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INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST TABOO

6. Fighting Dragons


by Sue

"'Morning, Anna!" Indiana Jones burst into the kitchen, Alsatian at his heels, the pair of them having all the appearance of an accident looking for a place to happen.

"Good morning, Indy. Breakfast's almost ready. Did you two have a good run?" Pointedly she glared at his mud-caked running shoes, but with a seraphic smile he removed them and left them outside the door. Junior, on the other hand, had no scruples whatever about tracking muddy footmarks across Anna's clean floor. "For goodness' sake, Indy, stop him before he gets upstairs!"

Indy leaped after the dog, who was already disappearing round the kitchen door and heading for the stairs. The animal knew perfectly well it wasn't allowed in the bedrooms - which was why it made a beeline in that direction whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Indy rounded the door at speed and started up the stairs, only to run into a minor traffic jam. Junior, heading upstairs, had encountered Henry, heading down, and the dog now had two of its filthy paws firmly placed on the front of Henry's clean shirt and was wagging its tail gleefully whilst its master patted it. In view of the fact that Henry was anticipating a difficult meeting with the College Principal later in the morning, his tolerance of the dog's behaviour was nothing short of saintly.

Indy leaned back against the doorframe. "Too late," he groaned, unable to suppress a smile.

Henry grinned at him over the animal's ears. "I think it's a good thing I don't go running with you, boy," he chuckled. "Look at the state you get your companions into."

Indy pushed the dog out of the way, climbed up the couple of stairs to where his father stood, and kissed him on the cheek. "Hey, he's got great taste. You look fantastic - or did, until Junior got his paws on you!"

Returning the kiss, Henry linked his arm with his son's and guided him back down the stairs. "I do? Have you seen yourself this morning? Remind me again how old you are, son - is it fifteen or sixteen?"

Indy pushed back the tousled hair from his forehead; hair in which the first traces of grey were beginning to show. "Nice guess, Henry - you're only thirty years out. Thirty years older, but not a whole lot wiser."

He stood back to allow Henry to precede him into the kitchen. The older man greeted his young ward cheerfully. "Anna, my dear - breakfast smells wonderful today."

"Uncle Henry, my cooking always smells wonderful. Any sign of Uncle Marcus yet?"

"He'll be along in a minute - he was just going into the bathroom as I started downstairs. Anna, I was telling Indiana how young he's looking this morning. What do you think?"

The girl turned away from the cooker, a pan full of scrambled eggs in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, and appraised the rather startled Indy across the breakfast table. Her expression was serious. She waited a full minute before speaking.

"You know, I think you're right. He doesn't look a bit like the human disaster that walked in here six months ago, barely able to stand up on his own two feet. You've put on weight, Indy - which must be due to all the good food you've been eating - and you've definitely got a sparkle in your eyes. You look very happy, and it's taken years off your age."

"What did I tell you?" Henry laughed, taking his customary place at the head of the table. Indy pulled out the chair for him automatically - it was one of the unnecessary little courtesies that had found their way into the routine of their lives.

"Ah, but it's not just him, is it?" the girl went on, turning back and spooning scrambled egg onto two of the plates she had set beside the cooker. "You, too, Uncle Henry. When I moved in here you were almost seventy and bad-tempered. You're certainly younger and happier then I ever remember. Uncle Marcus is right - being together suits you."

Henry smiled as she placed his breakfast in front of him. "I never doubted it for a moment," he said. "Thank you, dear, this looks delicious."

"It's probably utterly inedible," came Marcus's voice from the doorway. The cynical tone was belied by the grin on his face. "That's the problem with you two - you see everything through rose-tinted spectacles. You're happy, so the world must be a wonderful place. You have no idea how sickening your boundless optimism can be, sometimes."

Anna placed Marcus's meal in front of him with a clatter. "It most certainly is not inedible," she informed him strongly. "My cooking's improved a lot since Indy started teaching me. Maybe if I fail my exams I could take up cooking as a career."

"You'd better not fail them," Henry put in, around a mouthful of bacon.

"Did you make lemon tea, honey?" Indy asked, rising from the table to search for it. Locating the pot, he sat down again and poured himself a glass.

"As usual," she smiled. "Honestly, catering for you three impossible men is probably all the background I need to take over the kitchens at the Waldorf Astoria."

"If you're serious," Indy told her, "Stavros Gavrakis has a chain of hotels all along the East Coast. Maybe he could help you."

