GH Fic: I'll Keep Screaming Until You Understand: I've Been Here, Here, Here Forever - Part 3
Title: “I’ll Keep Screaming Until You Understand: I’ve Been Here, Here, Here Forever”
Author: normative_jean
Fandom: General Hospital
Characters/pairings: Robin, Maxie, Lulu, Sam, Kristina, and the whole damn cast (allusions to multiple couples in various stages of relationship drama, but fairly gen)
Rating: PG-13 (gun violence and language)
Word count: ~27,600 (I KNOW)
Warnings: Guns. And hostage-taking. And more guns. So, same warnings as for the average GH episode.
Author's Notes: Well, technically it’s still October 7 in some places, right? Oh my goodness, this fic completely ate my brain and destroyed my sanity. There can be no end to the amount of thanks and praise for empressearwig, who is entirely responsible for this semi-coherent story. Would you believe that this is the not insane draft? Everything left that sucks is mine. Written for girlsavesboyfic.
Summary: "Are you insane? You want to go running into trouble in an evening gown?"
Part 3
“How come we’re stuck doing the heavy lifting?” Maxie grumbled. She and Lulu were attempting to drag the unconscious robber back towards the other end of the hall. If he had hostages on this floor, they’d have been where he could keep an eye on them. “I swear, dragging big, heavy guys around hotels is so not good for my manicure.”
“Maxie,” Lulu hissed, heaving the body along, “don’t you think we have…” Heave. “…bigger problems than your fashion issues?”
“I’m just saying, this is the second guy we’ve had to dispose of tonight. How come we, the two people whose looks actually matter, have to get all sweaty and strained, and risk chipping our polish?”
Lulu stopped pulling and stared at her friend. “Your brain must be a fascinating place.”
“Thanks!”
Deciding that silence, in this case, was the better part of valor, Lulu ignored that. “And besides. Sam’s injured, Kristina’s in shock, and Robin’s trying to take care of Kristina’s shock.”
“I can’t believe she tasered the guy, just like that.” Maxie looked up at Lulu as they reached the end of the hallway. “She may have insisted on coming with us, but she’s not like us, is she?”
Lulu pursed her lips, dropping the robber’s arm and standing up to stretch. “She got to grow up normally. Well, as normally as the daughter of a mobster and a Cassadine can, anyway.”
“You know what I mean,” Maxie chided. “Robin and I grew up around cops and private investigators; we knew the kinds of people who were out there, and our family made sure we could protect ourselves. Same thing with you. I mean, you might not have grown up on the run like Lucky, but you’re a Spencer, through and through, and between your dad and your brothers, they made sure you knew how to handle yourself.” She paused as something seemed to occur to her. “Does it even seem weird to you that we’re all trained to handle firearms, that Robin can recognize on sight non-lethal crowd control equipment, and that none of us really thought twice about breaking into a building that was taken hostage?”
“We are who we are. “ Lulu shrugged. “You said it yourself. We were raised to be able to do this if the time ever came. Well, the time came.” She chuckled quietly, remembering how much more comfortable she had been than Dante was, impersonating cops and being on the run in rural Ireland. He had accused her then of liking the Spencer reputation a little too much, and she hadn’t even had a gun that time; she really wasn’t looking forward to the lecture he was going to give her after tonight.
But they’d both be alive to have that fight, and that made it worth it.
“Hey, check it out.” Maxie’s voice broke through Lulu’s reverie. “There’s like, a reading room or something here.”
Leaving the restrained robber outside the doors, Lulu clicked on the flashlight and followed Maxie into the alcove at the end of the hallway. She shined the light around the room, ready for whatever jumped out at them.
“Hey,” Maxie said, moving towards the back corner. “What’s this?”
Lulu moved the light towards where Maxie was pointing, and they both gasped at what they saw. “Guys!” Lulu called towards the hallway. “Hey, guys! Get down here, now!”
***
“You lied to me, Ms. Walsh,” the leader hissed into the phone. “You said there were no cops in the building.”
“There aren’t. I promised you, I’d do everything I had to in order to keep the hostages safe and get us all what we want.”
He shook his head; she couldn’t see it, but he knew the hostages could, and he knew they were hanging onto every angry word he said and angry gesture he made. That level of fear was what would allow him to take back the control of the situation.
“Now, see, I just can’t believe you. Two of my men have fallen out of radio contact, and that’s just not like them. And they’re both on floors below us, which makes me think that they’re being silences as someone - or a group of someones - heads upstairs.”
“I can absolutely promise you, there are no law enforcement officials from any agency are trying to get through the building-“
“Then who the hell is here?” the leader growled.
“Please listen to me, we can still resolve this in a-“
“Sorry, Ms. Walsh, but you’re out of time. You’ve got fifteen minutes to get a vehicle ready for me and my men, or I start shooting hostages.”
***
“Oh God, are they still alive?” Maxie asked as she and Lulu knelt beside the bodies of Jason and Johnny.
“I think?” Lulu said, pressing along Johnny’s throat the way she’d seen Robin do to the robbers and Kristina before. “I feel movement, so I guess they’re still alive, thank God.”
Robin rushed into the room ahead of Sam and Kristina; Sam refused to leave her sister’s side to allow Robin to look at her injured arm, and Kristina moved in a daze. “Oh, God.” Robin hurried over to the corner of the room and slipped efficiently into doctor mode. She felt for pulses in both men and must have been satisfied by what she found, because she exhaled loudly and relaxed.
“Are they okay?” Maxie asked, looking worriedly from Johnny to Jason.
Robin nodded. “Just unconscious, but their pulses are strong and steady. But we need to try and wake them up so I can check for other injuries and neurological damage.”
The other women appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the outside lights. “Hey,” Sam said, leaning heavily against the doorframe. “Who is it?”
“Jason,” Robin answered. “And Johnny. They’re fine,” she hurried to add when Sam gasped and seemed to slump further against the frame. “Just unconscious.”
Sam was torn between keeping Kristina out of the room and rushing to Jason’s side, but Kristina seemed to make that decision for her. She felt her sister’s body stiffen beside her, and heard the sharp intake of breath. “Oh no,” Kristina whimpered. “Johnny!” She broke free from Sam’s grip and stumbled over to the group on the floor.
Sam should have figured; no matter what happened between Sonny and Johnny, Kristina’s soft spot for Johnny and Ethan had remained, as had the men’s for Kristina. The whole night had just become even more personal for Kristina. She headed towards the group as well, now using her free arm to brace her injured one.
“We need to wake them up,” Robin was saying when Sam got to them. “If it’s really just unconsciousness, a sharp slap to the face should be enough to work.”
“Ooh!” Maxie’s hand shot up. “Dibs on slapping Jason!”
“Maxie!” Sam shouted.
“What? He was never very nice to me, even when I was practically living with him and Spinelli.”
Robin rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Let’s at least pretend we don’t enjoy senseless violence, okay?”
“I can’t hurt Johnny,” Kristina whimpered softly.
Grimly, Lulu replied, “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll wake Jason up,” Sam added, though Robin emphatically shook her head.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “You are going to let me look at that arm.”
“It’s fine,” Sam insisted.
“It’s bleeding.”
Johnny’s groan made them turn around. His head was lifting up, and in the flashlight Lulu had set aside when they’d gone to check on the men, Robin could see his eyes opening. She could also now see a trail of blood leading down the side of his face.
“Wha’ happ’ned?” he slurred, blinking slowly. He seemed to register the worried faces looking at him. “Hey, guys. When’d you ge’ h’r?”
Kristina turned to Robin. “Why’s he talking like that? What’s wrong?”
Robin dropped in front of Johnny and picked up the flashlight, shining it into his eyes before moving to examine the injury more closely.
“Ow,” Johnny groaned at the light press of Robin’s fingers along his hairline. “Whacha doin’, Doc?”
“I’m checking to see how bad your bleeding head wound is,” she responded with a small smile. “Luckily, head wounds always look worse than they are, your pupils are normal, and you seem to be in possession of your faculties.”
Johnny’s face slipped into a loopy half-grin. “Yay, me.”
Maxie sniffled. “Yes, yay you. You idiot!” She glared at him. “What were you thinking, taking on an armed robber without any backup or weapon?”
Leaving Johnny to Maxie, Lulu, and Kristina, Robin shifted over to Sam and Jason. “Has he woken up yet?”
Sam shook her head; as Robin swung the flashlight up to examine Jason for a similar head wound as Johnny’s, she saw tears shining in the other woman’s eyes. Robin remembered all too well what it was like to worry about Jason getting injured by one of the bad guys.
It was always easier to forget that Jason was also one of the bad guys in those situations.
“He hasn’t woken up at all?” Robin asked, frowning. “Even opened his eyes?”
“No,” Sam replied.
“He got hit pretty bad,” Johnny slurred. “Robber guy butted him in the back of the head with his gun.”
Robin cursed under her breath and reached around to feel Jason’s skull. Sure enough, she felt the caked blood on the back of his head almost immediately. That changed things significantly; the wound may have stopped bleeding on the surface, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still bleeding inside is skull, especially since he wasn’t waking up as easily as Johnny had.
“Robin, what is it?” Sam asked.
Before Robin could answer, the radio on the robber out in the hallway crackled to life.
***
As soon as they leader spoke, the ballroom erupted.
Mac, Lucky, and Dante were the first on their feet, arguing to the robbers that doing this would end any chance the robbers had at getting what they wanted from the police. So far, the robbers had seemed to listen to Mac’s advice when it came to dealing with Claire and the police outside, and they all hoped it would continue to be that way.
The rest of the room, however, now seemed to take matters into their own hands.
“You can’t seriously think you can do something like this!” Edward shouted, standing up and banging his fist against the table.
“Sit down, Edward!” Monica hissed. “Do you want to make things worse?”
“I won’t wait here to be shot, Monica!”
Jax and Carly had bolted up as well, bargaining with the robbers. “If it’s just money you want,” Jax tried, “just give me an amount and you’ll get it.
“So you can have the police trace what you give us?” the leader of the crew said. “No thanks.”
“We just want to get out of here!” Carly screamed at them “So just take the damn money and let us go!”
“Sit down, lady!” One of the guards moved closer to the crowd, gun pointed out. “And shut up!”
“Don’t talk to me that way!”
Jax pulled on his wife’s arm. “Carly!”
“Can we all just try to stay calm?” Steven asked, standing and moving towards the center of the group.
“Hey, no moving!” the same guard shouted, pointing the gun towards Steven.
Patrick jumped up from the GH table. “Look, no one wants any problems-“
“No moving!”
Matt stood as well, walking towards his brother. “Hey, hey, we’re all on the same-“
“I said no moving!”
The gunshot silenced the room.
***
The crackle of the radio brought the group in the reading alcove to stillness. If this was a check-in, then the robbers holding everybody hostage upstairs were about to get confirmation that their plan was officially off the rails.
“Whoever the hell has this radio, I already know you’re not my guy.”
Sam swore under her breath, and Lulu jumped up to retrieve the walkie and bring it back to the group. The voice was back again as she returned.
“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care. I know you’ve taken out two of my men, and I know that the prosecutor lady outside hasn’t kept her end of the bargain.”“Listen to me, and listen good. My men and I are getting our payday, and we’re getting the hell out of here. So I’ll tell you what I’ve told the cops outside: if we don’t have a vehicle waiting to take us to the docks without police interference in fifteen minutes, we’re going to start shooting hostages.”
“Damn it!” Robin hissed. “I knew we could make things worse!”
“It would have gotten to this anyway, Robin,” Sam argued. “I mean, let’s face it. People who take hostages aren’t exactly known for their non-violent ways.”
“This is directly because of us! Because the guards around the hotel didn’t check in on time, so now these guys know that their plan won’t work anymore!”
Maxie held up a hand. “What if something else is going on? I mean, we don’t know what’s happening up in the ballroom, so this could just be their way of trying to keep control up there.”
Sam shook her head. “Look, we still have time to get up there and finish this without anyone getting hurt. I say we use whatever time we have left.”
