"Trouble in River City," Lucas muttered when he looked at his phone and found its face lit with photographs of both Billie and Austin.
Billie had called him out of the blue periodically for at least ten years because that was the kind of big sister Billie was. Lucas loved her for it.
Austin had called him out of the blue occasionally since Will's death because Austin had loved Will like his own and knew that Lucas missed him every single day. Lucas appreciated him for it.
Billie and Austin placing a joint conference call meant exactly one thing: their mother had done something, and since Lucas was the only one of her children in Salem, cleaning up the mess was going to be Lucas' job.
"Do you know what Mom did?" demanded Austin before Lucas could so much as say hello and ask what was up.
"Of course he doesn't," Billie injected. "If he knew, he would have called us."
Lucas started to thank Billie for defending him, but Austin's next words banished all idle pleasantries from his brain. "Mom married Andre DiMera. Andre DiMera. You know, the guy who murdered a bunch of women back in the 80s. The serial killer. That guy. Then he kidnapped a dozen people and put them on an island and let their families think they were dead, and then…"
Lucas let Austin rant on without interrupting to point out that he had had a front row seat to Andre's last reign of terror and Austin had not. He lowered the phone and caught Adrienne's eye.
"You're not going to believe what my mom did," he whispered to Adrienne, who sat with him in the Horton Town Square. The Horton Town Square. At least his father's side of the family never did this kind of thing.
"Frame someone for murder? Poison a daughter in law?" guessed Adrienne. Everyone was a comedian when it came to Kate, and Lucas couldn't object. He was amazed that any woman was willing to be in a relationship with him in light of Kate's history of removing Lucas' girlfriends from the picture when she didn't approve. (And she never approved.)
"She got married!" Lucas answered.
"Lucas, your mom getting married isn't exactly a rare occurrence."
Didn't Lucas know it. "She married Andre DiMera."
Adrienne was kind enough to excuse Lucas as he went in search of his mother, still talking with Austin and Billie.
"We need to have her committed," said Austin firmly. "I'm sure Carrie can get started on the paperwork."
"Better leave Carrie out of it," Lucas advised. Adrienne's words rang in his ears. "Mom might try to poison her or something. A big shiny red poisoned apple. Mom's the only person who ever read Snow White and thought that the Evil Queen was the hero."
That gave Austin pause. "Was it Sami that Mom did that to? Or was it Belle?"
"Chloe," Lucas corrected.
"Right," said Austin. "We should have had her committed then, but she'd just had cancer and it didn't seem right."
"We can give her the benefit of the doubt," Billie tried ingratiatingly. "Maybe… maybe she's just lonely. All of her children except Lucas avoid her like the plague. Her grandchildren all live far away. Most of the men who were important in her life are dead or not who they were when they were younger. All those years in the fashion industry can really make a woman feel like there's nothing worse than hitting a certain age. So she tries to feel younger—"
"And she marries a man even worse than the one she married when she was a kid so that she can relive her youth? Why would she want to relive her youth? Her youth was being married to a man who beat her and kidnapped us," Austin argued. "But you have a point, Billie. Lucas, you need to look her in the eye and ask her why she did this. You know her tells better than any of us. If she's being threatened, or if Andre threatened one of us, maybe she felt like she had to marry him."
"Feeling optimistic?" Lucas asked. "Like she'd care if someone threatened us. She married Stefano something like a week after he had Philip shot." He paused at the thought of his youngest brother. "Does Phil know about this?"
"Haven't been able to reach him," said Billie. "We'll keep trying. Maybe we'll have him by the time you know something."
Just then, Lucas caught sight of his mother and Andre. "I'm about to know something. Call you back in an hour?"
"Good luck," Austin and Billie chorused.
Lucas steeled himself. He would need all the luck they could send him.
Kate turned dramatically to Andre as she saw Lucas approach. "I love my son, but he can be so tedious. I forgot to tell him I got married," she stage whispered. Lucas pretended not to hear. It was better not to let Kate distract him from the issue at hand with name-calling.
He looked Kate straight in the eye as Austin had directed. "Tell me Austin's hallucinating. Tell me that you didn't marry that DiMera." He jerked his head at Andre.
