"MARLENA!!!" John screams hoarsely for the last time before he slumps back to the bed. He doesn't even know why he's calling her Marlena. That's not her name, he knows that now.
He squeezes his eyes tightly closed, a rebuttal against the notion forming inside him even as the idea takes shape.
No, no it's *Doc*. She's hurt, she's angry... she's just....
He feels a dull ache burrow into his chest as an image of her forms against his eyelids. He sees the vindictive smile that she left him with as she shut the door and he shivers as he feels the fog closing in on him.
Fragments of memories swim into his consciousness, blurring at the edges as the reality around him dissolves into a cacophony of static noise and vision. He sees her astride him and then dancing at the penthouse grill, her strange gold eyes ensnaring him as she laughs. Dragging against the tide of time, he sees her looking down at Hope's crumpled form, at Roman's funeral, leaving with Stefano.... And then further back again, he sees her dishevelled and beautiful in Craig Wesley's arms. He relives the feeling of having her in his arms again as he pushes her against the pier support and kisses her hard....
The images flow even faster now, Marlena hurling the picture at him in the penthouse. Throwing her wedding ring at him in her office. Her cruel angry words as she tells him she wants him out of her life. Marlena sending Belle away, Marlena in the hospital telling him she needs time.... Marlena.... Marlena....
Lashes spring open, revealing pained blue eyes as John's mind finally accepts the truth that his heart and soul already know.
She's not Marlena.
The truth is, he's known it for a long time, but he's been in denial. At least until the moment "she" told him she was "playing".
He had known it then, even if he hadn't quite been ready to admit it. He'd known with a cold, hard certainty; the tone of her voice and the iciness in her eyes had said it all. She, whoever the woman is that inhabits the body he knows so well, is not Marlena.
He yanks fruitlessly at the unyielding metal that keeps him manacled to the bedstead and he wonders how the hell he's going to get out of this. The steel is cutting into his wrists and his shoulders are starting to get stiff from the awkward position he finds himself in, but he's stuck, well and truly. Beside him, the phone sends it's monotonous warning tone telling him it is off the hook. As if he doesn't know.
He stills and tries to quell the bile that burns his throat and churns in his stomach. Everything is starting to make sense now. The only thing that doesn't make sense is why he hasn't seen it before now.
Marlena would never do the things that this woman has done. She would not deliberately hurt him and hurt her family in such a cruel, calculated way. She wouldn't... would she?
He shivers as he realizes that even now he's trying to convince himself that his worst fear has not been realized. Trying to ignore what should have been patently obvious to all of them weeks ago. Certainly to him. He knows Marlena, he loves her with everything that he is and he knows this is not her. None of this is her, not the clothes, not the words that come from her mouth, not the way she has treated her friends and family, not her sudden familiarity with DiMera....
His face darkens as he thinks of Marlena... or whoever the hell she is, leaving St. Luke's with Stefano. He should have known it then. Hell, the old bastard had pretty much implied it when John had confronted him at his house. However, John had been too busy wallowing in guilt and self-pity to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together.
"Dammit," he spits out the word in disgust as he twists against his bonds, metal scraping against metal with no measure of success. He grits his teeth as he pulls against the handcuffs, the metal biting painfully into his wrists. He strains, grunting as the nerves in his wrists and shoulders scream with pain, but when he finally collapses back against the sheets, his efforts show little achievement. He is effectively trapped here until someone finds him. It's not a prospect he is comfortable with, but he has little other choice.
He closes his eyes again but they fly open a scant second later as the image of his cell at Maison Blanche fills his mind. His taut body starts to tremble as memories of being helpless at Stefano's mercy flood his conscious thoughts.
He doesn't want to recall that time. He doesn't want to relive that hell. And yet, he seems unable to stop it. Unable to stem the flood of memories and emotions that wash over him.
Instead they are insistent and insidious and he can feel it as though it was yesterday. The pain, the hunger and the utter exhaustion. The mental torture, knowing that Marlena was suffering because of him. Self-awareness, starting to slowly ebb away under the influence of DiMera's drugs.
But perhaps the worst and most pernicious memory is lying in the cell, bound by his chains, knowing that if he succumbs, there will be no way he can protect *her* from that *bastard* DiMera....
John groans as he feels himself drift back into the hellhole DiMera created for him down in Louisiana. Stefano had known that his one weakness was Marlena and he had exploited it ruthlessly. He had known John would do anything for the woman he loved, that he would *die* for her if it became necessary. He had known it and he had used it without mercy.
