Author: Regency

Title: Love Is a Promise (Don't Leave Me)

Contains: Grief/Mourning, Temporary Character Death

Summary: AU. Serena comes home the day after Bernie's funeral to an unexpected guest.

Author's Notes: Come flail with me about Berena and everything that went horribly wrong on Tumblr, at sententiousandbellicose!

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters, settings, or stories recognizable as being from Holby City. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

The day of Bernie's funeral dawned for Serena at 2:19 in the morning, well ahead of the rising sun, and she remained awake for hours afterward, unable to stomach another night dreaming of Bernie and what became of her. What they used to be.

Bernie would be buried after the service. Or rather, they'd bury an empty coffin in a plot bearing her name. There wasn't a body to bring home, just a resounding silence from the army and a lack of hope. It was the same, after a fashion. Bernie's absence was a death sentence. They needn't have it spelled out for them. It would be a small graveside ceremony for intimate family members only. Serena didn't ask if she'd be allowed to attend. Alex took it as read she wouldn't be.

Serena started cleaning her en suite at a quarter of three. She rifled under her bathroom sink to throw out mostly spent containers of bubble bath and fragrant oils. Pushed far to the right she found a jar of lavender chamomile bath salts Bernie had bought her in the weeks after she lost Elinor and couldn't get to sleep. Serena spent passed oppressively silent evenings pickling in baths hot as she could stand or hotter. Hour after hour Bernie would emerge from the fog of steam, ostensibly to offer food or tea, a helping hand to wash her hair or a lingering kiss as if to remind Serena she had a reason to come out, the world was still going on. She didn't throw the jar away. She wasn't sure the world was still going, and she could do with the reminder.

In her kitchen, she found Bernie's favorite brand of tea tucked behind hers in the middlemost cupboard, her striped mug snug beside it. Mementos of Bernie had been cropping up everywhere Serena since she'd been declared MIA. Some were sent to her, tokens of well-meaning colleagues and friends, none accepting for a moment Serena was beyond caring, or mourning.

Pictures Bernie sent to Jason or Cameron or Dom. Video of Bernie doing drunken karaoke with her comrades, often in laughable schoolgirl French. Just the other day, Fleur had walked down from Obs & Gynae to hand deliver a recently-published journal article she wanted Serena to read during a lull in her shift. An article on novel treatments of acute perinatal trauma co-authored by one Major Berenice Wolfe. Serena had read the byline and been nearly bowled over by grief, yet she'd also been so relieved to see something of Bernie's she'd never read. That meant there were heretofore unreleased pieces of Bernie still moving about in the world, things Serena had never seen that might someday come back to her. Beyond the illegible notes she stumbled upon in coat pockets that she'd neglected to throw away, and voice mails that she never got around to deleting. Echoes of Bernie she could still replay when she needed them most. Holding so fast to the past would drive her mad one day, she reckoned, but for now it kept her sane.

Serena sat on Elinor's bed at half four, flipping through her baby book, reminiscing in solitary fascination over her chubby-cheeked, auburn-haired girl, the apple of her eye before she became the furious, spoiled, mercurial young woman who would never grow to be anything else. Two years gone, her Elinor. Serena had been sure losing her daughter would kill her when it happened. Having survived it, she was all but convinced nothing else could. Today threatened to come close. Today she would say her final goodbye to the undisputed love of her life. How was she meant to survive this too?

Five a.m. came and went, finding Serena emptying her closet of articles of clothing she needed to discard right, right now. The blouse she begged Bernie not to leave her in (she left, to Kiev); the unflattering vertical stripes in which she welcomed her home. What she wore when she lost Elinor, when she lost Bernie a second time, and then forever. They piled up on her bed beside a crumpled pair of too-tight jeans and a green plaid shirt. On the floor there was a single overturned ankle boot, found underneath her bed. Serena was sat beside it, swaddled up to her nose in a dark green scarf. Bernie must have dropped it in her haste to leave in December. Like her Holby hooded sweatshirt in the hamper, her striped socks caught between the mattress and the headboard. Bits of herself sprinkling Serena's solitary life, all these months unseen but loved.