Andre, the man who had pretended to murder half of Lucas' family just for fun.
Lucas remembered his Aunt Maggie, slashed and bloody while his Uncle Mickey stared vacantly into nothingness, completely lost without his wife.
He remembered his young niece Abby sobbing brokenly as Jennifer allowed Jack to be removed from life support. Lucas wasn't entirely sure that Abby had ever truly recovered from the shock of losing Jack and finding him again. He remembered, too, how Jennifer had soldiered through a difficult pregnancy with JJ on her own.
He remembered Julie brokenly showing Will photographs of her life with Doug while Will, always wise beyond his years, promised to help keep Doug's memory alive.
He remembered his grandmother, cowering in a closet and choked on her own donuts, as if that was supposed to be funny.
He remembered huddling in whatever shelter he could find with Sami and Will, offering them what scant protection he could from an angry tiger.
He remembered Sami's and Will's tears at Marlena's death— and Roman's death at his wedding to Kate. His mother had wailed for Roman in her blood-soaked wedding gown; now she was gleefully married to the man who had put her through so much pain. Put all of them through so much pain.
Kate rolled her eyes, then shot Lucas a long-suffering look. "Please don't start. You would not want me to start saying snide things about the way you live your life. I always try to be very respectful of my children's choices although that tie is testing my resolve."
Lucas' own resolve not to be distracted collapsed. "There's nothing wrong with my tie! And I thought you hit rock bottom when you married Stefano. But this guy!"
Andre grinned his usual psychotic grin. "So nice to see you Lucas. I promise I will never try to take Daddy's place."
"I think that's a very wise decision," trilled Kate, reminding Lucas of just where her loyalties lay.
"Tell me something, Mother, is it that you just racked up too many days of not doing something insanely stupid that you just cracked under the pressure?" asked Lucas. He figured he owed it to Austin and Billie to ask at least twice.
"You're just so hilarious," said Kate, unmoved.
"You know, Billie's take on this is that you're trying to feel younger again and entering into a deeply stupid marriage," Lucas offered. Sometimes Kate responded better to Billie's concerns than Lucas' own. After all, Lucas was the child she had raised and upon whose loyalty she always counted. Billie was, in Kate's own words, "the difficult one." The only girl. Kate, by her own admission, had always handled men better than women and that included her own children.
Kate didn't dignify Lucas with a response. "I told you he could be tedious," she informed Andre.
And then Kate did dignify Lucas with a response. For a fraction of a second he could resolve the woman before him with the shrewd businesswoman who had taken time out from her eighty-hour work weeks to take six-year-old Lucas to feed the ducks in Central Park. "It's a business arrangement, Lucas. When Chad was stranded on that island the board threatened to sell off the company's assets unless a competent DiMera was running the company. They didn't believe him to be competent and I wasn't a DiMera, so we decided to pool our resources. The company can vote Chad back in as CEO after six months and then we can amicably divorce."
Lucas supposed that on some level he was relieved. She hadn't lost her mind. She wasn't being threatened.
On all the other levels, though, Lucas was still disgusted. "Six months with this man is like six months with eczema," he muttered.
"It's a good thing I have a good sense of humor," said Andre.
The story of his grandmother, the closet, and the donuts rose again to the forefront of his mind. "And now you're Mrs. Andre DiMera," he told Kate, ignoring Andre. "I'm sorry, there just isn't enough money in the world to justify that level of humiliation."
"Really? You were married to Chloe. And Nicole. And Sami. Talk about humiliating marriages, Lucas," Kate returned, as if she hadn't tried to poison Chloe and paid Nicole to marry him in the first place and dedicated years of her life to destroying everything he and Sami had built.
Not one to be ignored, Andre made a show of ordering martinis for himself and Kate. "Oh, can I get you something, Lucas?" he drawled. "A Shirley Temple, perhaps. Here I am, acting just like your daddy."
"Please tell me you got a pre-nup," said Lucas to Kate. "Please tell me you protected yourself before you married Beelzebub."
