Greece - June, 1981
"Are we done here, Father?"
"We are."
Both young men began to rise.
"Stefan, remain," Mikkos instructed, drawing the half-depleted platter of scones closer to his plate.
The rarity of such a request...well, the shocking call for a private word between the Prince and his younger son simply couldn't be trusted. Stefan cast a sharp glance at his brother but Stavros was up and out before his expression could be gauged. No way to know if he'd pulled the pin; if their father had at long last been apprised of the boat, the storm, the local girl's death; if this, the most harrowing secret of his life-to-date, had finally been compromised. He drifted back down to his chair, quiet in the stillness of a dread anticipation. And, as his father's silence grew thick, resisted the reflex to quake.
Mikkos lifted a pastry off the dish - his fourth, though no one dared admit to counting or possessed the temerity to complain - and began to tear it into ragged pieces he then stuffed into the jowled cavern of his mouth. "You will understand, I think, why we will have this conversation in the absence of your mother. To say she would not be pleased with what we are about to discuss would be to gravely understate the case."
Here it came, the bitter truth, the bitter end, and Stefan rose to face it. "I know."
"She told you, then? Of course she did. She's always been your little compatriot, hasn't she? No, now, no need to be ashamed," Mikkos rushed to reassure, mistaking the motivation behind his son's sudden fluster. "I appreciate your efforts there. I always have."
Stefan scrambled for a justification, masking the nearly irrepressible relief that his sin was still safe. "My apologies, Father. I thought you were referring to your upcoming trip to South America. Mother has made no secret of her dismay over not being invited along."
Mikkos snorted ruefully. "Dismay? That's a kind word for it. Surprisingly diplomatic for one so young." His father's gaze narrowed, shrewd as he threw the last clod of cake across his hungry tongue. "No, in this instance I was speaking of your cousin. Another topic upon which, you'll agree, your mother's dismay is quite profound."
Stefan nodded, his manner circumspect. Helena's antipathy toward this baseborn foundling in her otherwise regal nest was well-known and rather richly expressed. A small but genuine mercy the girl was no longer in residence to hear it.
"She had a bit of trouble at Briarton-Griggs. She has told you nothing of this?"
"She has not."
"I see." Stefan got the distinct sense his father would have preferred the way paved for him by that particular confidence, but he blustered by its void nonetheless. "Well, yes. She entered into some thoughtless tryst. Bore herself a daughter in the process. Never say we don't pay for our sins. The heart makes a cruel bargain."
He felt himself blinking at the baldness of the revelation and suppressed the urge to advance some form of abnegative protest. "I...I knew nothing of this."
"It hit her very hard," his father confessed. "I was there at the time of her confinement. We put the child up for adoption...or so we told her, in any event."
This, of course, explained why his cousin had been an infrequent presence on the island of late. Christmas in Florence, Easter in Prague, these many inexplicable studies abroad - not to mention the stilted tenor of her increasingly abbreviated correspondence. But a child? Mikkos had spoken more, was in fact still speaking, yet in his struggle to absorb this news Stefan's mind could find nowhere to place it. Insensible seconds passed before he slipped back into the discourse mid-sentence.
"...when one bows to a woman's whimsical desire for an education. She will be graduating from this error in judgment before the month is out. And once she returns to Greece? It will be to stay." With the lock of his father's jaw on that pronouncement any hope of a destiny beyond these shores was denied for all time to Alexis; extracted like a key and thrown away. He wondered if his cousin knew. If that was why she'd been making the most of every absent day.
"A new world order is dawning, Stefan, and a Cassadine will stand at the helm. But it is an extremely complicated and dangerous business, not without its risks to life and limb. If something should happen to me..."
"To you? I can't imagine..."
"A wise man walks down every road," Mikkos submitted resolutely, then swept a cunning glance across the table. "Although, if I am not mistaken, this is a maxim of which you are already more than well aware."
