A due South birthday fic for Nicci_Mac
*chucks streamers and toots tooters*
It's the birthday of one of my best fandom buddies, nicci_mac. I can't tell you how old she is, because she mostly doesn't have a clue herself. Whatever age it is - it's exactly the right one for her, because she's a wonderful person with a great sense of fun who always seems to have her head screwed on right. And I love her to pieces.
Unfortunately my adoration of her has not translated into a happy. fluffy story, but rather a bittersweet, ambiguous one. I'm sorry, Babe! It's a sequel to Breathing, which was the fic I wrote for her birthday 2 years ago. She made a most magnificent cover for it that's still one of my favourites from the artwork she's showered on me. So I'm hoping that means that she liked the story enough to want to read a sequel!
Anyway, Happy Birthday Nicci, may your day be lovely and your year even better. You're one of the handful of people I look to when I wonder why I'm in fandom at all. *g*
Title - Needing
Author - Berty
Rated - PG-13
Pairing - Fraser/Kowalski
Author's Notes - This story won't make a lot of sense unless you've read Breathing, and it follows on directly from that story.
Huge thanks to nos4a2no9 for providing a tight and insightful beta and some useful comments about where this arc is going. *hugs*
Needing by Berty
Fraser felt the silence in the car like a palpable presence. It weighed on him, heavier and heavier. Close to unendurable.
And yet Ray seemed completely oblivious to it. He drove as he always did - with skill, with panache and slightly faster than was strictly necessary. Diefenbaker slept on the back seat, also indifferent to the situation, and Fraser wished he had a little of the wolf’s laissez-faire.
With his head tilted down, Fraser watched Ray from the corner of his eye; his booted feet on the pedals, his pale hands on the wheel assured and almost lazy. Like a lover’s.
“Relax, Frase.”
Fraser jumped, betraying his troubled state of mind. He berated himself for being such a fool; there was no chance that Ray would have missed the awkward silence of the last few minutes.
“Jeez. You’re tying yourself up into tighter knots than before,” Ray chuckled, looking over at him and grinning with enviable ease. As if he hadn’t just had his… as if he hadn’t just done what he’d done.
Fraser turned his face to the window where the city went by in a dizzying blur of black, neon colour and drizzle. The windshield wipers slid intermittently, punctuating the stillness with their wet drag-slip, drag-slip.
Fraser’s mind felt numb, overwhelmed by the sudden change in his relationship with a partner he thought he knew. He seemed unable to concentrate, distracted repeatedly from calm analysis by the memory of Ray’s touch, Ray’s mouth, a shivered recollection of the sensations of rain, cold on his face, and hot wet breath on his hips and belly and…
“You’re freaking out on me, aren’t you?”
Fraser turned to look at him closely in the darkened interior of the car. Ray was shaking his head with a strange, bitter little smile on his lips. Their eyes met briefly, but Ray twisted his face back to the traffic.
“No, no, I’m just a little… distracted,” Fraser admitted.
“Yeah? By what?”
“Several things,” he said evasively.
“Bullshit! You’re freaking out about what I did back there.” His voice had lost the edge of humour and the cajoling quality it had held before. Ray’s eyes never strayed from the road ahead. Fraser felt this was an excuse more than a necessity. He sighed.
“It was a little unexpected.”
“Look, Frase, I told you. It’s no big deal. You just looked like… like you needed a little human contact, that’s all. Your face when you heard the…the…”
Fraser knew what he must have looked like.
The case had been an ugly one. A teenaged boy had been found, brutally beaten close to his home, and although his father claimed that he’d been attacked by a group of unidentified youths, it had been clear from the start that he’d been lying.
Once back at the station and with only a little pressure, the father’s story had begun to show inconsistencies. Ray had made his move, pushing and pushing, and when he’d asked the right question at the critical moment the father had launched into a spiteful, vicious rage. His son was to blame. He’d been patient with him. He’d been tried beyond endurance. And he’d cracked and beaten the short, slender boy into a bloody, broken mess.
His own child.
Because he’d admitted he was gay.
Fraser had tried to stop his own revulsion showing, had attempted to mask his feelings. Maybe he’d been over-tired. Maybe he’d been surprised. But when the man had commented blandly that it wouldn’t be the boy’s last beating if he was going to be a ‘fucking queer’, Fraser had closed his eyes in mute, helpless despair.
