Fic: Out, Doors (Due South)

2008-04-21T18:27:07Z

Due South - Fraser/Vecchio; PG-13, 2690 words

Disclaimer: Due South (c) Paul Haggis. The author makes no claim to owning the rights to the originating stories or characters.

Note: Written for Livejournal's F/V ficathon community Fraser-Vecchio and Aingeal. AU to the series, a little, unless you ignore the last two seasons, but isn't that often the way with Fraser/Vecchio fics.

Out, Doors

'Look, two people can go out together, as friends. It's perfectly normal. It doesn't always have to be, you know, a date.'

'Even if the two are... involved?'

'It's up to them to decide it they're involved or not, okay, both of them, together. It's not something you can automatically assign, like you do this, you must be doing that. No. That's like... like...'

'Like seeing a young man grab an old lady's purse and assuming he's robbing her?'

'Kinda, although I wouldn't blame you for jumping into that particular conclusion in this city. But we ain't talking about a crime here, Benny, we're talking about two people going out to have a nice dinner in a nice restaurant...'

'...Dancing, strolling on the balcony under a canopy...'

'...Dancing, as you say, having a good time...'

'...Kissing, in fact, all the way to the car.'

'You have heard about friends with benefits, right?'

'So what you're basically saying, Ray, is that there are situations where no one interpretation can be assigned, despite overwhelming circumstantial evidence.'

'That's exactly what I'm saying.'

Benny shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. 'I don't suppose... there's anything I can say to convince you to at least consider the alternative, in this particular case?'

'Look, all I'm saying is it's possible, okay?'

'Ray.' Fraser's voice was conciliating, now. 'I think you should at least consider the possibility that Francesca may have been telling the truth about being engaged.'

'I know my sister, Benny, she would never marry a man she just met three weeks ago.' He said it with conviction that almost managed to fool himself.

'Love can be a funny thing, Ray.'

'It's not love, okay? She'll wake up tomorrow and poof, it'll all be gone, like a bad dream.'

'For a bad dream, it did look remarkably pleasant.'

They were silent for a while. The streetlights and shop windows that lit up the night whirled past, leaving fluorescent trails on the egdes of sight. The traffic was high for the late hour.

'Huh,' said Fraser, at last.

Ray glanced at him, saw his features half in shadow, reliefed against the flash of a passing car's headlights. 'What?'

'Nothing.'

'You always say nothing. Come on.'

'I was just thinking about that term - "friends with benefits".'

'You do know what it means, don't you?'

'Ray, we're friends, aren't we?'

'Of course we are. You're my best friend, Benny.'

'I thought so.'

Fraser fell silent again, in that way he had, where the presence of his thoughts lay loud between them, pressing into Ray's mind until he had to either shout or hit something or hear them spoken. He could feel their pressure now, filling the tight space of the car. Even Diefenbaker snorted in his sleep on the back seat.

'What?!' he snapped at last.

'Hm?'

'Talk to me, mountie, I know there's something bothering you.'

'It's just... You and me, Ray. Is that what we are?'

Ray slammed the breaks, swirved to the side of the road, and barely missed scraping the car on a streetlight. He parked the Riv a little more carefully, by the side of a brightly lit adult video store.

He turned off the engine calmly and turned to his partner. 'Look, Benny, I'm going to say it now, so make sure you listen.' His voice dropped low, to that point close to whispering where he could let the edge go, let the detective go. 'You're my friend and my partner. You're the best man I ever met and if anyone ever hurt you, I'd kill them. I put you before my own family once and may God forgive me, I think I'd do it again. And,' his voice regained an edge of angry dismissal, 'you're anything but some casual lay, Fraser.' Now it was all whisper, saturated with that secret tenderness. 'You're my lover.'

Fraser's fingers fumbled in the dark, closed around the back of Ray's head, pulled him close. Ray's fingers tightened on Fraser's dark coat sleeves, crushed the fabric. Fraser felt the prickling of short hair on his cheek, and the curious sensation of constricted breath and cramped space and of joy, like a phantasm of pure open north territories beauty stretching out into the blue sky. Happiness.

A muffled sound and a sudden tremble broke into this feeling. 'Fraser. Benny. Love.' Ray's face was lost in shadow; his voice was louder now, broken, struggling like a man fallen into a crack in the ice. 'I'm so sorry I can't say it out loud, all the time, everywhere. I'm sorry. I can't.'

'Shh,' Fraser said, holding him. 'All right, Ray. It's all right.' He pulled him up, and kissed him, there under the glow of the shop window, the flashing neon, the passing headlights; in the anonymity of night.

'You deserve--' Ray said between kisses, '--better.'

'Doesn't exist.'

Dief, who had felt a seat bump, raised his head to see them wrangle, but put it down between his paws again soon after. He'd seen it before.

---

Two months before.

Dief rushed off into the thicket, barking after the stick. Ray had to shade his eyes to see him run - the sun was shining brightly between the trees; they were still thick on this side of the cabin, but the ground sloped down beyond the thicket, sweeping down into a valley. Diefenbaker's form got lost among the white patches of snow still clinging to ground.