The radio went on again, silencing everyone.
“Oh, and in case you think I’m bluffing, or you still have time to stop me, you should know that one hostage has already been shot. Unlike you, I keep my word.”
***
“Matt!” Patrick screamed as his brother fell to the floor.
The leader of the robbers shot his gun into the air. “Nobody move!” He looked at the crew member who had fired into the crowd; it was the new guy, the one who had just joined them on the last job. He should have known better than to trust he could keep his cool when this job went south.
“He’s bleeding!” Patrick spun around and looked at the leader. “I’m a doctor, you have to let me help him.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” the leader replied, but he didn’t like that a hostage had been shot ahead of schedule. It was just one more thing that was going wrong tonight.
Mac held up his hands and slowly stood up. “Listen to me, you’re going to want all the bargaining power you can get with the police outside. And the best thing you can do for yourselves is for us to be able to say that when someone was accidentally shot,” he threw a look at Patrick to silence his protest, “you let doctors start helping him immediately.”
He hated it, but the leader knew Mac was right. And as Police Commissioner, his word would carry a lot of weight with the local authorities, especially when it came time for him and his crew to get the hell out of town. He tilted his head, indicating his guys to step back and return to their guard positions. “Alright,” he said. “Let your doctors do what they can. But no one’s leaving until my men and I do.”
Patrick and Steven rushed across the room to where Matt had fallen. They had virtually no supplies, and he was bleeding pretty heavily from his shoulder, but Matt was still alive, and that was what they held onto.
Patrick would just have to keep reminding himself that at least he was here this time. He wasn’t going to lose any more of his family.
***
“I’m going!”
“The hell you are, Kristina!” Sam wasn’t even going to pretend to have this argument now, not after what had just been announced over the radio. They didn’t know who was hurt upstairs, or how bad, but everything in the last fifteen minutes proved one overwhelming fact to Sam:
These guys meant business. Kristina wasn’t going anywhere near them.
“But I can help!” Kristina kept arguing. “I took down this guy!”
“Yeah,” Sam acknowledged. “And you also went into shock when you did it!”
“Sam!”
“You’re not going, and that’s final.” Sam marched over to her sister, side-stepping Robin and Lulu who were on the floor going through what remained of their supplies, while Maxie kept Johnny awake. “You agreed to two terms when I let you come: that you would be armed, and that you would do everything I said. Ah!” She held up a hand to stave off Kristina’s protest. “You agreed, fair and square. So now I’m telling you that you are staying here.”
“Hey, c’mon Kristina,” Johnny said, still slurring his words around the edges. “Someone’s gotta stay and protect me.” He flashed her a grin that was probably supposed to be charming but looked more stoned than anything else. Sam shot him a grateful look, though Kristina just glared.
Lulu looked up from the floor. “I hate to say it Kristina, but Sam’s right. This just hit a whole new level of dangerous, and no offense, but you haven’t exactly been handling everything as well as the rest of us.”
Robin stood and leaned over to Sam. “Can I talk to you for a second?” she whispered.
“Sure.” Confused, Sam followed Robin back to the room’s entrance, out of earshot of everyone else. Robin seemed to be deciding how to say whatever it was she wanted to say, before finally meeting Sam’s eyes.
“You’re injured,” Robin said. “I think you should stay here with Kristina and the guys.”
“I don’t think so!” Where the hell did Robin get off telling her something like that? Sam was in way too deep to bow out now. And besides, she’d worked through worse injuries than a bullet graze.
Robin wasn’t moved. “You won’t even let me look at it, which makes me think that it’s worse than you’re letting on.”
“Oh, what, do you have some sort of doctory sixth sense?”
“No.” Robin’s hand shot out and poked at Sam’s injury before she could stop her. Sam bit back a groan, but couldn’t stop herself from stumbling back a few steps. “You see?” Robin said as Sam grimaced. “And I barely put any pressure on that. What are you going to do if you have to actually use that arm? Like, say, to tackle one of the hostage takers?”
“Then I’ll take him down and deal with the pain later.” But Sam’s arm was throbbing more, and even though she couldn’t see it, she knew she was still bleeding. Robin was right; she’d barely touched her and could still hurt her badly. What would happen if someone wasn’t pulling their punches?
When Sam looked back at Robin again, she saw an empathy she wasn’t sure she understood on her face. “Believe me, I hate being the one left behind, too. But we wouldn’t have gotten this far without you. Hell,” she chuckled ruefully, “we wouldn’t have come at all if it hadn’t been for you. So let Maxie, Lulu, and I finish what you started, while you make sure that Kristina, Johnny, and Jason are safe.” Her voice faltered just slightly, but Sam heard it.
“What were you going to say about Jason?” Sam asked. “Before, back when the radio came on?”
Robin sighed. “The fact that he hasn’t woken up yet is worrying me. And he took a hard blow to the back of the head.”
“Is he still bleeding or something?” Sam gulped.
“Not on the outside.”
The implications didn’t need to be spelled out for Sam; this was the same problem that had ultimately introduced her and Robin five years ago. Except the last time Jason had been bleeding in his brain, he had nearly died… “Oh, God.”
Robin nodded. “I don’t want to scare you. I can’t say anything for certain without taking him to the hospital, but I don’t like what I know right now. Someone needs to stay with him who knows what to look for…”
“…Because I know everything that happened last time he had a brain injury,” Sam finished. She clutched her wounded arm tightly against her side. “I just feel like I need to be with you guys, too.”
“Don’t worry about us.” Robin smiled gently, but even in the dim light Sam could see how tight it was. “Either way, this will all be over in fifteen minutes.”
There was nothing Sam could say to that. Robin was right, even in what she wasn’t saying - Sam’s injury would slow them down, and they needed every last advantage they could get if they were going to save everybody.
Robin headed back to the group to help Lulu and Maxie finish packing up. Sam staying in the doorway, watching them. She would have to trust that the three of them would be enough to finish what they’d all started together.
***
“I’m not sure this is the best idea we’ve ever had,” Maxie said as they stood in front of the service elevator on the twentieth floor, the floor below the ballroom. She really, really wasn’t sure about this plan.
Lulu looked over at her. “Is it really any worse than getting Johnny to take the blame for Logan’s murder so I wouldn’t have another psychotic break?”
“Well…”
“Worse than trying to prove Kate was selling her own magazine’s secrets and wound up getting poor Spinelli bikini-waxed?”
Maxie couldn’t help giggling, even though she felt bad about it. “Well.”
“And is it really any worse than that time we went to Paris for Fashion Week and accidentally wandered into that-“
“You’ve made your point!”
Robin eyed the two of them. “I don’t remember you telling me any exciting stories about Paris Fashion Week, Maxie.”
Maxie swallowed delicately. “That’s because there’s nothing to tell,” she hissed pointedly at Lulu. “You agreed we’d never mention it again!”
Lulu shrugged. “I’m just saying, climbing up the service elevator shaft isn’t the craziest thing we’ve ever done. Now,” she said, eyeing the doors. “What’s say we pry these babies open and get to shimmying?”
***
Kristina sat against the wall with her knees pulled tightly to her chest, eyes closed. She hadn’t spoken to Sam since the other women had left to complete the rescue attempt. Granted, it had only been two minutes, but Kristina was making sure that the silence felt like a long two minutes. That was her prerogative as younger sister; Molly had perfected the technique on both of them when she was younger.
Kristina had always been an excellent student.
“Y’know, Kristina,” Johnny broke through the silence, rolling his head to look at her. “I think I’m still a li’l loopy, ‘cause I coulda sworn I heard you say you tasered a guy.”
Sam snorted. “You are still loopy, but you didn’t hear wrong.”
Johnny blinked. “You…wow.”
Kristina shrugged. “It needed to be done. I just wasn’t expecting the guy to…shake like that.”
“Made you talk,” Sam said quietly, echoing the numerous times these battles had ended the same way since she’d become part of the family. “I know you weren’t expecting it, but you still caused less damage than a bullet would have.”
“Than a bullet did,” Kristina corrected with an eye roll. She hated when her older sister won. “You shot him in the leg, remember?”
Johnny blinked again. “You shot him? This guy?” He waved vaguely towards the body slumped against the overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. “You didn’t like, leave him bleeding, did you?”
“No,” Kristina huffed. “Robin tied off the wound. She’s really good in a crisis.”
“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that.” Johnny leaned his head back and closed his eyes, the winter of two years ago flashing through his mind. It was very good to know that Robin’s actions then had truly been because she was sick. It made him feel much better knowing that she’d been guarding the backs of three women he cared quite a bit about. Although from the sound of things… “So what you’re basically saying,” he said to Kristina, a teasing glint in his eye, “is that you saved the day.”
That made Kristina jolt up. “What?”
Sam gave him a stink-eye. “Yeah, what?”
“Well,” Johnny explained, completely ignoring the threat in Sam’s voice. “It’s like you guys were saying before everyone left. Things were going terribly out there, and Kristina was the one who ended up taking the guy down. Not even Jason and I could do that.” His smirk softened into a real smile for Kristina. “It’s a good thing that you hated what you did. You’re not the kind of person who can hurt others, even someone threatening you, and not feel something. I’m actually kind of glad that you can protect people, but aren’t really cut out for it. I’d much rather you didn’t go rushing into danger like most of the people in your life.”
Kristina wasn’t looking at him anymore. “I can protect people,” she murmured. Unseen by the others, she shifted the taser at her side that she’d kept hold of while Robin and Lulu were going over the remaining supplies. “I can protect people.”
“Krissy…?” Sam started, not trusting the expression on her face at all. “What are you thinking?”
Finally, Kristina looked back at her sister. “I can’t do nothing. I’m sorry.” And before Sam could respond, she bolted up and ran out of the room.
“Damn it!” Sam jumped up as well, but she could really feel the pain in her arm now, and knew it would slow her down. She glared at Johnny. “You just had to do that, didn’t you?” she snapped, before hurrying to catch up with Kristina.
Johnny stared, dumbfounded, at the doorway. “What’d I do?” His eyes went back to the robber, tied up and unconscious in the middle of the room. “And what am I supposed to do with him?” He glanced at Jason. “Or him?... Hello?”
***
“Seriously,” Maxie grunted as she pulled herself to the top of the elevator shaft, “why couldn’t we just use the elevator? I mean, power is still on at the top floor, right?”
“Because it would make a lot of noise, Maxie,” Lulu answered. She carefully sat on the inner edge of the shaft locks and worked with Robin to pry the doors open. “You know, the stuff we’re trying to avoid by say, not talking once we’re in the ballroom?”
The emergency lighting had been on in the elevator shaft when they’d pried the lower doors open, so at least they’d been able to see where they were climbing. It also meant that Lulu could see Maxie roll her eyes. “Yeah, because prying open the metal elevator doors won’t make any noise at all.”
“It won’t,” Robin muttered, working a small metal file along the bottom of the elevator, “if we can release the doors just above the locking clamp on the base. Then,” she smiled as a small click could be heard, “we can slide them open without dragging.” She and Lulu slid the doors aside just enough to show they didn’t make noise. “Get ready in case it’s guarded.”
Maxie braced herself on the metal support frame and pointed the submachine gun they’d lifted from the robber towards the middle of the doors. Slowly - and, Maxie conceded, almost silently - Robin and Lulu separated the elevator doors, revealing the backstage area of the ballroom.
It was completely empty, and all three sighed in relief. They’d had far too many gunfights that night already.
They climbed out of the elevator shaft and stepped onto the floor. Maxie handed off the submachine gun to Robin and took one of the handguns from Lulu. All armed, they carefully advanced through the backstage area. It was littered with boxes and equipment, all evidence that the set-up for the evening’s event had never been completed. Maxie shook her head at the mess; it might have meant that they had placed to take cover or hide and spy on the ballroom, but it also meant that things had been seriously lacking in the management department. She was never trusting Lulu with anything important again.
