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madam-wakefield · 1 year ago

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Open when...Chapter 2

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Summary:

Chapter 1 When a few years into their relationship Bernie is asked to go back to the army and deploy Serena isn't sure how she's going to get through the nine months without her girlfriend. What she doesn't expect is for it to be her girlfriend who has the perfect set of surprises to get her through both the best and the worst days. Canon divergent - Elinor lives (well actually the accident never happens), Raf lives, and Cameron isn't a total ass! The staff of AAU also probably didn't all work on there at the same time in canon but do in this! The fic is already fully written with the first few chapters having already been Beta'd. 27 chapters including the epilogue. Hoping to post every Monday and Friday!

Chapter 2

Open when you have been alone for a week...

Serena forgets her girlfriend isn’t going to join her the first time she goes to Albie’s after Bernie has deployed, until after she walks through the front door. She goes to the bar and orders a large Shiraz and a whiskey.

It isn’t until the man behind the bar passes her the whiskey that she realises what she’s done. She takes a long sip of her wine, eyes fixed on the other glass as if staring at it will make Bernie suddenly appear.

“She’ll be alright, you know.” Dom’s voice shocks her, since she hadn’t known anyone was sitting so close.

“Sorry,” she says numbly, still in shock that anyone is actually talking to her.

“Ms. Campbell, you and I both know you brought that drink for Bernie despite the fact she’s been deployed a week, and I just wanted to reassure you that she’ll be okay.” Serena doesn’t miss the way he calls her Ms. Campbell but refers to Bernie by her first name. She knows the two of them are close and often meet on the roof when Bernie goes out for a cigarette since Dom is one of the few staff members that doesn’t judge her for smoking.

“But what if she’s not? She landed at Holby after being blown up by an IED. Those haven’t disappeared in the years Bernie’s been away from the place. She may be there as a medic but you and I both know the insurgents don’t exactly follow the Geneva Conventions.” She’s shared all these worries with Bernie, not to stop her from going, but because their relationship is built upon honesty. Now that Bernie is gone, though, it’s nice to be able to voice them to someone else.

“I can’t promise you that she isn’t going to be caught up in all of that, I can’t promise you for sure that she isn’t going to get hurt. But what I can promise you is that every day she will do her job thinking of you and how she needs to get back to you. On the tough days she’ll think about how much she loves you and how much you love her and that’s what’ll get her through. Just how on your tough days here you’ll think of her and how it won’t be long until she comes back to you.”

It’s exactly what Serena needs to hear, exactly what she needs to calm her nerves a little, something that hasn’t happened since she and Bernie separated at the airport.

“Thank you, Dom.” She uses his first name because there really isn’t a need for formalities. “Do you want that?” She points to the glass of whiskey. “I don’t think I can bring myself to drink it right now.”

She watches the glass as Dom raises it but doesn’t drink, understanding he’s waiting for her to do the same. She lifts her already half empty wine glass, not realising she’d been drinking it during their conversation.

“To Bernie,” Dom says gently. “The bravest woman and finest Major we know.” Serena lets her glass clink against Dom’s before she takes a long drink of her wine, letting his words sink in. Bernie is the bravest woman she knows, and she is so lucky that she’s the one that gets to call Bernie her partner.

***

When she gets home there is a letter on the doorstep. It’s strange because Jason always brings the mail in if he’s home first and he was on the early shift this morning. She picks it up and turns it over, her breath catching slightly when she realises what it is. On the envelope in Bernie’s messy scrawl is the message “Serena - Open when you have been alone for a week…”

She wants to rip the envelope open but stands in the doorway having just come in from work and when Jason is around isn’t the right time. She knows whatever is in the envelope is going to make her emotional and she doesn’t need Jason to see that, not yet as he’s still struggling with the day-to-day routine of Bernie being gone. Instead, she puts the envelope in her pocket and walks into the living room where Jason is watching “World’s Strongest Man,” a rerun she’s almost sure.

