AN - some explanation is needed. This is set in the past, I'm thinking 98-99. definitely before the Sonny/Carly hate sex, a little AU (I've cobbled together both Carly new (the incident with the 'real' Carly's dad and old Virginia's past - as best as I could remember) and it's sort of Jason/Carly - my first, last & always OTP (one true pairing), but only slightly. I need serious work regarding everyone's else reactions, but I just couldn't get this idea out of my head, so I had to type it up over the past two days & unfortunately unbetaed.
Standing in Luke's, Carly felt cornered and maybe, she thought sarcastically that's because she was. "Trapped like a rat," as Lucky had so succinctly summed it up. Anxiously she looked over towards Jason, hoping that he'd bail her out, but she couldn't quite catch his eyes. Gathered around in a half-circle, she was surrounded by Emily, Lucky and her 'dear' Uncle Luke. The waves of hostility coming off them was palpable, but at least she lucked out somewhat – Tony, Bobbie, Robin and none of the Quatermaines were anywhere in sight.
"So sweet Caroline do tell, because inquiring minds are just dying to know. Exactly why are you such a bitch?"
Carly's chocolate brown eyes focused in on Luke with a fierceness that was almost enough to rock him back on his heels. "I don't know, Uncle? Maybe genetics?" She practically spit out the question, laden with bitterness.
He stepped forward, ready to challenge the defiant expression on her face, when he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder and knew even before he turned around that it was Morgan.
"Enough Luke. Leave her alone." Jason's voice was low and flat, his fingers tightening slightly in warning. But before anyone could retort one way or the other, Carly cut in.
"No. You want to know, Luke? You really want to know? Then fine, I'll tell you all!" She hissed the words, bordering on near hysteria, because there was only so much anyone could take and she had reached her breaking point. Damn them all, staring at her like they were god's judgment from on high. "But not here, it's too public. In your office." She spun around and stalked off, not waiting to see who, if any of them, followed.
Seeing the tears that glittered in her eyes and the furious tone in her voice, Jason grew concerned and cursed to himself as he pushed past Lucky and Luke rushed forward, drawing up along aside of her. He caught her hand and pulled her to a gentle stop. "Carly, you don't have to do this. You don't have to defend yourself to anyone."
She glanced up at him and smiled weakly, eyes awash with moisture. "I know, Jase, but I might as well get this over with once and for all. And besides," her smile dropped, "there's a few things you might want to know too."
He winced reflectively, wondering what secret she was going to drop like a bomb this time, while behind them Lucky and Luke smirked knowingly and Emily silently fumed. Watching the expressions cross their faces, Carly felt her resolve harden. Even Jason, who was her best friend and claimed to have her back, was so ready to believe the worst of her. She couldn't blame him, really, although the rest of them she considered fair game – no matter how hard she tried to make things right, it always ended so disastrously wrong. What was that they said about the best of intentions? She laughed caustically to herself, shaking her head, it was so damn typical.
Entering Luke's office, Carly hopped up onto the large desk and pulled her legs up to sit Indian-style, carelessly ignoring the papers that fell to the floor and Luke's obvious ire.
"Well that's just great Carly, trash my office, why don't you?" Luke glared at her balefully, kicking the desk as more papers drifted to the floor.
Leaning up against the wall, Jason's eyes narrowed slightly at Luke before refocusing on Carly who was just sitting there. Legs drawn under her, elbows resting on her knees, hair hanging in her face as she stared down at the paper-strewn floor and felt a stirring of concern even stronger than before. Carly looked defeated in a way that he had never seen from her before, even at her most desperate. He debated taking her out of there altogether. Whatever she had to say could wait and making his decision, he was about to step forward when she spoke.
"I know what you all think of me and you don't have a fucking clue . . . as usual." She snickered softly, without a shred of humor.
"Oh, spare us the self-pity, Caroline. Are you going to talk or what?" Luke bit out, beginning to lose his patience.
"Shut up, Luke. God, man . . ." She scoffed in disbelief. "You are such a damn hypocrite." Carly looked up to roll her eyes at him. "You act so self-righteous, when we both known what you've done in your life. You've got no place judging me. Them," she haphazardly waved a hand towards Lucky and Emily, "I get. They hate me, fine; maybe I deserve it, but you?" She shrugged incredulously. "You've done a helluva worse than me and yet half of this damn town loves you and the other half respects you. That, I just don't get."
