Enough
Rated PG-13
by Paradise

Laura sat in her living room with both her sons and a beautiful young woman she’d come to love as her own daughter. They had all been talking about secrets, painful memories, things they rarely talked about but that always needed to be said. Elizabeth had talked about her father and was now asking her about her father.

“Oh we were very close,” Laura said. “I haven’t seen him since I was eighteen years old and he left Port Charles with your brother PJ, but yes, we loved each other very much. He was a wonderful uncle to me.”

“Did you love him?” Elizabeth asked.

“Oh yes, very much. And he loved me. And I’m sure he loves you.”

“Never as much as he loved Sarah,” she replied softly.

Laura took Elizabeth’s hand. “Hey, I know how much it hurts you to believe that. And I haven’t spoken to Jeff in twenty years and I’m sure he’s changed, but if he loves Sarah more, he doesn’t deserve you as his daughter. I’ve never even met my biological father, now that is not being loved. And I never forget that, I never forget the love my mother has shown me, despite the way my father treated her. It stays with me.”

“How come some things stay with you, Mom, and other things don’t?” Lucky said.

“You mean like the rape,” Laura said flatly, not having meant to say that but there was no more denying it now.

Lucky said nothing. Laura’s eyes were calm and black with anger.

“I will never forget what I saw in your eyes when you first let me know how much you hated me for that,” Laura said with cool intensity. “How you asked me if I had to be raped and kidnapped to be turned on.”

“Lucky!” Nikolas said.

Laura continued. “I know that you think, Lucky, because Luke and I are your parents that you have a right to know and to judge anything and everything from the time we were born to yesterday. But you don’t. What happened or happens between us is none of your business. You are my son but do I have a right to know anything I damn well want to about you and Elizabeth? Absolutely not. Luke and I have both done a lot of things we’d just as soon remove from our past and the rape hurt him a helluva lot more than it hurt me. I’m not saying I wasn’t hurt but I healed, thank you. But you opened that wound and hurt him so badly I couldn’t get him to see anything but your hatred, and your judgments. It was like you hated us it as if we hadn’t know what had happened. But we did know, we were there. But you created more hatred and more anger than I ever believed possible. And believe me, you will probably sooner or later hear something else about one of us and you may go ballistic. But the good news is, the next time you wanna hate us, the next time you want to judge my life and my choices, you can do it without me. I’m not going to beg you to forgive something you have no right to even have an opinion to. You telling your father he doesn’t know what no means, how dare you,” she said bitterly. “How dare you take my past and use it as a weapon against anyone. I never said anything about how truly angry I was at you then, I was so concerned with getting you back, but I do now.”

Laura drank a little water, then looked back at her youngest son. Lucky knew better than to even speak and inside Liz was thrilled Laura was finally expressing this.

“You thought you knew, didn’t you? Because of Elizabeth. You wanted to create Elizabeth into me. You saw her in the snow, with blood on her legs,” Laura said taking Liz’s hand to comfort her. “And you saw your mother. Because you wanted to. That’s right, you wanted to. You thrived on that.”

“That’s not true-“

“Yes you know it is true!” she said, her eyes widened in anger he would deny it. “And you wanna know how I know, because not even for one second did you try to understand, let alone accept it. You found out something extremely controversial and you decided that Luke and I were made out of lies and then you were so proud of how right you’d been when you learned I had been in love with Stefan. You wanted to believe it.”

Nikolas jumped in. “I-I think that is my fault, I told Lucky-“

“So what?” Laura interrupted, defending Nikolas’s actions. “It wasn’t your fault, Nikolas, you should have never known either. But Stefan at that time wanted to punish me, and he knew telling you everything he could label as bad to you would hurt me. And it did. But it’s not your fault.”

“Rape is still rape, though,” Lucky said.