"Thanks, Indy, I'll ask him some time."

"If you fail your exams - which you won't do." Henry's warning was delivered with the full force of his powerful dark eyes, whose humour could never quite conceal the steel at the core of his personality. Even Indy knew better than to pursue the subject in the face of Henry's openly expressed disapproval.

Marcus cleared his throat. "Er ... Henry, I think I may have a small assignment for you and Indy, if you don't have anything else planned."

Indy welcomed the distraction. "Really - when?"

"Well, there's no great hurry, but it ought to be done as soon as possible." Assured that he had the attention of both Joneses - Anna was surreptitiously forking burned bacon into the dog's bowl - Marcus explained. "You remember the apartment Walter Donovan had in Venice? Isla's very anxious that someone should go over and take a look at it and make sure everything's all right. The Italian subsidiary of Walter's company was closed down by Mussolini's people, but as far as she's aware the apartment itself wasn't touched. She can't go - she's due to have cataract surgery any day now - and she asked me to. I will, of course, if you wish ... but I thought it might make a welcome holiday for the two of you. I think you need a little time to yourselves ... and I seem to remember that apartment was rather luxurious ... "

Henry was regarding him with the kind of overt distrust usually reserved for his more recalcitrant pupils. He turned from Marcus to Indy, whose expression was studiedly neutral. Anna, putting her own breakfast plate on the table, sat down opposite Indy and followed the confrontation with interest.

"First I've heard of this," the son said, evenly, aware that Henry suspected him of being in collusion with Marcus.

"I'll consider it," Henry told them both, briefly. "A great deal depends on the result of my interview with Dean Richardson this morning. If he agrees to release me from my contract, I may well be in a position to accept. Now, if you'll all excuse me, I'd better change my shirt." He got up from the table quickly, his disposition distinctly altered from the sunny mood of a few minutes before. Indy's eyes followed him as he left the room, and as the door closed behind Henry he turned to look, with concern, towards Marcus.

"Something's wrong," he said, thoughtfully.

"You don't say. For goodness' sake, Indy, what is the matter with the man?"

"I wish I knew, Marcus. Could just be this retirement business, I suppose, but Henry's never been worried about his age before. It was that mention of Venice that upset him, I think."

"Or it could have been me," Anna put in, anxiously. "I know I've let him down, Indy, by not being what he wanted me to be, but I can't change my whole nature just to please him!"

Marcus considered her words carefully. "Well, there's something in what you say," he conceded, "but I felt it was something that hit him rather more suddenly and sharply than that. I think Indy's right - it's got something to do with Venice; specifically, that apartment. Perhaps he'd rather not go?"

"Why, did something bad happen there?" Anna had heard snippets of the chronicles of Indiana's hectic past, and had been regaled with the details of the father and son's adventurous pursuit of the Holy Grail across three continents, but recalled no mention of anything unpleasant linked to Henry's stay at the Venice apartment.

"I'm not sure what it could be," Indy told her, with a smile, "but

you can bet I'll find out. One thing's for sure, Marcus - Henry's way of dealing with anything that worries him is to meet it head-on. If the thought of Venice worries him, you'd better start getting hold of the tickets. Sounds like we're going fighting dragons again." He got up from the table, rounded it and kissed Anna on the top of her head. "Great meal, honey. You really enjoy cooking?"

"I really do, Indy."

"Okay, then. Leave it to Marcus and me - we'll persuade Henry."

"Thanks." She grinned towards him as he reached the door.

"Just a moment, Indy - you're not going up to your bedroom, are you?"

"What - Marcus, I can't go to college dressed in running shorts and singlet, can I?"

Marcus groaned, then pulled a gold watch out of his vest-pocket. "Kindly remember you've only got just over half an hour," he said, in the tone of a censorious parent. "Do try to keep your hands off the old monster that long, will you?"

Indy almost choked. It was going to take him a long time to get used to the new openness with which his relationship with Henry was treated in this chaotic shared household. Anna, approaching her twentieth birthday and theoretically the least sophisticated of all of them, had accepted it as a 'given' and now hardly turned a hair when Marcus made one of his frequent slyly calculated remarks. Indy, on the other hand, who had spent the worst part of seven years hiding secrets from other people and even from himself, found such frankness disturbing at times.

"Marcus," he said, cautiously, "one of these days that won't be funny. Then he smiled again, the gentle rebuke gaining strength from his innate good humour. "But I'll do my best."