Crouching down at the edge of the backstage area, Robin pulled back just enough on the heavy drapes that would have formed the backdrop to the catwalk so they could look into the main room. Four robbers in ski masks with submachine guns stood around the room guarding the hostages, most of whom were seated on the floor; only a few tables were in use, most likely by those attendees who had already been sitting there. From their vantage point, Robin could see the Quartermaines, the GH staff, and Jax still at their tables; finding the people on the floor was nearly impossible with the floor-length tablecloths and chairs blocking her view.
And somewhere in that crowd, someone lay dying.
They retreated back far enough to talk without being overheard by the robber standing guard about ten feet from the backstage entrance.
“We have to do something fast,” Lulu said.
“I know,” Robin agreed. “But we also can’t risk the hostages, especially one with a gunshot wound.”
Maxie crawled back to look out into the ballroom. She looked at the guard nearest to them, and then she turned back to her friends. “I think I have an idea.”
***
Sam caught up to Kristina on the landing of the eighth floor stairwell. The throbbing in her arm had turned into a numb heat spreading through her shoulder, and she felt weaker than she normally would have after running up several flights of stairs, but she was still faster than her teenage sister.
“You have got some serious explaining to do!”
“There’s a dumbwaiter that runs up the end of this hallway,” Kristina said, no apology in her voice. “It goes right into the kitchen; I remember seeing it when Michael and I were hiding there during Claudia’s birthday party.”
“Krissy…”
Kristina shook her head. “Don’t. I can’t think about that. I can’t think about dad, I can’t think about what he did to Claudia that night, I can’t think about everything that’s happened in the last year.” She glared up at Sam, a hardened resolve on her face that Sam had seen far too often on their mother, and on herself. “But I can think about helping those people up in the ballroom. I can think about backing up Maxie, Lulu, and Robin. I can think about the fact that as scared as I’ve been tonight, I’ve made a difference. Please don’t try to stop me, Sam.”
Sam was so used to dealing with the frightened, stubborn girl Kristina had become since the nightmare of Claudia’s birthday party that she had almost forgotten what the real Kristina was like - the Kristina who cared about her family and friends, and who didn’t care about risking herself if it meant protecting them.
As crazy as the situation was, it was nice to have the old Kristina back, and maybe even a little better than before.
“Alright.” Sam pointed up the stairs. “We’ll climb to the floor below the ballroom, and go with your idea of using the dumbwaiter. There’s no way I could climb up an elevator shaft now anyway.”
Kristina glanced at her injured arm. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Hey,” Sam chided, shaking a finger at Kristina. “We’re in this together, all the way to the end.”
In the dim dispersed light of the flashlight, Sam still saw Kristina smile widely. “Together.”
***
“Maxie!” Robin hissed frantically. “What are you doing?”
“It works in the movies!” she sniped back. “Now shut up and get ready.”
Robin and Lulu gaped at her from their places behind a box of lighting equipment. “You are certifiably insane,” Lulu marveled. “And I should know.”
“Maxie!” Robin repeated.
But Maxie just waved her off and inched as close to the end of the backstage curtain as possible without being seen. She kept her eyes on the guard nearest to them; he was pacing back and forth as if he was nervous, and Maxie was certain she could use that edginess to her advantage. She just needed him to come back this way…a little closer…and…
“Psst!”
Robin buried her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she muttered.
Lulu pulled her hands away. “You’d better get ready to move, because one way or another, I’m pretty sure that Maxie’s about to bring us some company back here.”
“Oh my God…”
Maxie ignored them. Her focus was only on the robber, who seemed to have heard her first whisper, but wasn’t paying it enough mind to investigate. She leaned forward again, still just out of his line of sight. “Psst!”
This time, the robber came over to investigate. Scooting further back, Maxie again whispered, “Psst!”
There was silence, and then they heard the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps heading towards the entryway to the backstage area. Maxie turned around and waved Robin forward. “Get ready!”
Robin sighed, but nonetheless crouched behind a box, preparing to spring up and attack as soon as the robber was within her reach. He appeared around the curtain, gun lowered but movements cautious, and moved fully into the backstage. He was now completely out of sight of anyone in the ballroom, and Robin waited until he took a few more steps…
She jumped up, and before he could react, she shot out a hand and hit his jugular, paralyzing his vocal chords and preventing him from calling out for help. She quickly followed that with a hard punch to his solar plexus; with the wind knocked out of him, he swiftly dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Maxie and Lulu joined Robin and stood to stare at the fallen hostage taker. “Wow,” Maxie said, eyes wide. “I can’t believe that worked.”
***
It had taken some maneuvering, but Sam and Kristina finally pried open the dumbwaiter doors and fell out into the kitchen. It was empty; clearly, the robbers had wanted to keep all the hostages in one place so they would be easier to control.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Sam muttered, “but thank God these guys actually seem smart. We’d never last with just our one little taser against a gun.”
Kristina swallowed hard and forced herself to move through the kitchen. The last time she had been here, her world had been ripped apart. She wouldn’t let herself think about that now; there was far too much at stake for her to succumb to panic and memory. “The kitchen doors open into a little entry area before getting to the ballroom proper,” she said instead. “We can open them enough to listen without anyone knowing we’re here.” She knew it would work; she’d done it before.
“Krissy…”
“I know, I know,” Kristina sighed. “I’m going to have a lot to talk about in therapy on Monday, that’s for sure.”
Sam chucked. “Well, at least you can’t ever complain that your life is boring.” She raised a finger her lips when they reached the swinging double doors. Sam pushed open one of the doors just enough so they could hear what was going on in the ballroom.
“Hey, that’s Mom!” Kristina whispered excitedly. “I can hear her trying to talk down the robbers! She’s okay!” She hadn’t wanted to say it, but Kristina had been terrified that Alexis was the hostage who’d been shot.
“I can hear Mac, too,” Sam added. “it sounds like they’re trying to get…okay, they must be talking to this crew’s leader, because they’re telling him that whatever they think is going on outside, letting the doctors help the guy who was shot will go a long way towards helping them.” She closed the door and moved Kristina back a bit so they could talk. “So, we know it’s a guy who was shot.”
“It could be anybody.” Kristina frowned. “I can see the Quartermaines and Carly and Jax, so we know it wasn’t them. But I can’t see anybody else on the floor.” There were still too many people she cared about who could be injured. One man she considered a friend already was.
Sam shook her head slightly. “I hate to say it, Krissy, but we can’t worry about who’s been hurt right now. Whoever it is isn’t going to get the help they need unless we can take down all the robbers at once. How many of them did you see?”
Kristina thought for a moment. “Three: the leader guy that Mom and Mac were talking to, one guarding the ballroom entrance, and one on the opposite wall from us.”
“Good, I counted the same.” Sam would never say it, but she was intensely proud of Kristina; she was proving to have a cool head under pressure after all. “But who I didn’t see were Maxie, Robin, and Lulu.”
“Well,” Kristina said, “since they weren’t talking about new hostages or people sneaking inside, we can assume that they’re still safe, and hiding backstage, right?”
Sam nodded. “Right. And that means we can coordinate an attack on two fronts.” She smiled. “We may actually stop these guys.”
Kristina met Sam’s smile, but before she could respond, the phone attached to Sam’s hip vibrated. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID: Maxie Jones.
“Huh,” Sam mused. “I guess Anna’s security patch worked. Let’s see what their plan of attack is.”
***
Patrick tore another strip from his shirt and pressed the makeshift bandage against Matt’s shoulder. The bleeding was finally slowing down, but he was still soaking through too many strips of cloth for Patrick’s comfort.
The fact that he was bleeding at all was too much for Patrick’s comfort.
“Hey,” he said when Matt’s eyes began to roll closed. “Hey! Stay with me! You’re not allowed to go to sleep, understand?”
Matt blinked bleary eyes up at Patrick. “Hey, man,” he said, a goofy, tired smile crossing his lips. “How’sit goin’?”
“It was going a lot better before you got yourself shot.”
Matt blinked again. “Oops. My bad.”
Steven leaned over to Patrick’s side to speak without being overheard, either by the robbers or by their patient. “He’s starting to slur his words. We need to get him out of here.”
“No, really?” Patrick scoffed. “Thanks so much for that brilliant trauma diagnosis, Dr. Webber.”
“Hey,” Steven said, voice calm. “I know this is stressful, but don’t take it out on me. I’m on your side here.”
“No yer not.”
Patrick and Matt blinked and looked down at Matt, who didn’t seem to be aware he had spoken. “Matt?” Patrick asked. “What did you say?”
“He’s getting delirious, too,” Steven worried.
Matt seemed to come back to the present again. “Oh! No, I meant wha I said.” He looked over to Patrick and tried to whisper, but just ended up talking normally. “He’s got a crush on your wife. An’ her bes’ frien’ is encouraging it. Maxie tol’ me so.”
Patrick forced himself not to punch Steven in the face. “Matt, I’m sure this is just the blood loss talking. So why don’t you save your strength and not say anything else?”
“Ohhhhhh, nope!” Matt’s head lolled back and forth in an attempt to shake it. “Maxie tol’ me so, an’ I agreed with her. So we came up with a plan. But shh! I’m not suppos’ta tell. She’ll hurt me if I do. Maxie’s tiny, but scary.”
Patrick snorted. “That’s the second time you’ve called your ex-girlfriend scary. And what are you doing conspiring with your ex-girlfriend, anyway?”
“I nev’r sai’ we were conspiring,” Matt protested weakly.
Despite the accusations that had been leveled, Steven chuckled slightly. “You and Maxie are the textbook definition of conspiring, sorry to say.”
Patrick suddenly got an all-too-clear idea of just what Matt and Maxie would be conspiring about, the only thing they still had in common: their family.
Him, Robin, and Emma.
“Oh, tell me you and Maxie weren’t trying to use the Bachelor Auction to set me and Robin up,” Patrick groaned.
“Okay, I won’t.”
Steven snorted trying to hold back his laughter. Patrick glared at him, as Matt’s other words became clearer as well. “You know,” Patrick said quietly. “You may be my boss, but don’t think for a second that I won’t come after you if you try to take advantage of Robin.”
Steven sobered immediately, leveling Patrick with the same annoyingly cool gaze he always used at the hospital whenever he was in Chief of Staff mode. “I’m not taking advantage or anyone or anything. I’ve just been a friend to an amazing woman who’s needed a friend. If she wants anything more from me, that’s up to her. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, if she wants to pursue something, I’d be a fool to say no.”
“She’s not free to pursue anything,” Patrick said through gritted teeth, checking the bandage on Matt’s shoulder as a distraction from the increasingly strong desire to punch his boss. At least this time it would be for the right reasons.
“That’s up to her, wouldn’t you say?”
There was nothing Patrick could say to that, because as much as he hated it, he knew Steven was right; Robin was still moving ahead with the divorce, and there didn’t seem to be anything Patrick could do to change her mind.
“I don’t know,” Matt interrupted. “I actually think Maxie thinks it’s up to her, not Robin. She’s pretty convinced that Robin can’t make desh-decu-choices for herself anymore. You can’t either,” he frowned up at Patrick. “You suck at winning back your wife. So we to make your choices for you. And thus, tonight!”
Patrick and Steven both hastily quieted Matt down; setting aside that he needed to save his energy and focus on healing, any sudden, loud noises were likely to not be looked upon very kindly by the men holding them hostage. If it weren’t such a sad reflection of his current situation, Patrick might actually feel happy that Matt had such a vested interest in his family that he took steps to keep them together. It meant that he and Matt had really, finally become brothers.
But Patrick was glad that Matt and Maxie’s plan had failed, because if Maxie had been successful in persuading Robin to come to the Bachelor Auction, then she would have been taken hostage (again) as well. If nothing else, Patrick could comfort himself knowing that Robin was safe, and that no matter what happened tonight, Emma would at least have one of her parents.
Robin was nowhere near the hotel tonight, and that would have to be enough to get Patrick through the crisis.
***
“You want to do what?! Have you gone completely insane?”
“Sam!” Maxie hissed into the phone. “Not so loud!”