Stefan shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with both the words and his father's direct attention. A brighter light could not shine and, in so doing, eliminate the sanctuary he'd so often found in shadow. "Certainly nothing will be left up to me," he negated demurely, grasping a touch too conspicuously at the cloak of his status as the wholly forgettable, and frequently forgotten, second of the sons.
"On the contrary," his father disputed, relishing the prick of the refutation and the way it left the boy at a loss for words. "You may not be a man of action, Stefan, but the world needs its strategists, too - its thoughtful, measured men who invariably give great consideration to everything they do. Tell me that is not you."
Stefan's shoulder twitched; this was as much of an acquiescence as his nature would permit. The prince's head tilted, taking it.
"And that is why I am leaving her guardianship entirely in your charge. Alexis is a damaged soul. No, no," Mikkos retorted, wagging a finger at his son's clearly impending objection. "If we cannot admit this fact then we cannot truly see her, and in seeing her discover what is right to do, what would be in her best interests. Think back, Stefan. Back over all the years you've known her. Has your cousin once spoken of the life she had before she came here? Of what happened to her parents? She has not, and do you know why? It is because she does not remember it. Oh, the wistful impression of a mother's beauty, the scrap of a song, a fond embrace...but the rest is gone, and quite irretrievably. Death is like that, a little thief, and what it stole from Alexis was everything she knew before I brought her into this house; before she came to be raised with you. Every other memory she possessed has been erased." His father's hands crossed in pantomime of a carnival magician. "Poof," he said, flailing his empty palms before his face.
Stefan squinted, resistant of the convenience of this view. "Some would say those memories are still in place, anchored at the bottom of her psyche by an unendurable pain. Just because she can't find them, Father, doesn't mean they've ceased to exist."
"Apples and apples, it all comes out the same," Mikkos tossed off indifferently. "Let's not mire ourselves in speculation. What matters is the proclivity. It is possible this child, like the child she once was, will vanish from her mind completely. In many ways that would be a blessing. But if a distant day dawns equipped with a hunger to hunt down the truth?"
"Someone should be there to help her find it."
"Indeed."
His father seemed pleased, if slightly startled, to have the thought cut so cleanly from his mind. That great dark head drew up for an instant, and Stefan knew he was being re-assessed. This was not altogether a desirous outcome for him. "And that truth would be...?" he pressed.
"That truth would be that I did not leave her daughter in the care of strangers across the sea." His father's eyes shifted to the door, his voice lowering provocatively. "The truth is I brought her home with me."
"She's here? Where? You brought her back to Greece?"
"To this very island," Mikkos accorded. "You've met Ondine?"
"The caretaker's infant, yes...wait. What are you saying, Father? That's...? That's...? You fostered Alexis' daughter with George?" He couldn't believe what he was hearing and was too startled to modulate the censure in his tone. Mikkos picked up on it immediately.
"Blood is blood, Stefan," his father growled ominously. "A Cassadine child is a Cassadine child. We take care of our own." He glared across the table with an ancient rage; an old, coldly-smoldering fury. "If you think for a moment I'd do less for that child than I did for her mother...?"
"I don't, Father. No."
"No?"
"No," Stefan avowed, keenly aware of this prince's immanent embrace of his anger, his legendary wrath; that overpowering, all-but-uncontrollable thunder. Very little standing in his path at such times managed to stand for long.
"The Papas family is receiving a stipend for her care and feeding, and also for their silence. You will be silent as well, Stefan, until such time as your cousin evinces a desire to locate the fruit of her adolescent foolishness. I will have your word on this."
His son nodded curtly; it wasn't a request.
Mikkos reached for another scone he bobbled idly between a thumb and forefinger. "I would keep that new housekeeper for her baking skills alone," he professed, bring the flakey sweet to his lips. "And yes, you are now dismissed."
Port Charles - November, 1997
Do I know you at all?
Clearly, he did not.