Luke's fists clenched as he cast a wary eye to Lucky who looked back at him in confusion, he gave the Cowboy a tight smile as if he had no idea what she was talking about. And if sweet Caroline was talking about what he was afraid of, then she'd damn better keep her mouth shut or he really would follow up on his threat to kill her, although he made a mental point to figure out exactly what she thought that she knew later on. "I don't know, Carly, maybe it's your habitual lies or compulsive sleeping around that fails to endear you to Port Charles at large," he mockingly advised.
She really did laugh at that, head falling backwards, the absurdity of that statement getting to her. Jason admired the white curve of her neck, before he caught himself and slouched further. "Yeah, but if that was case, no one would speak to anyone else in this hellhole masquerading as a town. No, I 'm pretty sure that it's just me they hate, but it's cool. I'm used to it, from a long time back."
"Hey, if the shoe fits, Carly . . . " Lucky couldn't resist getting his dig in. And beside him, Emily nodded in agreement.
"Yeah, if you really hate it so much here, you can always leave," she added spitefully.
Carly slowly and reluctantly pulled her head back to face them, tilting it slightly to the side as her eyes met Emily's. "And that would satisfy you, wouldn't it? You're . . . what? 15? Maybe 16, Em? You barely know me, hardily ever have even spoken to me and yet you can't stand me? Don't you think that's just a little fucked up?"
Emily was stymied for a moment; unable to comprehend that Carly had actually asked her that and was seriously waiting for an answer. "I don't need to know you to know what kind of person you are. I know what you've done to people I care about – Jason, AJ, Robin and Bobbie, off the top of my head." Her words were even without malice and it seemed to her that Carly considered her answer intelligently before replying.
"Well, I generally think it's a bad idea to make judgments without knowing all the details. As far as AJ is concerned – I have no apologies, he got what he deserved, Jason isn't really holding a grudge, Robin just hates me, ask yourself and she'll tell you and," she paused, deliberating over her next words, "as far as Bobbie goes . . . Well, that's something you know nothing about it."
"Oh bullshit!" Lucky cut in, explosively. "We all know what you did to Bobbie, all of Port Charles, hell maybe all of NY State knows now. Nothing you can say can ever excuse that!"
Carly calmly shifted her attention towards her cousin. "Maybe, maybe not." She shrugged, seemingly apathetic to his proclamation. "But I don't understand why you take it so personally – "
"She's my aunt! Damn, just because you don't know what family is doesn - " He began angrily, only to be cut off.
"I don't know what family is?" She stared at him, hating herself for feeling so betrayed again when she thought there was nothing a Spenser could say that would ever hurt so much.
From across the room, Jason could see the widening of her eyes and the flash of stunned pain that turned them a shade darker in the dim light. Enough was enough, he thought to himself as he pushed himself of the wall purposefully and instinctively needing to put an end to this. Whatever Carly may have done for whatever reason, he didn't care, all he could see is that she needed him to protect her and he could do no less.
He wasn't going to standby and let her drag herself over broken glass like this when he knew that nothing she said was going to change their minds. Despite the anger he felt towards Lucky and Luke especially, he deliberately kept his voice even. "Carly," he began, his hands reaching out towards her entreatingly, silently hoping that she'd just give up and leave with him.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. It was going to get worse before it got better, if it ever did, she couldn't help but mentally tack on. And as much as she'd love to step into Jason's arms, she knew that as much as he might care about her - he didn't, couldn't and wouldn't ever let himself love her. She wasn't 'Saint Robin' and she wouldn't ever be, nor did she want to be. All Carly had ever wanted was to be loved for who she was, and that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. She'd fucked up far too much for that now, but she wasn't going to back down yet either. Slowly opening her eyes, she warded him off with one hand.
"Cut the dramatics, Caroline. Either start talking or get the fuck out of my office and club." Luke bit off impatiently.
"Yeah . . ." the dryly amused note in her voice and faint smirk didn't reach the dull, almost glazed over desolation that Jason could see in her eyes. "Family," the word seemed to roll tentatively off of her tongue as if she was pronouncing it for the first time. "I guess you're right Lucky, maybe I don't know what family is or at least maybe the Spenser definition of it, but then again I don't think that I really want to." She chuckled slightly, although it had a distinctly hollow sound to it.