Elizabeth spoke up. “You make it too simple, Lucky. I went to Laura, because for some reason since I first came here to Port Charles I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and I learned how different it was for her. I learned how much Luke was not the man who raped me. The man who raped me was a serial rapist. Luke…still has a hard time looking in the mirror, even though it’s been over twenty years. There is a difference, because Luke helped me. I was afraid of Luke, Lucky, because of what you told me about him. What you said he was. It was like you were trying to make me believe he was my rapist. You were so wonderful to me and I loved you so much but I couldn’t ever see your logic truthfully on this. I came to this house in search of Laura and he was here. He asked me if I was afraid of him and I said yes. He told me to leave if I wanted to. I looked at his eyes, how sad they were, how empty. I never saw anyone like that. He was in every bit as much pain as I was in, every bit as much, he felt every bit as sick as I did…and I asked him, if I had done something, my clothes or my makeup and he told me so firmly no. He knows how wrong what he did was, and he can’t even comprehend how he did it. And your mother never portrayed herself as a victim, she never said “woe is me, for I have been raped”. And maybe she’s the one that’s right, not you, not Stefan, not Luke.”

Laura reached for Liz’s hand. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I love you, thank you for being there for me.”

Laura turned back to Lucky.

“Would you like to know now the difference between what happened to Elizabeth and what happened to me? About everything you could imagine, except maybe the fact that we both said no, but that’s about it. And that’s the truth. And how dare you try to make your parents who had loved you your whole life, some narcotic people you’d never laid eyes on.”

“But it’s a pretty big shock,” Lucky said.

“Fine, that would’ve been fine. Of course it should have been a shock to you. That’s not something you hear everyday, I understand that. And it amazingly translated everything you’d seen your whole life which was Luke loving me, my loving Luke, us loving you. We loved each other more than anything,” Laura said. “And it’s not your choice to say that’s wrong.”

Nikolas tried to understand, and it was easier to believe Laura this time because she was so firm, not trying to defend herself but saying it like it is.

Laura struggled with keeping completely calm. “Lucky,” she said slowly. “How could you assume I would walk through the park and feel terrified and afraid? I can walk through that park and it never even comes into my mind. I was perfectly able to be at that same disco for the next two years without fear or pain. Ask Bobbie or my mother how many times I would go back to that disco and dance. I danced with Robert there a lot, it didn’t scare me to stand in that room, or outside in the park. I kept working for Luke, thank you very much. Luke and Robert and I used to celebrate in the park and at the disco because at that time it was pretty much the hot place in town. I can breathe fine, Lucky. It was so strange because I don’t even think about the rape when I go through the park, it took me a minute to find out what you were accusing me of when you brought it up. I don’t know why you wanted to insist that I was so in denial that I would be married to him for twenty-five years and had two kids with him. That’s probably the biggest denial known to man had it been true. I’m fine, Lucky, I healed a very long time ago.”

“How?” Lucky said, still not sure he understood.

Laura tried to think of a way to put it into words. “Okay, you saw Elizabeth, you saw her crawling out of the bushes, bleeding and frightened right? Well, that’s Elizabeth, that wasn’t me. And the situations are different, and believe it or not the actions are different.”

“I agree,” Elizabeth said. “I saw Luke, I instantly liked him even though I knew he had made a huge mistake twenty years ago. You do move on, Lucky, I did. And Laura’s experience wasn’t mine, and I’m very sorry that because you watched me go through it that that further angered you with your parents.”

“Don’t say that, Elizabeth, you had nothing to do with any of this,” Laura said. “And even if you did it’s not your fault at all. God…Luke was so much like Lucky, refusing to accept that I could forgive, that I could not be in pain. You two were alike in that, he wanted me to hate him, he wanted me to have something better than he thought he was. Yes, I’ll admit, the fact that I wasn’t in unbearable pain for very long is unusual, but so is everything else I’ve done in my life. How could you not only stop loving me, Lucky, but call your father a rapist? I truly hate to break it to you Lucky, but your father is not a rapist. Anymore than I’m a murderer and I have killed a couple of people, thank you. That never bothered you. Kinda ironic. He’s not perfect, and while I was victimized by him, he was victimized by him, and he made it his goal in life to never be that man he was in a few minutes of broken contact with reality.”

Lucky nodded, wishing they could change the subject because he remembered how absurd he had been. “I know I was wrong to judge, but I couldn’t understand how you could get over it, so I thought you just never did.”

