*Author's Note: This fic will incorporate the recent reveal of a Valentin Cassadine as yet another of Mikkos' bastard children, but will also focus on the past of my favorite Cassadines. Also, underline text in the body indicates actual GH quotes.*
Little Sister
Prologue: The Binding
She was the first person he ever loved.
The Cassadines were many things. Cold, manipulative, ruthless, deadly – these were just a few of the adjectives they might proudly, and accurately, use to describe themselves. Even their innumerable enemies spoke of them with a certain admiration, which only fueled their aristocratic pride.
This was a family whose members had always thought themselves to be above and apart from the ordinary dregs of humanity – a superior breed, so far advanced as to almost be a separate race. However, for all their airs and attitudes that made them a law unto themselves, they were still members of the larger human race. And human beings need to love, and be loved in return.
Mikkos Cassadine could not satisfy this need within his arranged marriage, so he sought the semblance of love with several mistresses. More interested in receiving love (or at least certain female attentions) than giving it, he largely ignored his children, legitimate or otherwise. His wife and oldest son were not bothered by this emotional distance, however, because they had each other.
Helena, his beautiful but frigid wife, lavished all the love she was capable of their eldest son, and Stavros returned her affection in kind. Neither had a great enough capacity to love anyone else, and though Stavros was wise enough to at least pretend he respected his father, he never asked for his attention. For this, Mikkos was grateful.
Stefan was another story. He was the second son, the one that Helena never wanted or needed, after she had produced the required heir. She alternately belittled and ignored him, and her favored son followed suit. The few crumbs of affection he received in his early life came from the succession of governesses employed on the Cassadine compound (Helena had a tendency to fire them frequently, ever watchful of her husband's wandering eye).
In particular, young Stefan remembered a beautiful and gentle young woman with vivid red hair and big brown eyes. She had a soothing, melodious voice, and he if he asked very nicely, she would sometimes sing to him. She would also hold him when he cried, which was not often. He became attached to her. Then one day his father and mother had one of their rare but intense shouting matches, and the governesses went away, to be replaced but an older woman who was diligent but unfeeling. Soon enough, he was old enough to longer need a governess, and he was again left with no one to love.
His father, whom he resembled more than his brother did, would occasionally toss him scraps of attention that passed for affection – a toy sailboat as a surprise gift (though Stavros soon destroyed it) or a night together at the opera, in which the lead female singer seemed oddly familiar, and he fell asleep after his father went backstage for what seemed to him to be quite a long time. However, these moments, few and far between, did little to ease the profound loneliness he felt he was drowning in. He struggled with this loneliness for the first ten years of his life.
And then, she came to live with them.
They were told she was a cousin – sometimes she was called a distant one, sometimes not – the familial bond was never clearly explained, but both Stavros and himself knew better than to press their parents for details. He remembers his mother's coldness, how his father seemed almost nervous, and how his brother quickly picked up on his mother's distaste for this new addition, and copied it. The thing he remembers the most though, is her eyes: those big, brown, soft eyes that seemed so strangely familiar. Her hair and her skin tone closely resembled his, and his father's – perhaps they were not so distantly related? But he could not ask.
"Alexis Davidovich," was her name, the one spat out by her mother like a bitter pill or a vulgar curse. She was four years old, silent and wary, not daring to look directly at any of them. The first time she sat at the dinner table, she ate slowly and deliberately, her poise admirable, Stefan thought, considering her tender years. Her eyes were focused steadfastly on her plate.
Their meal was eaten in near silence, as usual. Sitting across the table from this newly discovered cousin, Stefan tried to catch her eye. It took a while, but when she dared to look up at him, he chanced a smile. She seemed startled by the expression, as if she had never seen it before, but gave him a small smile in return. Encouraged and emboldened, wanting to elicit a further reaction, he stuck his tongue out at her playfully – though really, he was too old for such foolishness. Her eyes lit up, and the laugh escaped her mouth before she could stop herself.
Silverware clanked loudly back onto the table, and a deadly silence fell over the room. Stavros looked amused, regarding Alexis with a sneer as she trembled and clapped a hand over her mouth, too late. Having been the recipient of too many of his mother's glares, Stefan did not wonder that the poor child shrank under his mother's eyes now.
"Go to your room," Helena said, her voice barely above a whisper, and all the more deadly for it. Alexis probably didn't even know where her room was in the large monstrosity they called a home, but she was smart enough to know that it was more important to simply get out of Helena's sight. It seemed he blinked, and she was gone, along with any remaining desire he had to finish his meal.