Kate sighed heavily. "I told you that he could be tedious," she told Andre for the third time. "Lucas, it's a business arrangement. I could profit from all this."
"Financially and emotionally," Andre chimed in. Lucas' stomach lurched at the image.
"I can't believe this, I'm actually getting stomach pains right now. This is making me nauseous. I can't believe you married a man who beat me up in drag. Thank you Mom, my life is complete now. You know what, I should have been at the wedding. I could have given you away. Wouldn't it have been great, I could have given you away permanently."
"You know I'm sure he'll come around," Andre retorted. "I'll take him camping, fishing and then I'll drown him. And then we'll be one big happy family by Thanksgiving."
Lucas remembered the Thanksgiving that the Salem Stalker had terrorized Salem. Andre had stuffed the bleeding body of a teenage girl into a turkey-shaped piñata so that it would fall, broken and abused, into a crowd of children.
Kate laughed, and she and Andre strolled off arm-in-arm.
The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes.
Lucas was glad that he had time to retreat to a private hotel room before Austin and Billie called back. He had a feeling that he would be yelling things he didn't want anyone to overhear.
"What did she say?" asked Austin as soon as the conference call clicked through. Lucas was surprised, but pleased, to see that Philip's number was included alongside Austin's and Billie's this time.
"What did she say," Lucas repeated flatly. He sprawled across the bed and stared at the ceiling. "She said that I was tedious and that my tie is ugly."
"Is your tie ugly?" asked Philip. For all that Philip's mock-reasonableness sounded just like Kate's mock-reasonableness, a tiny knot in Lucas' chest began to unravel. It was good to hear Philip's voice, even made raspier than usual by a connection of questionable quality. When Philip got his heart broken, he often took off for the most dangerous corners of the world and buried himself in explosives and commando missions. And Chloe had broken his heart badly last December.
"Good to talk to you, too, Bro. You okay?"
"I'm fine. Really. I was having a perfectly nice day until Billie called me with the news. Mom does remember that this guy is the reason she was screaming for Roman in that bloody wedding dress, right?"
"He threatened to kill me and she thought it was funny, so I'm guessing she's let bygones be bygones."
"He threatened to kill you?" they demanded with impressive unison for three people who were on three different continents. Lucas was gratified by their outrage. The knot in his chest loosened a little more.
"He was making all these jokes about being my new daddy. Said that he was going to take me fishing and drown me. Of course, that was after I compared him to eczema and said I was sorry I missed the wedding because I wanted to give her away permanently."
Austin laughed so hard that Lucas heard him put his phone down.
For the first time since he'd heard about his latest stepfather, Lucas' stomach settled.
"Did you get around to asking our mother why she married an unrepentant serial killer, or did you just exchange insults with her?" asked Billie drily.
Lucas heaved a cleansing sigh. "I did ask her. It's a business arrangement. The Board at DiMera Enterprises was getting antsy and she couldn't take control without legally being a DiMera. She says she'll divorce Andre as soon as Chad can take the CEO position back in six months."
"So she's not trying to recapture her youth or being blackmailed. She just craving money and power again."
"Pretty much."
"And I'm going to guess she doesn't care at all what we think."
"She told me that she didn't have to care what we think because she always refrains from interfering in our lives."
There was a lengthy silence while Austin, Billie, and Philip digested that.
"Except for all those weddings she interrupted," said Austin.
"Except for the time she paid a man to seduce Hope so I could be Bo's second choice," said Billie.
"Except for the time she covered up Claire's paternity so I could get that much more attached and make letting go that much harder," said Philip.
"And the thing is," said Lucas, warming to his subject, "she says it with a straight face. She says it like she actually believes it."
"She practices in front of a mirror," suggested Philip.
"She doesn't know what those words mean," theorized Billie.
"I was right all along. She's delusional and we should have her committed," said Austin.
"I don't know if that's fair to the other inmates," said Philip.