Laura frowned in confusion. “So I’m married to your father for twenty years and have to of his kids yet I haven’t gotten over that one hour of pain?”

“That’s why I thought you hadn’t, because you did marry him.”

“I truly do understand your confusion. And if you asked certain people, they might say I only cried rape. In a way, they were right.”

“How?” Lucky asked, stunned.

“Because I lied. I ran to the park and I lied to the police, I never wanted Luke to be caught. I pretended to be terrified that my rapist would find me when I decided immediately to continue working for Luke, so no one would be suspicious…and so I could still be near him. I’m not saying it wasn’t rape but I was in love with him before and I was in love with him after. He was my best friend and I wanted to protect him because I knew Frank Smith was going to kill him if he didn’t kill someone else. And Luke was refusing to kill this person and it was a huge mess and I figured he was enough problems.”

“Frank Smith, I can bet,” Lucky said agreeing.

“May I ask why you wanted to remain working for Luke?” Nikolas said, polite as ever.

Laura tried to explain it so he could understand. “Before that night, I hadn’t admitted I was in love with him, but he was my very best friend, someone I trusted my secrets with, someone I would go to and tell things I never told anyone else. I knew how much pain he’d been in that night, how afraid he was. Shaking in tears, so afraid Frank Smith would kill him. Frank Smith was still going to kill him. And for some reason, instead of putting him in prison and hating him, I saved his life. Even though he hurt me it didn’t last because I knew he hadn’t intended it to be-“

“An act of violence?” Liz said.

“Yeah, exactly. I am never ever saying rape is okay, that there are exceptions, this wasn’t an exception, but since it happened to me, isn’t it my choice to forgive and move on?”

She had Lucky there. That sparked something in his mind and he realized once again how ashamed he was for saying all he had to his parents.

“Luke built my self respect ironically, and when we were on the run, and we were trapped in a department store, and we danced all night with caviar and champagne…all of the pain was gone. Not just the pain from that night, but from all the lies we told that grew and grew and exploded in our faces. I wouldn’t let him push me away, and I stayed with him, working for him, and I watched. And I loved the man I saw. In spite of that night,” Laura told her son.

“I did something really awful to Dad,” Lucky said softly.

Laura said nothing, but waited for him to continue.

“That song that was playing, Rise, I found it and I played it in the dark at Dad’s club when he came in. He didn’t know I was there.”

Laura closed her eyes in disappointment. “Well, all I can say is your obsession about that has nothing to do anymore with your father and me. It was all about you. And all I can say is, had I been there, I would’ve been on your father’s side. You don’t get to lecture us.”

Nikolas had had his own burning question. “Mother, I know this is very personal…and very hard for you to say because you think you’ll hurt me, but what was the difference between Luke and my father?”

Laura looked down, biting her lower lip, having no way of answering that. In her eyes, there were no similarities but she knew how Nikolas would assume there was. Nikolas reached for his mother’s hand.

“Mother, I found a newspaper, it said that Stavros beat Luke almost to death, tied to him to a bed to force him to watch Luke rape you.”

Laura looked up at him with shocked, teary eyes. What she would’ve done to spare Nikolas that pain.

“W-where did you read that?”

“I looked up a newspaper in 1983. Then it said you and Luke broke free and ran, and my father, while shooting at you, fell down the stairs. Luke had knocked him out to get him off you. It also said Stavros used a knife to tear your clothes, and he held it to your throat.”

Laura wasn’t prepared for this.

“Well…yes, that’s all true. But Stavros didn’t rape me, you do realize that. We stopped him-“

“But he would have.”

Laura said nothing for a minute. “Yes, he would,” she said softly.

“I know it’s hard for you to talk about, I know you’re afraid for me, but would you tell me what happened that night? What you remember? And please, don’t censor anything, please,” he urged. “I really need to know, and I know you think it will hurt me and it might, but I can’t keep envisioning things in my mind trying to not ask you because you think it will hurt me. If I just…know, it’ll be easier for me to move on, for me to let go. So please, Mom.”

