Written in 65 minutes.

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Recovery Room: Bar

Though the bar wouldn’t open for several more hours, the front door was unlocked when Jason checked it. Worried that there’d been a break-in, he pushed it open. The main part of the bar was dim, only sunlight peeking around the edges of the windows offered any illumination.

At first glance, the room appeared empty and there was were no obvious signs of trespass — the chairs had been neatly stacked on the tables, the floors were clean. It looked like it always did after closing though it had been some time since Jason had been to the bar as a patron, and Mike spent more time at Kelly’s these days.

One table in the corner by the doors to the kitchen was disturbed, its chairs settled in their usual places, and it was there that Jason found Mike. There were papers on the table, a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass by his side. The bottle hadn’t been open—the paper wrapped around the top still intact.

Jason approached the table almost reluctantly, and the fall of his steps stirred Mike. The older man looked up, blinked at the intrusion, then let out a slow breath. “You here with more bad news?”

“I don’t know,” Jason said. He stepped behind a chair, resting his hands on the back of it, but not taking a seat. He wasn’t sure of its welcome, wasn’t entirely sure that with some time and space, Mike was regretting his support of Jason in the wake of the shooting. Had Courtney felt abandoned, Jason wondered, and had that led her to the hotel, to the bullet that claimed her life?

Mike gestured at the papers on the table. “Arrangements,” he said, then dragged a hand down his face. “Have to pick a funeral home for my daughter.”

“If there’s anything I can—”

“You’ve—you’ve done enough.” Mike lifted his eyes to Jason again, then closed them, some of the stiffness easing. “That—I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t—I don’t blame you.” He chuckled lightly, though the sound was bitter. “I don’t want to blame you. It’s not your fault. None of this is. Not really. It’s mine.”

Jason pulled out the chair, sat down, clasped his hands on the table. “Mike, that’s not true—”

“Yeah? Tell me, Jason. How much of the darkness in Michael—how much is it from that piece of shit I left him with?” Mike demanded, and Jason looked down. “Maybe Michael would have always been a bit brooding, but what he turned into? Those seeds were planted by Deke, and if I had been any kind of man, well, that wouldn’t have happened. So Michael, that’s on me.”

Mike reached for the bottle of whiskey, twisted off the cap, tearing the paper that sealed it shut. “Courtney. Courtney. She was a little bright beam of sunshine from the moment she was born. Looked just like her mother. I told myself it’d be different. That I was different. That little girl just smiled and laughed all the time, looked at me like I hung the moon.” He turned away, the grief so stark on his face that Jason’s throat felt tight. “I couldn’t live up to that. Could never be the man that she thought I was, so I left. I left her alone with her mother, and she came looking for me here. She came to Port Charles, and if I weren’t here—”

He dipped his head. “I keep trying to tell myself I’m doing better. That I’ve been there for my kids these last few years, and maybe that’s true. But you never get that time back. You never get the trust back. There’s something that gets built in those early years, and when you don’t have it anymore—you can’t ever fix it.”

“Mike, Courtney was here because of you, but that’s — it’s not why she’s gone.”

“No. It’s not. Someone killed her. Someone she must have known a little bit, because she opened the door. She must have let them in, Mac told me.” He poured the whiskey, the bottle clicking against the top of the glass, his hand trembling. “D-do you think she was scared? Do you think she knew? Did she have time to know what was going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want it to be your fault. I want to rage at you and even at Elizabeth for having an affair. For breaking my little girl’s heart.” His voice was thick now, his dull blue eyes glazed with a sheen of tears. “Because if you hadn’t done that, she’d have been at home. She wouldn’t be dead.”

Jason dropped his eyes to the table, to the dark, scarred wood texture rough under his hands. “I know that. I’m sorry—”

“But it’s not your fault. And it’s not mine. Maybe you and me, we put the pieces in place. That’s on us. I brought her here, and you put her in that hotel.” Mike’s breathing was a bit ragged and he stared down at the whiskey, but didn’t drink. “But I didn’t lift that gun, and you didn’t pull the trigger. That—that’s not on us.”

