Chapter 28: Here We Go Again
Sonny turned the light off but then hesitated in the doorway and watched his sleeping daughter for a few moments. He remembered the day he had learned she was his. That had been a day of roller coaster emotions. He had been angry about Alexis's lies. But truthfully, he had been more hurt that Alexis hadn't trusted him with the most important truth of her life. He had been scared that Kristina could die, but he had also found hope in having a daughter.
September 9, 2003
Alexis's words echoed in Sonny's head as he tried to make some sense of them. Kristina was his daughter? He had a million questions, but he couldn't bring himself to ask any of them. He took in a shaky breath and squeezed his chin. "Is she going to be alright?" he finally asked.
"She has aplastic anemia. She needs a stem cell transplant, and we haven't found a donor," Alexis said.
Her brown eyes were cold, but Sonny saw protective detachment more than bitterness. She had flashed the same look when she had begun their daughter's namesake's eulogy four years earlier. But even protective detachment couldn't last forever. Sonny had watched Alexis crumble at her sister's memorial service, and he sensed she was moments away from that again. As mad as he should be, he still wanted to make everything alright just like he had four years ago. Cautiously he reached out and laid a hand on her knee. "We'll find a donor for Kristina. We'll all be tested, me and the boys. Anthony and Morgan would want to help their sister," he said.
They had all been tested, even his goddaughter Brooklyn was tested, but none of them were matches for Kristina. The doctors talked about matching on four out of five loci, whatever that meant. Sonny hadn't had a clue; he had passed high school biology because he saved the course for his senior year when Lois had been taking it as a freshman and they did all the labs together. All he really knew was that he might lose his daughter before he ever got a chance to really know her.
That desperation had been what had brought him to file for visitation and take Alexis to court when it had come to that. He hadn't wanted it to come to that though. He had just wanted Alexis to let him know his child. Yet, when Judge Ward had granted him full visitation the desperation had only intensified. It had been a hollow victory because Kristina could still die, and Sonny knew that.
Kristina had survived. Yet, the miracle had not come without costs. Kristina had survived because she had received a cord blood transplant from a baby that was not only her half-sister but also her cousin. Sonny hadn't known the last part at the time, although he suspected Sam had. Kristina had survived because baby Lila had been born four months early. Baby Lila hadn't survived for the same reason. Lila's stem cells had saved her sister, and cousin, Kristina's life. Sonny was grateful that Kristina lived. But, despite what Sam might always believe, he had never wanted things to end the way they did.
Sonny shuddered as he reflected on his relationship with Sam McCall. That relationship wasn't easy for Sonny to reconcile. In fact, he had eventually admitted there just wasn't a good explanation. In May 2003, Sam had been dating his best friend, and brother, Jason Morgan but she didn't trust him. He had been married to Ally and sometimes he wondered if he had ever trusted Ally. She actually had been sleeping with Lorenzo Alcazar and there was a time when Sonny might have felt that had justified his actions with Sam. He knew it didn't though. Not really.
Their pain, perhaps self-inflicted, had brought them together. They had comforted each other with rum. One thing led to another. A broken condom led to a baby; a baby that gave a child, he hadn't even realized was his, a chance at life but was denied their own chance, and things only got messier from there. Ally had another breakdown and went off to Rose Lawn. Sam had cheated on Jason with Jax. Ric had cheated on Alexis with more people than he wanted to count. He had thought about saying something, even though it was one of those things he wasn't really supposed to know. But then he had realized she had known so he had let it go, just like she had.
Then Ric had stooped to an ultimate low, and he had slept with the woman he believed was his stepdaughter. Except she wasn't really his stepdaughter, because she wasn't really Alexis's daughter. Sonny had proven that. At the time he had thought he was doing the right thing. Alexis deserved to know the truth. Jason deserved to know the truth. He hadn't really given much consideration to if Sam could handle the truth. In retrospect, he could see that she had not been able to. She had left Port Charles days after the police had ruled that she had shot Diego Alcazar in self-defense. The PCPD might have felt the killing was justified but Lorenzo Alcazar had a different view. Sam probably was safer outside of Port Charles than in it and, despite all that had happened, Sonny realized he wanted that for her. Unless she was still working with Ric, then perhaps all bets were off.