As he departed and his footsteps clattered up the stairs, Anna turned to her uncle with raised eyebrows.

"Still nothing?" she asked, sympathetically.

"Still nothing," he repeated. "I don't know what's the matter with the pair of them, Anna. There are times when I feel like battering their heads together and screaming at them to sort themselves out."

"Which is why you arranged the trip to Venice?" she speculated. "Oh, don't panic, Uncle Marcus, I heard you talking to Mrs Donovan on the telephone last Friday morning."

Marcus chuckled. "I'm much too old and entirely the wrong shape to play Cupid," he told her, helping himself to coffee. "However, those two cast me in that role more years ago than I care to remember, so it seems as if I'm stuck with it."

"They are a great deal more comfortable together now, aren't they?" If it ever surprised Anna to be talking so casually and sympathetically about such a bizarre relationship between a man and his son, the surprise never showed on her face. Marcus was convinced she'd be wasted as a cook - she would make an excellent nurse or welfare worker. "You heard what Uncle Henry said to me earlier? About how good Indy was looking?"

"He's got a soft heart," Marcus told her, sadly reflective. His own past with Henry was something he had never mentioned to her; things were complex enough as it was. "I think Venice could be just what they need. I hope they'll go."

"I'm sure they will," she smiled at him. "Now, are you going to help me wash the breakfast dishes? It is Thursday, you know - your turn."

With good grace Marcus accepted his fate and began to help her clear the table.

* * *

The vaporetto docked noiselessly at the little jetty and Indy scrambled onto the quay. The boatman handed up two large, battered leather suitcases and a Gladstone bag, then offered his arm to Henry. For a moment the redoubtable old man glared at the Italian, then held up one hand to his son and without hesitation swung up to join him.

Indy chuckled at the boatman's confusion, and drew out a handful of gaudy banknotes, three of which he peeled off and gave to the man. The Italian lifted one eyebrow and opened his mouth as though to make a comment, obviously thought better of it, stuffed the banknotes into his cap and drove his water-taxi away without further ado.

"Will you please take it easy?" Indy admonished his father as he reached for the two larger pieces of luggage. "I know you don't need help, I know there's no need to treat you as if you had one foot in the grave, but you can't expect a guy you've never met before to know it. He was just being polite."

"And I was being impolite?" The shortness of temper that had been

the permanent accompaniment to this excursion was very much in evidence today. Their journey from their New England home, begun only three weeks after Marcus's casual suggestion that they take the trip, had been accomplished with unexpected ease, but Henry had found things to complain of at every stage. He hadn't been comfortable on the flight, hadn't liked their Paris hotel room, had hated the food served on the long train journey across Europe and had, in general, been determined not to enjoy one single moment of the whole experience. His rudeness to the vaporetto driver was merely one more in a long series of brushes with innocent bystanders during which his inner disquiet had been allowed to show. He hated himself for it, but he could not help it.

"I didn't say that. I only meant maybe he didn't deserve that kind of treatment when he was just trying to help."

Henry sighed. In days gone by he would have used this lecture as an excuse to start an argument with his son, but at the end of such a long and arduous journey he scarcely had the strength. He hadn't slept well since they started out, and now he felt the weight of every one of his seventy-two years of age. Perhaps the boatman hadn't been so wrong, after all - it was only his own massive stubbornness that prevented him from admitting it.

"Point taken," he said, submissively. "Could we keep moving?" he asked, with a pained expression. "I'd like to get to the apartment before dark, and I would like something decent to eat."

"Marcus mentioned a good restaurant," Indy said, accepting the olive-branch for what it was and starting along the narrow alleyway that ran at right-angles to the canal. "We can either eat there or they'll send meals over - just like room service."

"Good. I think I'm too tired to eat out tonight."

Indy let the remark go. It wasn't that Henry's unfamiliar behaviour didn't interest him - it did, passionately. However he was not about to embarrass his father by opening up such a private subject in a public place, nor by intruding on some matter Henry might not be prepared to discuss.

A few paces along the alley he stopped by a green-painted wooden door and hauled a key out of his pocket. "This is the one," he said, cheerfully, unlocking the door. They stepped inside, closing the door after them, and found themselves once again in the cool daylight of a shady courtyard around which, on three sides, ran the former palazzo which had been converted into six tastefully-furnished apartments maintained by various companies for visiting executives. A small, dark woman dressed all in black emerged from a doorway to their right, a questioning look on her face.

