Author Note: I'm so sorry for the delay, I really have no excuse other then I was working on other stuff. Some of which will make it up on at some point.

Enjoy! And as always, feedback is loved.

Family Ties – 5

His dad enrolls him in school; they don't talk about it other than his parents saying that he's going to PC High and that he won't be going home any time soon. They don't ask his opinion on the matter, he could stay with Uncle Vito or his Grams and he thinks about saying that but his father has his 'don't argue with me' face on and his mom his biting her lip and nodding in agreement with everything he says.

So he doesn't offer up Uncle Vito or Grams, and he grudgingly goes shopping for new school supplies with his mom and Max.

He knows he's going to hate it. The only good thing about school in Bensonhurst had been Frankie and Lydia, and half the time Frankie hadn't even gone and Lydia was all pissed off at him right before…

His mind skitters away from that thought.

"You have everything?" his mom asks, he rolls his eyes, there's a backpack slung over his shoulder, new and barely broken in, there's new pencils and pens and notebooks and folders and he wants his old beat up backpack that half the time wouldn't zip shut but he's pretty sure that's either in police evidence or in a trashcan somewhere.

"I've got it," he says.

"How about your pills?" she runs a hand over his head, smoothing down his hair and he wrinkles his nose at her.

"I took one already, I shouldn't need one again until later," Dante says.

"You should take them with you just in case," she glances around, Max is waiting at the door to take him to school.

"If I take them I have to give them over to the nurse," Dante says, then he'll have to explain why he has to take them and then it'll be all over his new school before second period that he was one of those kids that got grabbed by the sicko pervert that killed a couple of other boys.

The cast he can explain away, if they know the whole story…

He'd rather be the new kid, certainly doesn't want to be labeled the damaged goods kid even though he knows that eventually the whole story will make the papers. When it does he doesn't think it's irrational to want Frankie and Lydia there for buffer.

"If you need to come home," his mom starts.

"It'll be fine," he promises. He doesn't even think he's lying to her.

OF + SC = DF

Everyone is staring at him as Max walks behind him into the school, they whisper behind raised hands and the hallway is crowded so he keeps his casted arm tucked tight against his body. There's a lot of kids and they're all looking at him or moving around him in the hallway.

Maybe he should have given it a couple more days. A week, a month. Maybe his mom and dad would be open to home schooling.

Max steers him in the direction of the front office and has a whispered conversation with a secretary. An older man comes out of the back office and Dante's been in enough Principal office's sitting side by side with Frankie to know what one looks like.

"You must be Dante Corinthos," he says, his voice is loud and carries and pretty much anyone that wasn't already sneaking him looks starts blatantly staring at him.

"Falconeri," he says, the Principal looks at him with a confused expression on his face. "My name is Dante Falconeri, my mom…" he bites his lip and shifts on his feet.

"Ms. Swarthout has your schedule here," the Principal says, he's still looking at Dante with some small measure of confusion. Dante could really just explain that because of the line of business that his father is in that his parents had decided that Dante should carry Olivia's family name instead of Sonny's.

He doesn't really have the energy to though.

Maybe once this is all over with his name will change, like everything else in his life that's changing; and there's some, small part of him that kind of wants to be Dante Corinthos, proof in the form of a name that he has a dad and that dad actually wants him back.

"Elizabeth?" the Principal calls and a young woman appears to the left, she's wearing baggy pants and a long-sleeved shirt, her arms are wrapped around her books and they're pulled tight against her chest.

"Why don't you show Mr.… Falconeri around, show him how to read his class schedule and make sure he knows where his locker is."

"Yes, sir."

Max takes the schedule from the secretary and does a quick glance at it before he hands it over to Dante, Dante is 99% sure that if his dad doesn't already have a copy of his schedule that he'll have one as soon as Max takes up position at his side once more.

"Jason will pick you up out front at 2:50," Max says and Dante nods.

He claps Dante on the shoulder and grins, "I'm supposed to tell you to have a good day at school and call if you need anything."

"It'll be fine," Dante shrugs, "it's school."

He doesn't say 'what could go wrong' even though it's on the tip of his tongue, because why jinx himself.

OF + SC = DF

It takes 97 minutes, almost the length of one and a half classes for someone to say, "You're Sonny Corinthos' son."