Laura licked her lips. “Um…all right. I’ll try. Luke and I were relieved finally because we thought Stavros was accepting that I wasn’t his wife…but he wasn’t. Even though he knew our marriage was invalid it didn’t matter. I went upstairs to bed and Luke was on the phone. Minutes later I heard something. It was dark, and I crept down the stairs calling his name. I saw someone strangling Luke. He begged me to run, to escape. Someone grabbed me, and there were men everywhere, and then Stavros came through the door. He spoke the usual revenge against betrayal and I remember I broke free for an instant and ran upstairs, it was my only option. I tried to find a way out of the house but I couldn’t from the bedroom on the top floor. I knew Stavros would come so I waited, hearing his running footsteps. Stavros broke through the door of the bedroom. We argued. I told him I didn’t belong to him and that I didn’t care about his threats. And I have to be honest with you, I wasn’t that afraid. Somehow I was angry instead of frightened. He grabbed me and almost hit me, but instead he kissed me, to hurt me.”

“Please don’t stop,” Nikolas said.

“They brought Luke upstairs, he was passed out, they’d beat him almost to death. They tied him to the bed. I told Stavros I would go back with him, to take me back to the island-“

“But you said you wouldn’t be a possession.”

“I didn’t want to be, and I told him he would never own me, but I’d always intended to return,” Laura said. “Anyway, Stavros refused to take me back. He told the men to leave and then he threw me on the bed. Luke was conscious by this point and Stavros told Luke of our ‘great love’. Luke asked Stavros why it didn’t matter that I hated him. Stavros told Luke he would make sure no one ever forgot who I belonged to, and that he would brand me in front of Luke.”

Elizabeth flinched a little at that remark, how awful it was.

“He said those words,” Lucky asked.

“Yes. And then he took the knife and cut my robe open. He pulled me up and tore my gown. Luke knew nothing he could say would stop Stavros so he worked to undo the bedpost so he could knock Stavros out. I wasn’t so much afraid of Stavros as I was angry. I told him to get the hell off me, he told me to relax…and I…said I’d relax when he was dead. He kissed me and held me down. My lips were bruised as were my arms. I looked at Luke and I saw what he was planning to do, so I kissed Stavros back and Luke knocked him out on the head. Stavros rolled off of me. My straps were torn but I got up and got the knife and cut Luke free. Luke held me and asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine and he wanted to take me to the hospital anyway. So we left Stavros there on the bed, prepared to get out of the house and then send someone to help him. Luke tried to take me to the hospital, wrapping me in his coat but then we heard a gun shot. Stavros stood at the top of the stairs shooting. Luke threw me behind him to protect me and all of a sudden Stavros just fell down the stairs. I walked over to him cautiously, took the gun immediately and Luke and I checked his pulse and took him to the hospital. And they said a few minutes later that Stavros’s neck was broken and he was demanding to see me. I went in to see him and he took my hand and squeezed it really hard in anger and desperation and told me it would never be over, that I would never be free and then…he died.”

Nikolas was silent for a moment, as was Laura. He’d wanted to know, and had she once again told him it was nothing, he would’ve only gone on imagining the worst or believing everything he read.

“It was always hard for you, wasn’t it?” Nikolas said.

“What do you mean,” Laura said, caressing his face as he sat straight in front of her on the table.

“I was conceived because he forced himself on you.”

“No,” Laura said calmly. “You were conceived in love.”

“How can you say that,” Nikolas said.

“Because I was in love with Stefan, and we are your parents. Without Stefan, I wouldn’t have had you, without our love we would not have had you. I don’t care if he isn’t genetically your father, he’s…your father to me. And I mean that, I would never have had you without him. And when I found out I was pregnant I went right to him and told him with tears in my eyes and—“ Laura trailed off remembering that moment.

A tear slipped from her eye then.

“What?” Lucky said.

“No I’m sorry,” Laura whispered as she continued the memory in her mind. “I…was just remembering that moment, how full of happiness we both were and full of pain we were in because we were so in love and we couldn’t say it.”

“Mom, you…really loved him, didn’t you,” Lucky said, a little surprised.