"She told me that marrying Andre wasn't any more humiliating than me marrying Sami," Lucas blurted out. "Like she didn't have anything to do with making sure Sami and Will and I weren't happy for more than five minutes. Like she didn't drug Sami and strip her naked and shove her in bed with Brandon Walker. Like she didn't barge into our apartment every single day to pick a fight. Like she didn't make sure EJ was there to crash our wedding or threaten the twins or drive Will past his breaking point. It didn't even matter when Will was collateral damage, as long as she got what she wanted, and now Will's dead and he never got the happiness he deserved or knew what it was like to feel stable—"
Lucas broke off, breathing heavily.
They'd been having such a good time, really, joking and commiserating over the particular challenge of being Kate Roberts' children. But his grief for Will, like it often did, came up out of nowhere and he hadn't controlled it.
"I'm sorry," he told them. "I didn't mean to—"
"No, we're sorry," said Billie. "It's not fair for us to make it your job to deal with her on your own."
"That's too much for any man alive," said Philip.
"I may never get within a thousand miles of her again, so you have my unending respect," added Austin.
"Thanks," said Lucas quietly.
"I hate to bring this up," said Billie just as quietly, "but do you know where to go to a meeting tonight?"
Lucas made a face. Being around people whose mothers had never married serial killers didn't sound that appealing. "Yes," he assured Billie. "Hospital basement. But don't worry. I wouldn't give Andre the satisfaction. He kept offering me Shirley Temples while he and Mom swilled martinis."
"I'd break that martini glass and shove it down his throat," said Billie.
"I wish you were here," Lucas admitted.
"Maybe you should come visit me," Billie suggested.
"Or me," said Austin. "You've never met Noah. He's your nephew. You should get to know him."
"I'd invite you to come visit me, but you'd have to wear a bullet-proof vest all the time and I'm not sure it's legal to cross the border," said Philip.
"Please tell me you're getting out of there soon," said Lucas.
"I promise," said Philip.
"You'd better," said Billie.
"Lucas won't give stepdaddy dearest the satisfaction falling off the wagon, and I won't give him the satisfaction of getting myself blown up. I wonder if Mom's so into this DiMera thing that she'd dance with him in the street if anyone named Kiriakis died, even if it was me."
"It would destroy her," said Billie. "Don't even joke about that."
"She only had me in the first place because she thought that presenting my father with the perfect Kiriakis heir would put her in charge of Titan forever. Joke was on her when he turned out to despise me. He'd rather put his long-lost crazy brother in charge."
"Did you know your uncle Deimos turned up dead last night?" Lucas asked.
"Well, at least something good happened yesterday," said Philip. "You think Mom did it?"
"You can never tell," sighed Lucas. "I look at her and I wonder how we got here. You say that she only had you because she wanted Titan, Phil, and I'm here to tell you that isn't it. She loved Victor and they both wanted you so much. What I don't understand is how she turned from this brilliant businesswoman who would go to the mat for any one of her kids to a woman who has no standards as long as there's money or power in it for her. When she left New York for Salem and that job at Titan, this is the last thing I ever saw happening."
"Welcome to life," said Austin, not unkindly. "There's always something you don't expect. Especially with a family."
"It would be nice if some of those things I don't expect could be good things," grumbled Lucas.
"How about this?" asked Billie. "When you and Mom first came to Salem, you did not expect to find a long lost brother and sister you never asked for and didn't want."
"And hated on sight," said Austin helpfully.
"You kept calling me a punk."
"You were a punk."
"We had very different childhoods and we lived very different lives. Did you think that one day you'd be on the phone with your two brothers and your sister who love you and would do anything for you?"
"Even when you're tedious?"
"Shut up, Philip."
"I was being nice!"
"Fine, Billie," said Lucas pointedly. "I love you, too."
She was right, Lucas reflected as Austin and Philip launched into a debate about the merits of mental institutions versus simple imprisonment in a basement dungeon. He never would have imagined the day that Austin and Billie would be on his side instead of aligned against him or that Philip would grow up to be a man who led his own life outside the shadow of his powerful father.
Against all odds, the news that Kate had married Andre DiMera hadn't simply reminded him of all he had lost. It had reminded him that, strangely enough, there were people in the world who understood exactly what it was to be him.
And at the moment, it was more than enough.
The End