After securing the guard with plastic ties and duct tape across his mouth - just in case he woke up and tried calling out for help - Robin, Maxie, and Lulu and retreated back to the service elevator, as far away from the main ballroom as they could get. They needed to talk out loud and strategize. They’d called Sam and Kristina, testing out Anna’s security patch, to fill them in on what they were up to, only to be shocked by the announcement that both women were hiding in the kitchen, ready to coordinate a single attack from multiple points of entry.
Robin hated it when she thought like her parents.
“Do you really think this will work?”
Lulu shrugged at Kristina’s question even though she couldn’t see it. “Well, at this point, anything’s better than Maxie’s ‘Three Stooges’ plan.”
“Hey!” Maxie protested. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, and no one was more surprised than you!”
Robin held up a hand. “Can we not do this now? Let’s at least save it for when you two can yell at top volume, because this whole whispered fighting thing that you two have been doing all night is really getting old.”
“Sorry, Robin,” they both answered meekly.
“Getting back to Kristina’s question, is this really the only thing you can think of?”
“Look,” Robin said. “We’re pretty much out of options, and it’s not like we had time to come up with a plan for what to do once we got to the ballroom before now. Our best bet is to take advantage of the fact that the robbers actually seem to be smart enough to keep all the hostages centered in the middle of the room. We can sneak around the edges of the ballroom under the tables until we’re each close enough to one of the guards, and then let off a stun-grenade right in front of them. We take them down as soon as the flash-bangs go off and disorient them, and then we turn everything over to the real cops and be done with this mess.”
“Yeah, speaking of. Maxie, it’s a good thing you went with floor-length table cloths tonight.”
Maxie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, because when I designed the event, what I was really thinking about was ease of infiltration!”
“I’m just saying! This could be a whole lot worse, even if this plan is shaky at best.”
Maxie leaned back on her haunches and sighed. “I hate to say it Sam, but we’re completely out of time. They’ve already shot somebody, and that guy said they’re going to shoot more people if their demands aren’t met in the next few minutes. If nothing else, we can create enough chaos for Mac, Lucky, and Dante to overpower them.”
“And we have to do something now,” Lulu added, “because they’re going to notice in a minute that they’re down one guard.”
“You’re right, you’re right. This is our best chance. How do Kristina and I do this, though? You’ve got all the grenades.”
Robin quickly went to scan the ballroom again, then returned to the phone. “It looks like we took out the guard who would have been standing between us and the kitchen area. Lulu can move around to you guys, and then meet Maxie to take out the guard by the entrance doors.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of taking the leader down on your own.”
“I’m not injured like you,” Robin said, not without sympathy, “and I’m better at hand-to-hand than Maxie and Lulu. No offense.”
Lulu waved her off. “None taken. Although when all this is over, I think we need to form some sort of Kick-Ass Women’s Club.”
There was soft laughter at both ends of the phone. Robin pulled the stun grenades out of the satchel and handed them out: one to her, one to Maxie, and two to Lulu so she could bring one to Sam and Kristina.
“Alright,” Robin said. “We’re out of time. Let’s go.”
***
Lulu headed off in one direction while Robin and Maxie went in another. It seemed that the easiest way to get into position would be to crawl beneath the second-innermost ring of tables; they were still removed from the main group of hostages, and they had an additional round of tables protecting them from the guards’ sights. Robin and Maxie would get to a table off to the side of the stage together, and then go their separate ways so Maxie could meet up with Lulu and Robin could continue on to the bar where the leader had taken up his post.
So far, everything had gone smoothly. The tables were wide enough to easily accommodate two women beneath them, and the tablecloths hid them entirely. They could move with virtual impunity because no one in the room, least of all the hostage takers, were expecting them to be there.
At this point, the element of surprise was their greatest weapon.
But as they prepared to would split off, Robin heard Maxie gasp and nearly banged her head against the underside of the table from jolting up in shock. “What?” she hissed.
Maxie was breathing erratically, one hand clutching at the tablecloth. “Matt,” was all she whimpered.
Robin crawled to her side and gently pried the tablecloth away from her cousin’s hand. Lifting carefully, she bent down and saw what had scared Maxie so: lying less than three feet away from her, bloody and barely conscious, was her ex-boyfriend.
It looked like they'd figured out which hostage was shot.
“Maxie,” Robin said. “I need you to listen to me. The best thing you can do for Matt is to get to Lulu and set off the grenade. We have to get him to a hospital as soon as possible, and that means we have to end this as soon as possible.”
Maxie jerked her head in a nod, but her eyes were still wide with panic. “I can’t…I don’t…”
“I know.” Robin hugged Maxie tightly, trying to sooth some of her anxiety away. This was the worst time Maxie could have picked to fall to pieces. “Listen to me, I know how worried you are. But right now we are the only ones who can help him. Patrick and Steven, they’re not enough. We have to get Matt out of here now.”
Swallowing her sobs, Maxie nodded. “Right,” she breathed. “Right.” Resolved, she squeezed Robin’s hands. “Okay, I’m going. You’ll call so we can all sync up our attacks once you’re in position?”
Robin nodded. “I will. Now go.”
Maxie nodded once more, sucked in a deep breath, and made her escape to the next table and continued on her way to meet up with Lulu. Robin stayed where she was for a moment, leaning back down to peek out from the tablecloth.
There, with his hands pressed against Matt’s shoulder to stem the blood loss, was Patrick.
Robin was tempted to let him know that she was there, to give him some reassurance that everything would be okay in a few minutes. No matter what else had passed between them, she would never wish for Patrick to be faced with losing another part of his family.
She swallowed hard against the thought that that was the same thing Maxie and Matt had been trying to prevent.
Patrick looked so worried, the lines around his eyes deeper than she had seen them since he’d pulled her out of that well. She’d forgotten how deeply Patrick could feel it when he was emotionally invested in something. And Patrick had already lived through someone he loved getting shot in a hostage situation once before; this couldn’t be bringing back good memories for him.
They’d been so good, so in love after that. They’d even managed to overcome Jerry Jack’s sadistic little game with her and Nikolas. But they’d fallen apart after that, even if they’d eventually found their way back to each other. Just like Patrick and Matt, she mused, dropping the cloth and concealing herself again. They’d had their ups and downs too since finding out they were brothers.
…It had been her and Patrick and Emma that had finally brought Matt around to the idea of being part of a family.
No matter what, they were all a family; her and Patrick and Emma, and Maxie, and Mac, and Matt. They were a family. They were her family.
She wasn’t going to let these monsters hurt them anymore. Any monsters - Lisa, the robbers, it didn’t matter. These people were hers and no one was allowed to take them away.
Robin continued crawling towards the table she needed, a new sense of determination washing over her. It had been her family who had given her the abilities to do everything she’d done tonight - weapons and combat training with her parents, survival and police tactics training with Mac - because they knew something about the world that Robin still had trouble admitting: there are bad people in the world who hurt others, and she needed to be able to protect herself.
Everybody thought that Robin was the black sheep of her family, that she was the one who hadn’t followed in everyone’s footsteps. But the truth was, Robin came from a family of protectors, and Robin was a protector, too. As a doctor, her job was to protect her patients; as a mother, her job was to protect Emma.
And right now, because of her family, her job was to protect everybody in this room.
She reached the table she needed; the lead hostage taker was so fixated on watching the crowd in the center of the room that he hadn’t paid attention to what was happening five feet in front of him. He thought he had planned everything perfectly. He thought he was so good at this.
Robin was better.
She pulled out her cell phone and conference-called Maxie and Sam, ready to synchronize their attacks. They had one shot at this, and Robin had no intention of failing now. Not after coming so far. She pulled the locking pin out of the grenade and got ready to throw it up at just the right time; they wanted to focus the flashes as much on the robbers as possible. Then, it would simply be a matter of tackling them when they were blind and disoriented, securing them with plastic ties, and handing them over to Mac and the rest of the police.
Although if Patrick ever called her boring again, she wouldn’t simply divorce him; she would make sure they never found his body.
***
The police cars still surrounded the outside of the Metro court, even though all of the robbers had been caught and taken down to the precinct for booking. The last ambulance had pulled out a few minutes ago with one of the robbers they’d knocked unconscious. Those two would be taken to GH under a police watch, and once cleared, would join the rest of their crew at the PCPD.
Robin and Maxie stood at the edge of the police barricade, her winter coat wrapped tightly around her body. She almost couldn’t believe it was over. Once the grenades had gone off, everything had happened so fast that Robin still had trouble wrapping her mind around it. The robbers had gone down easily, not expecting any sort of attack, let alone such a homespun one. In the end, it wasn’t the element of surprise or the weapons that had given them the edge; it was the simple fact that no one had been expecting a bunch of civilian women who were making up their plan as they went along.
“Hey,” Lulu said, coming up beside her and leaning against the barricade. “Mac finally finish yelling at you?”
Robin chuckled. “I think he’ll be ready to go another round once he gets statements from the guards who shot at us.”
“What about you?” Maxie asked, siding closer to Robin so Lulu could also lean back on the barricade. “Who yelled loudest, Lucky or Dante?”
“Tracy, surprisingly,” Lulu said. “I think she takes offense to me getting my Spencer on.”
“Ah, remember when you used to call her your step-monster?” Maxie teased. “How the mighty have fallen.”
Lulu bumped her shoulder against Maxie’s. “Hey, you’d better be talking about Tracy.”
They all laughed, though Robin sobered quickly when Sam and Kristina walked over to them. “Hey,” Robin said. “I would have thought you’d go in the ambulance with Jason.”
“Yeah, well.” Sam rolled her eyes and gripped her sister’s shoulders affectionately. “I had a much bigger problem to deal with.”
Robin’s eyes widened in understanding. “I guess Alexis wasn’t happy with either of you, huh?”
“Nope,” Kristina said. “I haven’t seen Mom yell like that in a while. Or had her hug me that tightly. I think she dislocated something.”
“Speaking of injuries…”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sam waved off Robin’s concern. “After this I’m going straight to GH to get my arm looked at. I promise.”
Robin smiled ruefully. “Hey, I can’t help it. You’re on my strike team. I’ve got to make sure you’re in top shape.”
“Not to mention you’re kind of a worrier by nature,” Maxie added.
“Not a worrier,” Robin corrected. “A protector.”
“Ooh,” Lulu said. “That’d be a good name for our group: ‘The Protectors.’ It can be like, our superhero team.” At everyone’s incredulous looks, she chuckled, “what, you thought I was kidding about starting a kick-ass club?”
Kristina buried her face in her hands. “What did I get myself into?”
Everyone laughed again, and Lulu added slyly, “Well, from the looks of things, you got quite the hug and lecture from my brother.”
Sam turned wide eyes to her sister. “Really? Krissy, is there anything between you and Ethan we need to talk about?”
“No!”
“So what about you, Robin?” Maxie asked. “After this, are you going home to give your baby a hug and wait for Mac to yell at you some more?”
Robin had been considering this since the night ended. Maxie was right; the first thing she was going to do was go home and just hold Emma for a while. But then…
“Actually,” she said slowly, “I think I’m going to go to GH for a while. I want to check on Matt.”
Lulu and Maxie exchanged a look. “Not just him, though, right?” Maxie waited impatiently for Robin to answer.
“No, Maxie,” Robin sighed in defeat. “I want to check on Patrick too. Ah!” She held up a hand to stop Maxie’s whoop of success. “And by the way, don’t even think we’re done discussing you trying to manipulate my life choices. But,” she confessed, “I realized something tonight.”
“That you’re more like your mother than you realized?” Maxie asked.
“That you can kick some serious butt when you want to?” Lulu tried.
“That you’re surrounded by insane people?” Sam asked.
“No,” Robin answered. “I realized that my family matters more than anything else, and that everything we did tonight, we did out of love.” She smiled softly. “I guess I’ve been forgetting how much power love can give you when you let it.”
Sam came up to Robin’s other side and sat against the barricade, waving Kristina over to join them. The five women sat there, staring out at the hotel where so much had happened in barely an hour. Robin would never have thought it before, but they had made a pretty formidable team.