"Guests of Signora Donovan," Indy said, producing Isla's letter of introduction. The old woman seized the letter, scanned it anxiously, and broke into a stream of excited Italian the two visitors had difficulty following. In the end, Indy managed to calm her. "That's okay, Signora Leone, we've been here before. We'll find our way."

The old woman vanished for a moment, and reappeared with the keys to the apartment. "If there is anything you need ... " she said, with a sad look on her face.

" ... we'll be sure and let you know," Indy confirmed. "C'mon, Dad, this way."

Henry's expression was scathing. "Yes, son, I do remember."

They crossed the courtyard and climbed a flight of wooden steps to an upper level where a balustraded walkway lined the inner face of the building. Turning as he reached the head of the stairs, Indy approached the apartment's door, unlocked it, and stood back to allow Henry to enter first. As he closed the door after him, he noticed his father had stopped stock still in the hallway, as though afraid to go any further.

Indy pulled off the fedora, threw it on an elegant hallstand, and stared at the older man.

"Are you finally going to tell me what's wrong about coming back here?" he asked, concern and annoyance mingling in his voice to give it an unfamiliar harshness.

Henry didn't meet his eyes. "It's like ... stepping back in

time," he said, after due consideration. "The same light, the same sounds, the same smells ... the whole world has gone to War, and this apartment is still here, after almost eight years, untouched. I almost expect Elsa to walk out of her bedroom and the whole business to start all over again."

So that was it, Indy realised. The apartment was associated in Henry's mind with the girl who'd betrayed them both to the Nazis.

"You were lonely," he said, comfortingly. "Maybe she took advantage of that - but if I'd been around, you wouldn't have been lonely."

"I won't deny being lonely," his father told him, with brisk frankness that sat ill with his otherwise wistful mood. "Or foolish. It had been so long since anyone ... And I missed you, more than I ever knew. I suppose technically she seduced me, but I allowed it to happen. For a little while ... a single night ... I felt truly elated. Almost the next thing I knew I was up to my eyeballs in drugs and being driven towards Germany."

"Don't feel bad about it - she tricked us both, the same way. It wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't both been so busy fighting battles against ourselves we didn't realise what she was doing until it was too late."

Slowly Henry lifted a hand and removed his own hat, smoothing back

what was left of his hair as he did so. "I'm almost afraid to go further," he said. "Afraid everything will be just as it was before. I don't believe anyone has been here at all since you and Marcus left in 1938."

"Except possibly Mamma Leone; I hope she's cleaned the place." Indy reached for his father's hand, caught it in his own, and squeezed. "Well, I don't intend to spend the night out here in the entrance hall. Want to take a look at the living-room first and save the bedrooms for later?"

Henry turned and looked at him, looking at him - not past him or through him or over the top of his head - for the first time in weeks. The troubled expression in the older man's brown eyes met its counterpart in his son's steady grey-blue gaze. "You always seem to understand what's worrying me, even when I don't fully understand it myself," Henry told him, thoughtfully.

Indy accepted the statement as nothing but the truth. "Could have something to do with loving you," he said, rather too glibly for his own liking. One of these days they were really going to have to sit down and talk properly about the mess they'd let themselves get into; maybe this ill-starred voyage down memory lane could provide them with such an opportunity.

"Could be." Henry's hand squeezed back, then released itself from Indy's grip. "Well, let's resign ourselves to the inevitable, then," he said, and led the way into the apartment.

The first evening in the apartment could have been uncomfortable, but Isla's telegrams of instruction to Mamma Leone had obviously been very thorough. All the shutters and windows had been thrown open the moment the day had begun to cool off, and fresh, soft evening air now reached every corner of the neglected rooms.

Henry wandered around as if in a trance, preoccupied with some matter he chose not to mention. One by one he visited each room in the apartment, occasionally stopping to lift and examine one or other of the numerous small objets d'art with which Donovan had always liked to surround himself. Very few of them had any great value - items of any real worth had been concealed long before the War had started; what remained were only interesting but worthless collectibles. He examined the bookshelves, too, flicking idly through the pages of some of the more interesting volumes before returning them to their places. It would have been plain even to someone who didn't know him as well as Indy that he was unsettled, restless and, though apparently tired, completely unable to relax.

The food the restaurant supplied was good and plentiful, and they ate beside an open window in a pleasant, graceful room, but Henry seemed uninterested in the food and pushed his plate away without having eaten much, getting up from the table wordlessly and leaving the room. Indy, by now more than merely concerned, picked up the Chianti bottle and two glasses and followed, abandoning his own meal to its fate.

