Title: The Monster on the Floor
Fandom: General Hospital
Characters: Tracy Quartermaine
Prompt: #25 Cancer
Word Count: 526 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Thoughts are a cancer, spreading, destroying, paralyzing.
Author's Notes: I started a completely different story for this prompt, then decided to save it elsewhere to write as an independent. This is a very dark little piece set in 1980. Tracy fans will probably know where I'm going with this one….

The thought was a cancer to her. It was one of those things she didn't like about herself, how she could come to obsess so quickly on an idea, on a plan. It had made her formidable in so many important areas of her life—school and work, mainly.

In her daily life, though, it just gave her a headache.

The thought taking form, taking root in her mind, was a particularly insidious one. A particularly vicious little inkling--My father is not my father.

She didn't know where it came from. She didn't know who put it there. Something in a look he gave her, something in a gesture. Maybe it was Divine Intervention.

Maybe it was the onset of a stroke.

But she began watching him, obsessing on his gestures, studying his features at the breakfast table, studying the way he looked at her when he thought she wasn't noticing.

My father is not my father. It sang in her mind, confused her thoughts, fiddled with her moods.

She found herself irritable and restless. She found herself angry for no reason, morose when she should have been content.

It was stupid, of course. There were only two way's Edward could not be her father. The first and most plausible would be if she were adopted. The second, unheard of, would be if her mother had had an affair. And everybody knew Lila would never do such a thing.

No, she had been switched at the hospital. She was a Quartermaine in name only.

The blood of some other man, some kind man who never knew he'd spawned such a witch, ran through her veins. The genetic structure of some other man pulsed through her cells, wrapping itself into the unique double-helix that created Tracy Quartermaine.

Edward could not possibly be her father. Edward could not be the one who sparked life into the egg that split, that renewed itself over and over, thousands of millions of time, to create the fetus that grew into the baby that grew into the young woman who now stared coldly at her dying father.

Edward is not my father, she thought as her father clutched his heart. I am an orphan. My father is dead. My father was a war hero. My father was a grocer. My father was a kind man. My father was not this monster on the floor, begging for his medication, begging for his life.

She watched him, looked at the creature crawling towards the pills she'd put on top of his new will. She turned to look out the window.

He wasn't her father. He was some other girl's father.

He was somebody else altogether, she thought as she stood still, as she refused to help him, not even one bit.

He was a stranger, she realized as she began to ramble, as she began to berate him for the horrible things he'd said to her, as she began to defend herself against his cruelty, as she told him the only man she'd ever loved was him.

He was a stranger, and it's much easier to kill a stranger than your own father.

The End

Written for the LJ 100 Situations ficathon.

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