Lulu was right. They were all protectors. Of their loved ones, of their friends, of the city. Together, they had saved the day.
Sometimes, love was enough.
*THE END*
Author: normative_jean
Fandom: General Hospital
Characters/pairings: Robin, Maxie, Lulu, Sam, Kristina, and the whole damn cast (allusions to multiple couples in various stages of relationship drama, but fairly gen)
Rating: PG-13 (gun violence and language)
Word count: ~27,600 (I KNOW)
Warnings: Guns. And hostage-taking. And more guns. So, same warnings as for the average GH episode.
Author's Notes: Well, technically it’s still October 7 in some places, right? Oh my goodness, this fic completely ate my brain and destroyed my sanity. There can be no end to the amount of thanks and praise for empressearwig, who is entirely responsible for this semi-coherent story. Would you believe that this is the not insane draft? Everything left that sucks is mine. Written for girlsavesboyfic.
Summary: "Are you insane? You want to go running into trouble in an evening gown?"
Part 3
“How come we’re stuck doing the heavy lifting?” Maxie grumbled. She and Lulu were attempting to drag the unconscious robber back towards the other end of the hall. If he had hostages on this floor, they’d have been where he could keep an eye on them. “I swear, dragging big, heavy guys around hotels is so not good for my manicure.”
“Maxie,” Lulu hissed, heaving the body along, “don’t you think we have…” Heave. “…bigger problems than your fashion issues?”
“I’m just saying, this is the second guy we’ve had to dispose of tonight. How come we, the two people whose looks actually matter, have to get all sweaty and strained, and risk chipping our polish?”
Lulu stopped pulling and stared at her friend. “Your brain must be a fascinating place.”
“Thanks!”
Deciding that silence, in this case, was the better part of valor, Lulu ignored that. “And besides. Sam’s injured, Kristina’s in shock, and Robin’s trying to take care of Kristina’s shock.”
“I can’t believe she tasered the guy, just like that.” Maxie looked up at Lulu as they reached the end of the hallway. “She may have insisted on coming with us, but she’s not like us, is she?”
Lulu pursed her lips, dropping the robber’s arm and standing up to stretch. “She got to grow up normally. Well, as normally as the daughter of a mobster and a Cassadine can, anyway.”
“You know what I mean,” Maxie chided. “Robin and I grew up around cops and private investigators; we knew the kinds of people who were out there, and our family made sure we could protect ourselves. Same thing with you. I mean, you might not have grown up on the run like Lucky, but you’re a Spencer, through and through, and between your dad and your brothers, they made sure you knew how to handle yourself.” She paused as something seemed to occur to her. “Does it even seem weird to you that we’re all trained to handle firearms, that Robin can recognize on sight non-lethal crowd control equipment, and that none of us really thought twice about breaking into a building that was taken hostage?”
“We are who we are. “ Lulu shrugged. “You said it yourself. We were raised to be able to do this if the time ever came. Well, the time came.” She chuckled quietly, remembering how much more comfortable she had been than Dante was, impersonating cops and being on the run in rural Ireland. He had accused her then of liking the Spencer reputation a little too much, and she hadn’t even had a gun that time; she really wasn’t looking forward to the lecture he was going to give her after tonight.
But they’d both be alive to have that fight, and that made it worth it.
“Hey, check it out.” Maxie’s voice broke through Lulu’s reverie. “There’s like, a reading room or something here.”
Leaving the restrained robber outside the doors, Lulu clicked on the flashlight and followed Maxie into the alcove at the end of the hallway. She shined the light around the room, ready for whatever jumped out at them.
“Hey,” Maxie said, moving towards the back corner. “What’s this?”
Lulu moved the light towards where Maxie was pointing, and they both gasped at what they saw. “Guys!” Lulu called towards the hallway. “Hey, guys! Get down here, now!”
***
“You lied to me, Ms. Walsh,” the leader hissed into the phone. “You said there were no cops in the building.”
“There aren’t. I promised you, I’d do everything I had to in order to keep the hostages safe and get us all what we want.”
He shook his head; she couldn’t see it, but he knew the hostages could, and he knew they were hanging onto every angry word he said and angry gesture he made. That level of fear was what would allow him to take back the control of the situation.
“Now, see, I just can’t believe you. Two of my men have fallen out of radio contact, and that’s just not like them. And they’re both on floors below us, which makes me think that they’re being silences as someone - or a group of someones - heads upstairs.”
“I can absolutely promise you, there are no law enforcement officials from any agency are trying to get through the building-“
“Then who the hell is here?” the leader growled.
“Please listen to me, we can still resolve this in a-“
“Sorry, Ms. Walsh, but you’re out of time. You’ve got fifteen minutes to get a vehicle ready for me and my men, or I start shooting hostages.”
***
“Oh God, are they still alive?” Maxie asked as she and Lulu knelt beside the bodies of Jason and Johnny.
“I think?” Lulu said, pressing along Johnny’s throat the way she’d seen Robin do to the robbers and Kristina before. “I feel movement, so I guess they’re still alive, thank God.”
Robin rushed into the room ahead of Sam and Kristina; Sam refused to leave her sister’s side to allow Robin to look at her injured arm, and Kristina moved in a daze. “Oh, God.” Robin hurried over to the corner of the room and slipped efficiently into doctor mode. She felt for pulses in both men and must have been satisfied by what she found, because she exhaled loudly and relaxed.
“Are they okay?” Maxie asked, looking worriedly from Johnny to Jason.
Robin nodded. “Just unconscious, but their pulses are strong and steady. But we need to try and wake them up so I can check for other injuries and neurological damage.”
The other women appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the outside lights. “Hey,” Sam said, leaning heavily against the doorframe. “Who is it?”
“Jason,” Robin answered. “And Johnny. They’re fine,” she hurried to add when Sam gasped and seemed to slump further against the frame. “Just unconscious.”
Sam was torn between keeping Kristina out of the room and rushing to Jason’s side, but Kristina seemed to make that decision for her. She felt her sister’s body stiffen beside her, and heard the sharp intake of breath. “Oh no,” Kristina whimpered. “Johnny!” She broke free from Sam’s grip and stumbled over to the group on the floor.
Sam should have figured; no matter what happened between Sonny and Johnny, Kristina’s soft spot for Johnny and Ethan had remained, as had the men’s for Kristina. The whole night had just become even more personal for Kristina. She headed towards the group as well, now using her free arm to brace her injured one.
“We need to wake them up,” Robin was saying when Sam got to them. “If it’s really just unconsciousness, a sharp slap to the face should be enough to work.”
“Ooh!” Maxie’s hand shot up. “Dibs on slapping Jason!”
“Maxie!” Sam shouted.
“What? He was never very nice to me, even when I was practically living with him and Spinelli.”
Robin rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Let’s at least pretend we don’t enjoy senseless violence, okay?”
“I can’t hurt Johnny,” Kristina whimpered softly.
Grimly, Lulu replied, “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll wake Jason up,” Sam added, though Robin emphatically shook her head.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “You are going to let me look at that arm.”
“It’s fine,” Sam insisted.
“It’s bleeding.”
Johnny’s groan made them turn around. His head was lifting up, and in the flashlight Lulu had set aside when they’d gone to check on the men, Robin could see his eyes opening. She could also now see a trail of blood leading down the side of his face.
“Wha’ happ’ned?” he slurred, blinking slowly. He seemed to register the worried faces looking at him. “Hey, guys. When’d you ge’ h’r?”
Kristina turned to Robin. “Why’s he talking like that? What’s wrong?”
Robin dropped in front of Johnny and picked up the flashlight, shining it into his eyes before moving to examine the injury more closely.
“Ow,” Johnny groaned at the light press of Robin’s fingers along his hairline. “Whacha doin’, Doc?”
“I’m checking to see how bad your bleeding head wound is,” she responded with a small smile. “Luckily, head wounds always look worse than they are, your pupils are normal, and you seem to be in possession of your faculties.”
Johnny’s face slipped into a loopy half-grin. “Yay, me.”
Maxie sniffled. “Yes, yay you. You idiot!” She glared at him. “What were you thinking, taking on an armed robber without any backup or weapon?”
Leaving Johnny to Maxie, Lulu, and Kristina, Robin shifted over to Sam and Jason. “Has he woken up yet?”
Sam shook her head; as Robin swung the flashlight up to examine Jason for a similar head wound as Johnny’s, she saw tears shining in the other woman’s eyes. Robin remembered all too well what it was like to worry about Jason getting injured by one of the bad guys.
It was always easier to forget that Jason was also one of the bad guys in those situations.
“He hasn’t woken up at all?” Robin asked, frowning. “Even opened his eyes?”
“No,” Sam replied.
“He got hit pretty bad,” Johnny slurred. “Robber guy butted him in the back of the head with his gun.”
Robin cursed under her breath and reached around to feel Jason’s skull. Sure enough, she felt the caked blood on the back of his head almost immediately. That changed things significantly; the wound may have stopped bleeding on the surface, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still bleeding inside is skull, especially since he wasn’t waking up as easily as Johnny had.
“Robin, what is it?” Sam asked.
Before Robin could answer, the radio on the robber out in the hallway crackled to life.
***
As soon as they leader spoke, the ballroom erupted.
Mac, Lucky, and Dante were the first on their feet, arguing to the robbers that doing this would end any chance the robbers had at getting what they wanted from the police. So far, the robbers had seemed to listen to Mac’s advice when it came to dealing with Claire and the police outside, and they all hoped it would continue to be that way.
The rest of the room, however, now seemed to take matters into their own hands.
“You can’t seriously think you can do something like this!” Edward shouted, standing up and banging his fist against the table.
“Sit down, Edward!” Monica hissed. “Do you want to make things worse?”
“I won’t wait here to be shot, Monica!”
Jax and Carly had bolted up as well, bargaining with the robbers. “If it’s just money you want,” Jax tried, “just give me an amount and you’ll get it.
“So you can have the police trace what you give us?” the leader of the crew said. “No thanks.”
“We just want to get out of here!” Carly screamed at them “So just take the damn money and let us go!”
“Sit down, lady!” One of the guards moved closer to the crowd, gun pointed out. “And shut up!”
“Don’t talk to me that way!”
Jax pulled on his wife’s arm. “Carly!”
“Can we all just try to stay calm?” Steven asked, standing and moving towards the center of the group.
“Hey, no moving!” the same guard shouted, pointing the gun towards Steven.
Patrick jumped up from the GH table. “Look, no one wants any problems-“
“No moving!”
Matt stood as well, walking towards his brother. “Hey, hey, we’re all on the same-“
“I said no moving!”
The gunshot silenced the room.
***
The crackle of the radio brought the group in the reading alcove to stillness. If this was a check-in, then the robbers holding everybody hostage upstairs were about to get confirmation that their plan was officially off the rails.
“Whoever the hell has this radio, I already know you’re not my guy.”
Sam swore under her breath, and Lulu jumped up to retrieve the walkie and bring it back to the group. The voice was back again as she returned.
“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care. I know you’ve taken out two of my men, and I know that the prosecutor lady outside hasn’t kept her end of the bargain.”“Listen to me, and listen good. My men and I are getting our payday, and we’re getting the hell out of here. So I’ll tell you what I’ve told the cops outside: if we don’t have a vehicle waiting to take us to the docks without police interference in fifteen minutes, we’re going to start shooting hostages.”
“Damn it!” Robin hissed. “I knew we could make things worse!”
“It would have gotten to this anyway, Robin,” Sam argued. “I mean, let’s face it. People who take hostages aren’t exactly known for their non-violent ways.”
“This is directly because of us! Because the guards around the hotel didn’t check in on time, so now these guys know that their plan won’t work anymore!”
Maxie held up a hand. “What if something else is going on? I mean, we don’t know what’s happening up in the ballroom, so this could just be their way of trying to keep control up there.”
Sam shook her head. “Look, we still have time to get up there and finish this without anyone getting hurt. I say we use whatever time we have left.”
The radio went on again, silencing everyone.
“Oh, and in case you think I’m bluffing, or you still have time to stop me, you should know that one hostage has already been shot. Unlike you, I keep my word.”