When he’d found some balance and looked again, Ray had already been busy Mirandising the man with an almost obsessive intensity. Fraser thought he had escaped with his lapse going unnoticed - until Ray had called for a uniformed officer to take the man away, then grabbed Fraser’s sleeve and led him to a secluded, dead-end alleyway two streets down from the 27th.
Ray was still talking, waiting at a traffic light, watching the red circle intently as if by an act of will he could make it change faster. The sound of his voice pulled Fraser back from the obsessive replay of the father’s twisted fury. Short snatches of Ray’s low, intense soliloquy even resolved into a kind of sense.
“… gets you like that… I’m sorry… in my head and I couldn’t stand to see you looking like that… I just wanted to… It doesn’t have to mean anything… just something for… listening to me?”
Ray’s hands gripped the wheel, the tendons showing through the thin skin like strings of shadow. His jaw was clenched, hollowing his cheeks as he swallowed repeatedly. He sat up straighter and took a deep breath. “I didn’t do it to pressure you, Fraser. I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t think it through too well. I didn’t mean to upset you even more. Let’s just forget it ever happened, ‘kay?”
Fraser wondered whether he had used up every platitude he had at his disposal, for he couldn’t think of a single thing to say in reply. For a man who lived behind a veneer of trite phrases, this was something of a surprise. None of his stock in trade would do this time, not a “thank you kindly”, or an “understood”, nor even a catch-all “ah” would be appropriate. So he kept his eyes averted and nodded his head, hoping Ray would see it.
The light changed and Ray pulled away smoothly, at odds with the thrumming tension of his body behind the wheel. Fraser marvelled at the sudden change in Ray’s mood; his own fault, no doubt - his reaction to what Ray saw as a friendly gesture causing this undercurrent of discomfort between them.
He had to assume that his own behaviour was the issue here. Ray had seemed so certain that Fraser would be willing to join him in the cold, dark alleyway, he hadn’t even asked. And when Fraser had realised what his partner’s intention was, instead of politely declining, he’d accepted his surprising offer eagerly. His body had responded instantly to the mere idea of Ray’s hands and Ray’s mouth, so when Ray had worked his way beneath his jodhpurs and shorts, he’d been hard already, straining into Ray’s touch.
Ray had known what he was doing. Fraser’s experience of such acts, although limited, told him that this was a procedure that Ray had performed before. So perhaps this was not uncommon. Perhaps previous partners of Ray’s had enjoyed similar pleasures. Perhaps this was a normal expression between men in high stress jobs; men possessed of a certain… flexible disposition. Perhaps the original Ray Vecchio was not so inclined and hadn’t indulged in such practices, but maybe he’d known that it happened. Or maybe he’d just recognised that Fraser wasn’t easy with any intimate behaviour - that his natural reserve made it nigh on impossible to react to sexual advances or even reach for what he desired. With one notable, almost fatal exception.
And what had made Ray Kowalski ignore all that and reach for him anyway?
What did it mean? As friendly gestures went, this was much, much more than a simple hand on the shoulder or supportive word. Was Fraser really so naïve that he didn’t know this kind of act happened regularly enough to make it unremarkable? Perhaps Ray was right - maybe he was the freak he so often declared him to be.
Fraser could not resolve any of this. He felt utterly lost. The subject seemed so huge that he couldn’t even see the edges of it. Like the brick wall from the alleyway earlier, it offered him no handholds; a flat surface without a distinct feature he could grasp or use to orient himself.
They rode in silence the rest of the way to the Consulate, which, mercifully, was only a matter of minutes. Ray pulled up directly outside and waited. He didn’t stop the engine, he didn’t even put on his parking brake, and Fraser understood that well enough.
He took his Stetson from its familiar place on the dash, still hoping the delay would give him time to find something to say; something to make Ray speak, something that would help him make sense of this. The situation, his reaction to it, Ray’s apparent ease up until he’d given away his own misgivings - none of these things had an obvious response. Without knowing Ray’s motivations more clearly, he was unable to formulate a single phrase that didn’t either make him sound pathetic, callous, or betray more of himself than he was currently comfortable with.
It all hinged on the silent man sitting beside him, staring at his hands on the steering wheel.
What, ultimately, did Ray want?
“Goodnight, Frase,” Ray said softly, his voice as insubstantial as the soft drizzle on the windshield.
Fraser got out and let Dief out of the back. The wolf barked once, bounded up to the Consulate door and waited.
Fraser bent down, talking to his partner’s profile. “Thanks for the ride, Ray. Goodnight.”
Ray nodded stiffly.
Fraser followed Dief and joined him on the steps, but by the time he turned back, Ray had already gone.