He found his father in one of the wide, airy bedrooms overlooking the canal. Kicking the door shut behind him, he advanced to the dressing-table, set down the two glasses and filled them with wine, presenting one to Henry.

"Stop running away," he said, calmly.

"What?"

"Turn around and fight, like you usually do," Indy advised. "Whatever it is that's worrying you, it's time we talked about it."

Henry accepted the Chianti and drained the glass at a single swallow. "You're right, of course," he conceded. "Is there any more of this?"

"There's a cupboard full of it, off the kitchen. Something else the fascisti didn't find."

Henry crossed the room and poured himself another drink, deep in thought. "I never understood why Marcus took such great delight in drinking himself insensible," he said, savagely. "However, there are days when I do see the attractiveness of oblivion. This is one of those days."

Indy seated himself on the low windowsill, glass in hand, and watched the way the low evening light reflected on the surface of the water. "So tell me," he encouraged, deliberately not looking in his father's direction.

There was a long pause, during which it seemed Henry was never going to be able to bring himself to speak. At length, however, he began, with some circumspection. "Have you ever thought," he asked, "about old age? Your own? Other people's?"

"Not my own," his son conceded. "I never expected to see it; there seems to be some moron with a machine-gun around every corner who wants to make sure I don't grow old. Other people - I don't know. You ... Marcus ... yes, sometimes. People grow old. People die."

"And when a person reaches the age of seventy he suddenly finds his friends are beginning to die off around him," Henry told him, dolefully. "However intelligent, however vital he may have been in younger days, his acquaintances start treating him as though he were a mental defective lacking the capacity to do the simplest thing for himself, until he is virtually an outcast in his own life."

The bitterness of the tone wounded Indy, but he didn't turn to face his father, knowing that there were times when Henry liked to pretend their conversations just weren't taking place. This was such a time. "I didn't do that, did I?" he asked.

"Not to any great extent, no," Henry conceded. "Fortunately you don't seem to notice my age and Marcus is keeping pace with me. Even Anna hasn't fallen into the trap of believing I'm approaching senility - she makes no concessions whatever for age or frailty."

"Which is why you and Marcus are so crazy about her," Indy suggested, with a little laugh.

"Quite possibly. Dean Richardson, on the other hand ... the day I asked him to release me from my contract, he more or less implied that I should settle for the pipe and slippers by the fire. It was only by superhuman strength of will he managed to prevent himself saying 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant'."

"You - retire? Settle down to a sedentary existence with your books and papers? Henry, I never want to live to see that day."

"I feel the same way, I must admit. In fact, as you know, it's only with the greatest difficulty I remember my true age; it's been that way ever since Hatay." He pronounced the last word with a kind of careful reverence, which brought Indy's head swinging around towards him until their gazes locked across the dusk.

The younger man swallowed back the horror of the moment when he had seen his father shot, suppressed that memory ruthlessly in favour of one only slightly more recent; the miraculous recovery Henry had made when water from the Cup of Christ touched his lips.

"You drank from the Grail," he said, although neither of them needed to be reminded. "The knight had lived eight hundred years by drinking from the Grail. It restored your life - no reason why it shouldn't have lengthened it, as well."

"And yours," mused Henry. "After Donovan died, you drank from the True Grail too. No, you didn't need to tell me," he went on. "After what happened to poor Walter, you would never have brought that cup to me unless you'd tried it first. You drank, and therefore whatever effect the water had on me it has also had on you."

Indy nodded, having no wish to argue the point.

"Our lives, therefore, will be longer than those of our contemporaries."

"That's more or less what I figured," his son acknowledged, quietly.

"Good. Then for once we agree about something. I don't feel seventy-two, you neither feel nor look forty-six - am I correct?"

"You are." Someone a little further down the canal had a record-player by an open window. The sound of 'swing' bouncing off the ancient walls around them was aesthetically incongruous, but somehow comforting.

"Then why - ?" The question was not completed, but fell away on a note of despair. Indy's absence during the War had lasted almost six years. On his return he was both physically and emotionally ruined, weaker than he had been for thirty years. For months after that the pair had lived the kind of nightmare of readjustment usually reserved for the bereaved; days turned sour by hostile silences giving way to insomniac nights filled with recriminations, stubborn arguments erupting suddenly with vitriol as the two proud men fought to hold on to a love which was alternately lifeline and noose for them both. Henry had lost count of the times one or other of them had walked out, supposedly for ever. He had grown to hate and fear the bitter gleam in his son's eyes which heralded some cruelly cutting remark designed solely to wound him. "What is it you're afraid of, Indiana?"

