ds_flashfiction | the things we do to avoid homework -- er, I mean, for love

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For the Anywhere But Here challenge: snark, sap, and scenery. 1791 words (yes, almost double the limit), Ray/Ray.

Passeggiata
by Hth

He didn't know what time it was when the Italian cops in their funny Italian uniforms came out to put up the road blocks that turned the Piazza Vittorio Veneto into a pedestrian mall; he hadn't been wearing a watch since the plane. Ray's father had taken off his watch when he was on vacation, letting the job of watching the itinerary fall to his wife over long car trips to Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse and the Devil's Tower. He was turning into his father, and it was hardly even painful at all.

"Wish I had my glasses," he said. From the patio of their restaurant, he could hear the crowd gathering below, but it was like his vision was all stretched out of shape by the things he'd seen in the last week - the mountains, the castles, the ocean, God, the ocean. It was like he was blinder than ever, at least when it came to seeing things as small as people.

Vecchio finished off his wine and made that annoying sound, sucking in air across the top of it or some other pretentious thing that supposedly made the wine taste better. "This, you want to see," he said in exasperation once he finally got around to swallowing. "Peasants on parade. This is what you come to Italy to look at."

"You're the one who brought me here; don't you want to see anything?"

"I brought you to Naples. Naples, the crown jewel of southern Italy, in the shadow of majestic Mt. Vesuvius, the pride of Magna Graecia, the birthplace of Sophia Loren. You wanted to see sheep farmers who live in caves."

He thought about mentioning that nobody really lived in the sassi anymore, but Vecchio knew that, so it would be a waste of his breath. Vecchio was just pissed because the shopping sucked in Matera. Besides, Ray liked to imagine that they did. The sassi had been carved into the side of the mountain, a dense medieval city of strong rock warrens meant to house monks fleeing secular wars and equally lethal church politics and that eventually became -- well, something very much like the apartment buildings Ray had grown up in. He liked to imagine that as he sat here eating his chicken alla cacciatore and drinking his fucking unbelievable Italian espresso (Starbuck's was ruined for him forever), he'd see children playing in and out of the cave doorways, women hanging up the wash along the side of the mountain. Goats playing fetch or something. "Naples was all pizza, jazz, and crime. I coulda stayed home for that. Besides, less of a drive tomorrow."

"Naples is la dolce vita," Vecchio was grumbling over his fresh glass of wine. "Naples is art, excitement, music, passion. Basilicata is Idaho with earthquakes."

Ray smiled at that. Yeah, Naples had been right up Vecchio's alley -- Byzantine and chaotic, a bejeweled and mosaic-tiled city-that-never-sleeps by the sea, the illegitimate child of Vegas and Versailles, like Chicago with castles, like the Marrakesh Night Market with bus service. Ray.... Maybe it was all those summer vacation road trips to the Badlands, but Ray liked Basilicata province, with its rough ground, its hard white mountains pressed up against the radiant blue sea. "How far are we from Mont-- Monte-- "

"Montescaglioso. Not far. Don't get your hopes up, though; there's nothing to see there."

"You said that about here," Ray reminded him.

Vecchio made a flippant gesture. "I admit, the sassi are not nothing. Montescaglioso, now that's nothing." Without comment, Vecchio fished a pair of glasses out of the inside pocket of his new Versace jacket and passed them over to Ray.

With his glasses on, everyone walking the piazza below them looked older than Ray expected. All those little old Italian couples, shuffling along arm in arm, leaned against each other for support with a cane turning them into mobile tripods. But they were talking all at once, like a good night around the Vecchio dinner table -- happy to be alive. "Well, we're going anyway, so you can shove the attitude," Ray said, knowing full well that they day his partner shoved the attitude would be the date on his death certificate. And even then, Ray wouldn't trust him to keep his mouth shut until he was six feet under. "Do you think we shouldn't go?" Ray asked abruptly.

"Don't chicken out." Vecchio sounded bored, which would be insulting if Ray really were getting cold-feet type nerves here, which he was not. But if he were, that tone would really piss him off -- which would probably distract him from nerves, which was probably Vecchio's angle all along, sneaky bastard that he was.

"I don't care. I just don't want to -- I don't want to make grandma keel over from a heart attack or anything."

"Ray, my Bisnonna is ninety-seven years old; if she keels over while we're there, try not to take it personally."

"She is not gonna be down with me. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you seriously think she's gonna-- She'll probably spit on me," he said in utter resignation. That was what little old Italian ladies did, right? Pissed off little old Italian ladies who thought you were making a faggot out of their great-grandson. "I don't know why we're doing this at all."