"When I was a kid, I thought I knew the perfect family. Carly, the real Carly, had the most charmed life I could imagine. Her parents were great, she was great. I hated where I lived, not the house that you saw Jase, Virginia didn't more there until years afterward. I grew up in a trailer park, straight up trailer trash." She smirked sarcastically before anyone else could comment, because she saw that Emily and Lucky were dying to say something.
"Carly's family has this huge house, or so I thought at the time. She even had her own bedroom and a four poster bed complete with a princess canopy. I used to make fun of her for that, but secretly I always wished that it was mine. I used to even pretend sometimes that her family was mine. Her mom always let me crash whenever I wanted and her dad was the dad I always wanted. She had the perfect life. And I spent more time there, then with Virginia, like she was my sister. There was a spare bedroom that was sort of mine, but I always managed to hang out and fall sleep in her room on a daybed in the corner. "
She paused, staring off in a distant past where Luke's grumblings went unheard. Carly focused in on Jason, half shrugging almost apologetically, before she looked over towards Emily and Lucky. The bored expression on her cousin's face seemed to spur her on. "You don't really know what it's like growing up in a trailer home when everyone knows it. Not the worst childhood, I guess, but it really does suck. And as far as Virginia and I? We fought all the time, because I was a teenaged girl and salvation army bought clothes don't quite cut it in high school, so I was an angry, hostile brat. Her drinking and boyfriends didn't exactly help, but it got to the point where I didn't really care. It worked out, she had her JD and whoever of the week and I had Carly and her family."
"So how'd you fuck it up, Carly?" Lucky challenged her derisively as she drifted off.
"Oh spectacularly, of course." She smiled then, a mere thin, cruel twist to her lips that Jason found chillingly ominous. Whatever 'truth' Carly had to tell, it was coming and he knew it was going to be bad. He just wasn't sure who was going to be hurt more – Luke or Carly. He had to stop this before it went any further. "Come on Carly, it's getting late. Leticia is going to want to be getting home and we need to take care of Michael."
"The nanny can wait, Morgen. I have a feeling that it's about to get interesting, wouldn't you agree, Caroline?" Luke stepped in front of the Mafioso, all but taunting Carly, who rose to the bait.
"Oh yeah, she can wait a few more minutes, I think. After all, we're all having so much fun here, right?" She met him jibe for jibe, her chin raised in that stubborn way of hers that Jason recognized all too well.
"Sure and she's a big girl, aren't you, Caroline? You can handle it." He sniped again, hitting his mark with far more of a deadly accuracy then even he expected.
Carly instantly paled out to a barely there shade of white, before a furious rush of color bloomed across her checks, the angles of her face thrust into a sharper than usual contrast. "Now that's irony for you, Uncle Luke, 'cause that's exactly what he said." Her strange smile twisted once again in a perverse mockery devoid of any emotion remotely connected to humor.
The muted quality of her voice was lost in the painful tenseness that suddenly arose in the room as her words hung in the air like a visible brand still searing with heat.
Emily abruptly stiffened next to Lucky, whose hand reached out to hold hers tightly. Luke winced with a horrified expression, shaking in his head in a mute sort of denial.
Jason was the last to react.
Obviously based on everyone else's behavior they 'got it,' whatever it was. Frustrated, he replayed her words in his head again, before realization dawned upon him and an intense sense of helpless rage suddenly grew from somewhere deep inside of him. His field of vision narrowed down to just Carly, sitting there like some kind of broken doll - hair tossed carelessly to the side, eyes so soft that seemed to be made of melted chocolate and a bittersweet smile that was gouging deep fissures in his heart.
Before he could do something, anything to stop her, those brown eyes fell shut cutting him off and locked her away in a world where he couldn't reach. Her voice softened, taking on an almost little girl quality as her story drew them all deeper into a dark and ugly past.
"This one day, it'd gotten really bad. Virginia was at work and her boyfriend at the time really hated me, so I had to get out of there. I knew there was a hurricane coming, but I didn't care, after all if worse came to worse, I'd just crash at Carly's. I'd done it tons of times before, so it wasn't a big deal, but when I got there, Carly and her mom had gone out shopping. Carly was older than me by two years and was going to this spring fling dance. Her dad said I could stay over for dinner while we waited for them, but then he got the call that the roads were too bad to travel, so they were going to stay in a hotel."
