Part 30- Sonnez les Matines

Johnny didn't expect mind being shunted back to the Kiriakis Mansion while his "parents," his "brother," and his sister went to London.

The mansion was more his style than the hovel Will had bought with his doctor's salary (which was probably mostly owned by a bank anyway).

Claire pointedly ignored him; Tyler fled in terror of him; Shawn and Philip buried themselves in work and were never home; and Belle was flawlessly kind no matter how condescending or belligerent Johnny's behavior.

And so, Johnny was mostly left alone, which was what he preferred.

For the first couple of hours.

By the end of the first day, though, he was at his wit's end. He was too jittery to sit still and couldn't focus on his laughably simple homework assignments. He looked longingly out the window at the tennis court and almost considered begging Aunt Belle to let him hit a few balls around (most of the snow from the latest storm had melted), but found that his hands were shaking too hard to hold a racket.

The butler served dinner. Johnny couldn't eat it, and no one said a word, because most of them weren't really eating, either.

He longed for a glass of wine. EJ had begun allowing Allie and Johnny to have sips of alcohol as soon as they were old enough to show an interest. They had been served small glasses of wine with dinner, if they liked, for at least a year before Lucas had decided to mess everything up.

The Americans, with their pseudo-puritan attitudes and their addiction runs in the family lectures, were appalled when they learned of it. Allie didn't seem to mind the new restriction on her diet; she was always eager to please Lucas. To Johnny, the blanket refusal to allow him to have a drink was just one more indication of how imperceptive and narrow-minded his new "family" could be. His annoyance had mainly been an intellectual exercise.

Until today.

Now he wanted a buzz, damn it, and one drink to take the edge off of his nerves wasn't going to turn him into a raving alcoholic.

It wasn't as if the nerves were even his, he thought resentfully. Johnny didn't want anything bad to happen to EJ, but EJ could take care of himself—and obviously would, as evidenced by his failure to contact Johnny these past few months that Johnny had been in America. Johnny didn't want anything bad to happen to Allie, either, but she had chosen this course of her own volition.

Allie was the one who was nervous, he decided, and since he was her twin he was sensing her anxiety. She doesn't have to do this, he thought for the umpteenth time. EJ would never have hurt her like that, never, and if he had I would have known and I would have stopped it. Twin, not twin, I always promised to protect her.

The fall they were five, Johnny had poured glue into their first tutor's shoe because the tutor had been too hard on Allie about her handwriting.

The summer they were seven, Johnny had chased a dog that barked at Allie and had been bitten. He still had the scar on his forearm.

The Christmas they were nine, Johnny had noticed that a piece of candy beside Allie's plate was broken, so he swapped it for his own, whole candy. Girls cared so much more about how things looked, after all, and Johnny didn't mind if his was broken as long as it tasted good.

The spring they were eleven, EJ had taken them to a museum that bored Johnny but fascinated Allie. Johnny had spent the whole time thrusting himself between Allie and the rest of the crowd so no one jostled her while she looked. He couldn't even remember what had so interested her, but he could remember her face as she gazed at it.

None of that made him feel justified in doing nothing in Salem while Allie was panicking in London.

Just calm down, Allie, he thought over whatever perverse plane of existence connected them when they were thousands of miles apart.

She didn't calm down. He didn't calm down.

So when dinner was over and the women had gathered in the living room to talk about how proud they were of Allie—like they knew the first thing about Allie!—Johnny snuck into the kitchen, tucked a bottle of vodka under his shirt, and retreated to his bedroom.

The first sip was horrible, and the second sip wasn't much better, but by the third sip he stopped shaking and the taste wasn't quite so bad. A sense of confidence rushed through him and he reached for his homework; he might as well get it done.

Then he reconsidered. Why on earth was he bothering with homework? He already knew everything the idiot teachers at Salem Middle School were attempting to instill in their moronic charges, excepting American history, and how much of that did anyone need? The country had been around for less than three hundred years!

He took another swallow of vodka. His room was suddenly warm, and he removed his dark gray sweater and flung it to the floor. Then he stepped on it and kicked it under the bed.