"Afraid?" The helpless echoing of the word annoyed Indy, but he could not make himself answer.

"We used to be lovers," Henry said, pain evident in his tone. "I had hoped that one day ... Why are you afraid?"

Indy closed his eyes, let the influence of the wine fill his senses and bolster his courage. "I told Marcus we were coming here to fight dragons," he said. "I thought it was your dragon we were going to fight, not mine."

"There's no such thing," snapped his father, dangerously. "We're no longer separate entities, my boy; the last eight years have seen to that. We have made the sort of memories that can't be escaped or ignored. There is no 'you', no 'me' - whatever we have, we share."

"I know."

"Then talk to me, for heaven's sake. Tell me why you're willing to sleep beside me and give every evidence of affection, but not ... You're well again, and we've established that I'm not in imminent danger of quitting this life. Why are you still holding back?"

Indiana stared at the tiny amount of Chianti left in the glass as though the answer could be found there. "Because I still don't feel clean," he said, painfully. "Because I still don't feel good enough for you, after everything that happened in Singapore. Does that answer your question?"

"You know it doesn't. Do I really have to start at the beginning again with you, Indiana? Nothing that anyone else could do can change even for a moment the way I feel about you. I love you; I always have, and I always will. If you could only bring yourself to accept that, things might be as they were between us before you went away."

Indy crossed the room and upended the Chianti bottle into his glass. "Better get a couple more out of the kitchen," he mused, absently. "If I'm gonna be drinking at this rate."

Wisely Henry refrained from commenting.

Resuming his place on the windowsill the younger man squinted absent-mindedly along the canal, picking out the looming shapes of a few late sightseers in the gathering dusk. "Venice is falling apart," he said, morosely. "Everything decays. I feel as if I died back in Changi, Dad; what you got back wasn't really me. Maybe one day I'll be the same person I was, but for now ... you tell me I stopped a tank single-handed, and I have to believe you - but the guy who did that is dead. I'm the one Satoru Nagayama created."

"You're recovering well." The evening's gloom had penetrated the bedroom and swirled around them now, an invisible miasma of despair. "You're becoming fitter, stronger all the time. You exercise, you eat well, you sleep soundly ... "

"You don't."

"I know. I would have thought my reasons were obvious."

Indy turned and smiled at him affectionately. "They are. Of course they are." He reached out a hand. "And so are mine. Remember me telling you that I love you too much to have you hurt, even by me?"

Henry was on his feet in a moment and grasped the hand in both of his. "It was one of the more ridiculous things you've ever said," he commented, acidly. "I'm strong enough to bear a little pain on your account, I hope. How many times do I need to tell you that I'm in love with you because of who you are - and not for the sake of an imaginary ideal? If I was searching for some dream of perfection I would scarcely have looked for it in my own son, would I?"

"I don't know, Henry. The crazy things you do never cease to amaze me. No, don't answer that ... I'm sorry. I do take this seriously. Very seriously. Maybe I just feel that I'm so different now that it could never work the way it did. Maybe I just feel I don't ... deserve you any more."

Henry's voice shook alarmingly. "Shouldn't you let me decide that?" he asked, tone so husky it was almost inaudible. He removed the wineglass from Indy's suddenly numbed hand, setting it down on the floor.

Indy knew he was going to be kissed, and thoroughly, and he no longer had the energy to resist. As Henry approached him he closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and waited passively for it to happen. He was almost as submissive, as quiescent, as he had been with Nagayama; accepting this loving touch from Henry was far more difficult for him than accepting the Japanese officer's brutal treatment. He willed himself to relax, fighting down an instinct to push his father away, but when Henry's lips touched his for the first time in - how long? centuries? - all fight, all fear drained from his body instantly and he found himself collapsing into the older man's arms with an alacrity that was almost suicidal. A brief moment of disorientation, and then he ceased to resist and began to give, responding to the kiss with a hunger shocking in its intensity.

Below, on the canal that ran past the front of the building, the driver of a vaporetto looked upwards and saw an elderly man kissing a younger man passionately and, either in sympathy or disgust, sounded his boat's horn. Indy and Henry, temporarily removed to a planet where they were the only living beings, were totally unable to hear or to comprehend the sound.

