Nightmare headaches and visions tormented him, the voices that echoed from his distant past bleeding into present-day consciousness-Lena and Tim Spencer, good, evil-and he shuttered his mind's awareness against their intrusion and festering hidden memories.
It was true, he had intended destruction of the Haunted Star, murder, on a mass scale, for reasons that seemed murky in his mind. Daily, additional facts were coming to light, and the list of crimes grew, as did Luke's indifference to the knowledge of those crimes. He chafed against the talking that was meant to cure and redeem him, and confinement and therapy and the dismaying attitudes of doctors. They said he was not himself, the smug, know-it-all types who didn't in fact know psychology from their backsides. They certainly didn't know how to untangle what lived in the depths of the buzzing brain of Luke Spencer.
It had gone far past words like "crazy" and "Mentally unstable". They could classify it as they liked, but the outdated term "insane" served well enough, he felt, to accurately define the incomprehensible, broken man he had become.
Finally, everyone who mattered was taking a hard look and seeing him in the tarnished mirror he'd been looking into for most of his life. For once, the vision of those around him was clear and true, and they saw the monster for what he was. Luke had always tried to tell them, and stupidly, his people stubbornly clung to hope, to love-burdensome emotions, they were. Burdensome people...
Something had to break, and he routinely did the breaking. He broke bonds, trust, ties. He broke locks. He broke out.
And he assured himself that contrary to legend, hearts do not break.
Though no longer in his physical prime, restraints, bolts and gates proved a challenge, but no real obstacle. Freedom was the challenge, and seldom as sweet as anticipated, and this held true, even now. With six decades behind him, perhaps it was inevitable that he would undergo a tectonic shift.
Like so many times before, Luke came in from the cold, from a rainy night, stealthily as the thief he was, like the criminal he had become, into her room and into her bed. Peace was here, and reality and its consequences dodged, if only for a short interval. He hoped for welcome from her now, needed anything from her but to see suspicion, or that glare that could melt stone-or worse, her fear.
"Don't be afraid, Tracy. I'm not going to hurt you, and I can't stay long."
"H-how did you get out?" she stammered. He could almost hear her brilliant brain frantically working, decisions being weighed and considered. The "right" action against her own needs. Call out and alert others and the authorities, or conspire in whispers. Run, or turn and take him in her arms.
They had not spoken at length since his admittance to Shadybrook in February, and by coming to the Quartermaine mansion, Luke risked his freedom. Tracy's love for him was a powerful surety, but her unpredictability was an equally reliable force-a quality he relished, and even in this dire circumstance, a gamble he could not ultimately resist.
"Baldwin's son aided the great escape effort, if you can believe that."
"Franco?" she chortled.
"It didn't quite go according to my plan."
"Nor mine."
"Nothing has gone according to our plans, has it, baby? Looks like it's all gone south."
"And you'll be doing the same." she said, quick on the uptake, but eyeing him warily.
"I needed to see you, to be with you, before I go."
"Is that true, or another convenient lie from your dark half?"
"Ever the skeptic. I don't know how to answer that, Spanky."
She visibly relaxed, hearing his nickname for her, knowing all it meant.
"I know you aren't to blame. You aren't yourself." The brittle, acerbic note was gone, and instead she spoke softly to him, in the voice he loved, and with more kindness than he thought he deserved.
"I'm enough of myself to miss you. I don't know how long I'll be gone, or when I'll see you. I hate that, Tracy." His voice, too, was husky with emotion. "I made you a promise that I would stay."
"Oh, Luke. You were poisoned and practically at death's door when you said that."
"I promised to stay, and I meant it."
"To the best of your ability. You try, I know that." Then she attempted to downplay the sentiment. "You didn't think I took that promise too much to heart, after all these years?"
"I promised always to come back to you."
"And that one, I believe."
The day when he would be able to return to Port Charles without arrest and resume his life seemed a remote possibility, and to anticipate it at this point was to indulge in wishful thinking.
Luke hoped to forestall any plans or solutions Tracy would suggest; he hadn't the time or spirit to argue. He took her in his arms for a long while, bestowing and receiving kisses and an embrace that might prove to be their last, until the inevitability of parting made such closeness more anguish than solace. Tears were for the uneventful days ahead, and so too was leaning on the self-reliance they valued in each other.