Serena closed her eyes and inhaled deep, past the smell of dust, of clean wool to the scent of a comely neck turned back toward her as Bernie saluted her goodbye. Like her hair and her perfume and her cigarettes. Serena knew it shouldn't smell of her after all this time but she needed to believe it, needed some part of Bernie to hold onto now there was no more of her. So she believed with all her heart. And if she imagined hard enough, believed strongly enough, she could feel Bernie wrapped around her like this scarf, safe in arms as she should be. Safe as houses. She believed with every ounce of her being and for a moment she felt her there, spindly arms and legs and unkempt hair, breathing into the crook of her neck.

In all her fantasizing, she fell asleep and she dreamed. Bernie was there, sprawled limbs flung out wide beside Serena. She snuffled and snorted, an opinionated sleeper at the best of times. Her lips pursed in dismay in response to something Serena wished she could see. Bernie inhaled deep and then exhaled a sigh. Serena longed to touch her, to feel the contours of her high cheekbones underneath her fingers one last time. She didn't. Touching ended the dream and Serena couldn't say goodbye twice today. She wasn't ready to wake up.

Serena dreamed Bernie smashing grapes in the South of France. She was smeared in red and purple grape gore and she chased Serena around the vineyard threatening to smear the mess all over her, lips first. Serena let herself be caught every time. Serena kept her eyes closed as long as she could to hold on to the sweetness of the fantasy. She didn't want to remember what was real. Reality never did her any kindness.

Her alarm sounded nevertheless and the day violently began without asking. Serena finally rose at the stroke of seven to dueling text streams from Charlotte and Cameron. Marcus was taking over the funeral arrangements at the eleventh hour and disregarding Bernie's wishes in the offing. Could Serena help, each asked in their own way. Would she? Serena shoved her many blouses in their places and reverently placed Bernie's scarf on her pillow. She'd need it later but Bernie's children needed her now. Her grief would wait.

Serena dressed in black and donned the scarf Bernie had given her the year before, a splash of color to represent Bernie's life in lieu of Serena's loss. She spent the better part of the morning at the Dunn residence playing referee between a mulish Marcus and a fuming Cameron and Charlotte. Despite her pronounced shyness in most settings, Charlotte was a prone to shouting as her father, and house was soon an echo chamber of long-repressed anger and grief come spilling forth. Serena gave up the ghost when all was lost and left to retrieve Jason for the service. Greta would be staying home with Guinevere as all agreed a funeral was no place for a baby. Cameron tagged along behind Serena, a red-eyed wraith in a pressed suit. He couldn't take any more shouting, he said; it wouldn't bring her back.

The non-denominational funeral service was a who's who of army personnel: ranking officers Bernie had served under and service members Bernie had served beside, soldiers and civilians Bernie had saved. There wasn't time enough for everyone to say all they cared to say. Two hours was insufficient to memorialize all the living Bernie had done in her 53 years.

Alex was present on the far end of the front row, well distant of Marcus and the kids, and as it happens, Serena. Cameron had caught Serena's arm when she and Jason made to join Donna and Ric on the third row. He hadn't been able to verbalize what he needed—so much his mother's son that way—but he hadn't needed to. Don't leave me. The plea was written in his eyes, his mother's eyes; Serena wouldn't, couldn't refuse him. Serena and Jason sat with Cameron, directly in front of Bernie's framed service photo and listened as Bernie's illustrious career was summed up in 90-second speeches that were galaxies from being equal to the task.

Cameron had planned to give a eulogy but when the time came he quailed, because a eulogy meant his mother was gone and never coming back, and he wasn't ready to live in that world. It was Marcus who took the podium, then, though Serena thought Alex might have liked to. It was Marcus who recited their love story—college chums and then lovers, parents-to-be and then wed. Twenty-five years. Serena and Alex exchanged pained glances over the heads of the other attendees. Marcus's story was one rendition of Bernie's biography half-told and redacting all the unromantic, unsunny events that made Bernie the force she would become. That she remained in Serena's mind. Her soldier, brave as anything and impossible to pin down.

