Between the Times - 6. Val

"What do you think of the exhibition?", Dante wanted to know after handing the menu back to the waiter slave.

"Pretty meaningless," Val replied, leaning back. "I'm not sure I liked even one of the paintings."

"There was one that looked like a sun dying in the sea," Dante replied, smiling wryly. "That was quite lovely. But why the artist called it a 'milk-drinking fish' is beyond me."

That made Val laugh and shake his head in equal measure. "I'm not sure I really want a rationale for that."

Dante nodded weakly, then his gaze slid to the window, where heavy raindrops were still pattering against the pane.

Val suppressed a sigh. Nature desperately needed the rain, and since they had spent the morning in the warm dry exhibit, they had barely gotten a drop, but they could forget the stroll through the historic old town.

The drinks were brought. While Val opened the water bottle and poured them, Dante put his hands around his cup of herbal tea as if they were in the depths of winter and it was snowing outside, not raining.

"Are you all right?" Val wanted to know. As disappointing as the art exhibit had been, it didn't explain Dante's depressed expression.

"Hmm? Yes. I just..." Dante shook his head. "Does it help you to know that Blaise is dead?"

Glass already to his lips, Val paused, then lowered it. "Blaise...? I mean..." Puzzled, he stared at Dante, who shrugged without returning the look. "It's good to know he can't hurt anyone else," he finally said. "Why do you ask?"

"Today is the anniversary of his death."

Val blinked. Glanced at the date display on his wristwatch. "Does it still bother you that much?"

"I see the results every day." Dante's hand slid to his arm, to where the scar was hidden beneath the thin sweater. The fingers of his left hand- mostly numb, as far as Val knew- twitched weakly. "Frank still has nightmares on a regular basis. Sometimes, when he's sound asleep, I wonder what would have happened if he hadn't woken up." At the last words, he sounded distressingly small and helpless.

Val licked his lips a little uncomfortably. It was strange to see Dante like this, the topic... well. "Do you talk about it at your house?" he wanted to know anyway.

Dante shook his head and as if to keep himself busy, he stirred sugar into his tea. "The kids know their grandpa died, of course, but since we don't broach the subject and there are no pictures around, it's absolutely not present."

Now Val did sip his water, mostly to do anything, too. "I've been trying to talk to my brothers about it," he then said. Drowning the broached conversation in awkward silence was definitely not a good idea. "As you might expect, anything but successful."

"If I didn't know Mikey worships you like a hero, I'd guess he blames you for not protecting them," Dante said quietly.

"It's probably because he knows full well that I tried." Val couldn't stop a bitter tone from creeping into his voice. "My mother wouldn't believe me. Told me I needed someone to explain growing up and that I'd gotten something wrong. She was still way too focused on my father's disappearance." Even if that had been a few years ago at the time. She deserved the guilt she'd felt since the revelation.

Dante nodded weakly.

"Mikey was the baby at home and ignored my careful warnings at first, too. He wanted to be an adult." He still vividly remembered his horror when Mikey had said 'being an adult feels good' after his first conversation with Blaise. Remembered how Mikey had cried in his arms a few weeks later after all. Remembered how he had argued with his mother so Mikey wouldn't have to go to the Mitchells. "Mikey understood," he continued quietly. "Understood that against a woman like our mother, against a man like Blaise, we stood no chance."

Dante nodded again.

Perfectly timed at that moment, the waiter slave brought a bread basket and two plates of mixed salad. The salad seemed to be drowning in its yogurt dressing, and the croutons on top were probably more of an alibi.

Val stabbed his fork into the greens anyway.

"You never talked to Frank about it, did you?" Dante asked then, and chewing, Val shook his head.

"No," he said after swallowing. "After he came out of the coma, I of course tried to reconnect with the friendship, but we were both overwhelmed with the situation. And the adults around us weren't much help either. It was a shock for me- as it was for everyone else- to learn that he had been wearing a mask for years." To be honest, he had shied away from asking why Frank hadn't even confided in his childhood best friend. After all, all four of them had known what was happening then.

Dante stirred his salad more than he ate from it.

"And since then... we haven't mentioned the past once." Val shrugged weakly. Keeping dead silence over things seemed to be a hallmark of the region.

Again they were silent for a moment. Outside, the rain was easing noticeably.

Val could tell by looking at Dante that it was working hard inside him, but he wasn't yet clear on what he was getting at.

"Do you think it's changed you? Well, of course it has... I mean..." Screwing up his face, Dante broke off.

Val pushed the salad away from him. "What's your point?" He washed down the somewhat strange aftertaste of dressing with water.

"Henry," Dante finally said after a moment.

"Henry?" Val was confused. "I thought Blaise didn't touch Henry."

"He didn't," Dante confirmed. "But Flynn did."

"Ah." That dispelled the confusion only slightly.

Dante sighed, holding onto his teacup again. "Henry has nightmares. Whereas the nightmare for him isn't necessarily what Flynn does, but that he likes what Flynn does in it."

"Ah," Val went on again.

"I don't know how to help him. How we should help him," Dante continued quietly. "Would Henry have developed a healthy interest in men normally if it hadn't happened? Or is this just an attempt to deal with the trauma?" He looked up. The helplessness in his gaze caught Val off guard.

"I don't know," he heard himself say. "I don't think you can answer it that easily."

This time the timing of the waiter slave taking the salad and announcing the main course was not very fitting.

"When I talked to Anthony about it, this was one of our concerns," Val then said softly. "That it might somehow twist Frank's dreams of a prince. That it would break him much more than it broke us."

"Frank told me that for years he was afraid that there was something wrong with him," Dante returned just as quietly. "That he'd inherited Blaise's perverted preferences. He told that sometimes he was desperate and exhausted from the mask and almost surrendered. He said that since he liked men anyway, it might not be so bad."

