Apocalypse Challenge by Sara
Title: The End of the World
Author: Sara
Word Count: 2700ish
Category and Characters: Gen, Fraser and Ray Vecchio
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Thanks to ladyivy and elmyraemilie for the betas. And thanks to Dave, eh? for the idea, all those years ago. My first due South fic ever...
My first hint of the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as I knew it, was when I saw a guy, one of Frankie Zuko's boys, helping an old lady across the street. Now, I know as well as the next person that made guys are just like you and me. So maybe it was his old grandmother he was helping. I could have seen that. That made sense to me. So I watched. Once he'd gotten her safely across, he made a move like he was tipping a hat to her, only he didn't have a hat on, and walked off without a backward glance. Not his granny, then.
I didn't think much about it after that--in a city of a couple of million people, a one in a million shot is going to happen at least once in a while.
And, besides that, Fraser and I got involved in one of our typical cases around then and spent four days on the trail of a tightrope walking cat burglar. Or make that ferret burglar. With a trained parrot. Fraser assures me it was a Hyacinthine Macaw, like I care. And when it was all done, I had to explain it all to Welsh, which is the worst part about being partnered with Fraser. All this crazy stuff happens and I'm the one standing in Welch's office feeling like a moron, saying things like, "Yes, sir, the parrot was used to transport the jewels after the ferret picked them out of the jewelry boxes." "Yes, sir, we reasoned that the burglar must have something wrong with his hands." "Very severe arthritis, actually, sir." "Yes, sir, at a retirement home for elderly circus performers." So what with Welsh, the old guy, the bird and the ferret, which ruined one of my best Armani coats in disgusting ways I don't even want to think about, my whole week was blown and I forgot all about Zuko's boy and the old lady. Hell, a lot would have been driven out of my mind just by the five minutes I spent watching Fraser walk across a tightrope eight stories over the street.
But when Fraser and I were leaving the 2-7 after booking the tightrope walker and sending the ferret and the macaw to animal control, I noticed a couple of kids, gang bangers it looked like, baggy pants showing off the tops of their underwear and colors flying, picking up trash on the sidewalk. Not just a little bit of it; they were going down the street picking up trash and putting it into big plastic bags they were carrying. Systematically.
I gaped open-mouthed, but Fraser, who never gets anything, smiled. "Ah, youth. Doesn't that give you confidence in the future of the city?" he asked, gesturing to the kids, who had stopped picking up trash and were trying to grab a woman's groceries instead.
"Yeah, kids stealing a lady's groceries. That's very reassuring." I was at least reassured that I wasn't going nuts by the fact that the lady wasn't having any of it, but I didn't say that to Fraser. She was holding onto her bags of food like she had no money to buy more. From her clothes and the neighborhood that could probably have been the case.
"Oh, no, Ray, I don't think so," Fraser said just as I was about to go scare the boys off, and strode over to see if he could help with the situation. I figured I'd wait and watch. Sometimes it's good for Fraser to get reminded of how the city really is. As soon as he got up to them, red serge shining like neon in the late afternoon sun, the lady looked at him with relief and not a little appreciation. I expected that the boys would run off; that's what bangers do when confronted with someone like Fraser. But they didn't; they smiled and shook his hand and started talking, rapid fire. Fraser spoke to the boys and the lady, and before I could get over there, he had them all shaking hands. What the...? By the time he walked away, the boys were carrying the lady's groceries and she was walking beside them with a great big smile on her face.
"Benny, what was that?" I asked when he got back to me.
He looked back over his shoulder at the kids loading groceries in the woman's car. "They were offering to help her. She misunderstood, as you did, Ray," and with that he gave me a scolding glance just like Ma does when I get in the kitchen while she's cooking. "I just explained their offer of assistance to her. They do speak in the rather peculiar idiom of the young so a certain amount of translation was necessary. Once she understood they simply wanted to help, the situation was resolved."
He started walking down the street, away from the boys, who had gone back to picking up trash. I followed him. What else could I do? You can't arrest bangers for acting like Canadians, even if you want to.
That made me aware, though, and I started paying more attention for a few days. Gathering evidence. And once I was looking, I saw the craziness all over Chicago. People letting others in through doorways first. "Oh, no, Miss, after you." People with only one item getting to the head of the line in the grocery store. "You go right ahead, sir." The people in Fraser's building, Mr. Mustafi and all the others, the same ones who had slammed their doors in his face when he greeted them, started having impromptu parties in the hallway. Which I heard about in detail the next day at the station. Fraser-ness was spreading out from my partner to everyone in town, like a disease.
About a week after the incident with the bangers, I went to Fraser's for pizza after work. His place isn't nice, or even comfortable, but sometimes the peace and quiet is worth more than the TV and sofa at Ma's house. I almost tripped as soon as I walked in the building, though; Fraser's slumlord had cleaned and painted the hallway. That was the final straw, so, as we were going into Fraser's apartment, I finally said something. "Okay, Fraser, what have you done to my city?"
"Ray? I simply live and work here. I haven't done anything..." His voice trailed off and he looked away. "Oh, you noticed the..." he made a vague gesture out toward the street.
"Yeah, that..." I shook my hand in a mimic of his gesture. "What have you done to my city?"
He flushed a little and said, "I apologize, Ray. I sincerely didn't think you'd notice. It was just a little thing." He looked at his hands, folded in his lap now like he was sitting in church.
