"Sometimes" - a Due South Ficlet for Arrow.
This is late.
And unbeta'd.
This is me.
Apologising!
Title - Sometimes.
Pairing - Fraser/RayK
Rated - PG
Word count - 2172
Authors Notes- For arrow00, the queen of the mid-length, 'rip out your heart and then make it better' fic, whose work has enthralled me since joining the fandom. Happy Birthday, my dear.
Synopsis - Sometimes Fraser thinks that if he doesn’t kill Ray, he’ll end up pinning him down and kissing him, just to make him shut up and be still for a moment.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that Ray Kowalski knows all this. But does it anyway.
Sometimes
In the borderland between dreams and the day, Fraser sometimes hears the rumble and screech of the L a few blocks away and he thinks he’s home. Even in winter’s fierce embrace the wilderness is never silent, no matter what people say. The ice squeaks and groans, and sometimes cracks, sudden and heart stopping like a gunshot. It’s never still; like a living thing, stirring in its sleep, it mutters and moves before settling again.
When he recalls where he is, Fraser gets up and goes to work. His disappointment in his position at the consulate is tempered by his work with the Chicago P.D. and the friendship of his partner, Detective First Class Raymond Vecchio. He finds comfort in the simple things - duty, order and companionship - and berates himself for the yearning that even after all this time, he can’t quite master.
But all day he’s got the scent of the ice in his nostrils overlying the car exhaust and the people, and everything is too loud when it’s not dampened by the snow cover.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes, when he was younger, Ray would do this trick to stop himself from going mental. When things got too much and he couldn’t think of what to do next, he’d close his eyes and imagine himself in the centre of a big, white, open space filled with all the things that were on his mind - good and bad.
The things would vary depending on how old he was: his Dad, his Mom, Steven, impending exams, some jerk from school who was rattling his cage, Stella, his bike, James, his car, insecurities, fears and joys. Then with a word, or a flick of a finger, he’d delete them. Systematically, one-by-one he would order them gone from his space until only he was left. Just him. In a big, white nothing. Quiet and at peace. And then he’d be able to breathe and think and get his head straight.
He stopped doing it when he was nineteen and he asked Stella to marry him because it didn’t feel right to vanish his wife-to-be from his quiet place. From then on they were a couple, never to be divided, even in his mind.
But it never really worked when there were two of them in the quiet place. Too much distraction. Too little space for him to get that clarity he needed to see his way through stuff.
Now, of course, there’s only him again, and he’s spending a lot of time in the big, empty space, but it’s just not as simple to find the peace as it used to be.
He takes a mouthful of Jack, and looks at the paperwork one more time. Sign here and his whole life goes away for a little while. He can try out someone else’s life; see if that fits better.
He signs it.
He waits for the quiet to come, but he’s not going to be holding his breath.
~ / ~ / ~
Fraser sometimes believes that Ray Vecchio… the new Ray Vecchio… has been sent to try him. Although he and the original Ray were very different people, they worked well together - logically, with order and sense. Perhaps they didn’t always agree on things but they rarely found an issue so thorny that they couldn’t come to some mutually acceptable course.
The improbably named Stanley Raymond Kowalski is a whole other brace of ptarmigan. His mind skitters from one idea to the next, slippery, without direction or process. He has hunches; some kind of intuitive reasoning that has no basis in method. He wilfully ignores accepted police protocols, skirting dangerously close to unethical conduct. He’s inconsistent, veering from pathologically secretive to brutally honest in a disarmingly short time scale. He’s unpredictable. He’s unscientific. He’s infuriating.
And yet, somehow, they work. The combination of logic and instinct, which should, by rights, be an impossible blend, serves them admirably.
He’s everything that Fraser isn’t, everything that Fraser has trained himself out of over many years: passionate, impatient, undisciplined. He smiles at inappropriate moments. He is tactile and over-familiar: needle-sharp and annoyingly obtuse in turn. Sometimes Fraser thinks that if he doesn’t kill Ray, he’ll end up pinning him down and kissing him, just to make him shut up and be still for a moment.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that Ray Kowalski knows all this. But does it anyway.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes Ray thinks that all the words meant for the world have been used up. He looks at Fraser - they’re sharing one of those moments - the ones where one of them needs to say something. Fraser’s eyes hold him pinned, his cheeks are flushed and he’s breathing hard through parted lips that Ray longs to taste and bite and whisper his name against. All he has to do is find the right words - like a kind of puzzle to be solved before he can claim his prize.