Serena was set on Bernie's photo on the altar. She was in formal dress, stoic and yet becoming, a serious sort of humor crinkling her dark eyes. Those eyes that had gazed at Serena over paperwork and over the operating table, over the breakfast table and in bed. Serena could live thirty years and never see their like again. Serena counted to ten and took deep, even breaths in an effort to ease the hitch of frightened panic settling between her lungs to stay. Thirty more years without the love of her life. The thought of thirty more minutes was unbearable as it was.

I should have told her I wanted her to stay. I should have said she was enough. I should never have let her go.

As if anybody could compel Bernie to do anything other than what she wished. She was headstrong and knew her own mind. On the front lines was where she'd belonged, as Cameron had concluded, and Serena was alike in his thinking. Bernie had died doing what she would have chosen to go doing. Bernie Wolfe would have burned and raved at old age, would have raged against the dying of the light. She was never meant to fizzle out gently so she'd gone out in flames. It might have been poetic were it not the stuff tragedies were made of.

Serena counted from ten again, and then twenty when that didn't suffice.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

If Serena were anything but highly attuned to the moods of the young people seated on each side of her she wouldn't have realized the crescendo of Marcus's remarks addressed her at all. Jason shifted in discomfort to her left and Cameron stiffened to her right. Charlotte was already standing, restrained only by her godmother Verity's quelling hand. Marcus had a list of grievances as long as his arm and a distinct ranking of those he considered to blame. Serena was at the very the tip-top, over even Alex Dawson, not that the younger woman had in any way escaped a public flogging. Alex had disrupted their supposedly happy family but Serena had broken Bernie's heart and sent Bernie to her death. His words, her fault.

Serena summoned her not inconsiderable self-control not to make a scene. Bernie deserved to be honored, not fought over like a piece of meat, unable to defend herself. From the pulpit Marcus stared at Serena as if he dared her to deny his accusations. She stared back and realized that the fool had never stopped loving Bernie and this was all he knew to do with what had become of that love.

Serena said nothing, did nothing. Denied nothing. Marcus's children were there when his outrage crumbled for the grief buried underneath to show through. Jason handed her a tissue to dry her face. She hadn't realized she was crying.

If home is where the heart is Serena had no idea where she was going anymore.

They'd memorialized Bernie at Holby today, the day after the funeral, Serena and all their colleagues able to take time away from their patients to attend. Cameron had broken under the onslaught of his grief. He had no experience in loss this profound, Bernie had been the shadow he stood in, the boogeyman he railed at, and the hero he revered; and now she was nothing but a memory. He would take the worst of her over the nothing they had left to share. Serena was in the same boat but hers had sprung a leak. She felt sure she was drowning day by day. It was a sensation with which she was intimately familiar.

She'd taken the circuitous route home after leaving the hospital at the end of her shift. Returning to a house that would never again hold Bernie was an experience she did the utmost to avoid. She had grand-auntie time with Guinevere and took as many extra shifts as Henrik would approve. She pressed an indulgent Fleur into accompanying her to lengthy stage shows she couldn't recall the instant she set foot outside of the theater. She went to therapy and listened expressionlessly as her therapist told her she was allowed to grieve. In what world when she was the one who sent Bernie back into the arms of danger? Grief was the last thing she should permit herself. That didn't stop the sobs from bubbling up inside her when she happened upon one of the terribly rare songs Bernie knew (correctly) by name and artist. It could have been the universe being cruel or it could have been entirely random, and neither possibility offered the least comfort to her. Nothing offered her comfort but for work and sleep and the occasional, carefully moderated drink.

Serena was doing all she could not to fall into another bottle of Shiraz. She had had her fair share after her run-in with Marcus yesterday, to say nothing of her encounters with Alex today. She needed to cope and alcohol was not the way. There was no Bernie to steer her clear of her penchant for self-destruction; she'd need to rescue herself. She had work in the morning, having once again refused Henrik's now habitual offer of compassionate leave. She was fine. She would be fine. This wasn't like Elinor when she lost a piece of her heart; this was the bottom dropped out of her world and the only treatment was to grasp what remained in an iron grip and pray nothing broke.