“I’ll be with you in a second” she says as she passes him on the way to the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of wine before going to settle on the sofa with Jason, who might not actively appreciate his aunt’s companionship, but she knows that he does. She might not be Bernie Wolfe, but she’s hoping she can help Jason by at least taking her place tonight.

She doesn’t get any of what’s going on, but then Jason doesn’t need her to. He just needs her to sit with him and be. It’s only later, once she’s safely in the privacy of her own bedroom, dressed in soft satin pyjamas, Jason having gone up to bed half an hour before that she finally lets herself take the envelope in hand and open it. Bernie’s handwriting is as awful as ever but the sight of it fills her heart with joy.

“My Dearest Serena,

Today marks the longest we’ve ever been apart since we first got together, and I don’t for a second imagine those days have been easy on you. I’m hoping that you are just about getting used to sleeping without your own personal radiator and can instead enjoy the luxury of stretching out on our king-size bed. If memory serves me correctly, I will have just about gotten used to the ridiculously small size of the bunks in camp. Of course, I miss you like crazy, but I also have to thank you again for trusting me to do this. For allowing me the closure that I need. I would tell you not to worry about me, but I know that will be impossible so what I will say is please don’t forget to look after yourself while I’m gone. Protect my trauma unit and don’t let Raf get too comfortable at my desk. I should be back in eight months and three weeks, after all.

I have only one other request from you now, if you haven’t already, please write me my first bluey, the timing of it will mean it should arrive as my first month here comes to an end, and I usually find that’s the toughest part of being out here.

Say hello to Jason for me. Remember that I love you deeply and I miss you more than you can ever imagine.

All My Love, Bernie…

Your Big Macho Army Medic x

She doesn’t bother wiping the tears away, the emotion is good, it reminds her that she can still feel. This isn’t like the last time Bernie went away, she’s coming back. She caresses Bernie’s name on the paper for a few minutes before standing and padding over to her own desk to grab her laptop.

She realises now is the time to battle the dreaded INtouchmail service to send Bernie her first electronic letter. It’s a bit of a strange concept in Serena’s mind as she knows even though she types the letter online, Bernie gets a printed copy, unlike the handwritten blueys she knows she’ll also keep writing. The only bonus of this system is they arrive much more quickly.

She realises soon enough that she does not have a clue how to use the INtouch electronic mail service and has to resort to Facetiming Fletch and Raf so she can show them her screen as she works out what she needs to do, only thanking them and ending the call once she’s on the page where she needs to type out her message.

Dear Bernie,

Thank you so much for my special one-week letter. Though I have to ask who you had deliver it as there is definitely no stamp! I’ll assume it’s the same person who placed the box of envelopes on my desk last week. I am missing you like crazy, and right now I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of the time without you! The bed is so cold without you, and I may have taken to hugging your pillow to sleep, but can you blame me, you smell amazing.

The guys managed to drag me to Albie’s tonight for the first time. I may have brought you a whiskey before my brain even registered that you weren’t there. Dom drank it and sent his best. Tonight, Jason has even had me watching “World's Strongest Man,” though I’m sure you’ll say you don’t believe it. I have the day off tomorrow so I’m taking Elinor out for brunch before some girly shopping with Fleur.

Your first handwritten bluey is already in the post, but I wanted to write to you again, so you know we are all thinking about you, that we love you and miss you so much. There isn’t much more news from here for now, so I’ll sign this letter off and write to you again soon.

All my love, darling…

Stay safe, soldier.

Serena x

#open when #bernea #bernie wolfe #serena campbell #berena fanfiction #Berena ff #berena fanfic #holby city #holby city fanfic #holby city fanfiction #holby city ff #Buckle fandom #Madam Wakefield Writes

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talenlee · 2 years ago

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The Szudetken Empires, Part III

This is a continuation of the previous post describing the Szudetken Empires peninsula in Cobrin’Seil.

