The Sigh Of Things (10) She did dream of you. She dreamt of you the whole night through… He was alone…it was in his hands - an emptiness he filled with pens and keys and cash; with telephones and tooled gloves; with the reins of fiery horses and unmanageable empires. Fine hands. Strong hands. Ever-present hands. She marked the way he kept them always out of pocket, always loose, always in a moment free for the taking. There had been love. She could see it absent from those hands; lost but only just. She could recognize, even at this distance, how his uncle had trained him to remove all the pain from his face. Yet those hands betrayed him. They wept with their wanting, with their waiting to be held. Still he was his father's son and, as such, walked the earth as if he owned it. A dark lord striding through the ranks. Even in this insignificant town, on this unremarkable street, amidst these oh-so-commonplace pedestrians, he couldn't help but stalk; a great Cassadine cat on the prowl. Yes, she could see the signs of Stefan's tempering. The boy would move aside. The boy would wait in line. The boy would hang back, but at a cost. The blood, while tempered, roiled hot through his veins. A close second to the fury of the father's. Here she made the call and received his first message. He was alone…it was in his eyes - an emptiness he filled with images refracted through a camera lens. Sharp was that vision. Eagle-keen. Here were eyes that had coaxed an evasive Aphrodite from her every earthly disguise; enticing her with light and laughter, with promises of fame and the age-old gift of immortality. These were eyes possessed of a discernment so rare they could compare every aspect of her beauty to judge which was worthy to be fixed to film. Yet the same were these eyes that, on the whim of some baffling fancy, had one day turned themselves away. She did not believe for a moment that the loss of his berth at Deception had struck him blind. He could still see. He simply couldn't find. It was rank desperation that drove him to this park on such a bleak and lifeless afternoon. Rain to the earth gave him a misery of mud, gave him trees with their heavy branches weeping, gave him close clouds that spit and whipped their winds around every corner of his aching soul. And when he lifted that lens she knew what he thought he had found. Here, the landscape of his mother's mind. Turning, he was turning now to seek her out. In what grey shadow was she hiding? From which wet copse of trees would she emerge? Here she made the call and received his second message. She was alone…it was in her smile - an emptiness she filled with tiny chocolate candies, circus whistles and instructions for every smaller child who did not know the way. Her pink, perfected smile sent to whisper at the crest of each blindfolded ear - here's how, now take your tail to the donkey. The party smile she gave to the clown and the clever kid magician, though it held no amusement, left them sure they had brightened her day. Here was the smile everyone required, everyone expected and everyone sought as proof she had not come undone. Yet even through the window of this raucous restaurant, through the energetic melee of children, all the way through those bright primary colors that painted her face, it could be seen that this ever-present smile was slipping. It's pert little edges were falling away. Tracing the direction of the child's gaze, just left across a sea of crowded tables, one could spot the blonde quite clearly from the back. Not too high, not too low, just tall enough. Not too fat, not too thin, just wide enough. Graceful hands with graceful gestures and, in the twist of one hopeful moment, the deep-throated sound of a laugh. The girl's sturdy party smile rounded to an "oh," eyes wide and alert, palms pressing to the table as she stood. But the gods had mercy this day. The gods made the woman turn around. Down went the child and up again the smile. Here she made the call and received his third message. "Regret? This is Stefan. You must come home." And it was then she left Port Charles. The Sigh Of Things (11) It is only a kiss. You can fail to be moved. Regret leaned forward in the alcove and marked the lesson of distance. How far her heart had traveled to move no farther than this! States, nations, oceans away…she could never go apart enough to lose the music of the man. The sight of him had always been a sound to her; a serenade of shadows; the quiet cradlesong of a restless discontent. The rhythm was seductive, demanding, unrepentant in the ache of its call. Even now, as his body moved, she was haunted by the cadence; this ancient plaintive chant against which there was no resistance. Betrayer. An unbidden thought. Then a small, wavering breath. The day had long since passed when it came to her that she had been born for Stefan Cassadine. And it was true, what the Buddhists said. Life was meant to be a suffering. "Was this your plan, Stavros? Tell me! Did you arrange to have Laura replaced with an imposter? The woman in the hospital, whomever she is…is this your doing?" He argued with his brother still - Stavros mocking his urgency, taunting his patience, teasing his restraint. From her hidden vantage point, in