The regent of the Cassadine Empire set down the book he'd been carrying around for no earthly reason and sank weary to his breakfast seat, older now than the many bones that lay beneath his feet. He'd had far too little sleep. Such was the cost of introducing new demons to your dreams. Empty children's coffins. Silver bullets and maiden game. Incestuous attractions. And George, poor George, to have been thrust directly into the center of this. George, whose graveled voice underscored the entire waking nightmare. Fifty thousand dollars. A devil's bargain, a cheat. Of all he had to forgive her for, he wasn't sure he could ever get beyond the way she'd made that man's life so cheap; turned his death into a tawdry string of dishonorable confessions. Had she only known...if she only knew, she'd already be paying.
Eighteen years he'd given her daughter, eighteen years of a bond that had no small meaning. Light of his life, apple of his eye - she had become their Greek caretaker's reason for breathing. So grateful had he been for this gift of the gods, this star from the sky, this blessed beauty of a creature, that Stefan knew without a doubt the money had been ancillary. George Papas would have done anything "little Alexis" desired solely in thanks for unwittingly permitting him to foster her child.
It was painful to even attempt to imagine that negotiation. The mother of his heart's delight summons him all the way from Greece, directs him to journey posthaste halfway around the world to confer with her on Spoon Island. In those many arduous hours of travel from boat to plane to launch, it certainly must have occurred to him that she was finally prepared to claim her daughter - that through the diligence of her efforts, and perhaps those of her henchman Voss, she had located the girl and was laying the groundwork for a reconciliation. How shocked he'd no doubt been to discover her launching in an entirely different direction.
He could picture the caretaker's utter confoundment, and his cousin at her manipulative best; a single juror, her impassioned defense: Save your master! Save Stefan from the clutches of that gold-digger! As one of Mikkos' most trusted servants she knew every word out of George's mouth on the subject of Kristen and Natasha was sure to be believed. Tell him they left Europe in flight from Helena. Tell him they settled in America, on an estate called Serenity. We must protect him, George. Protect him from himself. He will thank us later, believe me. And this George had done - in part for Stefan, in part for Alexis, but ever so much more in recompense for his darling foster-daughter, all the while holding true to the pledge he'd made to the late, though seldom lamented, Prince of the Cassadine. Not a whisper until she comes looking. Not a hint of the real identity of the child I've given you to raise.
Well, he'd kept that vow to his final day, to his last gasping hour, under pseudonym in the indigent's wing of Mercy Hospital. A pauper's death for a man who had given everything he had and more, so far beyond what every dime in the Empire's coffers might afford. An agonized passing on an alien shore...and all to the simple service of the lie that Katherine Bell was, in actuality, Stefan Cassadine's half-sister. There were better lies to die for.
"You never went to bed, did you?"
He roused from the ache of his reverie to find Nikolas taking a chair at the table, his hand stretching out to grab hold of the book his uncle had dropped to the cloth. "Teutonic Myth," he read from the spine and abruptly grimaced. "Oh Uncle, I hadn't even thought..."
"You know the legend?"
"Not well. Perhaps you could refresh my memory?"
Stefan offered up a small smile, aware the prompt was a gentle attempt to provide him a distraction. "A full breakfast, then?" he bargained.
Nikolas sighed, then nodded, giving in. "Eggs and bacon, Mrs. Landsbury," he murmured to the silent presence behind him. "And scones, if you've got them." Drawing the napkin down to his lap, he looked up at his uncle with a princely bit of arrogance and declared, "You may begin."
"Once upon a time," Stefan jibed, teasing out the childhood tradition, "there lived an immortal water sprite named Ondine. A more joyous nymph could not be found, nor would exist again throughout eternity. In fact, and as she had been duly warned, the only threat to her perpetual happiness would be to fall in love with a mortal man and bear his child - upon which she would, in consequence, lose her gift of everlasting life. And this, of course, is precisely what came to pass.
"Ondine lost her heart completely to the dashing knight, Sir Lawrence. When he asked her to marry him, she agreed...and so in love with her was he that, while exchanging vows, he swore to her, 'My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you.' Ondine, as you may surmise, was exceedingly pleased.