The Bernean Lodges

Where the forests weave in tight against people and farmland is hard-fought from its ownership, there are the night-time howling stands of the Bernean Lodges. Tall, narrow houses, with tightly angled roofs to slough off the snow and rain, the people of the Bernean Lodges isolate themselves from other communities, because they are keenly aware of the way that Szudetken is full of monsters that look like humans. In response to the threat of werewolves, ghosts, changelings, cultists and other horrors, the Bernean people opt to threaten and endanger almost everyone who moves around in their spaces,

The Bernean Church, known as the Lodge Of Faith, is the unifying government structure across the country, whic h has no single strict doctrine written down. Rather, doctrine is to be treated as an interpretation of the strictures and lessons of each religious leader who currently holds power. This gives the faith a remarkable fluidity, and a historical revisionism – it’s a matter of faith in the Church that they’ve always been right, and therefore, any time a historical event is considered, the assumption must be whatever the church was teaching at the time was correct. This makes control over old texts and records of historical positions and behaviour extremely important.

The Church builds its power in part on channelling power from the angels that the church can commune with. The Bernean Angels are quite horrifying by the considered standards of most cultures – they’re not humanoid, often made up of whirling rings, or collections of eyes or wings, ringing bells, and structures of horrifying purity. These angels often appear in a location, bequeath power, and disappear again, meaning they serve as a sort of intermittent legitimisation for the church leaders. Basically, it’s really easy to doubt an angel that doesn’t show up for six months, and when it shows up you get humiliated and shamed and this further entrenches the power of those who never wavered in their faith in the angel.

The capital of the Bernean Lodges is a challenging place to describe, because there’s no united agreement on it. There are five different townsteads that each consider themselves ‘The Lodges,’ and they are large, sprawling compounds that could be compared to fortified towns. The walls are all double-reinforced and patrolled, and they slowly grow up into second and third stories in height, a sort of slow motion process to reinventing the castle.

When Bernea ruled the peninsula, was the heart of the Bernea Holy Empire of Szudetken, it was not a military empire but a religious one. The ideology of the Lodge of Faith, expressed through its church, had a social fervour to it, and was known after its collapse as the Quiet Madness. The Bernea Holy Empire was defined by a combination of religious zeal, social control, and dreadful social oppression. Its eventual end came when the empire started limiting social permission to exist to more and more people. With roaming bands of church militants, known as Cathars, travelling around seeking out Sins to Purge, there was an eventual uprising, followed by anti-religious violence that led to the collapse of the Empire.

This historical event is regarded by the other nations as a period of religious zeal and colonialism at the tip of a sword. Within Bernea, it’s regarded as the first and only time that the Szudetken Peninsula was capable of resisting the deep darkness that persisted within it – a time when the vampires stayed in their castles, when the sea was still, and when laborers of the Osteon were able to stop their work. None of these things are actually true – everyone’s quality of life under the Bernean Holy Empire was just as bad as before, if not worse, because the Bernean belief in purity of purpose didn’t actually stop any of the abuses. It was the place of peasants to feed their lords, after all, and the workers who felt deficient compared to skeleton labor were told they had to have faith that they could meet the challenge presented to them.

An important part of Bernean doctrine is the idea of the Coming End. For as long as the church has existed, the current events have signalled that within the coming five to ten years, the world is going to end. This constant oversight of apocalyptica plays into all their ideas and also their art and culture. It’s extremely common to see artwork of horror descriptions of the end, of the point of judgment, of the preservation of the holy and sainted.

Not everyone in Bernea belongs to these churches, but the churches are so tied into all the culture’s social networks and support mean that those outside these churches tend to be loners – even if only half a town attend church, that half have access to social capital, and everyone else is atomised out without a similar abiltiy to recognise one another’s lack of engagement with church. The church has a stranglehold on what it means to belong in the nation, and that means that anyone who isn’t part of the church is left assuming they’re alone.

If you’re from Bernea, you probably left. These strung out isolated cultures are definitionally exploitative and cultlike. Most towns are built around a church, and most churches have incredibly strict ideas about their vision of what doctrine is. When talking to one another, they focus on how they are alike, and when talking to themselves, they will point out the overwhelming differences in doctrine that make them different. You’re also probably prepared to survive and escape, because of the apocalyptic visions of your community growing up.