Laura nodded. “Yes I did. I…loved him, Nikolas. I was in love with him, and we were a family. Even for those weeks, Stefan and I together, adored you and loved you. And I know what it’s like to have a father who’s…not someone you admire, Nikolas. I hate what my father did to my mother.”

Nikolas hadn’t even ever asked Laura about her parents. But Laura began that subject knowing he would ask, and maybe her story would ease his pain a little.

“What d-did your father do?”

“He never loved my mother at all. She was his student in med-school. He was married but seduced her, and when he found out she was pregnant and she refused to give me up for adoption, my grandfather and my father switched me with another woman’s dead baby, making my mother believe I was a stillborn. I was given to another family.”

“Did you know?” Nikolas asked.

Laura shook her head. “Not until I was twelve years old. I was Laura Vining for the first twelve years of my life.”

“Did you ever meet your father,” Lucky asked.

“No. He didn’t care to and neither did I. Why would I want to meet him?”

“Do you ever wonder-“ Nikolas began.

“Wonder what? If he might love me now? If he ever cared about my mother at all? Wonder what he’s done with his life? No. I have my mother, that’s all I need. I have love, I have family, I have people around me I can go to, I can’t worry about the people who weren’t there, or aren’t here now.”

“Where’s the woman you thought was your mother?” Elizabeth asked.

Laura shrugged. “I don’t know. When I was seventeen she left town with some man, leaving her daughter Amy with me and Lesley.”

“She left her daughter too?” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah. Haven’t heard from her in since then. I don’t even know if she’s alive. And she was the one who heard my first word and taught me how to read. It’s amazing what dies, but for me, these two people were easy to let go of. Of course Barbara was harder than my father, but I don’t think about her much anymore. I have my mother.”

“Why can’t I be like that?” Nikolas said.

Laura looked at him with love overflowing in her eyes. “Because you were raised to be this man’s son, this man you don’t know yet you’re supposed to because you are the prince. It has nothing to do with you, it has to do with someone you’re supposed to be. And Nikolas, if I had known that being with Stavros could give me you, I would go back and do it all over again, and pray you would be there with me, just the same.”

“Laura, even when Stavros hurt you, abused you, you were so sane and calm when you returned. How did you do that?”

“Because the minute Luke screamed my name, I wasn’t Lasha Cassadine, I was Laura, I was who I was before the island. And I was able to separate the two lives, I had to. But I did feel ugly still, dirty, but no one looked at me like I was anyone but Laura. So it was easier to be her.”

Liz nodded. “It was also your third marriage, I hadn’t had sex yet.” Liz looked down. “He got such a kick out of seeing me bleed.”

Laura took Liz’s hands. “Look at me.” Liz did. “You did bleed because it was your first time. If you bleed at all your first time, it is a very small amount. You bled because of the brutality of it, the violence. It was like beating you on the inside. The blood ran down your legs, that is never what it would’ve been like had it been your first time having sex.”

Liz nodded, showing Laura she believed her.

“I could always tell you about it, Laura. I could always tell you anything.”

Laura pulled Liz to her. “Come here baby,” she said, holding this beautiful, thriving woman.

“Thank you,” Liz said.

“I never want you to think it was because it was your first time. He abused you, defiled your body, THAT is what he was proud of.”

“How do you do it?” Liz said, pulling back. “Feel so guilty and take so much and do so much and give so much and have been through so much and get up everyday?”

“I don’t know,” Laura smiled, caressing Liz’s face. “Sometimes…it’s just enough. I’ve had enough of apologizing to both my sons.” She looked at them. “I love you both more than anything, but I have no more I’m sorrys to give. Not for the past, and not for anything now. If I do something terrible tomorrow, I still won’t be able to say I’m sorry. Not to anyone. I’ve lost count of the things I’d do differently, but I’m done. I’m drained, and I have no more to give. It’s just…enough.”

Nikolas smiled at his mother. “I think so too.”

“We love you,” Lucky said.

They both hugged their mother. Lucky whispered to his mother, “It’s you who needs forgive us.”