"A year later she bore him a child and, as promised, from that moment forth she began to age. Unfortunately, as her beauty diminished so did her husband's interest. One day she was passing by the stables and heard Sir Lawrence snoring. When she walked through the door she found him lying in the arms of another woman. She pointed a perilous finger at him and he started awake as if he had been kicked. It was then she cursed him, saying: 'You swore faithfulness to me with every waking breath and I accepted your oath. So be it. As long as you are awake you shall have your breath, but should you ever fall asleep that breath will be taken and you will die!' Which we are left to believe he did, and rather quickly."
Stefan paused, permitting Mrs. Landsbury to serve her plates and pour out their tea. Once she disappeared through the pantry door he continued, "There is a rare medical condition bearing the name Ondine's Curse. Its sufferers have lost the ability to breathe naturally and must instigate their respiration through sheer act of will. It is said that, left untreated, like the fickle Sir Lawrence they are doomed to die when they fall asleep."
Nikolas stabbed at his eggs and gave a cynical chuckle. "It's sad, really."
"What?"
"The way it reminds me of Alexis and her paper bags. Alexis, who was the cause of all of this." He closed his eyes for a moment and softly shook his head. "I suppose you'll be going to Karpathos?"
"To inform George's family? Yes. Possibly by the end of the week."
"Ondine will be inconsolable," he asserted bleakly. "If you could, would you extend my personal sympathies? Anything she needs."
"Very gracious of you Nikolas, yes. That I will do."
Stockholm - April, 2008
No sooner had she bitten into the scone than she was looking for a place to spit it out. Dry and lumpish like a stone; not at all the pastry she remembered. Some people could content themselves with a pale replication. Some people would be more than satisfied with the unpalatable curdle of a counterfeit lingering on their tongue. Some people weren't bothered in the least by a rank imitation and would go so far as to set it on a plate, serve it up to their infant daughters, have it screw their husbands on the living room floor and never once question its provenance or admit to themselves it was a fake. Ondine was not one of those people. And, as far as she was concerned, anyone who settled for less than what was absolutely authentic deserved whatever heartbreak they met.
Left with no alternative but to regurgitate the turgid mouthful right back into the bakery bag, she did this - then took a swift swallow of her coffee to thoroughly dispel the taste.
She missed the simplicity of her youth, when there was only one kind of scone in the world - warm, aromatic, deliciously infused with butter, cinnamon, a lightly sugared glaze - and available only on a plate delivered from the main house; sent by the only woman in the world whose job, it seemed to her, was to make them. One bed, one house, one Poppi, one yaiyai, one life that rarely varied. Now? Half a dozen of everything and choices to be made. A hand dug into her traveling satchel, less from intent than habit, and pulled from its fold the two photographs in their battered silver frames. She propped them to prominence on the right wing of her dressing table - these gods who had never failed her - and stared at each one of them in turn as was her ritual of old.
It had taken a long time to come to terms with her beloved father's death, to discern the real reason behind that final journey, to uncover the true strain that had succeeded in tearing his titan's heart apart. This mountain of a man whose ruddy cheek she could still feel nestled against her own, his skin a parchment pressed by countless kisses from the sun, his scent a pungency of earth and vines and salt swept off the old blue sea; he was her country walking, her land incarnate, lumbering through its terrestrial eon on two great feet. How was it even possible to bring a force like this down? It was as if someone were telling her the clouds had all dried up, the stars had been winkled into exile, the moon had grown tired of waning and waxing and stalked off in a huff from the night.
And what was there to believe, really, when his Cassadine master came knocking on the door? That her father was a liar? That he was one conniving cog in a veritable matrix of deception fueled by some insanely well-intentioned cousin to prevent an unwanted marriage? The entire explanation was ludicrous. And while she cried, while he took it into his regent's head to embrace her with eyes awash in pity, to comfort her with this outrage that bordered on blasphemy, she turned right around and pitied him back for his credulity, his naivete; his ignorance of the man who had served his family so nobly and so well; his acceptance of the very idea that George Papas could be struck forever from existence by this one glancing blow.