Serena returned home to the clutter her grief left behind: A stained wine glass in the living room and Netflix idling on the TV screen. Kleenex spilling off the coffee table. Photos of her and Bernie together scattered round, and slightly crooked picture frames from where she'd staggered up to bed the night before.

She cleaned up her mess and trudged up the stairs, intending to undress and slip into something comfortable, something that would feel like the hug she was in desperate need of. Something that felt of the woman she missed.

She found the door to her bedroom ajar and stopped short. Years of cohabitating had put her in the habit of closing her bedroom to unwanted visitors. She still made a habit of it despite living alone.

She entered her bedroom, noting an odd, chemical sort of smell in the air. Disinfectant, not abnormal in and of itself, but not one Serena wasfamiliar with. Holby hadn't changed the brand of disinfectant used on the wards in ages.

First, she registered the semi-darkness where she'd left the room unlit. One of her bedside lamps was on, a mute yellow lights spilling across the rumpled duvet and the pillows, the floor. Serena hadn't left her bed in disarray when she roused at break of day. Sorting the house had been her way of delaying attending the memorial service. Got to make the bed and put away the laundry, take out the bins and apply her makeup. Had to put herself together lest everyone know she was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. It turned out everyone knew and no one was surprised.

Bernie's scarf was missing from her pillow and there was a lump in her bed where there hadn't been one.

"Who are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?"

The covered figure started with a shout and Serena retreated to the door, wishing she'd kept her phone or her keys, for all the good they'd have done against an intruder bold enough to sleep in her bed.

The dazed figure righted themselves and grabbed their chest, panting. "Bloody hell, you scared me."

Serena stared.

She had taken leave of her senses. That had to be it. And if that wasn't a fitting cap to this month from hell. Shutting her eyes, she willed herself to be sane even as her heart called out for the woman in front of her. When she opened them, she became certain she'd never got out of bed this morning and had slept the day away. Certain she was reliving the halcyon days of cramped fingers and mumbled, sheepish 'I love you's' said in the near-dark before work. Because this could not be real. This could not be that dream or those days.

A pale blonde woman stood before her, having shook off slumber and bedclothes, a scarf knotted round her throat. Her eyes were bruised, purple and sunken. She was speckled with healing lacerations, thin as a spirit in ill-fitting nightclothes borrowed from Serena's closet. She smelled of hospital and hard travel. She looked like home.

Serena couldn't allow herself to believe it yet her heart screamed for what she saw to be true.

"Hi." At the first hoarse word, Serena stumbled, her world pitching right side up underneath her.

Bernie instinctively reached out to steady her but Serena recoiled and Bernie followed suit, hands held aloft. Touching ended the dream.

"Say something, please." Bernie's eyes were glassy and pleading. Cameron's eyes yesterday morning. Don't leave me.

Serena crept forward, leery, filled with hope. There was no way. It wasn't possible. The army had said, and Alex had been so sure. Serena had been to Bernie's funeral. There was a burial, for Marcus and the children. After his display, Marcus had explicitly disinvited her over Cameron's strenuous objections, and Serena hadn't wanted to intrude on their grief any further. But if Bernie is alive…

"Serena."

Serena didn't speak, too preoccupied with absorbing Bernie in all her shambling glory to utter a response.

"Bernie," she breathed, at last permitting herself a first, furtive touch. She raked her fingers through Bernie's unevenly shorn hair, tucking her fringe neatly behind her ear. It was slightly chalky, interspersed with fine particles of dust. Fitting for a woman who walked out of an exploded airport hospital. Bernie encircled her wrist and brought her hand to her chest to feel where her heart was beating a rapid tattoo.

"Hi," Bernie said again, a beautiful, understated contrast to the muted Bernie of her dreams whose timbre was never quite as robust as memory recalled.