Even then DiMera had wanted Marlena. It had been part of his game, playing them off against each other, using their exquisite love to control and torture them until they broke. It had been a catch 22, John had submitted to DiMera to keep him from hurting Marlena, but in doing so, he had risked her safety.
As it turned out, he had risked her very soul.
It had been a most brutally excruciating agony for him down in that dank, desolate cell, knowing that whatever he did, he could not save her.
John feels the droning inside his head growing, and it is almost as if he can feel DiMera's nightmarish drugs sizzling under his skin.
There is no Marlena to save him now. No Marlena to ground him, to bring him back from the brink when he teeters on the edge of a hell that Stefano DiMera created.
The Marlena he loves knows his heart and soul and she would know the terror that is now flooding him. She would never leave him here to face it on his own. She would never inflict it on him.
The reality is, this Marlena knows too... but she revels in it.
It is only by the force of his extremely strong will that he is able to bring his focus back to the present and he shakes his head as though to clear it of the insidious humming.
"What has he done to you, Doc?" his voice cracks, hollow and tormented. It *was* DiMera's doing, he knows that unequivocally. But when and how?
He blinks away the grittiness that is plaguing his eyes and he stares at the ceiling, trying to clear his mind so that he can concentrate. The only way he can save her is if he knows what happened to her. Stefano won't tell him, that's for sure. So he is left with his own deductive reasoning for now.
His mind traces back the last few weeks far more slowly and deliberately than his previous spree through the painful recollections. He moves through everything that has happened, cataloguing each event and storing them away. They only confirm what he now knows. They only make him feel like a stupid, blind fool. Until he reaches the day he and Marlena encountered Stefano at Salem Place and he knows, without a doubt, that that is when it happened.
He remembers how she woke in the hospital, strange eyes and a strange voice demanding to speak to Stefano. She had lost consciousness as Marlena and she had awakened, an alien in Marlena's skin.
John wrenches at the manacles that bind him to the bed-head again, oblivious to the smarting of his now-tender wrists. It is all but obliterated by the rage and pain that fill his battered soul. An utterance of frustration that slips from his lips immediately swells into a howl that fills the room with raw, animalistic emotion. The grief and anger escape unfettered, needing to find expression before he can move onto something more constructive.
It seems as though it is minutes later that his scream peters out and he lays limp against the damp and twisted sheeting.
Exhausted, his mind drifts for long minutes until he finds his way back to the reasoning that he wants so badly to avoid. He knows he can't. He has to work out whom this woman is and how she came to exist. If he can't do that, he may well have no hope of ever seeing the woman he loves again. And that's his biggest fear. That, like at Maison Blanche, he will not be able to save her, he will fail her again and this time it will be utterly final.
He knows the reality is that whatever Stefano did to Marlena, he did when she was missing those four years. The thought makes John want to vomit as he considers just what Stefano may have had Marlena doing. After all, he had used Gina and John himself as thieves and mercenaries. It only makes sense that he would carry on his twisted schemes with Marlena.
"Oh Jesus," he mumbles as he thinks of Stefano and Marlena together. There are so many things right now that he doesn't want to even contemplate. Including the relationship between Stefano and Marlena, which now takes on a whole new slant, and one that makes him want to tear Stefano's limbs from his body, one by one.
Marlena.... He can't keep thinking of her as Marlena. If he does that, it's going to drive him crazy, he knows. He has to separate this woman from Marlena inside his head if he is to stay in control of this nightmare he finds himself in. He wonders for a moment what she calls herself, but the question itself is enough to make his skin crawl. It is hard enough to know that Gina has lived like a parasite inside Hope. It is hard enough to know that somewhere inside him, a mercenary lurks, waiting for a chink in his defences. But to know that Marlena has been violated in that way, to know that Stefano has instilled one of his perverted creations into Marlena, that he has deliberately corrupted the goodness that is the very essence of Marlena, is hideous.
"DAMN YOU DIMERA!" John screams, twisting wildly on the bed, the cuffs clanging, but never releasing their hold on him. "Fuck!" He suddenly realizes one of his wrists is chafed raw and is bleeding, and the pain rouses him from his outburst.
He can't afford to lose control. He has to find out why Stefano created this vixen and then he has to find out how to get rid of her and bring Marlena back. Without Marlena, there is nothing. He can't live without her, the last few weeks has been proof enough of that.
A grimace passes across his face as his thinks that Abe was closer to the truth than either of them knew. And then his heartbeat seems to still and everything grows cold.