But the words aren’t there. He can almost feel the shape of them in his mouth - almost make the sounds of the tantalising fragments that dance wildly just on the edge of his consciousness.
Ray thinks that the great writers and orators have used them all up - that there were a finite number of words to be spoken, and Ray has come to the party too late. Whitman has already said it, Shakespeare got there first or Tolstoy used the last of them. Someone else, someone smart, got Ray’s quota of words. So all as he’s left with is the yearning, the desperate need to explain himself and nothing to do it with.
Fraser licks a lip, drops his gaze, makes a comment about something stupid, and the moment’s gone.
~ / ~ / ~
Ray is a lot like Dief, Fraser sometimes thinks, even down to their physical characteristics. They share that same toothy, insolent grin, the same spiky hair and a penchant for unhealthy food. And, like Diefenbaker, Ray came to Fraser with history, albeit in very differing circumstances. Dief must have come from a pack somewhere, driven off or deserted. Ray had been left broken by the disintegration of his marriage to Stella.
Abandonment. It’s a word Fraser isn’t terribly comfortable with and one that he has some experience of.
But where Dief and Ray seem ready to trust again and place their hearts in his keeping with their companionship and friendship, Fraser wonders if he will ever be able to have enough faith to do the same. He knows he’s cheating them both by keeping a healthy distance, but to give himself wholeheartedly and love them the way he wants to would be to invite disaster. The pain of the loss of either one of them will be hard enough to bear as it is. To allow them closer is as good as a death sentence.
So he cares for them, he’s a friend to them, he will gladly protect them with his very life. But he can’t love them.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that self-delusion is the most hollow of victories.
~ / ~ / ~
Ray sometimes thinks that if he sits still, the aurora will come close enough for him to touch it. The first night he saw it, he’d been exhausted, borderline hypothermic and close to freaking out. Fraser had been checking him over, making sure he wasn’t going to just die in his sleep or anything when, over his shoulder, Ray had seen the sky go kind of weird. A big arc of green white light stretched across the black, then as he watched, another and another flowing slowly, rippling like they were caught by the wind.
“Frase, the sky’s broken,” he’d muttered and his friend, his big, best buddy-buddy-calamari had glanced behind him and said, “Oh, curtain form. It’s the Aurora Borealis, Ray.”
And then, like a cue, the whole sky had lit up, not just green, but red along the bottom, where it touched the trees, and sheets of blue and purple floating, gliding slowly like tall-ship sails. And Ray could still see the stars through the colour, little points of light, steady and unwavering. Then it was on them and Ray’d expected to be able to feel it rush through him and he’d raised his head, waiting for the tingle. But instead he’d seen tiny sparks like the ones from Frase’s fire, swirling and circling like the stars around the busted head of a cartoon cat. And then it’d been past them, fading off slowly behind him, rippling away to the opposite horizon.
Ray’s neck had ached and he’d had no idea how long it was since he’d last breathed, but when he’d looked down again, he found Fraser hadn’t been watching the lights at all.
~ / ~ / ~
Fraser thinks that the only thing on a par with being perpetually alone is not being alone. He’s become so used to his own company, and that of Dief, (which shouldn’t really count as much as it does if he were totally honest) that to be sharing space, day in, day out, with another human is both a trial and a joy. Particularly when that human is Ray whom he loves more than he ever thought he could, and who irritates him beyond all reason on an almost daily basis. Sometimes on purpose.
He knows that he himself isn’t exactly easy to live with - Ray has explained in excruciating detail, and once through the medium of mime when words failed him, how exceptionally annoying he can be. He hadn’t realised that the way he dried dishes or his habit of ironing his underwear on weekend mornings would be likely to make others feel homicidal toward him.
He’s never before had to share so much of himself with another - his space, his time, his thoughts, his body - it’s exhilarating and exhausting and terrifying.
