; she hadn't known that he could read her like that.

"Ric," she said quietly and hoarsely, her voice broken with agony. "Please, just leave me alone. Please." She turned and walked away but he pulled her by the hand off the bottom step back onto the landing. When he forced her to turn, his arm snaked around her upper back. The contact moved something within her, causing her eyes to sting with tears. It was testament to her humanity and therefore her fragility that she unwillingly leaned into him rather than struggle against his kindness.

At the bottom of the stairs, near the door of the lowermost stairwell, stood her father, just gazing up at her. A broken man staring up at his broken daughter, he looked as haunted as she was feeling. She was convinced people thought she was crazy by now. She gave her ex-husband a fair smack in the one situation that he really didn't deserve it. A couple of hours later she had kissed him. Mary-Claire Carter had jumped the toilet stall to see that she made it out of the bathrooms and back into the fire she had to face. She had broke down on top of Jac Naylor, of all people, and Elliot Hope had felt the need to wish her well, hug her and kiss her cheek. And now Ric was trying to break through to her, and she was terrified to let him for fear he would despise her.

Normally she could not care less what people thought of her, but this was different. This was a matter so deeply ingrained in her, so much a part of her, that she had to respect that people would take different views on it of they knew – hence why she kept it all a secret until now.

"Is Edward's face any better?" she asked as a distraction from the figure staring up at her.

"Not really," Ric admitted. "There's still swelling on his cheek, jaw and nose. It'll get worse before it gets better. But then you know that." How did he know she was avoiding the subject? It was like he knew her intention before she even finished what she was beginning. It was so frustrating that for a moment she wanted to turn around and throttle him. Even if he irritated her with good intent, she was annoyed by his foresight.

Together they stood, backs to the wall, and she felt the reassuring weight of his hand on her side, his arm around her back. They sank to the floor and just sat together as Serena contemplated the whole situation in silence.

In her eyes, this was her own fault. She shouldn't have gone with her father. But would he have done it anyway? Would he have stepped out if he had not been able to see his daughter one last time? She had told herself for so long that he wouldn't have but time and experience brought home the fact he was ill and his mind hadn't worked right. So maybe he would have. She would just never know.

Today she had been taken by surprise and it had forced it all to the surface of her own mind, causing her to slam up against her own walls – the walls that, ironically, she had built to protect herself. It had influenced her emotions and her mentality. It had caused her to throw punches and harsh words, and break down bit by bit until she everything she had created, the persona she kept, was stripped away.

Serena looked around at Ric, her face mere inches from his. "Ric, I am so sorry," she said. "My behaviour today has been completely out of line."

She waited for his response but a verbal one never came; instead he just squeezed her into his side for only a moment. Was that her forgiven? As simply and as easily as that?

"Why are you..." she began, but she couldn't find the right words to describe what he was doing without sounding like a right old sap. She searched his face for any indication that he had some kind of ulterior motive. All she saw was that he was worried, and that he was staring at her with the same intensity she stared at him.

Ric seemed to see right through her when he said, "You know, I just want you to be able to stop hurting. That's all I want." She took that as a probably rightful dig at Edward, and realised that, actually, Ric Griffin held more respect for her than Edward Campbell did. A theory he quickly proved. "And I wouldn't kiss you, even if you asked me to."

Serena raised an eyebrow at him. "Am I really that repulsive?" she demanded.

"Not at all," he replied, seemingly affronted by her apparent offence at his words. "But I know that you would only be even more confused by it, and I wouldn't do that to you!" he insisted.

In spite of her pain, she let a smile break across her face. "Joking," she assured him. "I'm only joking. You are so easy to wind up."

"Speak for yourself," he grumbled. He smiled slightly nonetheless, accepting that her sense of humour had not evaded her completely. "So. Are you going to tell me?" he asked her softly.

"Tell you what?" she retorted. She didn't want to tell him. What if he couldn't stand by what he said? What if he ended up hating her? It would have been more than she could take for Ric to hate her. She didn't even know if he would hear her out.

Zosia March passed them, shooting them a look of confusion, and it dawned on Serena that the young doctor would have seen what happened on Darwin. And she had spotted Zosia and Jac speaking earlier on, and they had looked worried as the had glanced into Mrs. Munro's room. She knew the F1 had a love for psychiatry, and she only hoped there would be no psychoanalysing of her reactions and situations today.

Her attention was drawn by Ric once more when he spoke as Zosia rounded the corner out of sight and through the door to the cafeteria. "Why you punched Edward. Why you kissed him. Why you've been crying," he listed. "Oh, and why you think I will hate you." She sighed slightly, knowing she would have to tell him sooner or later. He would not give up until she told him. "Who is she?" Ric asked. "Mrs. Munro. Who is she?"