"May I be excused?" His voice seemed to ring loud in the room, which had been silent for several minutes after Alexis' abrupt departure. Both his parents looked up, surprised. Stavros merely sneered again.
"No," Helena snapped, at the same time her husband said, "yes."
This was unprecedented. Stefan looked between them, trying to fathom what to do, but they were staring at each other, apparently locked in an intense but silent argument. After a moment, Helena lowered her eyes and nodded, though her jaw was tight with anger.
"You are excused," his father said, and Stefan made a hasty exit.
He inquired with the servants and found the small room his mother had deigned to allow the young girl to sleep in. She was sitting on the bed, hugging herself, rocking back and forth as she cried. His felt something in him break for her.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she looked up, startled, drawing herself into an even tighter ball, as if she wanted to disappear. She seemed almost frightened, and he approached her slowly, as one might a wild animal. He sat down beside her on the bed.
"It's my fault you got in trouble," he explained, under her questioning gaze. "I just … I wanted to see you smile."
She gave him a watery smile in response to this, instantly eager to comply with his wishes. After that, it seemed only natural to put his arm around her. She started at first, and then relaxed. She leaned her head against his chest, her sobs subsiding as she wrapped her arms around him. "Stefan," she said, clearly and plainly, with not a trace of a childhood lisp. Those big brown eyes, divested of their tears, were now full of admiration, gratitude, devotion… and love.
In that moment, the heart that he pretended he didn't have melted, for her. He remembers thinking that the fates had aligned and brought her to him, so that he might have someone to love, and be loved by in return.
She spent the night, and several after that, sleeping snuggled up to his side. Sometimes she seemed to be having nightmares; she would cry out, "Mama, mama!" and he would mutter soothing words in Russian or Greek, stroking her hair until she settled back down. They had been told only that her parents were dead, but the specifics had been omitted. Alexis appeared to have some vague memory of her mother at least, if only in her dreams.
During the day, he played with her, tutored her, and read to her, soon astonished to find that she could already read in a limited fashion herself. He immediately recognized the keen intelligence between her shyness and fear, and resolved not to let it go to waste.
And so from the first moment at the dinner table on, they spent the majority of their time together. Helena might occasionally make some disparaging comment about his attachment to the "ugly little thing" as she called her, and Stavros seemed to delight in terrifying Stefan's little one, but he did his best to shield her from all that. Otherwise, they were largely content, left to their own devices. Oddly enough, it seemed to him as though his father approved of this arrangement, though he never stated anything explicitly.
He relished her devotion, her complete and utter faith that he was "the most wonderful person in the world." When she told him this, her expression quite serious, he laughed, and replied that she had not met nearly enough people to make that claim, but she only shook her head, and said, "I know," melting his supposedly nonexistent heart all over again.
He was her playmate and parent, conspirator and companion, teacher and protector, and the only family she could ever fathom laying claim to in this place. In return, she was his to mold, to cherish, to guard, to nurture, and to control.
Yes, to control. It was an integral part of their relationship from the start, and a part of her would always relish his control, his power over her, even on the increasingly frequent occasions when she chafed under it later in life. After all, they were Cassadines, and even the purest love could not exist between them without a hint or undercurrent of darkness, of domination. He demanded (and received) her complete loyalty and obedience, rewarding it with all the love and devotion he had in him.
She was the first person he ever loved.
And so the binding tightened and strengthened between them, day by day, year by year. Neither could fathom anything ever breaking their connection. They were bound by their past, by their childhood. They knew each other better than any two siblings anywhere.
Their adult lives would be … complicated, to say the least. There would be betrayals, power struggles, accusations and arguments, but ultimately, always, reconciliations. And then something happened. Everything happened. The horrors of their past, the horrible night they'd vowed never to speak of – the ghosts were real, and they were gaining on him, if not on her, and he could not tell her the truth. It seemed to him as if he could not get her one daughter without sacrificing the other, the one who dwelt in the silences that suddenly lay heavily between them, oppressive and unnatural. The bindings were stretched taut, and the distance between them widened until it seemed insurmountable.
And so it seemed, in the face of his actions, his betrayal, her betrayal, the binding broke at last, and only death awaited him.
She attended his funeral. She mourned him, and moved on with her life.
This is the story that the world believed.
But this story was never true.