He rolls his eyes. "Sonny Corinthos is my dad, yeah."

"But you don't use his name," the kid continues. "Why not?"

"Would you in this town if you had another option," the kid looks at him then shrugs.

"Good point," the kid holds out his hand and grins at him, "Lucky Spencer."

"Dante," he says.

"We know," Lucky says and Dante blinks at the 'we' until he notices another young man, dark hair, dark eyes, and a young woman standing beside Elizabeth. "You should come have lunch with us."

"I'm not supposed to go off campus unless I call…" Dante starts patting his pockets looking for the new cell phone that his mom had given him that morning to replace the one that the pervert who grabbed him had destroyed.

"We're just going down to Kelly's," Elizabeth says softly. She doesn't have any books in her arms, though she appears to be clinging to her bag pretty tightly. Dante's sure there's a story there, and he's equally sure that it's not one that'll be shared with him any time soon.

OF + SC = DF

They're having a quick bite when Dante comes in, he's got Lucky Spencer on one side and Emily Quartermaine on the other, Nikolas Cassadine and Elizabeth Webber follow on their heels.

Lucky appears to be telling a story, hands waving, as they come in.

Sonny raises an eyebrow and waits for Dante to notice him.

When he does he stops dead in his tracks, Lucky shoots him a confused look until he sees Sonny and Jason sitting there, he makes a face but smiles. Lucky doesn't really like Jason, Sonny's pretty sure that's because of the badly disguised crush that Elizabeth appears to have on him.

"I called mom," Dante says when he approaches them, the others don't follow, he pats the pocket that Sonny figures he has his cellphone in.

"You should have called me, or Jason," Sonny says. Dante's in Port Charles now and Sonny has a lot of enemies that would be willing to go through his son to get to him. He'll have a lot more in a few months and he's been thinking seriously about Witness Protection for both Olivia and Dante once it's done.

"I called mom," Dante says again, he pulls his casted arm across his chest and wrinkles his brow at him. "And I was with a group, you said that as long as I was with a group that had more than two people…"

Sonny remembers that conversation, it was one they'd had back in Bensonhurst when Sonny had thought he could protect Dante and Olivia from the fall out of his choices by just not bringing them to Port Charles and putting them in a position where he would need to protect them in the first place.

He'd forgotten that there are other evils in the world, and the majority of them he has little to no control over.

"We're going to order," Lucky says, he appears on Dante's left and Sonny looks and sees that while Dante's been defending his decision to not call him when he left the school that Nikolas and Lucky had pulled two tables side by side and Nikolas and the girls are already sitting.

They're very pointedly not looking in their direction; Sonny thinks they might be talking about the weather.

"Okay, I'll see you after school?" Dante asks, Sonny nods.

"I'm making pasta and garlic bread," Sonny says. It's one of Dante's comfort meals, and like clockwork Dante's eyes light up, some of the darkness, some of the dullness that has been ever present since they got him back dimming.

"With the good sauce?" Dante asks.

"Is there any other kind?" Sonny says, Lucky just looks between them and then heads over to the tables, Dante gives him a half grin and follows.

"At least he's making friends," Jason says. His fingers are wrapped around his glass and his expression is neutral.

Sonny gives a slight incline of his head that indicates that he heard, he doesn't voice the thought that Dante making friends hadn't really been his priority.

OF + SC = DF

He calls Frankie when he gets to the penthouse.

He can't call the penthouse home yet; home is the yellow house with white shutters that he's lived in for as long as he can remember with his mother and periodic visits from his father.

It has posters that he's hung on the walls and pictures of his friends tacked up and a dent in the bottom of the door where he got mad and kicked it when his parents ganged up on him and told him he couldn't be friends with Frankie anymore.

The penthouse is new and the room that has been designated as his has nothing that really is his, he's sure that his mom or dad has already sent someone to the yellow house with white shutters to pack up their belongings and bring them here.

Dante doesn't know if hanging up his posters and tacking up his pictures and having his own clothes in the closet will make the penthouse even closer to a home.

It feels cold, he wants his house and his friends.

"So how was it?" Frankie asks by way of greeting, he hears shuffling and a voice and he knows that Lydia is there, the two of them hovering over the phone so they can both hear him.