Fin
It's the birthday of one of my best fandom buddies, nicci_mac. I can't tell you how old she is, because she mostly doesn't have a clue herself. Whatever age it is - it's exactly the right one for her, because she's a wonderful person with a great sense of fun who always seems to have her head screwed on right. And I love her to pieces.
Unfortunately my adoration of her has not translated into a happy. fluffy story, but rather a bittersweet, ambiguous one. I'm sorry, Babe! It's a sequel to Breathing, which was the fic I wrote for her birthday 2 years ago. She made a most magnificent cover for it that's still one of my favourites from the artwork she's showered on me. So I'm hoping that means that she liked the story enough to want to read a sequel!
Anyway, Happy Birthday Nicci, may your day be lovely and your year even better. You're one of the handful of people I look to when I wonder why I'm in fandom at all. *g*
Title - Needing
Author - Berty
Rated - PG-13
Pairing - Fraser/Kowalski
Author's Notes - This story won't make a lot of sense unless you've read Breathing, and it follows on directly from that story.
Huge thanks to nos4a2no9 for providing a tight and insightful beta and some useful comments about where this arc is going. *hugs*
Needing by Berty
Fraser felt the silence in the car like a palpable presence. It weighed on him, heavier and heavier. Close to unendurable.
And yet Ray seemed completely oblivious to it. He drove as he always did - with skill, with panache and slightly faster than was strictly necessary. Diefenbaker slept on the back seat, also indifferent to the situation, and Fraser wished he had a little of the wolf’s laissez-faire.
With his head tilted down, Fraser watched Ray from the corner of his eye; his booted feet on the pedals, his pale hands on the wheel assured and almost lazy. Like a lover’s.
“Relax, Frase.”
Fraser jumped, betraying his troubled state of mind. He berated himself for being such a fool; there was no chance that Ray would have missed the awkward silence of the last few minutes.
“Jeez. You’re tying yourself up into tighter knots than before,” Ray chuckled, looking over at him and grinning with enviable ease. As if he hadn’t just had his… as if he hadn’t just done what he’d done.
Fraser turned his face to the window where the city went by in a dizzying blur of black, neon colour and drizzle. The windshield wipers slid intermittently, punctuating the stillness with their wet drag-slip, drag-slip.
Fraser’s mind felt numb, overwhelmed by the sudden change in his relationship with a partner he thought he knew. He seemed unable to concentrate, distracted repeatedly from calm analysis by the memory of Ray’s touch, Ray’s mouth, a shivered recollection of the sensations of rain, cold on his face, and hot wet breath on his hips and belly and…
“You’re freaking out on me, aren’t you?”
Fraser turned to look at him closely in the darkened interior of the car. Ray was shaking his head with a strange, bitter little smile on his lips. Their eyes met briefly, but Ray twisted his face back to the traffic.
“No, no, I’m just a little… distracted,” Fraser admitted.
“Yeah? By what?”
“Several things,” he said evasively.
“Bullshit! You’re freaking out about what I did back there.” His voice had lost the edge of humour and the cajoling quality it had held before. Ray’s eyes never strayed from the road ahead. Fraser felt this was an excuse more than a necessity. He sighed.
“It was a little unexpected.”
“Look, Frase, I told you. It’s no big deal. You just looked like… like you needed a little human contact, that’s all. Your face when you heard the…the…”
Fraser knew what he must have looked like.
The case had been an ugly one. A teenaged boy had been found, brutally beaten close to his home, and although his father claimed that he’d been attacked by a group of unidentified youths, it had been clear from the start that he’d been lying.
Once back at the station and with only a little pressure, the father’s story had begun to show inconsistencies. Ray had made his move, pushing and pushing, and when he’d asked the right question at the critical moment the father had launched into a spiteful, vicious rage. His son was to blame. He’d been patient with him. He’d been tried beyond endurance. And he’d cracked and beaten the short, slender boy into a bloody, broken mess.
His own child.
Because he’d admitted he was gay.
Fraser had tried to stop his own revulsion showing, had attempted to mask his feelings. Maybe he’d been over-tired. Maybe he’d been surprised. But when the man had commented blandly that it wouldn’t be the boy’s last beating if he was going to be a ‘fucking queer’, Fraser had closed his eyes in mute, helpless despair.
When he’d found some balance and looked again, Ray had already been busy Mirandising the man with an almost obsessive intensity. Fraser thought he had escaped with his lapse going unnoticed - until Ray had called for a uniformed officer to take the man away, then grabbed Fraser’s sleeve and led him to a secluded, dead-end alleyway two streets down from the 27th.