Stupid sweater. He'd had lots of clothes—school uniforms and otherwise—back on the other side of the ocean, but he'd lost them, along with everything else, when he'd been kidnapped. He didn't know which member of his new family had appropriated his current wardrobe for him. Probably Allie had consulted, because a lot of it was just to his taste.

Damn it, he liked the gray sweater, and he looked good in it, too. But he left it under the bed as a matter of principle. He had more important things to do. Like worry about Allie.

"You don't have to do this," he said out loud, as if she could somehow hear him. "Well, why shouldn't you be able to hear me? We're twins, after all. Twins can do things like that. Don't know how I didn't know you were my twin."

He reached for the bottle again and ran his tongue around the outside of it before tilting it upwards. Some vodka splashed on his face and t-shirt instead of making it into his mouth. For some reason, this seemed funny. Johnny laughed.

"Don't know how I forgot. I knew her. I called her Mommy, and so did you." The puzzling, dreamlike memories had made sense almost as soon as Allie had informed him that they were brother and sister. He hadn't allowed himself to dwell on them; he hadn't wanted the confusion.

Now that Johnny and Allie were three years old, EJ let them sit on the big kid swings at the park instead of the baby swings. It was a huge achievement, and they couldn't wait to tell Sami when they got home.

"Mommy!" they chorused. "Mommy, Mommy!" Sami knelt down and pulled them both into a bone-crushing hug.

"Mommy, I swung so high!"

"Me too, Mommy, I swung the highest!"

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"I missed you, Mommy!"

"I missed you most, why can't you come and play with us?"

Sami's eyes were full of tears, like they often were. "I wish I could come with you. I wish it more than anything. Someday I'll take you both to the playground in Salem, where I grew up—"

"But someday isn't today, is it, darling?" asked EJ. He stood posed in the doorway, watching Sami and the twins with detached bemusement. "And I think it's time for their naps."

As if on cue, Johnny yawned.

Sami, her face rigid with some emotion Johnny didn't understand, shooed them both upstairs. Allie jumped onto Johnny's bed instead of her own, but Johnny didn't mind, and Sami didn't object.

"Whose song first?" Sami asked.

"Mine!" said Johnny.

"Save the best for last," chirped Allie, and Sami laughed and stroked Allie's soft blonde hair, then Johnny's dark curls.

"Close your eyes," Sami said, and they did.

Then Sami sang.

Go to sleep now, go to sleep now,
Baby John, Baby John,
'Til morning bells are ringing,
Morning bells are ringing,
Ding, ding, dong
Ding, ding, dong…

"And Allie's song," Johnny said to himself, irritated at the holes in his memory. "I know it… it… was it Hush Little Baby? No, Rock-a-bye Baby."

Almost unreasonably pleased with himself, he fairly skipped from one side of the room to the other. "Rock-a-bye Allie," he sang off-key, "sent from above. God's little angel, this song is dumb!"

He eyed the vodka. It wasn't making him feel better anymore. He even felt a little dizzy, and he knew that another gulp would make the lurching feeling worse.

"God, it's true. She's my mother, Allie's my sister, and Lucas… if… Mom… was with him first, then it's practically biologically impossible that his sperm… gross… wouldn't have, before EJ… and she was, he was keeping her a prisoner. If he did rape her, and he did keep her there, and then he didn't send Allie to school with me, and Allie does look like Mommy, and Allie doesn't lie, she can't lie, she sucks at it, can't even play poker, she wouldn't say it happened if it didn't… God."

He knew another drink wouldn't make him feel better, but the alternative was to keep dwelling on what a tosser he was.

He threw his head back and swallowed once more.

"That might not have been a good idea," he said to himself, and he stumbled to the bed and collapsed on his objecting stomach. The room spun around him. "Never had that much before," he mumbled. "Now I know why."

Once he got used to the spinning, he slept.

He roused several hours later when he heard Hope shouting at Claire and Ciara to go to bed.