He set the glass down, pushed it to the middle of the table. Put the cap back on the bottle. “I’ll feel guilty every day for the rest of my life for not being the father my kids deserved. And I expect you’ll carry a measure of guilt for what happened between you and Courtney. That’s right. That’s fair. You make a mistake, you carry the weight of it.” He exhaled in a long, low, shaky breath. “But I’ll be damned if I carry her death on my shoulders. And you aren’t going to either.”

His eyes found Jason’s now. “I’m going to arrange for my daughter’s funeral because it’s the last thing I ever get to do as her father. But Michael is still here, and I can still do right by him.”

Jason flexed his hands. “I went to see Sonny yesterday like we talked about. He was…he was clear. Lucid.”

Mike lifted his brows. “That’s—that’s good. Did he talk about that night?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Then I called the doctor at Rose Lawn. Sonny signed the papers. A seventy-two hour hold for evaluation. He went last night.”

“That’s good. It’s good. He’ll talk to someone who knows better than any of us, and we’ll sort out what’s going on.” Sonny’s father dragged a hand down his face. “But he talked about that night.”

“Yeah. He remembers it in bits and pieces. He—he says it was him. That night.” Jason paused. “He saw Ric with Elizabeth and Carly in the courtyard, thought he saw Ric lunge for Carly, and he just—he shot at him.”

Mike was quiet for a long moment, then pressed his lips together, looked away. “He remembers being the shooter.”

“I think—I think he thinks so. He says he threw the gun away on the way back to the Towers. Maybe he is. I have some guys looking for it. The timeline is tight, I know, but the only reason we thought it wasn’t him—”

“We thought the PCPD had the gun, and he didn’t have it when he came back. And what happened to Courtney—that doesn’t fit.” Mike shook his head. “I don’t understand how any of this works, Jason. What happened that night is a terrible, terrible tragedy, but almost inevitable if Michael is the one holding the gun. But—”

“But everything that’s happened since then feels like someone trying to clean up after him. To hide his identity as the shooter,” Jason acknowledged. “I don’t know—I don’t know if you heard but Ric went missing from the hospital yesterday. A false transfer,” he added when Mike scowled. “I thought it might be Lorenzo Alcazar pulling the strings. Maybe he liked that I was being accused of it, and knew Ric and Courtney’s stories would fall apart eventually. But there are still a lot of questions even that’s happening.”

“Maybe. If I had known Courtney was the other so-called witness, I would have tried harder to talk to her. To track her down, but—”

“Justus wanted to hold on to that information,” Jason admitted with some reluctance. “He—he was worried I might be accused of witness tampering.”

“I get it. I do. It just…” Mike shook his head. “It just means we have to work harder. But one way or another, we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

PCPD: Commissioner’s Office

Lorenzo Alcazar was on a lot of minds that day, including Mac Scorpio’s. He skimmed the case file on the only other Alcazar he’d come into contact with — Luis.

“Twins creep me out,” Scott muttered, looking at a newspaper clipping with a photo of the Alcazar brothers. “Someone just walking around with your face—” He hesitated, looked at Mac. “Sorry—”

“At least James Meadows wasn’t related to me,” Mac muttered, rolling his shoulders. “But yeah, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking into Luis Alcazar’s background last year. We had more than enough to keep us occupied.”

“True enough. Plenty of suspects right here in Port Charles.” Scott looked back at Mac. “But Morgan seemed to think this was the only possibility—unless he’s just screwing with us so he can go after the real bad guy—”

“No. No. We’re not doing this again, Scott,” Mac interrupted, and Scott made a face. “You wanted to play games the last time, and look what happened. We’re doing this my way which means the right way. I’ll get a full background check on Luis and Lorenzo Alcazar—”

“We might not have time for that—”

“If you have any ideas that don’t include screwing with Jason Morgan, by all means, lay them out. But right now, the guy is dealing with enough. And if you step one more foot wrong, Bobbie’s going to throw you out the window, and I’m going to let her, do you understand?” he demanded.

“Since you’re only half-kidding about the window, yeah, I get it. Let’s start at the beginning.”