her silence, she urged him to stop trying. Hold, she commanded in her head. Raise that barricade you're so fond of and stand the statue behind it. Be cold. Be stone. Be the rock your brother breaks his waves upon. It was Stavros' turn, after all. But he could not hear her. He wasn't listening. So long had he been contending with this, he had yet to be informed that she'd come home. Twenty minutes more before he surrendered, striding from that prison cell. And as if from a fit of his impotent fury, all the light suddenly vanished from the hall, leaving the prisoner nothing more than a small pool falling from the lamp above his bed. Stavros, to his credit or his folly, did not immediately move to that confined, white space. Instead, she heard water running in the darkness, splashing against the metal of the sink. She heard the chain slide along the floor. She startled at the sound of cloth ripping in one long, angry rent. When he did appear he wore only loose black pants and that infamous Cassadine medallion around his neck. Book in hand, he laid out on the bed and began to read. She was certain he'd heard her enter the cell, certain his senses had sparked as she crossed from the door - more than certain he'd detected the rustle of her linen skirt as she lowered herself into the chair. Still, five pages turned before his eyes nonchalantly rose from the book. "Ah," he said, closing the volume on a finger. "Stefan's pet." She nodded imperceptibly. "The one who does not require a leash." "Touché." He threw a well-muscled arm behind his head, deliberately provoking her to notice his state of undress. Which she did. "I can't always wait for my jailor to change a shirt. There's a bit of rag left in the corner. If you would take it when you go…?" With this he knocked his book back open and made to resume his reading. Regret had only ever seen him from afar, and the remove had not done him justice. There was magnificence here, expanding well-beyond what he'd crafted from muscle and bone, from smooth, taut skin and finely-carved sinew. Magnificence beyond that artful pose and the subtle use of form; beyond even this elegant manipulation of a circle of light to present himself divine - a brash Roman god in repose. These were skills and practices - deftly done, to be sure - yet the grandeur of the man, his genuine majesty, his one legitimately transcendent gift lay in the power that pulsed so purely from his core. Attuned to him now, she could feel that force cleaving the air between them, cutting through the atmosphere, assaulting her in waves of primal, charismatic intensity. Against the strong it would do battle for supremacy. Against the weak there would be nothing but a swift subjugation. Into which camp would she fall? "I've come about Laura." "Everyone does," he responded without looking up. "I came about Laura. I've come about Laura many times. Will she see me do you think?" "As I understand it, that is up to you." The speed with which he moved was alarming. In a flash he had tossed the book aside and swung from his prone position to perch at the edge of the bed. She did not flinch, though the unexpectedness of the motion led her to seek out the cuff on his wrist. He followed her gaze with amusement. "Many things are up to me," he agreed mockingly. "And I am up to thirty feet today." Stavros slipped off the bed and began to circle around her. "Thirty feet," he repeated as the chain dragged along the slate. "I find this far too little…yet you, I suspect, may well find it far too much." He brought the iron links to scrape against the chair leg as he all but vanished into shadow. A hand emerged from out of that darkness to rest atop her shoulder, his thumb and forefinger spanning the base of her neck. "Less than thirty inches now," he gauged in a hollow whisper at her ear. "At thirty feet or thirty inches, I am still too new to kill." And the weight of his hand was gone. As if by trick of magic, he suddenly appeared crouching at her side, one arm braced against the back of the chair. His concentrated stare did not bother her, though it poured over every facet of her face. In fact, she followed this close inspection; the mechanical sweep of its cold regard; the fix of it for moments at her throat, her mouth, the crown of her hair. So precise were his optical adjustments, cornering sharply from feature to feature, that this almost felt a measurement for marble or clay. A sculptor could have scaled his model no better. And when what could be examined had, that mechanistic vision came to rest where they met, finally, eye-to-eye. "You look nothing like her," he remarked, a tinge of wonder to his voice. "Perhaps it is in the taste?" And though he moved with a slow deliberation, the lips that met hers were hard. It was a mistake, yet one he would not recognize. What a woman could find in this elemental intimacy was more than any man could hope to hide. Every secret, every motive, every darkest dream would be here for the taking. With this act an unwitting Stavros Cassadine had presented himself for perusal. Regret met the challenge and set herself upon a course of discovery. She turned into the kiss and stole it from him, coaxing at the tension with a tenderness she set to ebb