Serena wordlessly pitched herself in Bernie's arms, the rules of dreaming be damned. She hadn't touched or held this woman in much too long. Words withheld and left unspoken tumbled to and fro inside her head, all of them jockeying to reach her mouth and none succeeding. Serena touched Bernie anywhere she could reach. Her long arms were finally coming useful; she could reach near anyplace. Thin, wiry shoulders, a narrow waist, a beautiful back—Bernie hissed when Serena was too heavy-handed, too careless in her exploration and happened upon a wound. Bernie was in pain. Bernie was hurt.

Serena guided her to sit on the bed.

"Where are you hurt? Tell me how." How she was hurt so Serena could heal her, how she had lived so Serena knew whether to start believing in miracles. "Where have you been, Bernie?"

"Mogadishu. I was on the periphery of the blast radius. I was injured by flying debris but not severely—bruised ribs and a severe concussion—but there were so many people in need of aid, I followed the need, never thinking I'd be declared missing in action."

"And then what? Are you all right?" Not perfectly well but she was breathing Her Bernie was intact. The rest would come later. They had later.

"The worse for wear but alive." Bernie offered a tremulous smile. The one Serena returned was no less frayed with disbelief. "I developed a severe case of exhaustion and dehydration. I didn't have my identification and it all became a muddle what with the closed head wound. I—I got in a bad way. Collapsed. Had to be taken to another regional hospital for treatment, the locals were so overrun."

"You're here." Serena couldn't stop touching her. Gently, gently, reverently all the same. Bernie softened and leant into her caresses, eyes fluttering shut in dawning fatigue, once more a survivor of what would have killed a lesser person.

"I was tired. I was—I wanted to see you and when you didn't answer your phone, I let myself in. I found the spare key. I'll put it back."

"I don't care about the key. It's you." She cradled Bernie's face. "My Bernie."

"If you'll have me," she murmured on a laugh that did nothing to conceal the question it was.

How Bernie could doubt it when Serena had slogged through the intervening weeks since hearing she was MIA in a mire of hopeful dread. Hope that Bernie was alive, hope that she hadn't suffered. Dread at discovering neither to be the case. But how could Bernie be anything but her nervous, rambling, vulnerable self when the last time they spoke, they were little more than former lovers. Yet here Bernie sat.

Serena swallowed a swell of emotion. "We just buried you. We—Marcus and the kids, they buried you yesterday."

"Buried what?"

"Nothing, I suppose, but it's symbolic. It's …they buried you. Cameron told me about the ceremony. I…I wasn't there." Bernie paused, something like fury a fleeting impression on her gaunt face till she shook it off.

"I'm not dead." Serena emitted a pained noise Bernie was helpless not to soothe with a kiss. "I'm sorry. No, no I'm not sorry for not dying. I was out of sorts and I got on the first flight home as soon as I could make it on my own two feet. I'm…I came to the first place I could think of. I came to you."

"It's really you."

"It's me, really." Bernie shrugged, a jot shamefaced. "In my defense, I did call first."

Serena shook her head, too fond of this impossible woman by half. "Shut up."

Bernie's smile grew. "I love you."

"Shut up," she murmured without rancor, already leaning in to kiss Bernie again. She could kiss Bernie. Bernie was here to be kissed. Let her have this one small mercy, someone. Let her live this dream for thirty years.

"I'm sorry. For the not calling or writing before, or coming back sooner after."

"Shut up and just…let me look at you."Bernie permitted Serena's roving hands, soft on her cheeks, gentle in her mussed hair, mapping her new scars with all the intimate acceptance of long love.

"I love you. I realized that while I was combing the exterior bomb site for survivors."

"Was that before or after the concussion?" Bernie glared and Serena laughed, unable to suppress her giddy humor of a sudden. "Sorry, sorry. I thought you died and here you are. I love you." There it was. "I love you."

Bernie kissed her, passion and gentleness, a promise made years ago they were each trying to keep. "I know." She stroked Serena's neck, finding the warm place seemingly made just for her hand. "I was in hospital a week, maybe more, I don't remember, and I kept thinking of you."

"I think about you every day." Serena held onto her and let go of the façade. "Never do that to me again." Being in Bernie's arms was better than any mere scarf. This was real. She had no idea how she would ever do without this now.

