AN - PLEASE READ!
Some explanation is needed. As mentioned in the summary this is a challenge response to the lj community fanfic100. 100 prompts for 100 stories, based around my chosen characters Jason & Carly. These stories will span canon, AU & really AU (I've got some really AU ideas, so if you object to something you might want to mention that in a review right now) - some will take place in the GH 'verse we know & follow, most won't - with a varying degree of AU.
All will be Jarly - sometimes they'll be the best friends they've known all their lives, sometimes they've just met, sometimes . . . lol, well you'll just have to read on to see. I'll do my best to keep them IC, but any & everything is up for grabs.
Each story will start off just as this one does - title, characters, prompt, summary, rating (which is rated M for the entire 100 chapters just to be on the safe side), etc. If the story is a continuation, it will be noted up here in the AN - bolded for your attention, otherwise assume it's a one-shot.
I own nothing but the plotlines you read here. If you want further info, check out my homepage. No this doesn't mean that I am putting aside my other GH story, this is just a little bit on the side.
General Hospital - Carly & Jason. 002, Middles
Title: In Medias Res
Fandom: General Hospital, GH
Characters: Carly, Jason
Prompt: 002. Middles.
Word Count: 2,271
Rating: PG13 - language
Summary: 10 facts about Carly & Jason that you never knew - past, present & future - and how they found their way back to each other.
1. Lets face the facts - Carly was never "in love" with Sonny, not really, anyway. Most of the time she actually felt an intense need to strangle him. Thinking about her situation with Sonny always involved her loyalty to Jason, the need for something vaguely stable for her kids, the chance to rub certain sanctimonious faces in her "apparent happiness" & well an enjoyment of angry-sex, more than love for Sonny, although to be fair, then was a certain amount of sympathy and guilt mixed in as well – pretty much all in that order.
Not that Sonny didn't have his moments, even a broken clock is right once in a while & they were together for years, after all. Sonny could be a good friend, a decent husband, always a loving father, terrible ex-husband and a somewhat less than perfect lover (unless you were talking about the afore-mentioned angry-sex, but even that was rarely worth the effort). Most of all, Sonny Corinthos when he finally made up his mind about something or someone, he always put forth his best effort – sometimes failing spectacularly, but he always tried, which in Carly's book meant something, not that much mind you, but something.
2. Truth be told, a couple of months after he moved out of the manor, Jason Morgan remembered more about Jason Q than anyone has ever figured out. How much more? Well, pretty much all of it, actually. Luckily as it turned out though, the only person observant enough to notice just happened to have been the one person who never met Jason Q. It helped that he remembered it more intellectually than emotionally. He knew who everyone was, but he knew there was a difference between how he'd felt before than how he felt now and he was ok with that.
Realistically, who'd want to live in that insane asylum, wearing those clothes, acting like such a dork if they really didn't have to? Sure Jason always knew that he could've have gone back and been welcomed with open arms, but he was having far too much fun, being a mobster in black leather, a motorcycle, with a hot blonde. No way in hell, he was ever going to tell anyone & since he "couldn't" lie, eventually everyone stopped asked. How many people get to live an entirely different life like that? If AJ wasn't such an asshole – Jason would have thanked him by now.
3. Of course, Carly knew how to drive a car. Hell forget about "The Fast & the Furious," those actors had nothing on her. She'd racing for pink slips years before she was legal or it was suddenly "cool." Even today, she'd occasionally, slip out & race, sometimes more successfully than others. To this day, no one else knew who "stole" Sonny's 2006 Scion and crashed it, Carly certainly wasn't telling anyone.
4. Jason thought it was terribly ironic that their "front" was importing coffee. The freakin' warehouse was full of that crap, along with guns, drugs and all the other accoutrements of being a mobster, of course. But still coffee? He hated the taste of it and for the life of him couldn't figure how the hell he got talked into that shit. Why couldn't they import something that actually tasted good, like Dr. Pepper? Or tea, he'd even take tea over coffee, not that he was actually going to admit that fact to anyone of course. Not even Carly – tell her something important and you had a 75/25 percent chance that she might keep it a secret, but give her fodder like that & Jason knew he'd never hear the end of it.