"Luke, can't you stay? Stay for the night."
His lips sought hers once more in a kiss suffused with need and desperation and regret, but the tension in his body conveyed his urgent desire to be on the road.
"Sweetheart, I've stayed for an hour longer than I should have, already. This is the first place they'll look for me. You know that."
She handed over his passport and cash enough to signify that she had anticipated this visit and Luke's intention.
"I'll come back when the coast is clear, when I've been gone long enough that no one's searching, anymore."
She was stung by what felt like rejection, his refusal, no matter how gently asserted and imperative, and the stark, depressing view of the immediate future. Resolutely, she began to move away, but he followed, detaining her with the strength of the longing that passed between them. He looked into her troubled eyes.
"Fine." she conceded, striving for disengaged stoicism.
"Don't do that." he implored.
"It's getting late." she said, a catch in her voice as she withdrew her hands from his.
"It's as easy as a one way flight. You know where to find me, Wife. That's for you, alone, to know."
Putting faith in Luke was a long shot. His illness clouded the love he professed, and yet she trusted his word. And still, he walked away, stretching that love and bond almost to its breaking point, because he was unwell, and at his lowest point in the darkest hour of his checkered life, desperately trying to outrun what he couldn't, choosing flight, abandoning the safety of home and help.
Her heart faltered and lay like a hot, heavy iron mass in her chest, a compromised heart, heavier than it had ever been, as she watched him fade out. Leaving, again. Gone again, and gone for good this time, perhaps. A story finished... a story severed before its natural time, left incomplete.
The sad reality rushed in on her, the way it would go. The cessation of communication. The sense of living with a crucial element unresolved. Days drifting onward, until weeks lengthened into years, squandered. Herself affected as by a death that no one else acknowledged, a catastrophic loss that she herself had enabled.
There was only now an open doorway, empty. It was impossible not to think that, if she kept watching for it, the thing lost would materialize.
From March to January, throughout two seasons and the turning of the year, Tracy's life proceeded in a state of numbed stasis. She was fine, as long as she didn't hear Luke's name.
Dillon was summoned home by his brother, and stayed on. ELQ was wrested from Quartermaine control by a Cassadine, and Tracy lacked the drive to fight and rally to reclaim what was hers. She had rarely been so neutral when it came to the legacy of ELQ; these momentous things should have mattered greatly, but Tracy was unable to feel anything but that the essential core of herself had been rendered abruptly dormant. Nothing managed to breach the barrier of desensitization that had replaced emotion not hope, not joy or even the basic mainstays of lust or the possibility of new romance, or simple diversion.
She wasn't waiting, exactly, for that would imply expectation of a change to the state of solitude into which she had settled. Yet if it were so, she should be able to accustom herself to it again, for before the advent of Luke Spencer, aloneness had long been her natural state and her comfort zone.
The December freeze arrived, and with it the tedious necessity of holiday rituals, and memories of other Decembers. The awareness unsettled her of the calendar date of the anniversary that should have marked her fifth year of marriage. The loneliness of being the only one to remember it welled up, unexpectedly, a sly unhappiness that lingered.
Keeping herself as busy as possible throughout the day, Tracy was involved with last minute arrangements and a bracing quarrel with Monica, over the final details of the Winter Gala. Home late and exhausted after the event, she trudged up the stairs to her suite, and discovered a small item out of place on her vanity table. It drew her like a beacon. No identifying note accompanied the secret gift.
A beautiful, and immediately recognizable star sapphire ring winked out from its nest of plush black velvet. Her hands shook as she plucked it from the box, and held it up to the light. Only one person had ever given her gifts of jewelry, and she had accepted this ring before. It meant something now; it proved that Luke was alive.
A month away would undoubtedly be a restorative benefit, and that was what she told anyone who required an explanation, starting with Dillon, when she defined her imminent leavetaking in terms of spa treatments, rest, and evaluating her priorities.
And in many ways, it was true. Tracy was not one to sit on her hands and wait. There was a vacancy, a chance and a direction. She considered her reservations, and then took a one way flight.
South. To Mexico.