***
“Matt!” Patrick screamed as his brother fell to the floor.
The leader of the robbers shot his gun into the air. “Nobody move!” He looked at the crew member who had fired into the crowd; it was the new guy, the one who had just joined them on the last job. He should have known better than to trust he could keep his cool when this job went south.
“He’s bleeding!” Patrick spun around and looked at the leader. “I’m a doctor, you have to let me help him.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” the leader replied, but he didn’t like that a hostage had been shot ahead of schedule. It was just one more thing that was going wrong tonight.
Mac held up his hands and slowly stood up. “Listen to me, you’re going to want all the bargaining power you can get with the police outside. And the best thing you can do for yourselves is for us to be able to say that when someone was accidentally shot,” he threw a look at Patrick to silence his protest, “you let doctors start helping him immediately.”
He hated it, but the leader knew Mac was right. And as Police Commissioner, his word would carry a lot of weight with the local authorities, especially when it came time for him and his crew to get the hell out of town. He tilted his head, indicating his guys to step back and return to their guard positions. “Alright,” he said. “Let your doctors do what they can. But no one’s leaving until my men and I do.”
Patrick and Steven rushed across the room to where Matt had fallen. They had virtually no supplies, and he was bleeding pretty heavily from his shoulder, but Matt was still alive, and that was what they held onto.
Patrick would just have to keep reminding himself that at least he was here this time. He wasn’t going to lose any more of his family.
***
“I’m going!”
“The hell you are, Kristina!” Sam wasn’t even going to pretend to have this argument now, not after what had just been announced over the radio. They didn’t know who was hurt upstairs, or how bad, but everything in the last fifteen minutes proved one overwhelming fact to Sam:
These guys meant business. Kristina wasn’t going anywhere near them.
“But I can help!” Kristina kept arguing. “I took down this guy!”
“Yeah,” Sam acknowledged. “And you also went into shock when you did it!”
“Sam!”
“You’re not going, and that’s final.” Sam marched over to her sister, side-stepping Robin and Lulu who were on the floor going through what remained of their supplies, while Maxie kept Johnny awake. “You agreed to two terms when I let you come: that you would be armed, and that you would do everything I said. Ah!” She held up a hand to stave off Kristina’s protest. “You agreed, fair and square. So now I’m telling you that you are staying here.”
“Hey, c’mon Kristina,” Johnny said, still slurring his words around the edges. “Someone’s gotta stay and protect me.” He flashed her a grin that was probably supposed to be charming but looked more stoned than anything else. Sam shot him a grateful look, though Kristina just glared.
Lulu looked up from the floor. “I hate to say it Kristina, but Sam’s right. This just hit a whole new level of dangerous, and no offense, but you haven’t exactly been handling everything as well as the rest of us.”
Robin stood and leaned over to Sam. “Can I talk to you for a second?” she whispered.
“Sure.” Confused, Sam followed Robin back to the room’s entrance, out of earshot of everyone else. Robin seemed to be deciding how to say whatever it was she wanted to say, before finally meeting Sam’s eyes.
“You’re injured,” Robin said. “I think you should stay here with Kristina and the guys.”
“I don’t think so!” Where the hell did Robin get off telling her something like that? Sam was in way too deep to bow out now. And besides, she’d worked through worse injuries than a bullet graze.
Robin wasn’t moved. “You won’t even let me look at it, which makes me think that it’s worse than you’re letting on.”
“Oh, what, do you have some sort of doctory sixth sense?”
“No.” Robin’s hand shot out and poked at Sam’s injury before she could stop her. Sam bit back a groan, but couldn’t stop herself from stumbling back a few steps. “You see?” Robin said as Sam grimaced. “And I barely put any pressure on that. What are you going to do if you have to actually use that arm? Like, say, to tackle one of the hostage takers?”
“Then I’ll take him down and deal with the pain later.” But Sam’s arm was throbbing more, and even though she couldn’t see it, she knew she was still bleeding. Robin was right; she’d barely touched her and could still hurt her badly. What would happen if someone wasn’t pulling their punches?
When Sam looked back at Robin again, she saw an empathy she wasn’t sure she understood on her face. “Believe me, I hate being the one left behind, too. But we wouldn’t have gotten this far without you. Hell,” she chuckled ruefully, “we wouldn’t have come at all if it hadn’t been for you. So let Maxie, Lulu, and I finish what you started, while you make sure that Kristina, Johnny, and Jason are safe.” Her voice faltered just slightly, but Sam heard it.
“What were you going to say about Jason?” Sam asked. “Before, back when the radio came on?”
Robin sighed. “The fact that he hasn’t woken up yet is worrying me. And he took a hard blow to the back of the head.”
“Is he still bleeding or something?” Sam gulped.
“Not on the outside.”
The implications didn’t need to be spelled out for Sam; this was the same problem that had ultimately introduced her and Robin five years ago. Except the last time Jason had been bleeding in his brain, he had nearly died… “Oh, God.”
Robin nodded. “I don’t want to scare you. I can’t say anything for certain without taking him to the hospital, but I don’t like what I know right now. Someone needs to stay with him who knows what to look for…”
“…Because I know everything that happened last time he had a brain injury,” Sam finished. She clutched her wounded arm tightly against her side. “I just feel like I need to be with you guys, too.”
“Don’t worry about us.” Robin smiled gently, but even in the dim light Sam could see how tight it was. “Either way, this will all be over in fifteen minutes.”
There was nothing Sam could say to that. Robin was right, even in what she wasn’t saying - Sam’s injury would slow them down, and they needed every last advantage they could get if they were going to save everybody.
Robin headed back to the group to help Lulu and Maxie finish packing up. Sam staying in the doorway, watching them. She would have to trust that the three of them would be enough to finish what they’d all started together.
***
“I’m not sure this is the best idea we’ve ever had,” Maxie said as they stood in front of the service elevator on the twentieth floor, the floor below the ballroom. She really, really wasn’t sure about this plan.
Lulu looked over at her. “Is it really any worse than getting Johnny to take the blame for Logan’s murder so I wouldn’t have another psychotic break?”
“Well…”
“Worse than trying to prove Kate was selling her own magazine’s secrets and wound up getting poor Spinelli bikini-waxed?”
Maxie couldn’t help giggling, even though she felt bad about it. “Well.”
“And is it really any worse than that time we went to Paris for Fashion Week and accidentally wandered into that-“
“You’ve made your point!”
Robin eyed the two of them. “I don’t remember you telling me any exciting stories about Paris Fashion Week, Maxie.”
Maxie swallowed delicately. “That’s because there’s nothing to tell,” she hissed pointedly at Lulu. “You agreed we’d never mention it again!”
Lulu shrugged. “I’m just saying, climbing up the service elevator shaft isn’t the craziest thing we’ve ever done. Now,” she said, eyeing the doors. “What’s say we pry these babies open and get to shimmying?”
***
Kristina sat against the wall with her knees pulled tightly to her chest, eyes closed. She hadn’t spoken to Sam since the other women had left to complete the rescue attempt. Granted, it had only been two minutes, but Kristina was making sure that the silence felt like a long two minutes. That was her prerogative as younger sister; Molly had perfected the technique on both of them when she was younger.
Kristina had always been an excellent student.
“Y’know, Kristina,” Johnny broke through the silence, rolling his head to look at her. “I think I’m still a li’l loopy, ‘cause I coulda sworn I heard you say you tasered a guy.”
Sam snorted. “You are still loopy, but you didn’t hear wrong.”
Johnny blinked. “You…wow.”
Kristina shrugged. “It needed to be done. I just wasn’t expecting the guy to…shake like that.”
“Made you talk,” Sam said quietly, echoing the numerous times these battles had ended the same way since she’d become part of the family. “I know you weren’t expecting it, but you still caused less damage than a bullet would have.”
“Than a bullet did,” Kristina corrected with an eye roll. She hated when her older sister won. “You shot him in the leg, remember?”
Johnny blinked again. “You shot him? This guy?” He waved vaguely towards the body slumped against the overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. “You didn’t like, leave him bleeding, did you?”
“No,” Kristina huffed. “Robin tied off the wound. She’s really good in a crisis.”
“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that.” Johnny leaned his head back and closed his eyes, the winter of two years ago flashing through his mind. It was very good to know that Robin’s actions then had truly been because she was sick. It made him feel much better knowing that she’d been guarding the backs of three women he cared quite a bit about. Although from the sound of things… “So what you’re basically saying,” he said to Kristina, a teasing glint in his eye, “is that you saved the day.”
That made Kristina jolt up. “What?”
Sam gave him a stink-eye. “Yeah, what?”
“Well,” Johnny explained, completely ignoring the threat in Sam’s voice. “It’s like you guys were saying before everyone left. Things were going terribly out there, and Kristina was the one who ended up taking the guy down. Not even Jason and I could do that.” His smirk softened into a real smile for Kristina. “It’s a good thing that you hated what you did. You’re not the kind of person who can hurt others, even someone threatening you, and not feel something. I’m actually kind of glad that you can protect people, but aren’t really cut out for it. I’d much rather you didn’t go rushing into danger like most of the people in your life.”
Kristina wasn’t looking at him anymore. “I can protect people,” she murmured. Unseen by the others, she shifted the taser at her side that she’d kept hold of while Robin and Lulu were going over the remaining supplies. “I can protect people.”
“Krissy…?” Sam started, not trusting the expression on her face at all. “What are you thinking?”
Finally, Kristina looked back at her sister. “I can’t do nothing. I’m sorry.” And before Sam could respond, she bolted up and ran out of the room.
“Damn it!” Sam jumped up as well, but she could really feel the pain in her arm now, and knew it would slow her down. She glared at Johnny. “You just had to do that, didn’t you?” she snapped, before hurrying to catch up with Kristina.
Johnny stared, dumbfounded, at the doorway. “What’d I do?” His eyes went back to the robber, tied up and unconscious in the middle of the room. “And what am I supposed to do with him?” He glanced at Jason. “Or him?... Hello?”
***
“Seriously,” Maxie grunted as she pulled herself to the top of the elevator shaft, “why couldn’t we just use the elevator? I mean, power is still on at the top floor, right?”
“Because it would make a lot of noise, Maxie,” Lulu answered. She carefully sat on the inner edge of the shaft locks and worked with Robin to pry the doors open. “You know, the stuff we’re trying to avoid by say, not talking once we’re in the ballroom?”
The emergency lighting had been on in the elevator shaft when they’d pried the lower doors open, so at least they’d been able to see where they were climbing. It also meant that Lulu could see Maxie roll her eyes. “Yeah, because prying open the metal elevator doors won’t make any noise at all.”
“It won’t,” Robin muttered, working a small metal file along the bottom of the elevator, “if we can release the doors just above the locking clamp on the base. Then,” she smiled as a small click could be heard, “we can slide them open without dragging.” She and Lulu slid the doors aside just enough to show they didn’t make noise. “Get ready in case it’s guarded.”
Maxie braced herself on the metal support frame and pointed the submachine gun they’d lifted from the robber towards the middle of the doors. Slowly - and, Maxie conceded, almost silently - Robin and Lulu separated the elevator doors, revealing the backstage area of the ballroom.
It was completely empty, and all three sighed in relief. They’d had far too many gunfights that night already.
They climbed out of the elevator shaft and stepped onto the floor. Maxie handed off the submachine gun to Robin and took one of the handguns from Lulu. All armed, they carefully advanced through the backstage area. It was littered with boxes and equipment, all evidence that the set-up for the evening’s event had never been completed. Maxie shook her head at the mess; it might have meant that they had placed to take cover or hide and spy on the ballroom, but it also meant that things had been seriously lacking in the management department. She was never trusting Lulu with anything important again.
Crouching down at the edge of the backstage area, Robin pulled back just enough on the heavy drapes that would have formed the backdrop to the catwalk so they could look into the main room. Four robbers in ski masks with submachine guns stood around the room guarding the hostages, most of whom were seated on the floor; only a few tables were in use, most likely by those attendees who had already been sitting there. From their vantage point, Robin could see the Quartermaines, the GH staff, and Jax still at their tables; finding the people on the floor was nearly impossible with the floor-length tablecloths and chairs blocking her view.