and flow. Here a subtle game of capture and release as she played with his lips, restively reproaching their arrogant resolve. This was not what he'd expected and in that instant of surprise, when the pressure slackened and he sought to withdraw, she grasped the advantage and began the chase. Her fingers rose to travel with an idle grace across the sleek, flat expanse of his chest. She permitted them to linger, a moment only, just above the beat of his heart, then drifted them to dance around the curve of his neck before plunging to tangle in the thick, black mane at the base of his skull. This fluid invasion intensified as she drew him once more into the kiss, effortlessly caught the breach between his lips and launched an errant tongue across the smooth, white surface of his teeth. She felt him smile and stole this as well, a theft made all the more sweet when he retreated to rise and inadvertently brought her with him. Now her mouth to a mouth - open, she was sure, to speak a clever word and finish this contest - slipped its tongue into a new terrain and in the process robbed the very breath from his lungs. He came to her then in frustration and the fierce humility of need. The chain jangled as he caught her at the waist, crushing her close as he purposefully provoked a hunger he not longer denied. All the many kisses fused into one; a single, savage madness he branded to her lips as an instinctual act of possession. She felt his hand at her jaw, his fingers pressed hard to the bone as he angled this mouth to better service his own. And here, in the shadowed stillness of a prison cell, with a ruthlessly predatory abandon, he set himself to feed upon her. Relinquishing her lips, he bared his teeth to sample the flesh at her neck, her shoulder, the small, soft delicacy of an ear. At the heart of each measured bite he flicked a tongue to savor the salt and the sweat, to capture the heat rising with the blood that flushed the surface of her skin. As if to augment the taste of her, he moistened his trail and set it to flame with a silently whistled stream of air, igniting the chilled burn of his journey from the hollow at her throat to the vein that betrayed her pulse, throbbing gently in the shade beneath her chin. He nuzzled against the side of her head, exhaling in a low, trenchant growl as he drank in the fragrance of her hair, her cologne and the musky scent of his own arousal. His body melted into hers, consuming whatever space remained between them as he claimed her lips yet again - a scavenger to the feast he found in her eyes, in the suppleness of her embrace, in the solid beat of her heart pounding strong and sure at the center of his chest. What he could devour she allowed as she might any starving soul come desperate to her table. And in this devouring she finally felt him true; the one, authentic Prince Stavros Cassadine engraving himself painfully into the precious metal of her mind. For now and forever she would have him there, this wounded animal set ablaze, smoldering like a sinner in the fires of hell. Here she would find him in a moment, on a dream, stalking through a nightmare just as he was - damaged, defiant and forsaken by God. Her spirit shattered in an instant, yet she had no choice but to accept him thus, and quickly too, as she sensed his intent changing. And just as the worm inside him turned from desperation to desire, she broke to catch her breath. With an almost superhuman effort, he retreated mere inches from her face and hovered there. Waiting. His regard, though cast through the film of a ferocious craving, seemed to pierce like a blade to the center of her soul. "What…," he rasped, his breath ragged with the effort to speak. "What color are they?" She felt the question as the back of his hand grazed her cheek and came to rest aside her eye. "Jade. No," he corrected softly. "Verdigris. The green of Greece. Ancient as the pool of Narcissus. Will I lose myself here, I wonder. Or here?" he asked, returning to her lips. She brought her fingers to his mouth and he kissed them gently. "Stavros, this can go no further." His eyes grew merry with the words. "I'm afraid, dear one, this is not an expectation I am likely to renounce." "Yet you will," she asserted, narrowing her gaze. "You know what you've tasted cannot be taken. Surely Laura taught you that." And on the sharp edge of a second his embrace became a vise; cold and hard and locked into position. Abandoning his passion, he pulled just far enough away to look her full in the face. There would be no merriment in those eyes, she knew. Nor would there be fury. Just the flat black void of an abyss. His chin rose slightly in defiance as he brought his hand to encircle her throat. "You seem so completely convinced I won't kill you," he remarked as he took his grip. "I'm not at all sure such confidence is wise." The look she gave him held exactly the right amount of impatience. "You waste your time to play at this, Stavros. You will not follow through." As she suspected, here came the familiar Cassadine astonishment; the reaction they delivered when convinced their powers had been grossly underestimated. And he smiled that vaunted Cassadine smile when he asked, "What reason could you possibly