"She was my teacher for Primary Six and Seven," Serena replied gently.

"You went to school in Scotland?" He sounded surprised, and she knew why. There wasn't a trace of Scotland in anything she said or did, and she had trained herself out of all the learned behaviour instilled into her in primary school.

"For a few years," she allowed. "I left when I was eleven. Moved back to Surrey with Mum." She looked around to see a look of confusion on his face.

"Why didn't your dad go with you?" he asked her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall; he had already said he knew she grew up with only her mother. How he knew that, she wasn't sure, but she had to accept that he had watched her and figured her out.

"He was dead and buried," she admitted. It came out harsher than she had intended, but it was the truth and it could not be avoided.

"I'm sor-"

"Don't," she stopped him. When she risked a glance at him, she saw he was taken aback by her reaction. "Don't be sorry. Not for me. Be sorry for my mother. She's the innocent in all this," she acknowledged. Though Adrienne had lied, she had done so with the best of intentions with only one goal: to protect her daughter.

"You're an innocent too, Serena," he said.

"I'm a killer. How can I be an innocent?" she asked. Now she had said it, there was no taking it back. "He's dead because of me." Contrary to her expectations, she found saying it easier this time around. The ache in her heart remained but the acute ripping and breaking had diminished, allowing her heart to open to the man next to her. "If I had stayed in my bed, he might have lived."

"What happened?"

"He was ill. Well, I didn't know that," she allowed. "I didn't think he ill like that. I didn't know his mind was broken. You know the old psych hospital in Hillside? Sunnyside?" she asked him. He nodded slightly. "That's why we moved to Scotland, so they could treat him."

Ric didn't speak for a moment, but he put his arm around her shoulders. "You lived with a mentally ill parent?"

"I can remember he wasn't always ill. It started when I was about four or five. I remember he used to lose the plot over nothing," she explained quietly. "The highs usually made him hyper and scatterbrained. He didn't sleep. He spoke absolute rubbish. He got drunk and bought ridiculous things we didn't even need. And then there were the bad times," she recalled. "The times when he tried to kill Mum. He battered her black and blue and he didn't even know what he was doing. He tried to kill himself a few times and that was when Mum put her foot down," said Serena. She realised only now that this was the first time she had explained exactly what her dad was like in the last few years of his life. "Only I didn't know that. At the age of seven, how could I know he was so ill?"

"You couldn't," he said. "What happened to him?" She looked at him, terrified to tell him how her actions had set deadly wheels in motion. Her father walked up the stairs towards her and leaned against the banister; she felt his stare burning through and looked away. "Serena?"

"When I was eleven, he escaped Sunnyside in the dead of night," she explained. "He came for me and, being an idiot, I climbed out my window and went with him. He took me to the train tracks and we stood there. When I heard a train coming, I walked off the tracks but he stayed and the train came and..."

"It hit him," Ric finished for her. She nodded silently. "So how can all this be your fault?"

"I shouldn't have let him die," she explained. Wasn't that obvious?

"If you hadn't, you'd be dead too," he reminded her. "Eleanor would never have been brought into this world. Edward wouldn't have had a wife in you, or a child with you. Your mother would have been alone in the world. I never would have met you. The lives of everyone you know would be a little emptier."

She stared into his eyes and saw his words were sincere and genuine, and it warmed her slightly to realise he would miss her if she wasn't there. "I shouldn't have gone with him in the first place," she added.

"You were a child," Ric protested. "You couldn't know any better."

She was deeply shocked that he hadn't got up and walked away from her in disgust. She had been expecting him to tell her she was stupid for going with him, and cold-blooded for allowing her own dad to die. "You don't hate me?" she asked hesitantly.

Ric shook his head, pulling her in tight. "No. I think you've been through hell and you're still here to tell me the tale," he replied. She hesitated for a moment before she allowed her head to fall gently onto his shoulder. She felt his hand move up and stroke her hair and her cheek, his arm still around her. "You can't have known what would have happened. It's not your fault. None of it is. You can stop torturing yourself."

She nodded and leaned into him, watching her dad vanish into thin air, Mary-Claire Carter walking through the spot he had only a moment ago stood in. The young redhead gave her a warm, understanding smile from the top of the next stairwell, and Serena smiled back. Mary-Claire had been right. Facing it was better for her than to keep running for the rest of her life.

Hope this is OK!
Please feel free to leave me a review and tell me your thoughts!
Sarah x