He had once told Ric he couldn't kill him because he was his mother's son. He had never told Faith he couldn't kill her because he couldn't hurt a woman, yet, it had basically been the truth. Perhaps it was an ironic truth since he was sure there was a list of women, Alexis included, who would line up to claim they had been hurt by him. The difference was that it wasn't intentional, not that, that made it right, but it made it more complicated. Sometimes he wondered when life had gotten so complicated.
He sighed as he pulled Kristina's door shut and then started down the stairs to the main level of his Penthouse. He was surprised to see Alexis sitting on his couch. "Is your head feeling better?" he asked and wondered if she would be honest with him.
Alexis avoided answering him. "What did you tell the girls?" she asked.
Sonny sighed as he sat down on the couch beside her. He wondered if she would ever trust him the way she once had. Once she had told him the truth about her childhood and about the horrors of Helena but that seemed like almost a different lifetime. Perhaps it had been. Perhaps he had made irreparable choices. Perhaps she would never be able to forgive him for her sister's death.
Sonny gripped his chin with his left hand and then cautiously extended his right towards the back of Alexis's neck. As he kneaded at her neck gently, he was surprised by the tension. He didn't want to believe he was responsible for all of it. "I said that you were tired and needed to rest. Kristina seemed ok with that and she is fast asleep now. I'm going to heat you up some soup you haven't eaten since breakfast," Sonny said as he started to get up from the couch.
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Once again, he just decides what I need, Alexis thought with a little frustration as Sonny left the room. She wanted to hate Sonny's desire to just step in and rescue her. Yet, she was afraid what she really hated was the fact that she needed him. Needing Sonny was insane for many reasons, however, the obvious professional conflict of interest, and the reality that his own insanity and craving for destruction would lead him back to Ally's door headed the list. A stronger woman would have walked away a long time ago, but Alexis knew she had only pretended to. The truth was that Sonny Corinthos still held a big piece of her heart and Alexis was afraid he always would. That scared her a lot of the time, but at other times she felt it perversely comforting as well.
To calm her fears, she tried to rationalize that she and Sonny were only connected through Kristina. But sometimes she wondered if that was even rational since she had spent years rationalizing that Sonny's world was too dangerous for her daughter. She had criticized Ally for not making the same sacrifice for her children. At other times she had accused her of using her sons to strengthen her hold on Sonny.
With a frustrated sigh Alexis accepted that she was a true hypocrite. Not because she didn't believe that Ally hadn't used her own children as bargaining chips, because she had. Not just because she could see that Kristina was insecure of Sonny's love in a way, she doubted Morgan ever would be. Not even because it wasn't like Ric's world had exactly been safe, or good, for her daughters either. She was a hypocrite because sometimes she was afraid her younger sister had been right when she had claimed she was using Sonny's child as an excuse to never address the biggest elephant in the room, Ally.
For years Alexis had denied those accusations, initially to Kristina herself. Then, after, Kristina's death she argued the points with imaginary opponents in her dreams. She took her frustration out on Mark, she set ridiculous standards for him as Kristina's father. Then, when he achieved them, and truly fell in love with a little girl who he would never share any biology with, she had changed the rules again and taken his child away. She really was a horrible mother, and some day, perhaps in a fit of anger, or maybe just a moment of clarity, Kristina would tell her that and she wouldn't even be able to begin to defend herself. Her best excuse would be that she had wanted Kristina to be safe. Safer than she had been, safer than her namesake had been, safer than her older sister had been.
Except Sam wasn't really Kristina's older sister, she was her half cousin, the daughter of a half-brother that had destroyed any illusions of safety Alexis had held as a child. Except she hadn't called herself Alexis then. She had been Natasha, the illegitimate daughter of Mikkos Cassadine and Kirstin Bergmon. After her mother's murder, by her stepmother, she went to live with her father although he never acknowledged her paternity. She grew up believing she was a poor cousin, not the Cassadine Princess.
Alexis cringed as she realized that the first person she had really tried to explain any of that to had been Sonny. Truly, the only person she had really tried to explain that to had been Sonny. She and Mark had talked around the issue at times either because he knew things from having been engaged to her sister; or because they needed to band together to protect Kristina from Helena. The realization that keeping Kristina and Molly safe from Ric might be even harder was too much for Alexis to take and she jumped up from the couch and fled out the front door of Sonny's penthouse.