Ray was still talking, waiting at a traffic light, watching the red circle intently as if by an act of will he could make it change faster. The sound of his voice pulled Fraser back from the obsessive replay of the father’s twisted fury. Short snatches of Ray’s low, intense soliloquy even resolved into a kind of sense.
“… gets you like that… I’m sorry… in my head and I couldn’t stand to see you looking like that… I just wanted to… It doesn’t have to mean anything… just something for… listening to me?”
Ray’s hands gripped the wheel, the tendons showing through the thin skin like strings of shadow. His jaw was clenched, hollowing his cheeks as he swallowed repeatedly. He sat up straighter and took a deep breath. “I didn’t do it to pressure you, Fraser. I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t think it through too well. I didn’t mean to upset you even more. Let’s just forget it ever happened, ‘kay?”
Fraser wondered whether he had used up every platitude he had at his disposal, for he couldn’t think of a single thing to say in reply. For a man who lived behind a veneer of trite phrases, this was something of a surprise. None of his stock in trade would do this time, not a “thank you kindly”, or an “understood”, nor even a catch-all “ah” would be appropriate. So he kept his eyes averted and nodded his head, hoping Ray would see it.
The light changed and Ray pulled away smoothly, at odds with the thrumming tension of his body behind the wheel. Fraser marvelled at the sudden change in Ray’s mood; his own fault, no doubt - his reaction to what Ray saw as a friendly gesture causing this undercurrent of discomfort between them.
He had to assume that his own behaviour was the issue here. Ray had seemed so certain that Fraser would be willing to join him in the cold, dark alleyway, he hadn’t even asked. And when Fraser had realised what his partner’s intention was, instead of politely declining, he’d accepted his surprising offer eagerly. His body had responded instantly to the mere idea of Ray’s hands and Ray’s mouth, so when Ray had worked his way beneath his jodhpurs and shorts, he’d been hard already, straining into Ray’s touch.
Ray had known what he was doing. Fraser’s experience of such acts, although limited, told him that this was a procedure that Ray had performed before. So perhaps this was not uncommon. Perhaps previous partners of Ray’s had enjoyed similar pleasures. Perhaps this was a normal expression between men in high stress jobs; men possessed of a certain… flexible disposition. Perhaps the original Ray Vecchio was not so inclined and hadn’t indulged in such practices, but maybe he’d known that it happened. Or maybe he’d just recognised that Fraser wasn’t easy with any intimate behaviour - that his natural reserve made it nigh on impossible to react to sexual advances or even reach for what he desired. With one notable, almost fatal exception.
And what had made Ray Kowalski ignore all that and reach for him anyway?
What did it mean? As friendly gestures went, this was much, much more than a simple hand on the shoulder or supportive word. Was Fraser really so naïve that he didn’t know this kind of act happened regularly enough to make it unremarkable? Perhaps Ray was right - maybe he was the freak he so often declared him to be.
Fraser could not resolve any of this. He felt utterly lost. The subject seemed so huge that he couldn’t even see the edges of it. Like the brick wall from the alleyway earlier, it offered him no handholds; a flat surface without a distinct feature he could grasp or use to orient himself.
They rode in silence the rest of the way to the Consulate, which, mercifully, was only a matter of minutes. Ray pulled up directly outside and waited. He didn’t stop the engine, he didn’t even put on his parking brake, and Fraser understood that well enough.
He took his Stetson from its familiar place on the dash, still hoping the delay would give him time to find something to say; something to make Ray speak, something that would help him make sense of this. The situation, his reaction to it, Ray’s apparent ease up until he’d given away his own misgivings - none of these things had an obvious response. Without knowing Ray’s motivations more clearly, he was unable to formulate a single phrase that didn’t either make him sound pathetic, callous, or betray more of himself than he was currently comfortable with.
It all hinged on the silent man sitting beside him, staring at his hands on the steering wheel.
What, ultimately, did Ray want?
“Goodnight, Frase,” Ray said softly, his voice as insubstantial as the soft drizzle on the windshield.
Fraser got out and let Dief out of the back. The wolf barked once, bounded up to the Consulate door and waited.
Fraser bent down, talking to his partner’s profile. “Thanks for the ride, Ray. Goodnight.”
Ray nodded stiffly.
Fraser followed Dief and joined him on the steps, but by the time he turned back, Ray had already gone.
Fin