He groaned. His body felt stiff, his head was half-fuzzy and half-achy, and his mouth was painfully dry. He needed a glass of water with a painkiller, he needed to relieve himself, and he needed to get to Allie.

The first two problems were easily solved.

The third was going to take some doing.

While he was brushing his teeth, changing his clothes, and hiding the vodka bottle in the bottom drawer of the dresser, he came up with a plan that was either ludicrous or inspired.

He glanced in the mirror and saw his reflection's lips curl into the ghost of a smirk.

Of course his plan was inspired. He might be a tosser, but he was also bloody brilliant. Getting from Salem to London with no passport, no money, and no time to spare might be difficult for some, but not for Johnny.

He opened the bedroom door slowly, quietly, in case Hope or one of the other adults was still minding Ciara and Claire. The hallway, though, was clear, and Johnny padded the few steps to Tyler's room.

He wrinkled his nose in disgust before knocking softly on Tyler's door. He knew that he had to humble himself, but he didn't have to enjoy it.

"Come in," called Tyler.

Johnny slipped into the room and closed the door behind himself. Tyler's back stiffened and his eyes widened.

Johnny raised his hands in surrender. "I come in peace," he told Tyler.

"OK," said Tyler slowly, clearly not convinced of anything of the kind.

"I should start by apologizing for basically everything I've ever said to you."

"What do you want?" asked Tyler.

Johnny almost smiled. For the first time, he wondered if he might be able to like his cousin… and there would be no more denying that Tyler was his cousin. "Your passport and your emergency credit card," Johnny said bluntly.

"Is that all?"

Johnny nodded. "Yes."

"I don't know where Mom keeps the passport, and if you use the credit card there's an alert on Dad's computer as soon as you do."

"I only need to buy one thing."

"A plane ticket to London?"

"Well, yes."

"One way?" asked Tyler wryly.

"For now. I don't know when they're planning on coming back."

Tyler shook his head. "I'm not going to let you go over there and hurt Allie. She's always been really nice. Besides, I'd be grounded until I'm 25 if I did that."

"You can tell your parents I stole the credit card and the passport. And I don't want to hurt Allie, I want to protect her. I want to apologize to her."

Tyler laughed.

"I apologized to you, didn't I?"

Tyler laughed again. "It was very sincere," he said wryly.

So Johnny did the only thing he could think of doing. He deposited himself, cross-legged, on Tyler's bedroom floor and told him everything he remembered about the first three years of his life. He told him how he'd worked and played and eaten and breathed with Allie. He told him about being cornered at school and dragged to Salem, and what it had been like to learn that the man he had admired all his life had violated both Sami and Allie. He told him how hard it was to admit that he had broken his promise to take care of Allie, always. He told him how it was even harder to admit that Lucas and Will probably felt the exact same way.

The alcohol that remained in his bloodstream helped the words find their way out of his mouth.

Tyler listened quietly and without interrupting. "All right," he finally decreed. "I'll do it, but first you have to pass a test."

"Anything."

Tyler pointed to the selection of gaming systems in the corner of his room. "You have to beat me."

Johnny blanched. He had had some video games in the townhouse in London, but neither her nor Allie had played them much. EJ had made it clear that he preferred that the twins use their time in more useful ways, and Allie and Johnny had done so.

Johnny had started to play more often at school, since some of the other boys had invited him and he'd wanted to get to know them. He hadn't developed any real skill, though.

"All right," Johnny told Tyler.

Tyler fussed with wires and buttons for a moment, and then handed a controller to Johnny.

Johnny bit his lip until blood came and used every ounce of concentration, but it wasn't enough. Tyler beat him so badly that it wasn't even worth plying "best two of three?" or "best three of five?"

"Please," Johnny whispered, not caring that he was begging. "Please. There has to be something you want. Do you want to hit me? Do you want to humiliate me?"

"Not everyone gets off on that," said Tyler.