have to believe you will leave this cell alive?" "Just the simple truth. I have seen your son." Here, an instant of disengagement. She knew to use it wisely. "Kill me now or release me. Choose, Stavros, and make it quick." His arm descended to his side and opened the way for her release. "You've seen Nikolas?" "Yes," she answered calmly, moving apart while he wrestled with the news. "I was never close enough to speak with him. But he is well. He is living his life." "More," he demanded, his hands closing into fists. "I will need a good deal more than that." Her head turned sharply at his tone. "Better to ask yourself what he might need! You are here. Stefan is here. Laura is here. Even your mother has departed the scene. Who does he have? No one." She pressed her hands down the front of her skirt and straightened the line of her blouse. "The only way out of this for him, for all of us in truth, is to bring her fully back. All the way to consciousness. The game will play as it will play, my friend. It is up to you to move us forward." She left him with this thought and crossed to the door. "Wait," he thundered, calling after her. "Your name. I would have your name." She paused briefly, then tossed it to him over her shoulder. "Regret, Stavros. I am called Regret." She would recall his sudden, rueful smile in the days that followed, and puzzle at the reason she'd found it so entirely…encouraging.     The Sigh Of Things (12) Here's the thing about priests - it's a very old book they're working from... Stefan thought this was worse, yet he couldn't comprehend how that was possible. Regret had come home, as he requested. She had not said a word, not asked for a reason, not pressed for an answer to a single question he might prove unwilling to provide - and there were all too many of those at the moment. In response to the news of additional security checks on every person residing at the estate - a list upon which her name would certainly appear - she had not batted an eye. This mild acquiescence had so intrigued him, he pushed just that little bit further and asked her to account for the time she'd been gone. With what could only be termed a graceful passivity, she explained her visit to Port Charles, New York and obligingly produced her receipts. It was an inspired idea, he had to admit, her seeing the children in order to speak of them to Laura; to tug her closer to the surface of reality. If this were possible. Perhaps. Still, what impressed him most was her complete disinterest in debate. She fought him on nothing. Instead she held quiet, and in that silence brought him peace. Why then was her absence from his bed driving him so slowly and surely insane? Why did he wish - with the astonishing frequency of every other minute in his day - that Regret had never received his summons or had, however foolishly, chosen not to return? He allowed a small sigh to escape his lips, his eyes closing to the question. Having should end the wanting of a thing. That it did not was a pure plague to reason. The object of these troubling distractions fairly bounced into the beach chair at his side. Her white capri slacks were spattered from the sea, her hair a tawny cloud of incongruent curls. She was disheveled and he knew this should bother him more, yet all he could think of was the sun burning down on the bridge of her nose and how, really, that should be protected. "She calls you Father Cassadine. Were you aware of that?" And the crest of those cheeks, and those lips…oh, this really had to stop! He plucked what he remembered from the words she'd said and tried to make a go of simple conversation. "Father Cassadine? Who? Not Laura." "No, not Laura. Mae." Her head nodded toward the surf and he reluctantly drew his eye away. His vision fixed, as it always did, on the distant image of his first true love. Hesitant now, at the water's edge, salt-foam swirling around her ankles, her hands were raised before her as if she imagined she possessed the ability to push this great sea back. That it would not bend to her wishes brought an insouciant frown to her face. A child's game, he noted sadly, yet at least a game of engagement. Her awareness of the world around her had returned, quite unexpectedly, some four days ago. Stefan suspected the continual treatment of shots had produced a sufficient build-up of anti-toxin. Stavros' formula had finally breached her walls, allowing Laura's consciousness this welcome release. Just as she had gone from functioning adult to child to pure catatonic blank, here was the reverse of the process. What disturbed him, though, was the sudden jump in her recovery. Yet it was a jump in the right direction and he could not fault the positive result. 