As the kiss ended, Henry's arms tightened fiercely on his son and he pulled Indiana down against his chest, looking out with unseeing eyes into the indigo sky. Indy was shaking, although he could not have said why. Hideous visions passed through his mind, memories he'd crushed and killed a thousand times only to have them rise again to claw at his throat. He'd spent the War years, and the period of his captivity, firmly keeping his thoughts away from Henry and all knowledge of what they had shared; he'd managed it so effectively that his conscious mind had destroyed all recollection of that loving. He'd prepared himself, quite deliberately, for the possibility of Henry's death during his absence. He'd built a brick wall around his heart, keeping his love for Henry firmly contained within, presenting a bland and featureless exterior to the world.

Now, with his face buried in the rough tweed of Henry's waistcoat, the thud of Henry's heartbeat against his cheek, there was suddenly no need to maintain that wall any longer. Henry knew he had been ill-treated, and he knew how, and had accepted him anyway. After all that had happened, Henry still wanted him; that was what Indiana found incredible.

He'd adored his father since the moment he was old enough to pick out that one face from all the others crowding over his cradle. As he grew up, Henry had become the model by which he had lived his life; his idol, the centre of his universe. Much as the child had loved his mother, his father had always been the lodestar of his existence. That his devotion to Henry had metamorphosed into sexual desire had never really surprised Indy. The fact that his feelings were returned, and with interest, was what had disorientated him most. He had watched with an almost scientific detachment as the love of a son for his father had grown, deepened, taken on a new and terrifying life of its own - had turned into an obsessive need for the one person in the world who seemed to be doing most to try and push him away.

Marcus had recognised it, of course. Marcus had seen through the masks and disguises the pair of them had assumed in their pursuit of and flight from one another. Marcus had tried to comfort the young Indiana when Henry's hostility had reached its zenith; Marcus had soothed him and promised that one day things would be well between them - and yet Indy had never been able to acknowledge, even to such a close friend, that it was more than his father's attention and affection he craved.

In Germany, in Hatay - throughout their perilous quest for the Grail - he'd learned once again to admire with all his heart the energy, the humour, the courage that made Henry unique in his experience. He'd climbed back up the cliff, after Vogel and the tank had made their catastrophic descent, to find himself wound in Henry's arms and drawing strength from him as he had done when a child; when Henry was shot, his eyes had turned towards Indy's and communicated a fear that was greater than that of death - the newly-recognised terror of being parted. Indy remembered pulling Henry against him then and knowing he had his entire world encompassed in his arms. There was no getting away from it; Henry was and always had been everything he ever wanted in a friend, a parent, a companion or a lover.

He drew back a little, looked up into swimming dark eyes in which pinpoints of yellow light were reflected.

"Could we go to bed?" he asked, humbly.

Henry looked down at him, an elderly man given a new lease of life by this unconventional love.

"Of course."

Carefully he drew Indy to his feet, ushered him the few steps to the double bed with its crisp, clean sheets and coverlet of daffodil-yellow silk, and sat him down. Then, with hands that shook violently, Henry unfastened his son's shirt and slid his hands across the broad, warm chest.

"You're so much stronger," he whispered. "You were little more than a skeleton when you came home. I was afraid for you then; I never understood how you had lived through it."

"Neither did I." Awkwardly Indy was beginning to respond, fumbling with Henry's shirt buttons and stroking his throat with trembling fingertips. "Mallory helped. One of these days I've got to find that guy and thank him."

"I would like to thank him myself," Henry told him, softly. "I only ever wanted you back, you know. Wanting to sleep with you again is pure greed. Loving you as much as I do ... "

"Yeah, you see ... " Indy drew back, stood up, and began to remove his lower garments, " ... I was right. One way or another, I was always going to hurt you."

"My boy, loving someone involves giving them the power to hurt you. It's the willing sacrifice that turns away evil."

"I know that now." Indy slipped between the covers; the bed was cold, but not damp. Within moments Henry was beside him, kissing his face with a concentrated frenzy, dropping kisses onto his forehead, temples, closed eyelids, lips and throat. Indy relaxed into it, let his father set the pace, allowed the tide of Henry's love to take him and sweep him away wherever it would - abandoned himself, finally and forever, into Henry's care.