Hardy House: Living Room

Elizabeth carefully lifted the black strap of the slung over her head, then tossed the contraption on the sofa behind her. She stretched out her arm, wincing at the pain her shoulder and at her elbow. Then she tried to flex her hand, spreading out her fingers. Her index finger wobbled, and her thumb bent—

But when she tried to curl it into a fist, her fingers only loosely curled over. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she wasn’t ready to give up. She went over to the desk by the stairs, picked up a pencil with her left hand and put it in the right, manually curling the fingers to force it to stay in position.

Then she tried to write her name on the edge of a piece of paper, tried to force her hand into a position and action that she’d taken for granted only a week ago—

But the tip of the pencil barely made any change in the paper, only the faintest of gray scribbles. She couldn’t really press down—the pencil shifted position, and she couldn’t hold it any tighter.

Her lips trembled as she took the pencil in her other hand—tried to write her name that way, but her hand didn’t know what to do, the muscles didn’t have any memory of moving in those ways, and while she was able to write her name, it was scrawled across the paper with awkward lines and angles—

Like the way a child might draw.

A tear dropped on the paper, right over the jumble of lines that should have been the ‘b’ in her first name. Elizabeth tossed the pencil side, went away from the desk, then used her good hand to massage her left as if she could reconnect the nerves and muscles through sheer will power.

A knock at the door broke her concentration. When she peered through the peephole and saw Jason, she pulled the door open. “I told you that you didn’t have to knock—” she started.

“What’s wrong?” he interrupted. He stepped inside, reached over to close the door. “Are you—are you in pain?”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” she muttered, leaving him at the door. She retrieved her sling, started to twist it over her head. “How was Mike?”

“Managing,” Jason said. “I’m sorry. I just—you were crying—”

She heard the steps behind her pause, and when she twisted to look, she saw him at the desk. He must have seen the pencil, noticed the paper sticking out. He looked down at it for a long moment, then at her, and the swirl of emotion in his expression, the way his mouth dipped at the corners had the tears crawling up her throat again. Elizabeth had to look away, to close her eyes.

She heard him drawing closer, then he was next to her, curling her into his side, careful not to jar her injury. He dropped a kiss in her hair, and she pressed her face into his shirt, wishing she could hide here forever.

“I’m sorry. I’m trying so hard to hold it together b-because t-there’s so much more going on, and a-nd I’m alive and w-walking around and Carly isn’t and Courtney never will, and Sonny’s so sick, and I still have the baby—it could have b-been so much worse, I got lucky—”

“Hey. Hey—” Jason stroked her back. “You don’t have to pretend anything with me.”

“It’s just—when things get h-ard or I c-can’t cope, I pick up a p-pencil and make it go away, and I c-can’t do that anymore.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “I can’t make any of it stop.”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t reassure her that they’d be able to make it stop, or that they’d be able to make any of this over. It wasn’t a promise he could keep, and he didn’t make those kinds of promises.

But he held her as she cried, and that was enough. For now.

General Hospital: Carly’s Room

It was times like these that Bobbie wished she’d taken up knitting. Or crocheting. Or any of those hobbies that gave you something to do with your hands, that kept your attention focused on anything other than what was going on.

She’d been in this room off and on for nearly five days now, listening to the sounds of machines beep and buzz, sounds that had provided the soundtrack for most of her adult life. She practically lived in the hospital, the only stable piece of her life for more than two decades.

And the sounds should be comforting now. They were signs that her daughter was alive, that the child she carried was still in good health. But beeps and buzzes and even the squeak of shoes in the hallway couldn’t comfort her anymore.

Bobbie wanted the sound of her daughter’s voice, from the way she held laughter in her words to the high-pitch whine when she wasn’t getting her way, even the jagged edges of her anger —

So used to the sounds of beeps and buzzes and squeaks that Bobbie didn’t register the way some of those beeps began to change. They were closer together, the heartbeat monitor picking up pace—

But Bobbie certainly knew the sound that her daughter made when a low moan emerged from her lips. Bobbie’s head snapped up, and she was just in time to see Carly turn her heard towards her mother, to see the lids lift to reveal just the brown eyes beneath.

“Mama?” the word was breathed more than spoken, but it was music to Bobbie’s ears. She leaned forward.

“There you are. There’s my girl. We missed you.”

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