"I thought we were doing this to weasel a free trip to Naples out of my relatives, but clearly what the fuck do I know? Here, for the love of God, put on a coat; this is gonna be the view from Hell once the place freezes over."

Ray put the coat on just to shut him up. He should probably never have dragged Vecchio out of Naples just to play mountain man, not when it had been so long since-- Well, hell, Ray didn't know if he'd ever seen Vecchio as happy as he seemed in Naples. He didn't even know why he'd insisted on cutting that part of the trip short, except that maybe there was something about wilderness that just wouldn't die out once you got it growing inside of you. Maybe the same thing that made his dad load the family into a station wagon and drive across Wyoming once a year. Maybe the same thing that made Fraser...Fraser.

"Anyway, it's tradition," Vecchio finished.

Ray snorted. "Tradition, right. I'm sure that'll be a great comfort to your Bisnonna, as the heart attack sets in."

"I wouldn't worry about it."

"She's ninety-seven. She's Italian. She's a ninety-seven-year-old Italian woman from Moose Jaw, Italy."

"She's also mostly blind, completely deaf, and mostly senile. You're not going to throw her whole world out of whack, here, Ray. You'll be lucky if she can tell you apart from a stray squirrel."

"Oh." Ray thought about that for a minute. "So this whole bit with the blessing is...?"

"Purely ceremonial. Tradition, like I said. The family sent Maria and Tony, they sent Francesca and Dante, and I was not gonna get screwed out of my trip to Italy on account of your dick."

"Oh," Ray said again, and looked away. It was soothing, watching the locals stroll the piazza, shuffling over the cobblestones in their ties and their buttoned shirtsleeves instead of the workday clothes Ray had been seeing all day, greeting each other, stopping for a gelato from the roadside stands. "Fraser would love this," he said. "All those people, chatting each other up for no reason, just to shoot the breeze. He'd think it was civilized."

"We invented civilization," Vecchio said placidly.

"I'm not going to marry you."

"So who asked you to?"

"Vecchio, you brought me halfway to the other side of the earth to meet your blind and senile great-grandmother. I get that it's tradition, I get that you wanted to mooch a vacation off your mom, but I'm just saying, I hate weddings, I especially hate my weddings, and gay weddings are a waste of time on every possible level. Look, I'm the beneficiary of your life insurance, you get the car in my will, we have a dog. Let's just-- It stops here. No weddings."

"No, of course no weddings," Vecchio said, with that light hint of sarcasm that might actually be sarcasm, or just a mirage of it. "Why ruin the romance?"

But he didn't know if Vecchio was listening for real or not, so he tried again back at their bed and breakfast, which was, like apparently every building in Italy, some kind of converted castle type thing. In the deep darkness of their room, he sat down on the edge of the bed, making Vecchio follow by the blind connection between his fingers and the belt loops of Ray's jeans. He put his own fingers underneath Vecchio's chin and let himself be kissed, soft and slow and la dolce vita in-fucking-deed, and he said, "I mean it, I don't want to make some kind of goddamn statement. I just wanna get on with our lives, get on to the good stuff." Vecchio's hand slipped down his chest, not pressing but making Ray fall to his back anyhow, and he hadn't meant this by the good stuff, he'd really meant putting on a tie and shuffling down the street with a cane in one hand and Vecchio holding onto his other arm while he harped about the time Ray made him leave Naples three days early. But in the meantime, Ray would definitely settle for this.

"Vivo per te," Vecchio murmured against his throat as everything started to slide off and come apart around them -- Versace and cotton and self-control. He brushed a gentle hand through Ray's hair and said, "Okay? You know what that means?" Ray nodded; he didn't feel exactly fluent in any language at the moment, and he'd only gotten partway through the second side of the first tape of Learn Italian in Your Car, but yeah, he knew what that meant. "I do. Amen. There's your wedding."

"Okay," Ray said, trying to swallow a gasp at the same time as Vecchio twisted against him, rolling his thigh across Ray's groin. "Yeah, that wasn't so bad...."

Afterwards, as he was falling asleep and Vecchio was on the other side of falling at rock-bottom, Ray nestled up against him and, just in case the thing wouldn't take if it was only half-done, he whispered into Vecchio's ear, "Vivo per te, amen." Not that he was superstitious, not that he stood much on ceremony or believed in magic words or fossilized tradition or even in guarantees anymore. But just in case.