Afterwards, in the calm that followed the storm, the last of Indy's defences fell away completely. He lay in Henry's arms and told, haltingly, the entire saga of his captivity in Changi, leaving no detail undescribed, no incident unrelated. It was some time before he became aware that his father was soothing him, stroking his hair, absorbing all the pain into his own body and releasing him from the guilt and the sensation of worthlessness that had settled like a black cloud across his life.

"It's over," Henry whispered repeatedly.

"I know ... but I'll never forget it."

"I don't ask you to." There was massive wisdom in the father's tone as with gentle reassurance he began to salve the open wounds in his son's soul. "Only to start again, with me."

"What do you mean - start again?"

Henry lifted his son's hand to his lips and kissed the fingertips idly. "I have retired," he said, slowly. "Officially I am now free to do whatever I choose with my 'declining years'."

"You - declining? No-one would ever believe you were supposed to be seventy-two - especially if they knew what we'd just been doing." A mischievous glint was just perceptible in the younger man's eyes as he gazed with his customary amazement at the man with whom he lay.

"Nevertheless," Henry pursued his subject, relentlessly, "in the eyes of the world I am no longer necessary. You have a generous service pension, I have my savings, and we have the house - not to mention the royalties from the Grail book and a sizeable publisher's advance on the next one. As long as are prepared to adopt a reasonably frugal way of life, Indiana, I see no reason why either of us would ever need to work again."

"Are you serious? You mean we're free to go wherever we want? Live anywhere we like?"

"With the possible exception of a penthouse on Park Lane, yes. I've been working on the calculations for weeks, boy; Marcus and Anna are quite willing to find a place of their own, and what we get for the house should keep us for several years. Do I take it you like the idea?"

Indy snuggled against him, joyfully enthusiastic. "I'm beginning to hate home," he said. "I feel like a complete anachronism there now. Let the younger guys move in and take over, Dad ... we'll stay out of the way. At any rate, after a few years people would probably start to wonder why we weren't getting any older."

"That was what I thought. Therefore we'll need to keep moving ... or to find somewhere to settle where we aren't known, and give the world a chance to forget about us."

Indy luxuriated in the words and in the concept they offered; his mind's eye filled with images of wild landscapes and secret hideaways, a world in which the residents numbered only two. "Maybe it's time for me to make a home for you," he mused. "Literally."

Henry chuckled indulgently. "What did you have in mind?"

"I don't know yet - but you can write your book more or less anywhere, can't you?"

"Yes - only I think I'd like to be as far away from so-called civilisation as possible."

"Then I believe I can provide just what the Professor ordered. Let me arrange it?"

Henry had watched his son's thought processes with devoted amusement. "Certainly," he responded, affectionately. "Name the place and the time, my boy, and I'll be there with you. 'Whither thou goest, I will go'."

For a moment they exchanged a look which could never have been expressed in words; a look which brought together the final loose threads of their lives and bound them tightly to one another - this time, at long last, inseparably.

"We'll have to say 'goodbye' to Marcus," Indy reminded his father, drawing back a little out of his embrace.

"Quite so." It was obviously a matter he had considered already, but was not as yet prepared to discuss.

"Okay." With a convulsive movement not unlike the beginnings of another earthquake, Indy hauled himself out of bed and on to the floor.

"Where on Earth are you going?" asked Henry, bemused.

Indy's grin was broad and delightful even in the reduced light.

"The kitchen," he explained. "For supplies - more Chianti, some bread and cheese. I thought that bearing in mind the number of things we seem to want to say and do to each other we'd probably be staying in bed a couple more days."

"Days?" his father echoed, scandalised.

"What's wrong with that?" Immediately Indy was concerned, defensive. Had he somehow upset the older man?

Henry's tone held a mildness and a soft humour that expressed all he had ever needed to say to his son. "I merely thought," he said, "that since you're no longer damaged and I'm no longer old you might be reckoning in terms of weeks rather than mere days."

Indy paused in the middle of the room, uncertain whether or not he had imagined the teasing words on his father's lips - then recrossed the floor, threw his arms around Henry, and kissed him avidly.

"You're insane," he said, "and I love you. And at this rate we could well end up starving to death."

Henry lifted the bedcovers for his son to slide in beside him.

"You're absolutely right," he said, meekly. "But probably not before morning."

With these words he pulled Indy down onto the bed, wrapped him in arms that were strong enough, now, to keep the world at bay forever, and for some considerable time after that allowed him no opportunity to reply.

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