"Oh my fucking God." The sight of her smiling callously down at Hope's body springs forth in his mind and he feels the chill creep over his body. He had sworn to Abe that Marlena had nothing to do with Hope's accident or Roman's death. After all, he had argued, she was Marlena, and Marlena would never hurt anyone, much less the people she loved....
A deep dread unfurls in his stomach and his whole body tenses. If she, if this woman, did have something to do with Roman's death... he may never even have an opportunity to get near enough to her to figure out how to bring Marlena back. And even if he succeeds in saving Marlena, how the hell is she going to prove she had nothing to do with Roman's death if all the evidence points to her?
John's immediate world is silent as the implications slide one after another into his awareness and he barely notices as something snaps within him. All concerns aside from Marlena suddenly seem utterly unimportant. If he fails to save her, then nothing matters, not ethical considerations, not friendships, not *anything*. He will do whatever it takes to get her back, to hold her again. Whatever it takes.
~
Grace doesn't even bother turning on the lights of the penthouse as she closes the door behind her and she drops her shoes and purse before she turns wearily for the stairs.
"Would you like to explain where you have been this evening?" Stefano's voice comes deep and angry from behind her.
Spinning around, Grace fixes him with a baleful glare. "What the *fuck* are you doing here?"
"Wondering where *exactly* you have been for the last four hours." Stefano steps out of the shadows, his face dark with anger.
"Since when did you start keeping tabs on me, Stefano?" she demands furiously. After tonight, the last thing she feels like is having this conversation. Her happy mood had evaporated in the taxi, leaving her feeling very much unsettled and it is making her more than a little pissed off.
"Since I discovered you were at Tuscany acting like a common *whore* with John Black!" Stefano roars as he grabs her wrist. "What the *hell* do you think you are doing, Grace?"
His answer is a violent slap against his cheek and she wrenches her arm from his strong grasp. "Me?" she screams at him. "*You* have the *nerve* to call *me* a whore when you fucked Gina?" She looks at him in disgust. "How *dare* you."
"One has nothing to do with the other," Stefano narrows his eyes, his rage palpable. He knows she slept with John tonight, she has that glow about her, that sated, satisfied look she gets when she has gratified her voracious sexual appetite. And the knowledge is enough to drive him to distraction, knowing that she will not share all of herself with him, but yet will give her body to *John Black* of all people.
"No, because *I'm* actually married to John, while you had Hope Williams think she was *Gina* to make her sleep with you." Grace's jaw sets and she shakes her hair back over her shoulder. "You may as well have raped the woman, it's much the same thing in the end."
"It is *not* the same thing." Stefano has the decency to look horrified at her accusation but his rebuttal seems a little stilted.
"You keep trying to tell yourself that," Grace gives him the once over, her revulsion quite flagrant. "In the meantime though, I'm going to bed."
"We haven't finished our conversation," Stefano yanks her arm as she turns away and she pulls it back furiously.
"Get your hands off me," she hisses. "And get out of my house. You have no right to tell me what to do."
"I am only looking out for your interests Grace," Stefano's voice holds a warning note.
"I'm not some feeble debutante, Stefano," Grace retorts angrily. "I'll look out for my *own* interests thank you."
"John Black..." Stefano starts
"John Black will no longer be a threat," Grace says assuredly. "He is neutralized for the time being.
"Are you quite sure about that?" Stefano is obviously unconvinced.
"I left him with a parting gift that guarantees the end of John and Marlena's marriage," Grace suddenly looks very pleased with herself. "Believe me Stefano, John is not going to be a problem."
Stefano raises his eyebrows, still sceptical of Grace's claims. However, he knows there is no point arguing with her any further tonight. The more he tries to tighten his grip on her, the more she will slip through his fingers. He has to play the next few weeks very carefully or he could well lose her. It is a thought that is untenable.
"All right Grace," he nods his head, "I will accept your assurances, for now."
"How *kind* of you," her sarcasm rears as he turns for the door. "I'm *ever* so grateful."
"Don't push me Grace," Stefano warns as he opens the door.
"Don't threaten me Stefano," she returns his glare with a shrewd one of her own. "I don't take well to threats."
"Will you call me?" he ignores her comment.
"Maybe," she shrugs carelessly and Stefano bites back his retort when he sees the recalcitrance in her eyes. As angry as he is with her, he knows her too well and he knows he can't afford to push her right now. The last thing he wants to do is push her right back into John Black's arms. That would be utterly disastrous. So instead, he turns and he hears the door click closed behind him. Sighing, he sets off for the elevator.