Carly took a deep breath and although it was warm, Jason could seem her tremble slightly.
"I knew something was wrong, I don't know what tipped me off, but it just felt off . . . weird. I should've left, but the storm was coming, it was a two mile walk back to trailer park and the thought of being stuck there with Virginia's boyfriend – some trucker guy . . ." She shrugged. "I convinced myself that I was crazy, paranoid. Carly's house is where I came to feel safe. What could possibly happen, right?"
She started rocking back and forth slightly under combined pressure of their eyes and weight of her memories.
"I can't remember what we ate. All I remember is the power going out, so he lit some candles and then poured me wine. The good stuff, you know, not the cheap rotgut shit that I found in half-empty bottle sometimes in the morning at the trailer. I –I don't remember how much I drank, either, not after the 2nd glass anyway. The next thing I know, it's the next day and Carly and her mom are screaming at me, because they came home and found me in bed with him."
She opened her eyes at that point, tucking an errant lock of hair behind her ear, but stared off to some distant point in her memory.
"It was like something out of a nightmare. I was so hung over; it took me a few minutes before I really understood what the hell was happening. So sick and bruised under the sheet, silk I think. Carly and her mother were calling me every name in the book at the top of their lungs; I barely had time to get dressed before one of the neighbors called the cops. And then everything went from disastrous to just horrifying. We all wound up at the police station, child welfare services showed up and they took me to the hospital. It was . . . just so fucking unreal, you know?"
Carly's voice faltered, as she looked past the aghast expressions of Luke, Emily and Lucky, straight to Jason. He recognized that half-shamed and half-hoping look in her eyes that reminded him vividly of when she showed up on his doorstep asking him to pretend to be Michael's father. That look that told him, she knew she had committed the unforgivable, but needed someone, not anyone but him, on her side and Jason felt something clenching deep in his chest. He wanted to say something, no to do something, but he didn't know what.
Typically Jase, she mused silently. Here she was literally spilling her heart in front of him and all he could do was to stand there watching her with those cool blue eyes of his. Eyes polished like blue shards of glass washed endlessly by the tide. Smooth, blank and carelessly kind and she lets herself slip away into better memories, the leather scent of his jacket, and familiar pungency of gun oil.
Jason Morgan, the love of her life who will never love her
Carly, waits for the space of one heartbeat, before gracing him with a painfully knowing bittersweet smile and forcing herself to continue.
"Not surprisingly, Carly and her family got their stories straight. I'd gone from being Carly's best friend and someone her parent's used to joke was their adopted daughter to being a wild and out of control 'troubled teenager.' A home-wrecking hussy, teasing slut and Lolita. It went on and on . . . and those were the polite ones. I should have expected that and on one level, I kinda did, but imaging it in the hospital room and actually living through it back in high school were different. We all lived in a small town and secrets like that don't stay secret very long."
"Time passed. He was eventually arrested but never convicted of anything, hung himself the day before the trial began. At least I didn't have to testify. And if it was bad before, it just kept getting worse. You think high school is fun now?" She asked in Emily and Lucky's general direction, "you have no fucking clue what's it like with fun," she spat the word out, "like that hanging over your head. Carly and all her other new friends, never let me forget, as if I ever could. Port Charles has nothing on my hometown when it comes to hatred for me. They make the Quatermaines and Spensers look like fucking amateurs." She laughed to herself; a harsh and ugly sound that sent chills down the spines of the room's other occupants.
"A few months later, I was back in the hospital – a miscarriage. Hell, I was almost part of the family. Just as well, I suppose, since as you so kindly pointed out, Lucky, I don't know what family is, right cous?" Her eyes seemed to burn through him as she threw back his own barbed words from earlier. Beside him, he could feel Emily's hand tightening around him, but the stranger he only dimly recognized as Carly didn't give him a chance to say a word back.
"Then it was Carly's birthday party. We were born on the same day, even though she was older and just turned seventeen."