And Fraser is also very aware how ungrateful that makes him sound.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes at night, it’s so quiet that Ray thinks he can hear the world turning in the muted roar of his own pulse. Those are the nights when Fraser has slipped out of their bed - it’s the lack of his warm breath that wakes Ray. He knows Fraser takes a rug from the rocking chair and goes outside; Ray’s seen him - a darker shape against the blackness. He watches the sky or the horizon or the ground at his feet, still and silent for long minutes before he comes back to the house, back to bed. He’s always careful not to touch Ray on those nights.
The first few times he did it, Ray lay in an agony of waiting, jumping at every cleared throat, at every intake of breath, expecting the words that would send him back south, but they never came. It’s been over two years now, and Fraser takes his midnight walks less and less. Ray has lived with the fear for so long it has become a kind of companion to him, familiar and accepted.
He wants to tell Fraser that it’s okay to doubt - it’s okay to feel overwhelmed and crowded and tired, because that’s what home feels like sometimes. It doesn’t mean it’s not working. If doesn’t mean it’s not the best place to be in the whole world; the only place Ray would want to be.
He wants to tell Fraser that when he closes his eyes, and goes to the quiet place in his head, Fraser is always there with him, helping him sort out the things that need sorting. That he’s been there since day one.
Ray figures that Fraser is a smart guy, and that he’ll sort it out on his own when he’s ready.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes, half way between waking and dreams, Fraser will forget where he is, and the familiar press of loneliness will be on his chest before he has time to open his eyes. He’ll take a deep breath, ready to shore up his soul and put on his duty like so much armour.
And then Ray will stir, mumbling something incomprehensible, scratching like a more primitive primate, and throw a heavy, hot arm across Fraser’s body. Trapping him. Expecting him to be there. Knowing he can rely on the comfort he draws from that touch.
“Five more minutes, Frase,” he’ll murmur into Fraser’s neck, his skin damp with sleepy, bed-scented sweat and his stubble a bright prickle against Fraser’s skin.
Five minutes will become ten. Ten will become soft kisses. Kisses will become touching, and touching will become something that can’t be rushed.
Fraser has learned to wake himself thirty minutes earlier than he needs to get up.
Fraser has also learned that Ray’s patience is greater than anybody might imagine. And that he’s come to trust in that.
And that sometimes… sometimes, things really are just this good.
Fin
And unbeta'd.
This is me.
Apologising!
Title - Sometimes.
Pairing - Fraser/RayK
Rated - PG
Word count - 2172
Authors Notes- For arrow00, the queen of the mid-length, 'rip out your heart and then make it better' fic, whose work has enthralled me since joining the fandom. Happy Birthday, my dear.
Synopsis - Sometimes Fraser thinks that if he doesn’t kill Ray, he’ll end up pinning him down and kissing him, just to make him shut up and be still for a moment.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that Ray Kowalski knows all this. But does it anyway.
Sometimes
In the borderland between dreams and the day, Fraser sometimes hears the rumble and screech of the L a few blocks away and he thinks he’s home. Even in winter’s fierce embrace the wilderness is never silent, no matter what people say. The ice squeaks and groans, and sometimes cracks, sudden and heart stopping like a gunshot. It’s never still; like a living thing, stirring in its sleep, it mutters and moves before settling again.
When he recalls where he is, Fraser gets up and goes to work. His disappointment in his position at the consulate is tempered by his work with the Chicago P.D. and the friendship of his partner, Detective First Class Raymond Vecchio. He finds comfort in the simple things - duty, order and companionship - and berates himself for the yearning that even after all this time, he can’t quite master.
But all day he’s got the scent of the ice in his nostrils overlying the car exhaust and the people, and everything is too loud when it’s not dampened by the snow cover.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes, when he was younger, Ray would do this trick to stop himself from going mental. When things got too much and he couldn’t think of what to do next, he’d close his eyes and imagine himself in the centre of a big, white, open space filled with all the things that were on his mind - good and bad.
The things would vary depending on how old he was: his Dad, his Mom, Steven, impending exams, some jerk from school who was rattling his cage, Stella, his bike, James, his car, insecurities, fears and joys. Then with a word, or a flick of a finger, he’d delete them. Systematically, one-by-one he would order them gone from his space until only he was left. Just him. In a big, white nothing. Quiet and at peace. And then he’d be able to breathe and think and get his head straight.
He stopped doing it when he was nineteen and he asked Stella to marry him because it didn’t feel right to vanish his wife-to-be from his quiet place. From then on they were a couple, never to be divided, even in his mind.