"I'm glad he didn't." Val shuddered hard.

Dante nodded with a tense smile. "That's what I meant. Frank knew who and what he liked already when he was a kid. But what about you? Do you ever feel like Blaise has taken something away from you? The voluntariness of trying things out? A possible honest interest?"

The question puzzled Val. As something like a doctor, he was the one who asked questions about how people felt and fared, but the questions were never actually directed at him.

Accordingly, the interruption by the arrival of the main course was very welcome. Dante got a bright yellow curry dish and Val got a vegetable casserole. At first glance, both already looked worlds better than the salad.

He stabbed through the layer of gratinated cheese. Did a simple 'yes' answer do the matter justice?

"Did Frank ever talk about our friendship?" he then wanted to know.

"No, not really." Dante raised his brows questioningly.

Val wrestled a smile from himself. "He didn't say much when he was a kid too. Doesn't seem to have changed."

"You just hear his voice better now."

Val chuckled in agreement and slid a first bite onto his fork, but the food was steaming far too hot. "Alice never wanted to be the princess waiting to be rescued, so she was mostly imaginary, or I was. And if Anthony just wanted a treasure, I was the prince to Frank, that's all." He shrugged.

Dante smiled faintly.

"But when it was just the two of us, sometimes he'd spin the most fantastic stories. Sometimes he'd talk like a waterfall."

"Hard to imagine."

"I know." Cautiously, Val took a bite. There was definitely salt missing. "There's a little patch of woods by our place, where two fields and two pastures border each other. There's a kind of picnic table and there's a little pond. We used to go there a lot on our bikes."

"Sounds like a nice retreat."

"It is. Or it was." Val nodded. "We kissed there."

"Really?" Dante seemed quite surprised.

Val nodded again, shrugging one shoulder. "We were kids, Dante. We just knew the fairy tales where slaves are freed after they perform heroic deeds. So we played it out. Frank was freed for saving the prince and got to marry him. That was just before Anthony first told me about all this."

The memory was over twenty years old.

It was a hot summer day when, as they often did, the two of them packed a picnic and drove to the small forest. Completely unfazed, they played naked, jumped in the pond when they felt like it, slayed monsters with their wooden swords. Val, as the rescued prince, had taken Frank's collar off in the game, declared him a free man, then, as the queen, promised her son to the hero. And Frank had asked if they didn't want to play that too.

So they had. They had thought up a ceremony full of exaggerated pathos and pulled it off amazingly seriously, had kissed at the end. And because the ceremony wouldn't end there, Frank had led him to a mossy patch where they lay down as a newlywed couple. Giggling embarrassedly, they had talked about sex- not much more than a hint of theory and a great deal of childish fantasy.

He could still remember incredibly clearly the soft moss, strangely cool despite the blazing heat. Of how Frank had very carefully laid down on top of him. He had wrapped his arms around Frank's neck and they had kissed even more. To what extent the memory of the kisses had been influenced by adult experience, or whether the kisses then had really not been half as childlike as might have been expected, he could not have said.

They had fallen asleep, and when Val awoke, he had felt somehow magical. Magical enough that they had repeated the game over the next days and weeks, magical enough that Anthony's telling thoroughly shattered the innocent joy of it.

Val couldn't have said in the end how detailed he'd been in telling Dante about it, but the latter's equally pained and dreamy smile spoke volumes.

"I guess if it hadn't been for Blaise, the natural progression would have been for us to actually sleep with each other at some point."

"You think so?" Dante tilted his head.

"Yeah, I do." Val nodded and looked at a piece of broccoli on his fork. "I mean... essentially, I asked myself the same question when I was a teenager. What would have happened if Blaise hadn't happened. Tom, Nick, others- boys and girls alike- made it pretty clear at times how little they cared about the opposite sex. There was no one I trusted as much as Frank, so it stayed solely at these theoretical considerations of a certain curiosity. In wondering what would have become of us."

"Probably not much, after all, he would have gone to the Horners," Dante interjected.

"That's not quite right," Val disagreed. "I had my mother ready to talk to Carolyn about it, but the accident beat us to it."

A bitter snort came from Dante. "That hurts just listening to you."

"Yeah," Val muttered, "it does." But it felt good to talk about it with someone. With someone who knew the people involved, who had a serious and emotional interest in the subject. "What about you?"

"About me?" Dante paused in surprise.

Val nodded. "Did you really never think about something like this before you came here? You were trained to be a bodyguard. Close physical contact with other young men, bare skin in the locker rooms..." He interrupted himself as Dante shook his head.

"I was raised to believe that men and women belong together. Not in a homophobic way, but just... in this way where other possibilities don't even occur. It's hard to explain. But it would never have occurred to me to look at another man in that way."

It was something Val could hardly imagine, even after living in the South for so long.

"Once it became clear that I couldn't serve in that way, the whole subject really had no relevance to me at all." With a bitter tug around his mouth, Dante shrugged. "And the fact that I didn't end up in some m/m luxury slave fun place is all thanks to my last name."

Val nodded slowly. He had finished eating and was leaning back.

Dante, too, put his fork aside.

For a long moment, they sat in silence, indulging their thoughts.

Finally, Val asked, "Do you think Frank would want to talk to me about this?" They had pushed the past so far away for so long that just the thought felt strange, almost tasted dusty.

A thin smile appeared on Dante's lips. "I've learned it's better to finish things rather than let loose threads dangle where you can get tangled."

Val nodded slowly. Then he glanced out the window and had to smile. Symbol-like the first rays of sunlight were breaking through the gray clouds.