Luke did the math faster than anyone. "Christ! You mean that you were just fourteen when that bastard r-"
She cut in before he could finish the word. "Yeah, lemme tell you, it was a helluva a freshman year. Anyway, we'd always had our party together, but naturally I wasn't invited this time. But I'd bought her present almost a year ago, before anything happened and I had no use for it. So I figured I'd just leave there, anonymously, what could be the harm in that?"
She took an abruptly deep and shuddering breath, tears welling up as she stared down at the floor again.
"It was bad timing. Her mother had just bought her a car, a cherry red, classic convertible – just the car we'd always talked about. And that's when Carly saw me, walking up the driveway. She gunned it and I – I just stood there, holding her present and waiting for the impact."
"Wait," Emily burst out with, "what does that you mean 'you just stood there?'"
Carly looked at her curiously and spoke very slowly, her words obviously exaggerated. "Just that. I just stood there, waiting."
The look of disbelief on the younger woman's face was matched by the two Spencers, but Jason felt that squeezing feeling even more intensely. Her next words confirmed his gut wrenching suspicions.
She sighed, as if vaguely confused by their reaction. "Think about it, Emily. Imagine yourself in my position for one second, I know it's difficult but try, ok? I'd just turned fifteen and already was the town whore and pariah. Failed out of my freshman year and was going to have to repeat, gotten pregnant and miscarried, nearly dying on the operating table. My own mother was too ashamed to even look at me, never mind the rest of the town and having to face that for the rest of my life? Would you want to? It's not like I much to look forward to. And then there was Carly – my only friend, the best friend that I had ever had, and whose life I pretty much single handedly destroyed. After what I did, I figured that she'd more than deserved the right to take mine if that was what she wanted."
Luke visibly winced, hearing her refer to Virginia as her mother. The rest of her words hit him like a sucker punch. He wondered, and not for the first time since she began, how the hell he had missed all of this in his search for her. The only reason that's he been able to convince Bobbie to give up her baby for adoption was to give her the chance of a better life than they could afford at the time. This litany of horrors was not what he had fought her real mother for.
"They said she was speeding and took the curve of her driveway too fast. All I know is that she was nearly on me, I could actually feel the vibration of the blacktop under my feet, when she swerved, jumping the curb past me and careened into oncoming traffic. The car spun wildly like one of Michael's toys, crashing into a telephone pole. She was only a few feet away from me and we could see each other through the windshield, she hadn't been wearing her seatbelt. Blood poured down her face and she stared at me, hatred in her eyes. I froze for a moment, then stepped towards the car. It exploded; the impact knocked me off my feet."
Carly tilted her head slightly to the side and gave an oddly quirky yet melancholic smile that was vividly reminiscent of the one Lucky had on the first time he'd gotten caught cutting class and had to explain where the hell he'd been. It cut Luke to the quick, painfully bringing home the fact that whether he liked it or not, this was his niece, with Spenser blood running through her veins, the baby girl who so many years ago smiled her first ever smile at him.
"To this day, I still don't understand why she died and I lived . . . I don't think that I ever will. God must have really fucked up that day, after all, it's not like there's anyone who'd miss me." Closing her eyes suddenly, she mentally added. "Except for Michael, I've never done anything to deserve this life and even that was a drunken accident," completely missing the flash of pain across Jason's face.
"So I woke up in the hospital . . . again, having missed the funeral, which worked out 'cause under the circumstances, I'm pretty sure that I wasn't invited. Hell, I was lucky her mother didn't get the cops to press charges. Two weeks later I left for good. Made my way down to Miami where no one had a clue who I was and lived on the streets for the next few years, only talking to Virginia once every month or so. She always said that she wanted to come back, but we both knew that she didn't really mean it."
"When that detective told me that I was adopted, you know I was excited for the first time in what seemed like forever. This was my chance to find my real family, a chance to make a new life with people who might actually give a damn and we all know how well that worked out, right?" She laughed softly, a tear broken free running down her check.
"So I came up to Port Charles. Despite everything, I really never meant to fuck everything up quite so much. I mean, it wasn't some conspiracy that everyone loves to imagine. Yeah, I didn't use my real name when I first got here, I didn't dare because I didn't know what to expect, so I figured I'd test the water a bit. I found my real mother, who abandoned and never once tried to find me, but somehow found the time and love to adopt two other kids."
"That. Was . . . Rough."