5. Of all the woman, Jason has been involved with, the only one Carly could really tolerate was Courtney. Maybe it was selfish, but she could never picture Courtney as being any kind of a real threat to her relationship with Jason. She and Courtney wound up being good friends, then again Courtney never quite realized that if it ever came down to the wire – if Carly was ever forced to choose between Jason and Courtney, than she'd always choose Jason first. Naturally, that fact probably helped, in retrospect.
Despite hours of listening to Courtney's proclamations of undying love for Jason, Carly always knew that they'd never last. Courtney, in many ways was just like Elizabeth and Robyn. They all cried pretty tears and talked about their "connection" to Jason, but it was always bullshit. Carly never managed to figure how if these "connections" were so strong, that none of the girls ever actually understood who Jason actually was. She could almost bring herself to feel pity for them . . . well, almost.
6. From the moment he moved into the cottage with Carly, Michael & Robyn, he knew it was going to end in disaster, but even forewarned, he couldn't seem to bring himself to avoid it. Despite everything he said to Carly and Robyn, only Michael knew the truth of how he felt and his son was too young to even understand. What he actually wanted, didn't make sense to him, so trying to explain it to either of the women in his life would've have only complicated the situation further – if that was even possible.
Carly only saw what she thought he wanted & Robyn only wanted what she wanted. Telling Robyn the truth about Michael doomed all of them, because other than having her wacked, Jason couldn't see a way to extricate himself from her. And if he ever had told Carly, she would have gleeful done the job. In his late-night daydreams, he toyed with that idea, but was all too aware of how Carly's plan inevitably backfired. So he killed time in the cottage, playing devil's advocate. Sleeping in the bed of a woman who left him cold, trying to forget about the one down the hall that kept him burning, knowing all along that at any goven moment it was about to come crashing down around him.
7. Late at nights, when she couldn't sleep, Carly mused about what was the worse memory of her life. While, there were too many possibilities to count, two always stood out as the major contenders and to no surprise, they both revolved around Jason Morgan – the hate-sex with Sonny and Jason's departure. And for the life of her, she couldn't decide which was more traumatic. Truthfully, she didn't remember very much of that night, between the devastating sight of Jason and Lizzibitch dancing and then shattered expression on Jason's face, it was all a hazy blank. It was vicious irony, considering that those forgotten hours irredeemably changed the course of her life. She hadn't thought anything could be worse than that, but hearing Jason, her Jase, telling her that she would wreak him – in that one moment, she realized that her world totally fell apart.
To her disbelief, she continued to breathe – walking, talking, eating & playing out her role in Port Charles – trash, slut, prodigal daughter, mother, etc, but in that moment she merely existed in the most basic and mechanical of ways, because she knew that she was really the walking dead. The logic of how she was able to continue to live with her heart broken, never quite made sense. She went through the motions, eventually she was able to love Michael – he was after all she had left, but for the small corner still clinging in her ribcage, her heart was simply gone & Jason took it's ghost with him when he left.
8. Jason spent his time away from Port Charles, trying to forget where he'd gone wrong with Carly, but it was like her ghost followed him wherever he went and like a shadow, he was never able to escape her. After a while, he stopped trying.
It was weird.
When he had broken up with Robyn, both times actually it had hurt, but this was different. Different like the difference between a paper cut and . . . well, like a gunshot. It took him years to puzzle it out, not how he felt, because that was obvious even to him after awhile, but how it happened. Carly for all her faults, was the most loyal person he knew – reckless and unpredictable as hell, but absolutely loyal. It wasn't even that sleeping with someone to get revenge on someone else was something she wouldn't do, because anyone who knew Carly, knew that she was more than capable of that. But what he couldn't understand was how she'd be able to do that to him.