'Huh,' Fraser intoned. Ray had heard his footsteps approaching, which meant he'd been intended to. Fraser had his arms full of firewood from the shack.

'Huh what, Fraser?'

'He doesn't usually do that out here - run after sticks, I mean. You know he'd never hurt you or me, but he tends to revert at least partly back to his wild self when he's far from the city. He'd be more likely to be chasing game.'

'Yeah, well, maybe he mistook it for a hotdog and reverted back to his urban self all over again.' Diefenbaker was loping back towards them with the stick in his mouth, and the two men noticed with some surprise that it did indeed bear a resemblance to a hotdog.

'Huh,' they said in unison.

They slept that night listening to the crackle of fire in the fireplace, curled up in their sleeping bags. Ray had been too bone-tired after the climb, the open air, and all the hammering to even notice he wasn't in his own bed, but he woke up with sore muscles and a runny nose, as the fire had gone out and the early spring chill had ambushed the partially repaired cabin. He struggled up and wasn't the least surprised to see Fraser's sleeping bag neatly tucked away, and hear the clatter of dishes around the corner in the cabin's kitchen.

He fell back, remembering his dream, and closed his eyes in quiet gratitude that it had all been a dream: the blood on his hand, his hand on his badge on the table in front of Walsh, the look in the lieutenant's eye, and the newspaper article under his badge reporting the accidental death of a mountie in a police shooting.

There were two axes by the fireplace.

Later that day, out on the yard, when they were both warm from the work, Ray put his hand on Fraser's arm just to make doubly sure he was really there, and Fraser looked up with those innocent blue eyes of his and Ray became very conscious of how alone they were, here in the middle of wilderness. All around him he felt what he didn't dare to voice.

'I,' he said. It was all he said.

By that evening he had also managed 'Love.' There hadn't been much talking in between.

---

Benton Fraser watched the contours of his lover's face, painted pale by the white afternoon sun behind a thick layer of clouds, its light slanted through the window of Ray's bedroom at the Vecchio house. Ray lay back on the bed, spent, half-dressed. The shadow of his clavicle stretched out along his chest.

It had been strange making love to him in silence.

He put his hand on that clavicle, and Ray shifted, smiled so sweetly that Benton thought his heart would break. Somewhere down the corridor, he could hear a spirited argument and a loud video game in vigorous progress, and downstairs a tea kettle was whistling. Ray pulled him down on top of him and kissed him again, soft and prickly. Fraser's fingertips felt the beginnings of stubble on his cheek, and it was still as sensual to him as that very first time under the blue skies.

This was where they met, in the silence between two skins.

---

'So, how's Manny?' said Ray, grinning.

Francesca shot him a look of hatred over the kitchen table and her buttered sandwich. 'That's nice, Ray. Real mature. Did Mom tell you?'

Ray leaned on the doorframe with the satisfied air of a well-fed cat. 'You can't blame me for being curious. We're practically family, me and Manny, now that you guys are engaged.'

'We're not engaged, okay, it's over. And I don't know what I ever saw in that guy. And Ray, please stop giving me that "told you so" face, it's really not helping.' Her voice broke on the last syllable and she turned to her coffee. That was how Ray knew without looking that Fraser was standing behind him.

'Perhaps I should go,' Fraser said, looking kind and concerned. For a moment Ray imagined what it would feel like to have that look directed towards him and know it meant nothing. He wondered for the first time how that must twist in her heart.

With a last secret touch of his hand Fraser was gone, and Ray turned back to Frannie, feeling a little rotten. Frannie was shredding cucumber slices with a little too much enthusiasm.

'I know you didn't like him,' she said. 'I knew that. Maybe I even knew it wasn't perfect but you have no idea how much I...' she paused, stuck the knife into the cutting board vehemently. 'You really have no idea.'

'Frannie, the guy was a crook. You'll find someone better.'

'You don't want me to be with anybody!' she yelled.

'I do, with the right guy! I want you to be happy, damn it!'

'Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well how about not parading your damn boyfriend around when I've just lost mine, Ray, how about that?'

Ray had gone pale. He attempted a laugh. 'Are you talking about Fraser?'

'Everything I want you have, and you don't even want to admit you have it? God Ray, the day you grow up is the day... melons... turn purple and... blow up! By themselves!'

'That doesn't even make any sense!'

'Just shut up and go away, Ray,' she said, every syllable dripping hostility.

'Frannie,' he said, but she picked up a bread knife and pointed it at him.

'Out!'

'You do know you're brandishing a weapon at a police officer, right?'

'Out, or it'll be a one-eyed police officer!'

Ray backed out. Francesca watched him all the way out the door and listened to his footsteps down the corridor, and for the slam of the door.

She finished her sandwich, and cried a little.

---

So they know. Ray could barely see the wheel in front of him, let alone the traffic, and it was half luck, half instinct that preserved both him and the Riviera.