"And after that, hearing all about the Spenser family and loyalty seemed like a fucking bad joke, making it very clear where I fell in the grand scheme of things. So I got pissed off, I admit it, but I won't apologize for that to anyone." Carly looked up and defiantly stared Lucky and Luke in the eyes. "This family screwed me, period. And as far as Tony . . ." She drifted off for a long moment. "Well, that wasn't exactly intended either. I knew who he was, of course, but he had no clue who I was and I blamed Bobbie for that. I was supposed to be his step-daughter and my track record with father figures pretty much sucked, so when he talked to me, I listened, I wanted to. He seemed like a really great guy. Then he hit on me. And it was like . . . something inside me just broke, you know?"
Her voice grew stronger, even as her eyes took on a distant, faraway cast. "Like I was fourteen, suddenly back in Florida and it was happening again, I lost it. All I knew was that I wasn't gonna be the victim again. Never. Again. Not like that, anyway. I had to take control, anyway I could, and right or wrong, that's exactly what I did. I don't expect you to understand, you couldn't, but it really wasn't deliberate. I did what I felt I had to survive. Maybe Tony wasn't like Carly's dad, but I didn't know. There was no one I could talk, no one who gave a damn one way or the other. Just like always, I was all alone and I panicked, you know?"
"I came here lying for one reason and it turned into something else. I couldn't stop because if I did, if for one moment I had actually thought about what I was doing, it was all going to fall apart and I couldn't let that happen. He told me that he loved me and no one had ever said to me before and I wanted so much to believe, to belong somewhere. By the time I found that I was only a substitute, it was too late, because everything just spiraled out of control."
"You know, it's kinda funny when you think about it. Bobbie didn't want me even before I did anything. Virginia only adopted me to save her marriage and failed – he walked out and never came back when I was three. Carly's dad, well we know what he wanted and then Carly herself wanted me dead. Jason wants 'Saint Robin.' You want me dead, Luke. Tony who only wanted Bobbie, probably wants me dead too. Hell, you guys can get together and start a club. I'm sure there's more than enough people in Port Charles who'd join. Bobbie still doesn't want me. Virginia's dead, that's another one to blame on me. But no one ever wanted to know how I felt, no one ever asked, not even once. And all I'm left with is Michael, who everyone wants without me and as I've been told, probably won't want me around either when he's grown up."
Emily winced, recognizing that all too familiar reference to something she screamed at Carly sometime last month.
Untangling her legs from underneath her, they hung limply off the edge of the desk, hands clinging to the slight lip of wood, before she raised her head, hair still hanging in her face and pushed herself off. "Now if none of you mind, while I still have custody, I'm going to put my son to bed." She didn't wait for a response as she strode to the door. Jason reached out as she passed him and was taken aback, when she flinched just out of his range. "Johnny'll go with me. I just . . . want to be alone, ok, Jase?" Behind her hair, he saw the tears she was hiding and dull, empty look in her eyes and against his better judgment stepped out of her way.
The door closed behind her, leaving an unsettled and silent awkwardness in her wake. After a brief moment, Jason nodded to Emily, Lucky and Luke before leaving. Emily and Lucky had nothing to say and making a hurried goodbye also left, leaving Luke alone. Walking to his desk, one arm swept out violently sending whatever remained on the desk crashing to the floor. Throwing himself into his chair, he slumped over, resting his head in his hands on the desk.
Memories and regrets flooded through him.
That first sweet baby smile and the look on Bobbie's face when he cradled her baby, his niece in his arms before giving her away. The first time he realized who Carly Benson really was. When he called 'Sweet Caroline' and then threatened to kill her. Bobbie's heartbreak when he told her the baby was dead and her voice screaming at him when she learned the truth. The way Carly's eyes dimmed when he first told her that she was just a slut and would never be a 'real' Spenser.
Sighing heavily, one arm reached down to the floor. He slowly and with a painful sense of reluctance, punched a series of numbers. The cheerful voice that answered sent another stab of sorrow through him. "Barbara Jean . . . we need to talk."
TBC?
I had intended this to be much more Jarly, but the ending point seemed so natural. If I get some feedback on this story, if there is any real interest, then I'll continue it, otherwise unless it gets back into my head they way it was earlier this week, this might be it. Any & all coments are more than appreciated.