That night when he almost lost Carly for the umpteenth time, when Sonny had shot her in the goddamned head, was when he finally found out. He was still amazed that he hadn't killed Sonny on the spot. His "friend" had fallen apart, just like Sonny always did and broke out the tequila and stupidly gotten drunk as hell, and it was in this half-stupor that he confessed. Confessed that like a bastard, he had fucking drugged her. Jason had never felt as cold as he did at that moment
He'd never found it easier to pull the trigger then he did when Carly had finally regained consciousness. Sonny wouldn't have even gotten that last month, if he hadn't still been Carly's next-of-kin. Even Sonny in a stupor was easier to deal with than Bobbie with a head full of steam.
9. When Carly woke up, the world had changed. It took her so long to believe that she was actually awake and that this wasn't just another dream. It wasn't just that Jason was there, because Jason was always around when she needed him most, but it was the way he was there for her. In so many ways, she felt detached from everyone and everything, even Sonny's death. Everyone was walking on eggshells around her, but Jason simply asked her if she wanted to leave and when she said yes, he took her back to the penthouse – not the one she shared with Sonny, but their penthouse. Courtney was still there and there was Morgan in addition to Michael, but it was almost like living with Robyn in the cottage, only she got along with Courtney.
And then Courtney was out of the picture and it was her and Jason, Michael and Morgan – a family unit united against Alcazar, just like they'd always worked against AJ. Carly wasn't sure how this sudden reversal had happened, but she certainly wasn't about to question it either. Aside from their usual disagreements as to how to handle him, Jason gave her grief over making any "plans", it was like it was before that disasterous Sonny. She couldn't say that she was falling back into love with Jason, because she'd never actually managed to fall out of love with him, but for the first time she started to feel secure again in a way she hadn't in what seemed like forever. But this time, Carly decided to bide her time because she still hadn't forgotten Jason's prediction that she was going to break him and she was sure that he hadn't either.
10. Getting back to where they had once been hadn't been as difficult as Jason had expected. Hell, if he had realized it could have been this easy years ago, life would have been so much less complicated. He looked down at Morgan sleeping in his bed just like his brother had so many years ago, whose room he'd already walked through, Morgan had become another son. Carly's latest pregnancy culminated in their marriage, something that sent Port Charles spinning on it's head. Jason still thought everyone's reaction was a bit extreme, but Carly had reveled in it, while he just shook his head and let her plot out the details to her heart's content. Although he did finally have to draw the line, when she starting asking hm about veils. Jason wasn't completely sure why there were 37 different kinds of veils exactly, but he was fairly sure that he could live without that knowledge – just seeing her standing there and hearing them take their vows was good enough for him.
The birth of their daughter, Emma Spencer Morgan, completed their family, and it was a good thing, because it was the last time Carly was ever going to pregnant. Jason refused to ever go through that terror again. Three traumatic births were enough to convince him that he wasn't willing to risk Carly's health ever again, no matter what she said. He lingered over his daughter's crib, visually tracing the wisps of blonde hair that framed a beautiful heart-shaped face. No doubt about it, Emma was the very image of her mother. Not for the first time, Jason reflected that it was a very good thing, Emma had two older brothers.
And life for the Morgan's went on.
It wasn't always easy, of course. Carly could drive a saint insane, but then again Jason knew he wasn't the prize Carly made him out to be either, when she wasn't pissed at him, of course. Occasionally she still plotted and he worked to circumvent her, but some things never changed and honestly Jason wouldn't want it any other way. He smiled at his wife as he walked into their bedroom.
Typically, Carly had taken possession of every blanket on the bed, but Jason had no regrets. He was, after at all, at the top of his game, had his family and the love of his life, what else could anyone ask for?
fin
I've got lots of ideas for this story so if you've gotten this far, leave me a review. It's good karma, you know :D