Johnny sighed. "Don't you want to get rid of me? If I go over there and never come back, I'm out of your hair. If I go over there and I do come back, you obviously didn't do anything wrong. Blackmail! What if I pose for horrible, embarrassing pictures and if I come back you'll always be able to get me to do what you—"

"I don't believe in blackmail. It's how my parents broke the rules and took me away from my adoptive parents."

Johnny flinched. "Do you wish they hadn't?"

Tyler shrugged.

Then he picked up a coat that had been flung over a chair and plucked a wallet from the pocket. He removed a green credit card and handed it to Johnny. "The security code is 0219," he said.

The credit card felt heavy in Johnny's hand. "Why?" he asked breathlessly.

"Because I think you really want to—I watched your face the whole time we were playing. I'm used to watching people while they're all watching Claire." Tyler blinked, as if he hadn't quite expected to make that admission. Apparently Johnny's confessional attitude had been contagious. "You—when you knew you were going to lose you looked shattered."

"So you didn't even have to pay attention to the game to beat me?" asked Johnny, because he didn't want to go further into whether or not he had been shattered.

"You aren't very good," said Tyler nonchalantly. "The passport, Mom really does have it. Bottom of her jewelry box, on her dresser."

"Is it locked?"

"No."

"How old is it?"

"Four or five years."

"Perfect." Although they had two grandmothers in common, Johnny and Tyler didn't especially resemble each other. But a dark-haired nine-year-old in a passport photo could easily grow into a thirteen-year-old who looked like an entirely different person.

"I can go get it," offered Tyler. "They'll be less suspicious of me if they catch me."

Johnny shook his head. "You should have plausible deniability." He slid the credit card into his pocket, then held out his hand to Tyler. Tyler looked surprised, but he extended his own hand and they shook on it.

"I won't forget this," Johnny said. "When I come back, I'll be a good friend to you. Really. In fact, I'll start now. That thing you said, about watching people when they're watching Claire?"

"Yeah," said Tyler cautiously.

"Use it to pick up girls. Trust me, it'll work."

Tyler burst out laughing.

"Unless you don't like girls. Which is cool," Johnny adjusted hastily.

"I like girls," Tyler confirmed.

"Good," Johnny nodded. "We'll check them out together. And we'll keep everyone else from checking out Allie and the others. That'll be hard work, so it's good that there are two of us."

"Don't you have a flight to catch?" Tyler asked.

"I'll be back," Johnny said, and left.

Johnny crept quietly from the "children's hall" through the guest wing and to the darkened master bedroom. As Tyler had promised, the jewelry box sat unlocked in plain sight. Four passports sat at the bottom of it; the third was Tyler's. It wouldn't fit in his pocket, so Johnny tucked it into the waistline of his jeans and slipped into the darkness.

The night was cold, but not as cold as it might have been. It wasn't bad weather for a run, Johnny decided, so he drew in a breath and started toward downtown at a good clip. His muscles loosened pleasantly; he hadn't run properly since he'd gotten to America and he'd missed it.

The cool air helped clean the remaining alcohol-induced cobwebs from his brain, too. He was on his way and her knew he was going in the right direction. That alone made him feel better than he'd felt in a long, long time.

As luck would have it, a crowd of Salem University students were already crowding the bus stop when he jogged up breathlessly. The bars had just closed and the students were heading back to dormitories and apartments. Johnny hid himself among the swarm and was able to make it onto the bus to the airport without being noticed.

At the airport, he paid an unconscionable price for a coach seat on the next flight to London. The saleswoman didn't make much of Johnny traveling alone. His English accent was a help; so, too, was the name "Kiriakis" on the passport. He explained that he lived in England with his mother, but that he held dual citizenship because his father, Philip Kiriakis, lived in America. No one looked very hard at the passport, although Johnny did garner one remark about how he'd certainly grown in the past few years.

Still, Johnny's heart didn't stop pounding until the plane had cleared the runway.

He had fantasized ten thousand times about running away from Salem and returning home to London, and now he was finally doing it. It wasn't at all as he had imagined it.

He closed his eyes to block out the noise of the people around him.

A tune lodged itself in his head.

Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines…

TBC