"I had to come home. That's all I knew. I couldn't wait. I needed to come home and here I am."

"I would have come to you had you asked."

"It's a long flight."

"Ten thousand miles is nothing."

"Now you tell me!" They shared an intimate laugh colored by all they'd been through and all they'd lost. Those months, those hours. Those many nights.

Serena laced their fingers together, just to be sure she could. The dream went on.

"Do the kids know you're back?"

"I called and didn't get anybody."

Serena clicked her tongue. "The memorial service at Holby today. Jason was too heartbroken to attend after the funeral. The kids—Cameron and Charlotte—you need to talk to them." Both were spinning their wheels, unprepared to carry their own pain and their father's bitterness.

"I will. I will right away. I didn't know about any of it. I wouldn't have made you wait, not if I realized. I—I was shattered and I wanted to come home," was her plaintive reply. Serena thumbed the welling of tears from beneath her tired eyes. Bernie had been in the wars; Serena would fight the next one and the one after to give her respite.

"You're home now, and I am never letting you go…if that's what you want."

"I want nothing more than that."

Home, she'd said. Because home was where Serena was and there was nothing like a near-death experience to make that clear. Serena knew that now, as well as anyone. She cleared her throat, remembering herself and that there were other matters to consider, other hearts than hers still beating a triumphant reveille inside her. Bernie was real. Bernie was here. Bernie was hers.

"Alex will want to see you."

Bernie's brow furrowed and cleared, understanding. "I'll talk to her."

"You should probably have seen to your fiancée first." Serena could have kicked herself. Don't send her running. Don't go back to her. Don't leave me.

"Fiancée?" Bernie squinted.

"She told me the two of you were engaged."

Bernie rubbed the pad of her thumb inside Serena's wrist. "There's only one person I've given any thought to marrying since my divorce. You know that."

"We never talked about it, not properly." Serena's inebriated declarations of Bernie being the 'great love affair of her life' notwithstanding. Serena shook her head, unwilling to give voice to the yearnings of her own desperate heart so soon. "That's a conversation for another day. You need to talk to her because she thinks…she thinks she's the love of your life and she should hear you're home from you, not an army chaplain." There was a story there to be told on all sides and Serena would weather it, for Bernie.

Bernie gave a short nod. "Could we, could we leave that till tomorrow? I can't face anybody else today." The rest went unsaid. Bernie had used a decade's allotment of candor to say what she needed to when it was in her nature to say almost nothing at all. One didn't cross the world and defy death for less than the genuine article of love land for Serena she'd done both.

Serena dressed for bed in soft pajamas intent on holding Bernie as close as she was allowed, never mind that it was early hours yet and nowhere near time for bed. She would take each hour for the gift it was and cherish it as she'd been too foolhardy and prideful to do before.

Bernie tucked into her under the covers, settling her ragged-run bones into Serena's welcoming softness with a sigh Serena recognized. Contentment.

Serena found her hand in Bernie's hair again, drawn to the golden strands shining in the half-light like a moth to flame. Better to go up in flames than to drown in the dark. "Alex, she gave me your journal when she told us. I, er, read it. I haven't stopped reading it since Alex gave it to me." She'd dampened many a page with tears, rendering some words bleeding, illegible. Serena recalled each and every one of them in crystal clarity.

Bernie nuzzled into Serena's shoulder and neck, flicking eyelashes a tickle on her skin. "You thought I could marry someone else after reading what I wrote to you?" Garden plans and flowers sketched and colored in. Love letters in an artist's pen. Bernie contained multitudes, all capable of immense love.

"I thought you got over it. Me. Us." The truth was the cost of getting everything she wanted. She'd pay it anytime.

Bernie shifted to gaze up at her, heavy eyes naked and honest. "I could never get over you."

Serena had had months as proof and weeks of hell to be sure.

"Likewise, Ms. Wolfe."

Serena kissed her wrinkled brow smooth and carded her fingers intently through Bernie's disheveled hair till her breathing slowed and deepened, and she slept the sleep of the beloved. Safe as houses in Serena's arms, right where she belonged.