True
by Abelard

****AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story takes place, for the most part, in Sonny and Alexis's past. It considers the question of what would have happened if they had met when they were teenagers. I'm sure this type of story has been done before, many times, and better. Apologies to all who have tackled Teenage Sexis before me. But I could not help but think they would have been an interesting pair of young people, would they not?

There are several parts of this story on the "Adult" site.

***

Part 1

Port Charles, sometime in the 2000s

"Hey Buddy, I think that's enough for tonight," the bartender barked. "Stay put, I'll call you a cab."

"Don't," Sonny said. His head was spinning from the bourbon, but he could still see straight. "I'll walk."

"As long as you ain't driving," the bartender shrugged. Sonny got to his feet, rocked unsteadily for a couple of seconds, then found his balance and walked out into the hot summer night.

The humidity was awful, as it usually was this time of year, and Sonny cursed it as he made his way slowly home from the docks. At least he didn't have to wear a coat over his suit. You wear a coat when you go out for a bender, you're bound to leave it on some barstool, the keys in the pocket…Wait. Did he know where his keys were?

Frowning and failing to remember if he'd taken his keys with him when he stormed out the penthouse door earlier that night, Sonny searched himself. They weren't in any of his pockets. Sonny ran a few steps to a tin garbage can at the side of a building and kicked it in frustration, then covered his ears at the clanging sound he'd made. His booze-riddled senses were in no shape to be attacked like that.

Suddenly, someone was standing in front of him. "Looking for these?" the man said. Sonny looked at his face - it was Luke. Luke was holding out Sonny's keys, dangling them from his fingertips. But when Sonny reached out to grab them, Luke held them away. "Uh-uh, Corinthos. You're not goin' home 'till we've had a chance to talk."

"Luke, what the hell…I'm in no mood to talk right now, and I'm not gonna play your games." Sonny lunged again for the keys, meaning to tackle Luke to the ground if he had to, but when he thought he'd run straight into Spencer's wiry form, Sonny encountered thin air instead, and hit the ground. It was as if he'd passed right through Luke - as if Luke wasn't even really there. Sonny shook his head and got to his feet, wondering if he'd drunk more than he thought. But then a familiar laugh sounded behind him. Sonny spun around: there was Luke again, grinning.

"Sorry, fella. This isn't a contest of strength. You'll never touch me. That isn't a threat, it's a fact. There's no 'me' for you to touch," Luke said.

"Wait a second," Sonny said. "You some kind of ghost? But…Luke Spencer isn't dead."

"I'll be damned, you're pretty sharp for a dude who's had eight shots in two hours!" Luke said jovially. "Well, you're right, I'm not Luke Spencer, I just look like him. They thought this might go better if I looked like someone you'd trust. Someone you would believe was telling you the truth."

"'They' thought? What 'they'?" Sonny rubbed his forehead, already wondering if this was all just some drunken delusion.

"The only 'they' there is, pal. And I am a ghost. Well, sort of. You ever read a little book by Charles Dickens? 'A Christmas Carol'?"

It only took a moment for Sonny to catch the reference. "You're the…what? Ghost of Christmas Past or something? Come to show me the evil of my ways?" Ghost Luke nodded, and Sonny burst out laughing. "You've gotta be…"

"It's no joke, friend." Suddenly, Ghost Luke turned serious. "Look, you're on the brink, Sonny. You're stuck in a dead-end marriage to a woman you only think you need, but you don't really love her at all. You're in a career that's, well, let's just say it's harmful to your health, and it doesn't do any wonders for the people who hang around you either. You've got a handful of friends and about twenty states full of enemies. You hate your life, you hate what you do, and you hate yourself. Tonight, you got to where you couldn't even stand to be yourself anymore, so you went out to drink yourself blind. That's what we folks upstairs call trouble with a capital letter, you know?"

Sonny didn't deny it, but he wasn't going to let some ghost he made up in his imagination get the better of him. "Look, if I drink, that's my business. It's not like I go out every night like this."

"No," admitted Ghost Luke, "but nights like these are gonna become more frequent, partner. Every morning you'll wake up and nothing will be different. So every night, you'll want to go out and forget yourself for a couple of hours. But unless you do something to change the whole shebang, Sonny, it'll always be the same crappy life you wake up to in the morning. And your loathing and your pain will only get worse and worse. You're on what they call one of those paths of no return, friend."

Sonny shivered a little, and it certainly wasn't from the cold, since the hot summer night was about ninety degrees. "So, what? I'm supposed to fix my life? I…I can't do it. I've thought about it. I have. But what's done is done. There's too much…I can't go back in time and change everything."

"What if you could go back in time and change just one thing?" Ghost Luke asked, with a lift of his grey eyebrows.

"Huh?" Sonny's head snapped up.

"I'm here to tell you the good news, Sonny. You're about to be given a second chance. To fix the one thing in your life that went wrong."

"Only one?" Sonny laughed. "More like one million."

Ghost Luke chuckled. "No, see, that's everyone's mistake. They think they took all these wrong turns, and their life is just one tangled yarn of bad moves. But really, most people just take the wrong fork at one of their crossroads. They just pay for that turn all their lives."

Sonny sighed, feeling a little too woozy and weak to fight this fantasy character anymore. "Okay. So, what was my mistake?"

"You never had a true love."

Sonny let that sink in, but then frowned. "What do you call Brenda? Lily? Carly?"

Ghost Luke chuckled heartily. "Oh, please, Lily? Carly? Pal, those two aren't even worth discussing. I'm from upstairs, where we know the score. No matter how much you mouth off about your devotion, blah blah, we both know Lily and Carly were just…there. Now, Ms. Barrett is another story, but where I'm from, we call that a Feel Good Catastrophe. Your relationship with Brenda was something that felt good, but it was a catastrophe, for both of you. Think about it. What was the pain-to-pleasure ratio in that relationship? About ten thousand to one? In fact, I'm pretty sure that someday, someone who looks like Robin Scorpio is gonna appear to Brenda on some night like this, and give her the chance to fix her big mistake: you."

Sonny rolled his eyes. "Fine, fine, so you're saying I missed out on true love. So who was it supposed to be, huh? Where was I supposed to meet her? What kind of difference would it have made?"

"All the difference in the world, Sonny. Now, in a second, I'm gonna send you back to the critical moment. You won't consciously remember anything of the life you've led, you'll just be in that moment in your past when you made the wrong turn. That moment that would have made the difference. But I really hope your subconscious remembers that this is the last chance you're gonna get. Because if you mess up this time, Sonny, that's it. Everyone only gets a second chance. Not a third. Got it?"

But before Sonny could respond, he'd already forgotten the whole conversation, and was standing on a street corner in broad daylight, having just walked out of the New York City Ballet, his mother on his arm. She smiled up at him, and he grinned back at her, and it was a good day.

Then, a group of schoolgirls in uniform rushed past, giggling and laughing, and Sonny felt someone bump into him, hard, from behind.

"Oh, excuse me! I'm so sorry," a girl's voice said.

Sonny turned and looked into a pair of caramel-colored eyes. He smiled. "No problem," he said. The girl smiled back. She had dimples, like he did. She wore a green school uniform, just like the other girls in the crowd. She started to walk away, to catch up to her friends, probably, and Sonny began to walk his mother in the other direction, towards the subway station. But then, something in the back of his sixteen-year-old mind said something. "You only get a second chance," the voice said.

"Mama, will you wait for me here, just for a minute?" Sonny asked, and turned to chase after the girl with the great smile.

part 2