And somewhere in that crowd, someone lay dying.
They retreated back far enough to talk without being overheard by the robber standing guard about ten feet from the backstage entrance.
“We have to do something fast,” Lulu said.
“I know,” Robin agreed. “But we also can’t risk the hostages, especially one with a gunshot wound.”
Maxie crawled back to look out into the ballroom. She looked at the guard nearest to them, and then she turned back to her friends. “I think I have an idea.”
***
Sam caught up to Kristina on the landing of the eighth floor stairwell. The throbbing in her arm had turned into a numb heat spreading through her shoulder, and she felt weaker than she normally would have after running up several flights of stairs, but she was still faster than her teenage sister.
“You have got some serious explaining to do!”
“There’s a dumbwaiter that runs up the end of this hallway,” Kristina said, no apology in her voice. “It goes right into the kitchen; I remember seeing it when Michael and I were hiding there during Claudia’s birthday party.”
“Krissy…”
Kristina shook her head. “Don’t. I can’t think about that. I can’t think about dad, I can’t think about what he did to Claudia that night, I can’t think about everything that’s happened in the last year.” She glared up at Sam, a hardened resolve on her face that Sam had seen far too often on their mother, and on herself. “But I can think about helping those people up in the ballroom. I can think about backing up Maxie, Lulu, and Robin. I can think about the fact that as scared as I’ve been tonight, I’ve made a difference. Please don’t try to stop me, Sam.”
Sam was so used to dealing with the frightened, stubborn girl Kristina had become since the nightmare of Claudia’s birthday party that she had almost forgotten what the real Kristina was like - the Kristina who cared about her family and friends, and who didn’t care about risking herself if it meant protecting them.
As crazy as the situation was, it was nice to have the old Kristina back, and maybe even a little better than before.
“Alright.” Sam pointed up the stairs. “We’ll climb to the floor below the ballroom, and go with your idea of using the dumbwaiter. There’s no way I could climb up an elevator shaft now anyway.”
Kristina glanced at her injured arm. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Hey,” Sam chided, shaking a finger at Kristina. “We’re in this together, all the way to the end.”
In the dim dispersed light of the flashlight, Sam still saw Kristina smile widely. “Together.”
***
“Maxie!” Robin hissed frantically. “What are you doing?”
“It works in the movies!” she sniped back. “Now shut up and get ready.”
Robin and Lulu gaped at her from their places behind a box of lighting equipment. “You are certifiably insane,” Lulu marveled. “And I should know.”
“Maxie!” Robin repeated.
But Maxie just waved her off and inched as close to the end of the backstage curtain as possible without being seen. She kept her eyes on the guard nearest to them; he was pacing back and forth as if he was nervous, and Maxie was certain she could use that edginess to her advantage. She just needed him to come back this way…a little closer…and…
“Psst!”
Robin buried her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she muttered.
Lulu pulled her hands away. “You’d better get ready to move, because one way or another, I’m pretty sure that Maxie’s about to bring us some company back here.”
“Oh my God…”
Maxie ignored them. Her focus was only on the robber, who seemed to have heard her first whisper, but wasn’t paying it enough mind to investigate. She leaned forward again, still just out of his line of sight. “Psst!”
This time, the robber came over to investigate. Scooting further back, Maxie again whispered, “Psst!”
There was silence, and then they heard the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps heading towards the entryway to the backstage area. Maxie turned around and waved Robin forward. “Get ready!”
Robin sighed, but nonetheless crouched behind a box, preparing to spring up and attack as soon as the robber was within her reach. He appeared around the curtain, gun lowered but movements cautious, and moved fully into the backstage. He was now completely out of sight of anyone in the ballroom, and Robin waited until he took a few more steps…
She jumped up, and before he could react, she shot out a hand and hit his jugular, paralyzing his vocal chords and preventing him from calling out for help. She quickly followed that with a hard punch to his solar plexus; with the wind knocked out of him, he swiftly dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Maxie and Lulu joined Robin and stood to stare at the fallen hostage taker. “Wow,” Maxie said, eyes wide. “I can’t believe that worked.”
***
It had taken some maneuvering, but Sam and Kristina finally pried open the dumbwaiter doors and fell out into the kitchen. It was empty; clearly, the robbers had wanted to keep all the hostages in one place so they would be easier to control.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Sam muttered, “but thank God these guys actually seem smart. We’d never last with just our one little taser against a gun.”
Kristina swallowed hard and forced herself to move through the kitchen. The last time she had been here, her world had been ripped apart. She wouldn’t let herself think about that now; there was far too much at stake for her to succumb to panic and memory. “The kitchen doors open into a little entry area before getting to the ballroom proper,” she said instead. “We can open them enough to listen without anyone knowing we’re here.” She knew it would work; she’d done it before.
“Krissy…”
“I know, I know,” Kristina sighed. “I’m going to have a lot to talk about in therapy on Monday, that’s for sure.”
Sam chucked. “Well, at least you can’t ever complain that your life is boring.” She raised a finger her lips when they reached the swinging double doors. Sam pushed open one of the doors just enough so they could hear what was going on in the ballroom.
“Hey, that’s Mom!” Kristina whispered excitedly. “I can hear her trying to talk down the robbers! She’s okay!” She hadn’t wanted to say it, but Kristina had been terrified that Alexis was the hostage who’d been shot.
“I can hear Mac, too,” Sam added. “it sounds like they’re trying to get…okay, they must be talking to this crew’s leader, because they’re telling him that whatever they think is going on outside, letting the doctors help the guy who was shot will go a long way towards helping them.” She closed the door and moved Kristina back a bit so they could talk. “So, we know it’s a guy who was shot.”
“It could be anybody.” Kristina frowned. “I can see the Quartermaines and Carly and Jax, so we know it wasn’t them. But I can’t see anybody else on the floor.” There were still too many people she cared about who could be injured. One man she considered a friend already was.
Sam shook her head slightly. “I hate to say it, Krissy, but we can’t worry about who’s been hurt right now. Whoever it is isn’t going to get the help they need unless we can take down all the robbers at once. How many of them did you see?”
Kristina thought for a moment. “Three: the leader guy that Mom and Mac were talking to, one guarding the ballroom entrance, and one on the opposite wall from us.”
“Good, I counted the same.” Sam would never say it, but she was intensely proud of Kristina; she was proving to have a cool head under pressure after all. “But who I didn’t see were Maxie, Robin, and Lulu.”
“Well,” Kristina said, “since they weren’t talking about new hostages or people sneaking inside, we can assume that they’re still safe, and hiding backstage, right?”
Sam nodded. “Right. And that means we can coordinate an attack on two fronts.” She smiled. “We may actually stop these guys.”
Kristina met Sam’s smile, but before she could respond, the phone attached to Sam’s hip vibrated. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID: Maxie Jones.
“Huh,” Sam mused. “I guess Anna’s security patch worked. Let’s see what their plan of attack is.”
***
Patrick tore another strip from his shirt and pressed the makeshift bandage against Matt’s shoulder. The bleeding was finally slowing down, but he was still soaking through too many strips of cloth for Patrick’s comfort.
The fact that he was bleeding at all was too much for Patrick’s comfort.
“Hey,” he said when Matt’s eyes began to roll closed. “Hey! Stay with me! You’re not allowed to go to sleep, understand?”
Matt blinked bleary eyes up at Patrick. “Hey, man,” he said, a goofy, tired smile crossing his lips. “How’sit goin’?”
“It was going a lot better before you got yourself shot.”
Matt blinked again. “Oops. My bad.”
Steven leaned over to Patrick’s side to speak without being overheard, either by the robbers or by their patient. “He’s starting to slur his words. We need to get him out of here.”
“No, really?” Patrick scoffed. “Thanks so much for that brilliant trauma diagnosis, Dr. Webber.”
“Hey,” Steven said, voice calm. “I know this is stressful, but don’t take it out on me. I’m on your side here.”
“No yer not.”
Patrick and Matt blinked and looked down at Matt, who didn’t seem to be aware he had spoken. “Matt?” Patrick asked. “What did you say?”
“He’s getting delirious, too,” Steven worried.
Matt seemed to come back to the present again. “Oh! No, I meant wha I said.” He looked over to Patrick and tried to whisper, but just ended up talking normally. “He’s got a crush on your wife. An’ her bes’ frien’ is encouraging it. Maxie tol’ me so.”
Patrick forced himself not to punch Steven in the face. “Matt, I’m sure this is just the blood loss talking. So why don’t you save your strength and not say anything else?”
“Ohhhhhh, nope!” Matt’s head lolled back and forth in an attempt to shake it. “Maxie tol’ me so, an’ I agreed with her. So we came up with a plan. But shh! I’m not suppos’ta tell. She’ll hurt me if I do. Maxie’s tiny, but scary.”
Patrick snorted. “That’s the second time you’ve called your ex-girlfriend scary. And what are you doing conspiring with your ex-girlfriend, anyway?”
“I nev’r sai’ we were conspiring,” Matt protested weakly.
Despite the accusations that had been leveled, Steven chuckled slightly. “You and Maxie are the textbook definition of conspiring, sorry to say.”
Patrick suddenly got an all-too-clear idea of just what Matt and Maxie would be conspiring about, the only thing they still had in common: their family.
Him, Robin, and Emma.
“Oh, tell me you and Maxie weren’t trying to use the Bachelor Auction to set me and Robin up,” Patrick groaned.
“Okay, I won’t.”
Steven snorted trying to hold back his laughter. Patrick glared at him, as Matt’s other words became clearer as well. “You know,” Patrick said quietly. “You may be my boss, but don’t think for a second that I won’t come after you if you try to take advantage of Robin.”
Steven sobered immediately, leveling Patrick with the same annoyingly cool gaze he always used at the hospital whenever he was in Chief of Staff mode. “I’m not taking advantage or anyone or anything. I’ve just been a friend to an amazing woman who’s needed a friend. If she wants anything more from me, that’s up to her. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, if she wants to pursue something, I’d be a fool to say no.”
“She’s not free to pursue anything,” Patrick said through gritted teeth, checking the bandage on Matt’s shoulder as a distraction from the increasingly strong desire to punch his boss. At least this time it would be for the right reasons.
“That’s up to her, wouldn’t you say?”
There was nothing Patrick could say to that, because as much as he hated it, he knew Steven was right; Robin was still moving ahead with the divorce, and there didn’t seem to be anything Patrick could do to change her mind.
“I don’t know,” Matt interrupted. “I actually think Maxie thinks it’s up to her, not Robin. She’s pretty convinced that Robin can’t make desh-decu-choices for herself anymore. You can’t either,” he frowned up at Patrick. “You suck at winning back your wife. So we to make your choices for you. And thus, tonight!”
Patrick and Steven both hastily quieted Matt down; setting aside that he needed to save his energy and focus on healing, any sudden, loud noises were likely to not be looked upon very kindly by the men holding them hostage. If it weren’t such a sad reflection of his current situation, Patrick might actually feel happy that Matt had such a vested interest in his family that he took steps to keep them together. It meant that he and Matt had really, finally become brothers.
But Patrick was glad that Matt and Maxie’s plan had failed, because if Maxie had been successful in persuading Robin to come to the Bachelor Auction, then she would have been taken hostage (again) as well. If nothing else, Patrick could comfort himself knowing that Robin was safe, and that no matter what happened tonight, Emma would at least have one of her parents.
Robin was nowhere near the hotel tonight, and that would have to be enough to get Patrick through the crisis.
***
“You want to do what?! Have you gone completely insane?”
“Sam!” Maxie hissed into the phone. “Not so loud!”