Years would pass as she bent to the task of peeling fact from fiction. He comes maybe once, maybe twice a season, inquiring after her, funding her studies - out of guilt, out of duty, out of mere ennui, she sincerely doesn't know - and she watches as he grows increasingly brittle about the mouth, his liquid blade of a gaze gone dry from all the seeing, his secret soul bleeding behind the barrier of a door he can no longer lock. This cousin, this Alexis she remembers catching sight of infrequently, indistinctly, from a distance all her life, turns out to be the fabled Natasha herself. My sister, he says, forgetting the 'half', forgetting what she'd done, what it cost, who she killed; as if the truth somehow humbled him and, in the grip of this humility, there lay an obligation to forgive.
Facts sweated out of him like poisons following that first revelation - deeds and crimes and intrigues and lies and the subtext behind a thousand of his infamously festering silences - all of which she absorbed with a vengeance. She couldn't fathom why he was telling her any of these things, but was so very glad he did. Ignorant rage was far too easily defeated. She hungered for a hatred that was well-informed. Yet as hard as her heart was becoming, as cold as it grew, as grey, as grim, there was one odd aspect to it, this one soft corner she set aside in reserve to hold her love for him. He couldn't help it. He wasn't up to it. Emotional accountability as a territory had always been so foreign to him. Nikolas, Laura, and now this Natasha come to share his father? He had no clue where to begin. And so he floundered. And so she let him. And so she loved him in the manner one loves a damaged child, a defeated warrior, an ancient sage who'd lost the thread of the wisdom that sustained him.
Which is why she did not argue when he put those many pieces of the puzzle together the way he had - smashing each unruly, unmatching truth to an ill-fit with the force of his need. He did not want to sincerely see what this woman was. Jakarta, he'd insisted, was the reason she took Katherine Bell away from him. Fear of Helena the grounds for her alliance with Spencer, the loosening of that rail, Miss Bell's tragic plunge. Her overwhelming sense of dispossession, he'd asserted, was the motive behind her public proclamation that Nikolas was his son. Once he embraced his empathy for the poor orphaned Natasha, it gripped him like a drug. Not so Ondine. Not so, as it turned out, the illegitimate daughter this illegitimate daughter was too selfish to acknowledge, and could so blithely walk away from.
Well, it takes one to know one. Makes it oh-so-much easier to understand. Her father, the only father she'd ever known, had died for next to nothing. Had died on the cusp of his little Alexis' whim to test the waters. Katherine Bell was her stalking horse, the means by which she could discover how the family would react to her emergence; how the long-lost Natasha might fit in. It was a test, no more no less; a carefully-constructed dry run. And the caretaker George Papas? An expendable resource. A casualty acceptably chalked off to the cost of introduction. Poppi. Her Poppi who knew it all, who knew Ondine was Natasha's and Natasha was Alexis, that Alexis meant to pass off a stranger as herself...no wonder, no wonder any longer why his great Greek heart had given out.
And now Stefan. Stefan, as well. Her mother's eternal champion. Her protector, her defender - and the only other human being on earth her daughter gave half a damn about. The second man to die still clutching at her secret, still holding her identity at bay until that fey maternal urge evinced itself; until Alexis came looking. But she hadn't come, had she? Halfway, perhaps, but not far enough. She'd settled on a grifter. A grifter with a history of pretending to be so many people she was not. Did she even plan to check the blood? Ondine bit back a small black laugh. According to her well-placed retainer, the somewhat conflicted and overly-sympathetic Viola, she could never seem to find the time.
"Miss Bergmann?"
"Yes?"
"Two hours to curtain."
"Thank you, Paul."
Ondine drew her chair before the mirror and began to clip back her hair.
If there was any justice in the universe whatsoever, tonight when Aida cast out her accusatory finger - the audience hushed, the tension thick - on the outer edge of her witless hemisphere Natasha Nilsson Davis Jacks Lansing, mother of the European opera world's latest sensation, would start awake as if she had been kicked.