But it never really worked when there were two of them in the quiet place. Too much distraction. Too little space for him to get that clarity he needed to see his way through stuff.
Now, of course, there’s only him again, and he’s spending a lot of time in the big, empty space, but it’s just not as simple to find the peace as it used to be.
He takes a mouthful of Jack, and looks at the paperwork one more time. Sign here and his whole life goes away for a little while. He can try out someone else’s life; see if that fits better.
He signs it.
He waits for the quiet to come, but he’s not going to be holding his breath.
~ / ~ / ~
Fraser sometimes believes that Ray Vecchio… the new Ray Vecchio… has been sent to try him. Although he and the original Ray were very different people, they worked well together - logically, with order and sense. Perhaps they didn’t always agree on things but they rarely found an issue so thorny that they couldn’t come to some mutually acceptable course.
The improbably named Stanley Raymond Kowalski is a whole other brace of ptarmigan. His mind skitters from one idea to the next, slippery, without direction or process. He has hunches; some kind of intuitive reasoning that has no basis in method. He wilfully ignores accepted police protocols, skirting dangerously close to unethical conduct. He’s inconsistent, veering from pathologically secretive to brutally honest in a disarmingly short time scale. He’s unpredictable. He’s unscientific. He’s infuriating.
And yet, somehow, they work. The combination of logic and instinct, which should, by rights, be an impossible blend, serves them admirably.
He’s everything that Fraser isn’t, everything that Fraser has trained himself out of over many years: passionate, impatient, undisciplined. He smiles at inappropriate moments. He is tactile and over-familiar: needle-sharp and annoyingly obtuse in turn. Sometimes Fraser thinks that if he doesn’t kill Ray, he’ll end up pinning him down and kissing him, just to make him shut up and be still for a moment.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that Ray Kowalski knows all this. But does it anyway.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes Ray thinks that all the words meant for the world have been used up. He looks at Fraser - they’re sharing one of those moments - the ones where one of them needs to say something. Fraser’s eyes hold him pinned, his cheeks are flushed and he’s breathing hard through parted lips that Ray longs to taste and bite and whisper his name against. All he has to do is find the right words - like a kind of puzzle to be solved before he can claim his prize.
But the words aren’t there. He can almost feel the shape of them in his mouth - almost make the sounds of the tantalising fragments that dance wildly just on the edge of his consciousness.
Ray thinks that the great writers and orators have used them all up - that there were a finite number of words to be spoken, and Ray has come to the party too late. Whitman has already said it, Shakespeare got there first or Tolstoy used the last of them. Someone else, someone smart, got Ray’s quota of words. So all as he’s left with is the yearning, the desperate need to explain himself and nothing to do it with.
Fraser licks a lip, drops his gaze, makes a comment about something stupid, and the moment’s gone.
~ / ~ / ~
Ray is a lot like Dief, Fraser sometimes thinks, even down to their physical characteristics. They share that same toothy, insolent grin, the same spiky hair and a penchant for unhealthy food. And, like Diefenbaker, Ray came to Fraser with history, albeit in very differing circumstances. Dief must have come from a pack somewhere, driven off or deserted. Ray had been left broken by the disintegration of his marriage to Stella.
Abandonment. It’s a word Fraser isn’t terribly comfortable with and one that he has some experience of.
But where Dief and Ray seem ready to trust again and place their hearts in his keeping with their companionship and friendship, Fraser wonders if he will ever be able to have enough faith to do the same. He knows he’s cheating them both by keeping a healthy distance, but to give himself wholeheartedly and love them the way he wants to would be to invite disaster. The pain of the loss of either one of them will be hard enough to bear as it is. To allow them closer is as good as a death sentence.
So he cares for them, he’s a friend to them, he will gladly protect them with his very life. But he can’t love them.
Sometimes Fraser thinks that self-delusion is the most hollow of victories.
~ / ~ / ~
Ray sometimes thinks that if he sits still, the aurora will come close enough for him to touch it. The first night he saw it, he’d been exhausted, borderline hypothermic and close to freaking out. Fraser had been checking him over, making sure he wasn’t going to just die in his sleep or anything when, over his shoulder, Ray had seen the sky go kind of weird. A big arc of green white light stretched across the black, then as he watched, another and another flowing slowly, rippling like they were caught by the wind.