After securing the guard with plastic ties and duct tape across his mouth - just in case he woke up and tried calling out for help - Robin, Maxie, and Lulu and retreated back to the service elevator, as far away from the main ballroom as they could get. They needed to talk out loud and strategize. They’d called Sam and Kristina, testing out Anna’s security patch, to fill them in on what they were up to, only to be shocked by the announcement that both women were hiding in the kitchen, ready to coordinate a single attack from multiple points of entry.
Robin hated it when she thought like her parents.
“Do you really think this will work?”
Lulu shrugged at Kristina’s question even though she couldn’t see it. “Well, at this point, anything’s better than Maxie’s ‘Three Stooges’ plan.”
“Hey!” Maxie protested. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, and no one was more surprised than you!”
Robin held up a hand. “Can we not do this now? Let’s at least save it for when you two can yell at top volume, because this whole whispered fighting thing that you two have been doing all night is really getting old.”
“Sorry, Robin,” they both answered meekly.
“Getting back to Kristina’s question, is this really the only thing you can think of?”
“Look,” Robin said. “We’re pretty much out of options, and it’s not like we had time to come up with a plan for what to do once we got to the ballroom before now. Our best bet is to take advantage of the fact that the robbers actually seem to be smart enough to keep all the hostages centered in the middle of the room. We can sneak around the edges of the ballroom under the tables until we’re each close enough to one of the guards, and then let off a stun-grenade right in front of them. We take them down as soon as the flash-bangs go off and disorient them, and then we turn everything over to the real cops and be done with this mess.”
“Yeah, speaking of. Maxie, it’s a good thing you went with floor-length table cloths tonight.”
Maxie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, because when I designed the event, what I was really thinking about was ease of infiltration!”
“I’m just saying! This could be a whole lot worse, even if this plan is shaky at best.”
Maxie leaned back on her haunches and sighed. “I hate to say it Sam, but we’re completely out of time. They’ve already shot somebody, and that guy said they’re going to shoot more people if their demands aren’t met in the next few minutes. If nothing else, we can create enough chaos for Mac, Lucky, and Dante to overpower them.”
“And we have to do something now,” Lulu added, “because they’re going to notice in a minute that they’re down one guard.”
“You’re right, you’re right. This is our best chance. How do Kristina and I do this, though? You’ve got all the grenades.”
Robin quickly went to scan the ballroom again, then returned to the phone. “It looks like we took out the guard who would have been standing between us and the kitchen area. Lulu can move around to you guys, and then meet Maxie to take out the guard by the entrance doors.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of taking the leader down on your own.”
“I’m not injured like you,” Robin said, not without sympathy, “and I’m better at hand-to-hand than Maxie and Lulu. No offense.”
Lulu waved her off. “None taken. Although when all this is over, I think we need to form some sort of Kick-Ass Women’s Club.”
There was soft laughter at both ends of the phone. Robin pulled the stun grenades out of the satchel and handed them out: one to her, one to Maxie, and two to Lulu so she could bring one to Sam and Kristina.
“Alright,” Robin said. “We’re out of time. Let’s go.”
***
Lulu headed off in one direction while Robin and Maxie went in another. It seemed that the easiest way to get into position would be to crawl beneath the second-innermost ring of tables; they were still removed from the main group of hostages, and they had an additional round of tables protecting them from the guards’ sights. Robin and Maxie would get to a table off to the side of the stage together, and then go their separate ways so Maxie could meet up with Lulu and Robin could continue on to the bar where the leader had taken up his post.
So far, everything had gone smoothly. The tables were wide enough to easily accommodate two women beneath them, and the tablecloths hid them entirely. They could move with virtual impunity because no one in the room, least of all the hostage takers, were expecting them to be there.
At this point, the element of surprise was their greatest weapon.
But as they prepared to would split off, Robin heard Maxie gasp and nearly banged her head against the underside of the table from jolting up in shock. “What?” she hissed.
Maxie was breathing erratically, one hand clutching at the tablecloth. “Matt,” was all she whimpered.
Robin crawled to her side and gently pried the tablecloth away from her cousin’s hand. Lifting carefully, she bent down and saw what had scared Maxie so: lying less than three feet away from her, bloody and barely conscious, was her ex-boyfriend.
It looked like they'd figured out which hostage was shot.
“Maxie,” Robin said. “I need you to listen to me. The best thing you can do for Matt is to get to Lulu and set off the grenade. We have to get him to a hospital as soon as possible, and that means we have to end this as soon as possible.”
Maxie jerked her head in a nod, but her eyes were still wide with panic. “I can’t…I don’t…”
“I know.” Robin hugged Maxie tightly, trying to sooth some of her anxiety away. This was the worst time Maxie could have picked to fall to pieces. “Listen to me, I know how worried you are. But right now we are the only ones who can help him. Patrick and Steven, they’re not enough. We have to get Matt out of here now.”
Swallowing her sobs, Maxie nodded. “Right,” she breathed. “Right.” Resolved, she squeezed Robin’s hands. “Okay, I’m going. You’ll call so we can all sync up our attacks once you’re in position?”
Robin nodded. “I will. Now go.”
Maxie nodded once more, sucked in a deep breath, and made her escape to the next table and continued on her way to meet up with Lulu. Robin stayed where she was for a moment, leaning back down to peek out from the tablecloth.
There, with his hands pressed against Matt’s shoulder to stem the blood loss, was Patrick.
Robin was tempted to let him know that she was there, to give him some reassurance that everything would be okay in a few minutes. No matter what else had passed between them, she would never wish for Patrick to be faced with losing another part of his family.
She swallowed hard against the thought that that was the same thing Maxie and Matt had been trying to prevent.
Patrick looked so worried, the lines around his eyes deeper than she had seen them since he’d pulled her out of that well. She’d forgotten how deeply Patrick could feel it when he was emotionally invested in something. And Patrick had already lived through someone he loved getting shot in a hostage situation once before; this couldn’t be bringing back good memories for him.
They’d been so good, so in love after that. They’d even managed to overcome Jerry Jack’s sadistic little game with her and Nikolas. But they’d fallen apart after that, even if they’d eventually found their way back to each other. Just like Patrick and Matt, she mused, dropping the cloth and concealing herself again. They’d had their ups and downs too since finding out they were brothers.
…It had been her and Patrick and Emma that had finally brought Matt around to the idea of being part of a family.
No matter what, they were all a family; her and Patrick and Emma, and Maxie, and Mac, and Matt. They were a family. They were her family.
She wasn’t going to let these monsters hurt them anymore. Any monsters - Lisa, the robbers, it didn’t matter. These people were hers and no one was allowed to take them away.
Robin continued crawling towards the table she needed, a new sense of determination washing over her. It had been her family who had given her the abilities to do everything she’d done tonight - weapons and combat training with her parents, survival and police tactics training with Mac - because they knew something about the world that Robin still had trouble admitting: there are bad people in the world who hurt others, and she needed to be able to protect herself.
Everybody thought that Robin was the black sheep of her family, that she was the one who hadn’t followed in everyone’s footsteps. But the truth was, Robin came from a family of protectors, and Robin was a protector, too. As a doctor, her job was to protect her patients; as a mother, her job was to protect Emma.
And right now, because of her family, her job was to protect everybody in this room.
She reached the table she needed; the lead hostage taker was so fixated on watching the crowd in the center of the room that he hadn’t paid attention to what was happening five feet in front of him. He thought he had planned everything perfectly. He thought he was so good at this.
Robin was better.
She pulled out her cell phone and conference-called Maxie and Sam, ready to synchronize their attacks. They had one shot at this, and Robin had no intention of failing now. Not after coming so far. She pulled the locking pin out of the grenade and got ready to throw it up at just the right time; they wanted to focus the flashes as much on the robbers as possible. Then, it would simply be a matter of tackling them when they were blind and disoriented, securing them with plastic ties, and handing them over to Mac and the rest of the police.
Although if Patrick ever called her boring again, she wouldn’t simply divorce him; she would make sure they never found his body.
***
The police cars still surrounded the outside of the Metro court, even though all of the robbers had been caught and taken down to the precinct for booking. The last ambulance had pulled out a few minutes ago with one of the robbers they’d knocked unconscious. Those two would be taken to GH under a police watch, and once cleared, would join the rest of their crew at the PCPD.
Robin and Maxie stood at the edge of the police barricade, her winter coat wrapped tightly around her body. She almost couldn’t believe it was over. Once the grenades had gone off, everything had happened so fast that Robin still had trouble wrapping her mind around it. The robbers had gone down easily, not expecting any sort of attack, let alone such a homespun one. In the end, it wasn’t the element of surprise or the weapons that had given them the edge; it was the simple fact that no one had been expecting a bunch of civilian women who were making up their plan as they went along.
“Hey,” Lulu said, coming up beside her and leaning against the barricade. “Mac finally finish yelling at you?”
Robin chuckled. “I think he’ll be ready to go another round once he gets statements from the guards who shot at us.”
“What about you?” Maxie asked, siding closer to Robin so Lulu could also lean back on the barricade. “Who yelled loudest, Lucky or Dante?”
“Tracy, surprisingly,” Lulu said. “I think she takes offense to me getting my Spencer on.”
“Ah, remember when you used to call her your step-monster?” Maxie teased. “How the mighty have fallen.”
Lulu bumped her shoulder against Maxie’s. “Hey, you’d better be talking about Tracy.”
They all laughed, though Robin sobered quickly when Sam and Kristina walked over to them. “Hey,” Robin said. “I would have thought you’d go in the ambulance with Jason.”
“Yeah, well.” Sam rolled her eyes and gripped her sister’s shoulders affectionately. “I had a much bigger problem to deal with.”
Robin’s eyes widened in understanding. “I guess Alexis wasn’t happy with either of you, huh?”
“Nope,” Kristina said. “I haven’t seen Mom yell like that in a while. Or had her hug me that tightly. I think she dislocated something.”
“Speaking of injuries…”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sam waved off Robin’s concern. “After this I’m going straight to GH to get my arm looked at. I promise.”
Robin smiled ruefully. “Hey, I can’t help it. You’re on my strike team. I’ve got to make sure you’re in top shape.”
“Not to mention you’re kind of a worrier by nature,” Maxie added.
“Not a worrier,” Robin corrected. “A protector.”
“Ooh,” Lulu said. “That’d be a good name for our group: ‘The Protectors.’ It can be like, our superhero team.” At everyone’s incredulous looks, she chuckled, “what, you thought I was kidding about starting a kick-ass club?”
Kristina buried her face in her hands. “What did I get myself into?”
Everyone laughed again, and Lulu added slyly, “Well, from the looks of things, you got quite the hug and lecture from my brother.”
Sam turned wide eyes to her sister. “Really? Krissy, is there anything between you and Ethan we need to talk about?”
“No!”
“So what about you, Robin?” Maxie asked. “After this, are you going home to give your baby a hug and wait for Mac to yell at you some more?”
Robin had been considering this since the night ended. Maxie was right; the first thing she was going to do was go home and just hold Emma for a while. But then…
“Actually,” she said slowly, “I think I’m going to go to GH for a while. I want to check on Matt.”
Lulu and Maxie exchanged a look. “Not just him, though, right?” Maxie waited impatiently for Robin to answer.
“No, Maxie,” Robin sighed in defeat. “I want to check on Patrick too. Ah!” She held up a hand to stop Maxie’s whoop of success. “And by the way, don’t even think we’re done discussing you trying to manipulate my life choices. But,” she confessed, “I realized something tonight.”
“That you’re more like your mother than you realized?” Maxie asked.
“That you can kick some serious butt when you want to?” Lulu tried.
“That you’re surrounded by insane people?” Sam asked.
“No,” Robin answered. “I realized that my family matters more than anything else, and that everything we did tonight, we did out of love.” She smiled softly. “I guess I’ve been forgetting how much power love can give you when you let it.”
Sam came up to Robin’s other side and sat against the barricade, waving Kristina over to join them. The five women sat there, staring out at the hotel where so much had happened in barely an hour. Robin would never have thought it before, but they had made a pretty formidable team.
Lulu was right. They were all protectors. Of their loved ones, of their friends, of the city. Together, they had saved the day.
Sometimes, love was enough.
*THE END*