Inspirations: Midnight Mass, The Lottery, Biblically Accurate Angel memes, churches I grew up in, Vermintide

Terzocco, The Garden of Night

Trade is the lifeblood of Terzocco, the nation where gold, it seems, flows like water. Where many of the other Szudetken cities are the only large establishment in their province, waging wars against the night, Terzocco has numerous cities, each of which spread through its borders, built around tall castles and wide estates. Streets are wide and easily walked, with beautiful gardens and crawling vines parto f the iconic architecture, and flowers lie along every major walkway. The people living outside the cities tend to live on farmsteads and small villages, removed from the city but always, always, sending praise and coin to the cities.

Terzocco’s capital is Ombrane, which is notable for the Garden Palace, home of the royal family of Terzocco. The Terzocco royal family is well known and well regarded throughout almost any point in history, and represented by a symbol of an elk with three eyes. The current prince of Terzocco is known for travelling around the kingdom in the disguise of a bard, but previous kings have been poets and doctors, connecting directly with the everyday people.

Generally speaking, Terzocco gets treated as the ‘default’ of the Szudetken peninsula by most people. Terzocco has the vast churches the Empire are known for, it has money enough to buy its way through things, and when it ruled the peninsula, it was an Empire of abusive economic trade. Everyone was required to pay money up to a superior, who was also paying up to a superior and so on, to pay for the ‘elevation’ of each state to match with the aesthetic of Terzocco. This is why almost all the capital cities have some traits of Terzocco’s design – most often, their gardens.

This is all the open, publically visible and recorded parts of Terzocco. There is another story told about Terzocco, which is blatantly false, that Terzocco is not and has never been ruled by mortals. This lie is that the Terzocco royal family are a small capricious cohort of fey from the Shadowfell, who vacation in the mortal realms as a sort of long-form LARP to play around with an entire kingdom like it’s a game space for them. Fools believe that the gardens of Terzocco are full of flowers that are made to hear people, allowing the royal family to spy on people all throughout their country. If this was true and it is obviously not it would explain the confusing economy of the country, which seems to have far more money and currency than their poor population would suggest could be taxed out of them, and how the vast and definitely not impossible monuments of the Terzocco nobility are built so quickly because that’s definitely a thing you could do.

Terzocco is renowned for being a place where it’s safe to walk about during the night, a thing that differentiates the state from most of the rest of Szudetken. The cities are well lit, the gardens glow under moonlight, and even the nobility of the nation wander about the streets at night to observe and participate in the culture of their people.

Inspirations: Alice in Wonderland, Megachurches, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, myths of the fair folk, Deca-Dence, MMO-Isekai stories like Sword Art Online

And that’s it. That’s the six major nations of the Szudetken. There are a number of small countries, fiefdoms and baronies, tucked in between the different estates, on the borders and boundaries, which usually get to be independent just because the people on either side of them don’t find it worth their time to shake them down for fealty. This is super easy since the spaces between civilisation in the Szudetken are pretty dangerous what with the vampires and ghosts and werewolves and tentacles and worse.

The final feature of the Szudetken that matters is the Great Veil. Between Szudetken and the mainland, an ancient curse keeps information from properly flowing from one side to the other. At some point in the past twenty to twenty-five years, though, the Veil has weakened, and people are able to leave and learn about Szudetken properly, the iron hold on the population is weakening, and truth fights through mistruth more readily.

Not that there’s been any established research into it, but anyone who can properly investigate will find that the path of the seven highways, with its six towering stones, serves as the magical focus of this ancient curse.

Where there were seven stones, though, there are now six.

And nobody in Szudetken can remember what the seventh stone was for.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#CobrinSeil #DungeonsDragons #Games #Making

#Cobrin'Seil #Dungeons &amp; Dragons #Games #Making

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