“Frase, the sky’s broken,” he’d muttered and his friend, his big, best buddy-buddy-calamari had glanced behind him and said, “Oh, curtain form. It’s the Aurora Borealis, Ray.”
And then, like a cue, the whole sky had lit up, not just green, but red along the bottom, where it touched the trees, and sheets of blue and purple floating, gliding slowly like tall-ship sails. And Ray could still see the stars through the colour, little points of light, steady and unwavering. Then it was on them and Ray’d expected to be able to feel it rush through him and he’d raised his head, waiting for the tingle. But instead he’d seen tiny sparks like the ones from Frase’s fire, swirling and circling like the stars around the busted head of a cartoon cat. And then it’d been past them, fading off slowly behind him, rippling away to the opposite horizon.
Ray’s neck had ached and he’d had no idea how long it was since he’d last breathed, but when he’d looked down again, he found Fraser hadn’t been watching the lights at all.
~ / ~ / ~
Fraser thinks that the only thing on a par with being perpetually alone is not being alone. He’s become so used to his own company, and that of Dief, (which shouldn’t really count as much as it does if he were totally honest) that to be sharing space, day in, day out, with another human is both a trial and a joy. Particularly when that human is Ray whom he loves more than he ever thought he could, and who irritates him beyond all reason on an almost daily basis. Sometimes on purpose.
He knows that he himself isn’t exactly easy to live with - Ray has explained in excruciating detail, and once through the medium of mime when words failed him, how exceptionally annoying he can be. He hadn’t realised that the way he dried dishes or his habit of ironing his underwear on weekend mornings would be likely to make others feel homicidal toward him.
He’s never before had to share so much of himself with another - his space, his time, his thoughts, his body - it’s exhilarating and exhausting and terrifying.
And Fraser is also very aware how ungrateful that makes him sound.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes at night, it’s so quiet that Ray thinks he can hear the world turning in the muted roar of his own pulse. Those are the nights when Fraser has slipped out of their bed - it’s the lack of his warm breath that wakes Ray. He knows Fraser takes a rug from the rocking chair and goes outside; Ray’s seen him - a darker shape against the blackness. He watches the sky or the horizon or the ground at his feet, still and silent for long minutes before he comes back to the house, back to bed. He’s always careful not to touch Ray on those nights.
The first few times he did it, Ray lay in an agony of waiting, jumping at every cleared throat, at every intake of breath, expecting the words that would send him back south, but they never came. It’s been over two years now, and Fraser takes his midnight walks less and less. Ray has lived with the fear for so long it has become a kind of companion to him, familiar and accepted.
He wants to tell Fraser that it’s okay to doubt - it’s okay to feel overwhelmed and crowded and tired, because that’s what home feels like sometimes. It doesn’t mean it’s not working. If doesn’t mean it’s not the best place to be in the whole world; the only place Ray would want to be.
He wants to tell Fraser that when he closes his eyes, and goes to the quiet place in his head, Fraser is always there with him, helping him sort out the things that need sorting. That he’s been there since day one.
Ray figures that Fraser is a smart guy, and that he’ll sort it out on his own when he’s ready.
~ / ~ / ~
Sometimes, half way between waking and dreams, Fraser will forget where he is, and the familiar press of loneliness will be on his chest before he has time to open his eyes. He’ll take a deep breath, ready to shore up his soul and put on his duty like so much armour.
And then Ray will stir, mumbling something incomprehensible, scratching like a more primitive primate, and throw a heavy, hot arm across Fraser’s body. Trapping him. Expecting him to be there. Knowing he can rely on the comfort he draws from that touch.
“Five more minutes, Frase,” he’ll murmur into Fraser’s neck, his skin damp with sleepy, bed-scented sweat and his stubble a bright prickle against Fraser’s skin.
Five minutes will become ten. Ten will become soft kisses. Kisses will become touching, and touching will become something that can’t be rushed.
Fraser has learned to wake himself thirty minutes earlier than he needs to get up.
Fraser has also learned that Ray’s patience is greater than anybody might imagine. And that he’s come to trust in that.
And that sometimes… sometimes, things really are just this good.
Fin