He got stuck in a traffic jam on Buckley Road. It was a hot midsummer for Chicago. Ray sweated and waited and sweated some more, and somewhere between two turns he came back to himself.

He got to the station just fifteen minutes behind schedule, thanks to a shortcut that might have earned him a ticket if the city's traffic control hadn't been understaffed since 1939. The smell of wet paper and dog sweat greeted him. There were seven poodles and a chinchilla in the lobby, and an elderly transvestite was trying to convince reception that they were the Chicago ASPCA.

'Just another day of fine policework, eh, Elaine?' he said as he maneuvered through the crowds to his desk. She answered with a pained look. 'Hey Fraser,' Ray said, seeing his partner sitting by his desk.

'Good morning again, Ray.'

'How's the consulate?'

'I didn't say I'd been to the consulate, Ray.'

'No, but the sand on your shoes is exactly like the finer grains of granite that are to be found only around the Canadian consulate, here in Chicago.'

'You didn't even look at my shoes.' Fraser peered down at his spotless boots.

'Okay, you want to know how I know you've been to the consulate? Because you always go to the consulate in the morning to make sure your desk is clean. And then you come in here, because it always is.'

'Then why didn't you say so?'

'I was pulling your leg, okay, Fraser? We can't all be rustic outdoors Sherlock Holmes.'

'You know, Ray, even though the usual impression people have of Sherlock Holmes is of an urban intellectual, he was depicted as a man of action when the circumstances called for it, and eventually preferred beekeeping to life in the city.'

'Sherlock Holmes, walking encyclopedia, whatever. I never thought I'd end up dating either.'

'Dating, Ray?'

'Going out with, being in a relationship with, sleeping with, whatever you want to call it. What do you want to call it? By the way, do you prefer to be called lover or boyfriend? I've kind of always been called a boyfriend, though no-one ever did me the courtesy of asking. In Canada you probably call it neglivapisy or something.'

Wonder had settled on Fraser's brow, and on his lips the beginnings of a careful smile. 'I think you mean negligevapse, Ray, although that's just the Inuit and also, that means "I love you", not... "lover".'

'I'm okay with lover.'

They looked at each other over the papers on Ray's desk, a little stupid with love.

'Huh!' This time it was neither of them. Ray looked up over his shoulder at the astonished face of Hewey.

'What?' said Ray, irritated. 'You'd do him if you could.'

Janet from the archives, two paces away, shrugged and smiled at Hewey. 'I know I would.'

'Doesn't it just figure!' said Ms Stravinsky, a defence attorney, with a sigh.

Elaine was there too, with her mouth open. Then her face screwed up. 'God! Of course! I'm such an idiot!' She turned and half-ran towards the reception.

'Hey, we can still be friends!' Ray called after her, grinning.

'Ray,' Fraser said helplessly.

'What?'

'Can I just...' Words failing, he took Ray by the arm, and they pushed through the thickening crowd.

'Where do you think you're going, Vecchio?' shouted Welsh from the other side of the room. 'You were late again!'

'There was traffic on Buckley and Kennedy, sir. Fraser, where are we going?'

'In the closet.'

'A little late now, darling,' said Ms Stravinsky.

The door of the closet slammed shut behind them. The light flickered and went out.

'Fraser.'

'Ray.'

'You're okay with this, right? I guess I should have asked you, but Frannie knows and I know everybody should know. Really, I always did. I was an idiot and I was afraid of what they'd think or what they'd do to me, Fraser, but I don't have to be, do I?'

'Ray...'

'Bring it on, right, Benny? It's not worth it.'

'Ray, shush.'

'Shush? Who ever says shush?'

'Shush.' Fraser stepped up through the darkness and kissed him, pulled him up against him, fit their angles together like two pieces of a puzzle - like two broken-off pieces of a single whole.

After a while, there was a loud knocking on the door. 'Okay, very nice, we're all happy for you two queers, now come on out here and do your goddamn job, Vecchio!'

They broke off. 'I guess we'd better...'

'Yeah.'

They grinned at each other in the dark, and left the closet, hand in hand.

Fic: Not an Omen At All (Discworld)

2008-03-27T08:13:47Z

Discworld - Lacrimosa de Magpyr; PG, 100 words

Disclaimer: Discworld (c) Terry Pratchett. The author makes no claim to owning the rights to the originating stories or characters.

Not an Omen At All

Lacrimosa laid out the turtle spread, remembering it was a holy symbol in many religions and that this meant nothing, as their ability to harm vampires lay in the vampire's own mind. Thinking all this made her angry with the effort.

Her father thought this was a good way to train the eye, since Caroc cards were famously ripe with symbology. They were leaving for Lancre the next day. He thought they could use practice.

She frowned at the deck, at its (clearly coincidental) message. The Ruler was crossed with The Witch, and followed by The Tower struck with lightning.

Hyelandia

Fic: Out, Doors (Due South)

Fic: Not an Omen At All (Discworld)