'I think it comes from her background, really. That and your own admittedly ministerial mien. Until she mentioned it, I have to say, I never really noticed how very much the priest you are, Stefan. The Cassocked Cassadine, indeed!" It took this off-hand jibe to have him apprehend the woman at all. Good Lord, she was old! A veritable fossil when compared against the newly-childlike Laura, side-by-side at the lip of the sea. Who was this elderly person in the worn black dress attempting, without much success, to coax the younger woman back from the waves? He drew his sunglasses down to the tip of his nose and squinted for a better look. He had seen her before - that full face, that slick, silver hair, that curvature of spine…who? No, it couldn't be. This was a maid! A maid whose name was apparently…Mae? "You never saw her, did you?" Regret was now gifting him with an irritatingly smug expression. He erased the outrage from his voice and remarked matter-of-factly, "You've brought the maid to the shore. An interesting choice." "And I'm sure, had you come with us this morning instead of taking those calls, you might well have vetoed that choice." "I might have asked for your reasoning." And then vetoed it, yes. Regret sat back in her chair and closed her eyes to the sun. "I couldn't manage this alone. Beyond that? Laura reacts to her. Perhaps it's because she's older. Older women can be very comforting, Stefan. I don't expect you to know this, having had as your examples only Mrs. Landsbury and your mother." And Audrey Hardy and Lila Quartermaine, he added in his head. Functional women and matrons. He had never found them particularly comforting. "You are speaking in a caretaking sense, I assume." "Oh no," she admonished, pursing her lips. Stefan fought past this distraction and worked to follow her meaning. "Women have bonds between them as old as the moon to the tides. As ancient as the earth and its attachment to every living thing. There is a different kind of knowledge knitted into us, and we are made more aware of that knowledge as each year passes. It is hardly explainable, my love. Yet I can say with absolute certainty that all women, when in deep distress, do desire the company of our older selves - those who know what we know and have, in their way, come to peace with it." One eye opened to delight in his confusion, then closed as she added, "Lesley would have been my first choice. She is the best choice, after all." He squawked then; an odd and humiliating sound. "Regret, we've been through this once." Her brow creased sharply and several seconds passed before it fell back to its original ease. When she spoke her words were laced with a quiet determination. "Perhaps once is enough in the end, Stefan. So I will say this. Once. I understand you very well. You believe this means I agree with you. That is a mistake in need of correction." He would have responded had a large glob of wet sand not just smacked him in the head. Twisting out of his chair, he whipped the sunglasses from his eyes to clear his field of vision. His body prepared to meet its attacker, then relaxed itself immediately. A jaunty Laura Spencer stood before him, hands on her hips and a full white grin on her face. In fact, he noted, everyone was smiling now - even the maid who had, no doubt, completely forgotten her station. Regret broke the moment and took Laura by the arm. "Let's eat, shall we?" Stefan snatched his towel from the chair and furiously swept the sand from his clothes. He scanned the short cliff behind him for the guards and found them facing this ludicrous scene. At least two of the men were making a show of coughing into their hands. Lovely. He twirled the towel over his head to signal their return to their assigned surveillances. He wasn't sure which bothered him more, the lapse in security or the foppish image he'd created of himself. He knew which should, but that didn't help to channel these feelings of acute irritation. When he joined the women at their blanket he made sure to sit as far from Laura as this intimate setting would allow. Regret was in the midst of laying out the food buffet-style at the center of the cloth; a large platter of cold chicken, two tubs of salad - one potato, one pasta, a basket of fresh French bread and rolls and, as a thoughtful aside, a single tuna salad sandwich with a small bag of chips should Laura's tastes so incline. She had given the maid a thermos of punch which the woman was struggling to open. Stefan lifted a hand to help, but found it waylaid by a bottle of wine and the quick addition of a corkscrew. While he worked the foil from the bottle's lip, she set three glasses for his pouring. Just as he popped the cork from this somewhat modest chablis, a struggle broke out at the other end of the blanket. Having apparently overcome her trouble with the thermos, the maid had filled a cup and was attempting to pass it to Laura. Laura kept pushing it away, each time more angrily than the last. Exchanging a look of concern with Regret, he extended his arm and snapped his fingers for the thermos. The thermos was passed. He unscrewed the lid and smelled the contents, nodding that this was indeed the punch. Plucking a wine glass from the blanket, he poured the fruity concoction to its half and offered this to his recalcitrant guest. Laura's brow furled as she took the glass, her jaw clenching in stubbornness. Tipping the drink to an odd little angle, she took a furious breath and tossed the liquid right back in his face. Ripe red juice splashed into his eyes, rolled down his chin and dripped its bloody drops to his chest. In their rush to attend to the sticky mess, no one noticed the solitary tear Laura Webber Spencer swept away with the back of her trembling hand.