"It was okay," Dante shrugs, he lies back on his bed, head propped up on two pillows, his old room had glow in the dark stars from when he was a kid and was going through his space phase. He'd outgrown it but the stars hadn't come down.

"Did you meet anyone?" Lydia asks. "Did you make friends?"

"You know…" Dante starts.

"You're stuck there for the foreseeable future," Lydia says sensibly. "Friends will make the fact that you're stuck there suck less."

He hears Frankie make a noise on the other end and Dante knows that in this matter he and Frankie are in perfect agreement.

He doesn't need or want new friends.

He has Frankie and Lydia and that had always been enough for all three of them.

"I met a couple of people," he says, he doesn't know if he'll call Lucky, Nikolas, Emily or Elizabeth friends. But they're companions and at the very least he won't have to eat lunch by himself.

Or risk being called the anti-social mobsters kid and have every looking at him like they expect him to bring a gun to school.

"We were thinking about coming up this weekend," Frankie says. "Do you think your dad will flip completely out if we do?"

"I think as long as you guys don't decide to stay overnight they won't really care," Dante thinks. Though his dad sort of unreasonably, in his opinion, doesn't like Frankie, so he could be really wrong about that.

"Your mom called to tell us that you were okay, but we'd kind of like to see for ourselves," Lydia says softly.

"I'm okay," Dante says. He doesn't tell them about the bruises and the broken arm and the fact that so far he hasn't been able to sleep through the night without some sort of help; they'll find out about the bruises and the broken arm. And by the time one of them will be in the position to know about the other thing he's hoping that it'll be a non-issue.

"Well we'll judge that for ourselves," Frankie mutters and Lydia makes sound that speaks of agreement.

Dante grins.

"I miss you guys."

OF + SC = DF

Johnny knows what his father wants him to do. And it's not like he's shy about his sexuality or about any of the partners his father knows (and doesn't know) about. But there's a line that has to be drawn and he draws it at seducing a sixteen year-old kid.

Especially since he knows that sixteen year-old kid has just gone through hell and back and is probably considering hiding under a rock a valid life-style choice.

Claudia wouldn't have a problem seducing the boy, Dante, but Claudia isn't there at the moment, there's just Johnny and his dad and his dads plots and plans.

Still, even though Johnny refuses to take the kid to his bed and fuck him up even more then he probably already is, he can't completely ignore the fact that even a friendship would go a long way in solidifying some sort of alliance between their families.

So he's been watching the kid, trying to get a feel for how to approach him without looking like some sort of psycho pervert himself. He's not being as discreet as he should be, he knows this, but he also kind of wants the kid to notice him. He's not much for subtle, has never really seen a point to being subtle.

Begin subtle doesn't get you want you want has been his experience. So he's there and pretty blatant about the fact that he's watching Dante. And he's waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Dante to notice him blatantly watching him.

And he does, finally, about four days after Johnny starts showing up at Kelly's to watch him interact with his new friends at both lunchtime and after school time. Dante corners him outside Kelly's, Johnny looks through the window and sees Dante's new friends at their usual table, Dante's usual chair next to Lucky empty, then Dante latches onto his arm with the hand not in the cast (strong grip, Johnny thinks idly) and drags him away.

"Look, I've already done the pervert pedo thing, I really don't need a repeat performance," Dante says, just spits it out and he sounds like Sonny when he's really mad.

All stiff voice and barely veiled anger that needs about 30 more seconds before hell hath no fury and fire and brimstone starts raining down. His dad delights in making Sonny lose that composure.

"I'm not looking for you to repeat it either," Johnny shakes his head. He's not going to lie to the kid (not yet at least, maybe in a few years) he's probably got enough people lying to him or telling him half truths in the vein of protecting him.

"Then the whole stalker thing needs to really be done, you stop I don't tell my dad and find out if he really makes people swim with the fishes or if those were just stories that he told Frankie and me to scare us."

"Your dad does make people swim with the fishes," Johnny smirks. "But then so does my dad so we've got that in common."

Dante blinks at him, eyes narrowing. Johnny's grin gets a little wider, wilder. He'd kind of figured that Sonny would have sat the kid down with a stack of pictures and a lecture on these are the people that you should run away from if you ever see them.

"Johnny Zacchara," he says, he holds out his hand and Dante looks at it then up at him and back again before he takes it.

OF + SC = DF