New F/K Story: The Question of Ghosts (R)

[arrow00]

Title: The Question of Ghosts
Podfic read by 2corbies
Author: arrow00
Fandom: dS
Pairing: Fraser/RayK
Rating: R
Category: FT, h/c
Wordcount: 6,375
Warning: primary character death
Beta: the fantastic nos4a2no9, whose insight and suggestions proved invaluable.
Summary:  It didn't matter, Fraser thought, if sometimes the flicker of Ray's reflection graced the curve of his

Comments

[j_s_cavalcante]

I'm glad you took a chance. I try not to leave my readers mortally wounded

I knew that about you. I knew that, and it gave me the courage to click the link. I'm glad I did, despite the tears.

although I am sometimes willing to read stories like that myself (or read them once, anyway. Such as End of the Road. Which is not a death story, Snarky. But it kilt me dead, anyway.)

It didn't kill me. It frustrated me. At the end I kept thinking, okay, where's the rest? Because it didn't ring true for me for the characters. As they kept making the worst possible choices, I started to feel they were veering more and more away from the characterizations I recognized. So I didn't find myself convinced by the scenario, and therefore, no tears.

I was sad as I wrote this because RAY, beautiful Ray, aiiii!

YES!!!!!

But, yeah, Ray is dead, and even just thinking that hurts.

*cries*

We are lucky in this fandom to have afterlife in canon. I couldn't have written this story otherwise, since I don't subscribe to the paranormal normally. But this is dS.

Interesting. Because I couldn't write something like this, and I do subscribe to the paranormal and have had some contact with "the afterlife."

He's a ghost to us, too. Not real. How is he not real?

He is so! He is! And we make him more realier with every story we write.

*loves you quite a lot* Yes. The velveteen detective? :)

Seriously, Plato's Heaven. I buy that, actually: that everything that is imagined, or even can be imagined, has reality on some other plane. It's the other plane that bothers me, really, because like Ray I'm impatient. I want him here, now, physical. But I do get you. I feel him. He lives in me. And I think that's why I recognized him when I watched him...and then started to write him.

And, heck, time is fleeting. We're each not even on this plane very long per lifetime. Fraser's so aware of that. And yet...their FT had to wait till Ray was...oh, God, the love. The enormous LOVE...Ray in the ballroom, under the mirror ball...

I'm crying again. Dammit. *smiles through tears*

But I love you very much.

[arrow00]

It didn't kill me. It frustrated me. At the end I kept thinking, okay, where's the rest? Because it didn't ring true for me for the characters.

Well, for me the characters didn't ring true as the characters we see in the series (especially Ray, who seemed homophobic and not demonstrative, and I don't see him that way) but I felt they definitely had integrity within the story she wrote. In other words, if you treat it as an AU departure, like slivers of the characters we know but extrapolated from critical personality points, I thought it incredibly well-written and cohesive. Believable within its own universe, in other words. And so reading it for itself (and reading them both like that) depressed me for days afterward.

The one thing I did find kind of believable and true to Fraser was his love of the freedom of solitude. Which also depresses me, so I try to ignore that part of his personality. ;)

The velveteen detective?

Hee. I so was thinking that. With Welsh as the Skin Horse.

I'm so glad you liked the image of Ray in the ballroom. I actually have a screen shot I took of some guy in a movie that was wearing the exact outfit I was picturing Ray (so hot!) in. But maybe some terrific artist could draw it for us better. ::ducking::