intheruins | (no subject)

The first couple of days, there's not much Serena can do. She's lost a lot of blood and there's a lot more to healing from a caesarean than there is a natural delivery, too.

It's almost maddening. She can't even nurse her son. Every so often they wheel her into a room with strange machines and let her hold him. He's doing well, she's told again and again, and she tells them that he's a survivor. That it's in his blood.

The nurses don't know what to do with her stoicism and it's only at night when they're off doing whatever it is they do when she's supposed to be sleeping that she lets herself cry, careful and silent. She doesn't know how to live without Pemberton. She doesn't know how to be a mother without a father.

If she were a better person, she'd think of Rachel with sympathy but instead, she just feels scorn.

At least she'd had the Widow Jenkins.

Serena and her child have no one.

After her blood levels lift back to normal, the doctors encourage her to move around. She's never been one to stay in bed all day and so she does, as much as it hurts. Since they took the IVs out, she hasn't been taking much for pain. They don't stick around to see if she swallows the pills and why should they?

She wanders about the maternity ward in a robe that's too big and slippers that are cheap and flimsy, watching as happy mothers are pushed around in wheelchairs, carrying their babies. They smile at her and she forces a smile back but the jealousy still bites. If she were back in North Carolina, if she had any control at all, no one would stand between her and her son.

Serena doesn't ask permission when she heads to another floor. There's the promise of a cafeteria and she hopes it has more to offer than the tasteless mush that is brought to her bedside. She's reading a map and turning to follow it when she suddenly feels weak, reaching out for a wall before she has a chance to fall.

[Dated May 11th.]

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"Wait here," he tells her, then gets up from the table. Leaving her for the moment, he manages to rummage up a simple sandwich and a cup of jello, green though it is. He spends a brief moment trying to chat up a nurse into getting him another flavour, but as suspected, there's nothing else on hand. He's beginning to think it's some kind of cosmic joke, some last slap in the face from the war, but he shakes it off.

When he finds her again, he deposits his findings on the table in front of her, gesturing for her to eat. She needs to get her strength up, that much is obvious. He's not about to leave her in peace until he can be sure she can make it back to her room again without collapsing in the hall.

"Dr Pierce," he tells her when he sits down again, leaning back in the chair. The white coat is a pretty good giveaway, but he supposes she has a point. "My friends call me Hawkeye."

Serena's not about to go anywhere. She's not sure she could if she tried. She needs food and then probably an escort back to her room, though that's something she's not ready to admit aloud.

She can't figure out when or how she went from a miraculous woman who tamed eagles to a helpless single mother, relying on the kindness of strange doctors with stranger senses of humor.

"Thank you," she says, starting on the sandwich. It's cold and bland but it's better than nothing. "I'm Serena."

She doesn't look particularly enthusiastic about the food, but that's to be expected. He snags his own cup of jello, rips open the top and plunges the little plastic spoon in to take a bite. It's green and it shouldn't taste green really, but it does. Next week, he'll make it his mission to try and get some other flavours in here, no matter what it takes.

He watches her eat for a moment, makes sure she's eating properly and not just making some show of it. The hospital is a whole lot different than the 4077th had been, but some things are always the same. He still watches over his own patients like a hawk, if the pun will be forgiven, even when there's teams of doctors to assist, now. Serena's not his patient, but he still intends to make sure she's fine before he leaves.

He tells himself it's because he's a doctor and it's his job, but there is something to be said about the fact that she has Aurora's face, maybe.

"What's the baby's name?" he asks, giving her a warm smile. She's a little standoffish, but in his experience there's no quicker way to put a smile on the face of a mother than to talk about her child.

"George," Serena says, and there is more than a ghost of a smile on her face as she says so. Even before she'd arrived here, even when she was back with Pemberton, she'd known her child would be a boy and that she'd want to name him after his father.

The first. The heir. It was only fitting. "After his father."

She's also given him her maiden name as his middle, but she doesn't talk about that so readily. She'd told the nurses it was her maiden name and they'd nodded and said that was common. She hadn't told him that it was the last shot of the Shaws living on, that the rest of them had perished more than a decade ago.

Nor that she still blames herself.