Title: "Contagion" 2/6
Author: monimala
Fandom: "General Hospital"
Rating/Classification: R, AU, various pairings, language, violence, sexual situations.
Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own these characters.
Summary: A little revisionist history and some cross-over inspiration make for a very different Port Charles. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
They took over in the late '90s, ignoring the efforts their brethren were making in other cities for paltry things like citizens' rights. First it was a few nightclubs... a red district...like the kind that existed in so many other places...and then it spread.
Up until 2001, the local Mafia outfit had been the scourge of upstate New York. When Caleb Morley crucified Sonny Corinthos in the park, any doubts about who the real boss was were eliminated.
Carly remembers taking out six vampires at Club 101 that very same night. She kept a sawed-off shotgun beneath the bar for protection, silver bullets soaked in holy water. She wasn't about to let them take her club without a fight.
They took her ex-husband instead.
And the quiet, bookish, man she was dating... he was next.
It's been almost eight years. Her club still stands, held together with the sheer force of her will, and so does she. They're both a little worse for the wear. For every patched-over hole in the wall, she has a corresponding scar on her body. The one bisecting her left cheek, temple to jaw, is for her son. She fought off a rogue werewolf as she stuffed him into the back seat of a limo with reinforced glass.
Michael, her mamma, and Max...last seen heading west.
Her son is a teenager now. And a stranger. But he's alive. And that's more than she can say for the people who stayed. For herself.
She turns on the taps in the hallway bathroom, slowly filling up the ancient porcelain tub. She knocked down the walls between the rentals a while ago and the space suits her more than well. She can't remember the last people who lived in the rooms. Lucky? Courtney? It doesn't matter. They're dead now. They're dead and Kelly's is hers. Her family legacy...a closed-down diner and nobody left that remembers Ruby's famous chili recipe.
She never took the time to learn it.
She still burns toast.
"He follow you to the door again?" The being sprawled on the lumpy chaise she stole from the lobby of the Port Charles hotel looks like he belongs there. Like in every incarnation of her life, there will be a version of him lazing on furniture.
"He doesn't follow me," she lies, effortlessly, stepping out of her leather pants. "That's you...you're the oversized puppy, remember?"
"I'm your *partner*, Carly." He looks suitably wounded. Proving her right. At least he doesn't shed. And he's housetrained. "And I live here."
"You're a lycanthrope, Jax," she counters, in the same singsong tone as she unsnaps her holster and lays the Glock on the bedside table.
"You know, you say that the same way you used to say 'you're my husband's enemy, Jax'." He folds his arms behind his head, grinning at her.
If she didn't know better, she'd be certain he was bitten by a golden retriever.
"Yeah? Well, just remember I wasn't fucking you then." Her blouse lands squarely on his too-pretty face. Even with his curse, with the montly attack of the hairies, he looks like a surfer boy. Like he always did. Untouched.
"You're not fucking me *now*," he reminds, annoyed.
As she walks, naked, towards the waiting steam and the deliciously precious hot water, she has to laugh. Just a little.
"I know...but at least... at least there's hope."
Hope.
She never took the time to learn that either.
***
It's a kind of perversion... living in the clouds, surrounded by the daylight he can never allow to touch him. The curtains are drawn tight against the dawn and he toasts the first rays of the sun with a half-tumbler of fine twenty-year-old scotch.
Not blood. He's not that provincial. He may be a fledgling yet in undead terms, but he'll never be that provincial.
Perhaps that's why they leave him alone.
Why no one comes to invite him to hunt, or to roll the punks at the hospital for a few pints.
Perhaps that's why they didn't kill him.
Now...now, he wishes they had.
He led a simple life. As simple as someone whose family business was illegal arms and even more illegal drugs *could* live. He'd escaped the guns and drug-running and his brother Luis's manic games... he'd fled into the warmth of academia, the shelter of books. Port Charles University gave him a teaching fellowship. He met a striking young divorcee with a sweet young son.
And then he died... and was born anew... with his teeth buried deep in a another man's throat. Morton Hewitt. Flailing. Rapidly going slack. He'd been on Lorenzo's tenure committee. And, oh, he'd provided tenure all right...
His lesson plans from that night, and a Ruropean history text, still lie open on his coffee table. They've gathered dust...the papers have begun to yellow... but he has not touched them.
Like the sun, they'll burn.
It's a kind of perversion.
And all he has left.
***
Chapter Three
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