Title: Reconciliation Part Three
Author: Aeon Cole
Rating: FRT
Warning: Slash
Fandom: CSI Miami
Pairing: Horatio/Speed
Prompt: #20 Memories
Word Count: 1320
Summary: Tim gets a phone call that changes his outlook on life and gives him the chance to reconcile with his father.
Chapter Summary: Tim does some reflecting.
Disclaimer: Arya and Michael Speedle belong to me. The rest do not.
Horatio was lying on his back in bed having what he considered to be a very pleasant dream when he was awoken by a noise in the room. His eyes fluttered open and he turned his head to the side. Tim was restless and muttering in his sleep. Horatio rolled to his side and gently nudged his lover to wake him from his disturbed sleep.
Tim's eyes flew open and he sat up quickly. "What the…" he said, startled.
Horatio reached out for him. "It's okay," he replied soothingly. "You were having another nightmare."
Tim fell back on his pillow and rubbed a hands over his face. He sighed. "What is this, like, the fifth time I woken you up over the past couple nights."
As Michael's surgery date approached, he was becoming more and more restless and distracted. He wasn't sleeping well. The doctor's had said that his father had a really good chance of surviving the surgery but that it was only postponing the inevitable. Michael had refused chemo.
Tim had been quiet for a while. He lay there staring at the ceiling. Finally Horatio asked, "You okay?"
Tim let out a long breath. "I'm worried," he said.
"Well, that's understandable. Your father's about to have major surgery," Horatio said trying to sound reassuring.
Tim shook his head. "It's not that so much. My dad's a tough old bastard. He'll come through the surgery, I'm sure."
Horatio raised an eyebrow. "What then?"
Again Tim was silent for a few moments and Horatio waited patiently for him to answer. Finally he said, "I'm worried about what's going to happen when we go to New York next month."
"You're worried about how he'll react to you, to us?"
"Yeah, but, I also worried about how I'll react to him," Tim replied. "I mean, I know we've been talking and all. But I feel like we've both been walking on eggshells. Neither of us has mentioned what happened seventeen years ago." Tim paused and took a breath. "Talking to him on the phone is different somehow, more distant. It's easier for me to separate myself from what happened. I'm afraid that when I see him…," he shrugged. "I don't know."
He brought his hands up to his face again. Horatio propped himself up on one elbow and laid a hand on Tim's chest. "If you don't want to go…"
"I do want to go," Tim interrupted him. "I need to go. I need to see him." He looked up into Horatio's eyes. "I can't have the last thing that I said to him face to face be 'I hate you and never want to see you again.'"
Horatio winced and pulled Tim into a hug. Tim hadn't told him about that before and he realized that he really knew very little about Michael Speedle. He wondered how much of the demise of their relationship was Michael's doing and how much was Tim's.
"Why don't you tell me about him?" he asked.
Tim looked up at him. "What do you want to know?"
"Arya's told me some stories about him from when you were little. She makes it sound like he was a great guy, a good father. What do you remember?"
Tim's mind drifted back in time to when he was a child. "We had a lot of fun back then," he said. "I was an only child, so was my dad. He understood what it was like not to have any brothers or sisters to play with. My mom is a middle child in a family of eight. She frequently had no idea what to do with me when I got bored. My dad would play with me, read to me. As I got older we would talk for hours at the restaurant while he worked."
Tim fell into silence. "But you never talked to him about being gay?"
"Around the time I was twelve, I was just becoming aware of my sexuality. My dad decided it was time to tell me about girls. He didn't hold anything back either. I listened and when he was done I told him that I didn't think I liked girls. The implication was that I thought I liked boys instead. He misunderstood and he basically told me that that was because I was still young and that that would change as I got older. Boys like girls after all."
Tim propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at Horatio. "I think that that one misunderstanding is ultimately what lead to all of our problems later on," he said. Even in the darkened room, Tim could see Horatio's puzzled look and he smirked. "Kid logic," he said. "In my mind I took what he'd said to mean that when you're a kid you like boys and as you get older you like girls."
Horatio nodded his understanding. "But that change never happened," he said.
"No, never happened," Tim replied. "In fact two years later is when I ran into Seth in the locker room after soccer practice. The locker room was just foreplay. Later that afternoon he took me somewhere private and showed me how things really worked. After that I knew things would never change. It just felt right."
Horatio nodded, remembering his first time with a man and how different it felt for his experience with girls. He wondered at the affect on Tim's young mind of that first encounter though, with nothing to compare it to. He hadn't had his first sexual encounter, with a girl, until he was much older, just after he'd graduated high school. And it was a very clumsy one at that, he remembered.
"Did it ever occur to you to talk to your father about it after that?" he asked.
"Sure, lots of times," Tim answered. "But he'd been so sure of himself when he said that eventually I would start liking girls that I didn't really know how to contradict that. I'd never had to tell him that I thought he was wrong before."
"But things were okay between the two of you?"
"Yeah. Our relationship changed somewhat as I got older. I had plenty of friends in high school, both male and female. My father always assumed that the boys were friends and the girls were more than friends. Of course he had it exactly backwards. He had this image of who I was and I never did anything to dissuade that." Tim shook his head. "Maybe I should have. But after a while it just became easier to let him believe what he wanted to about me."
Horatio was beginning to understand the dynamic of the relationship between Tim and his father. He decided to ask a question that had been rolling around in his head while Tim was talking. "Do you think he felt betrayed, in the end?"
Tim was silent for a moment. This was something that hadn't occurred to him, though he'd always wondered at his father's extreme reaction to finding out about him all those years ago.
"I don't know,' he replied honestly. He became contemplative. "I suppose he did. That would explain a lot. I mean, I guess I'd never really lied to him about anything else. And he'd always been honest with me, as far as I knew. I never thought of it that way before."
Suddenly Tim felt a wave of guilt about not talking to his father when he was a kid, right at the beginning. He began to wonder, if he had, how his father would have reacted, how things might have been different. He sighed.
He laid back down and rested his head on Horatio's shoulder. "I need to see him, to talk to him face to face."
Horatio rested an arm around his shoulders and placed a kiss on the top of his head. "You'll get your chance. I promise."
TBC