"A little thing," I shouted. "A little thing. It is not a little thing when Americans are letting people go through doors ahead of them." He opened his mouth to speak, but I kept talking, not giving him a chance. "Do not say that it only takes a moment to be polite." He shut his mouth. I paced around the room as I spoke, waving my arms. "It's not American. I haven't heard a horn honk on the street in a week. In Chicago."
He looked at me blankly, a wrinkle between his eyebrows showing that he was confused. "All I did was fix the bench out front, Ray. I don't see how that's having an effect on the patience of the city's drivers."
I stopped in my tracks and turned to look at him. "What are you talking about?"
He sat up even straighter, and stiffer, like a big red board, and said, "You asked what I did to your city." He paused and I nodded. "The only thing I can think of that would fit that description is that I sanded and painted the bench outside at the bus stop. Ms. Krezjapolou was complaining that the old wood was splintering and catching her clothes." He paused again while I goggled at him, then said, "I take it that you're referring to something else."
"Hell, yes, I'm referring to something else. I'm referring to the fact that everyone in Chicago, apparently, has gotten polite all of a sudden." I waved at the window, through which I could see a bus waiting for someone who was running from half a block away. "Look out there. It's just not natural the way people are behaving. I heard half a dozen people say 'Thank you kindly' just between my car and my desk this morning. It's like we've been invaded by Canadians or something."
"Oh, that. I had nothing to do with that," he said, walking over to stand next to me. He paused, rubbed his eyebrow, and continued, "Well, very little. All I've done in that regard is set a positive example. I don't feel that I am to be blamed if others are following it. In fact," and here he stood and looked out at the clean streets in front of his house, "I'm not at all certain that it's appropriate for an officer of the law to be complaining about an outbreak of public civility."
The fact that he was right only made that more irritating. "That is not the point," I said, right up in his face, before walking away from the window. "The point is that this is not the Chicago I've known my whole life. And I'm gonna find out why." I started walking toward the door, planning to fix whatever was wrong, but was startled by a loud knock. I jumped back, bumping into Fraser, who was pulling money out of his hat.
Oh, yeah, the pizza guy. Who apologized for being thirty seconds late with the delivery and offered, offered to let us have the pizza for free. He would have insisted, except that Fraser pressed the money into his hand and thanked him kindly. He looked at the money, Canadian of course, and didn't comment on it being red. My head was swimming. Maybe I'd been knocked out and was in the hospital hallucinating all of this. I could have gotten beaned by the crazy parrot, run over by a car, hit by a random brick falling from a building, anything. Right?
I sat down heavily at the table, resting my head in my hands. If I was in the hospital, it probably wasn't good for me to get all worked up like this. Once the door had closed behind the delivery boy, I said, without moving my head from my hands, "And you're telling me everything is normal?"
He looked from me to the door and then back to me before setting the pizza on the table and collecting plates and napkins for us. Once he had the table set, he said, "I never said normal, Ray. But it doesn't appear to be anything to complain about."
I lifted my head out of my hands to see Fraser put a slice of pizza onto a plate and hand it to me before taking a slice of his own. He was looking at me blandly, waiting for me to start eating before he did so, when I realized that he was looking too bland, too innocent. "Wait. Wait a minute. You're not involved in this..." I waved again at the window and all the strangeness beyond, "but you sure as hell know what's going on. Don't you?"
He flushed a little again, just a hint of color on his cheeks barely visible in the blue tinted light of his apartment. Then he pressed his lips together and nodded. "Yes. Yes, I do. But it is not something I'm at liberty to discuss."
"Not at lib.... What the hell does that mean?" I held up a hand for silence before he started explaining the meaning of the phrase to me and I had to pop him. I set my pizza down, wiped off my fingers, and leaned toward him. "Fraser, you are going to explain this to me, or I am going to assume that you are putting chemicals in the water and poisoning the good people of Chicago and I am going to arrest you."
He took a deep breath, then said, reasonable as you please, "There are no chemicals involved, I assure you. And, really, I don't know the details of the project. I'm just a very minor, trivial even, cog in the machine."
A machine? There was a machine doing this? I took a deep breath, then got up and started pacing again. "What are you talking about, Fraser? In plain English, please?"
He stared straight ahead, like he does when he's on guard duty. After a moment, when I thought he was going to totally clam up on me and I was going to have to make good on my threat to arrest him, he finally said, "All I can tell you is that Canadians have been introducing our values into your country through television, movies, music and comedy. This," he waved at the city again, "is the fruition of a decades long government project to subvert American culture."
Damn him, he was jerking my chain. Again. "Yeah, and there are dog sleds waiting at the border for cars without snow chains." I glared at him. "And you think Canadians are funny?" He smiled at me, then laughed, covering his mouth and I knew he was shitting me. "Sure, Benny. If you don't know what's going on, just say so, okay? Don't give me a cock-and-bull story about a bunch of snowsuits and eskimos subverting the greatest culture in the world."
"Please, Ray, they're Inuit," he said automatically, that chiding look on his face again. Then he smiled, saying, "Forgive me. Just my little joke." He gave me a great big grin, then stood and walked to the window and looked out over the city. "It really doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me, not even in Chicago."
"Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. But it's just not right, Chicagoans being nice to each other." I leaned against the wall next to the window, looking out on the night streets. A couple walked along holding hands. A man and a woman. I could hear a faint peal of laughter from her as she responded to something her boyfriend, husband maybe, said. There was no hint that they were afraid of being jumped, even in this neighborhood after dark. They weren't looking over their shoulders, hurrying, carrying their keys as possible weapons. They were just happy together. Weird.
Fraser watched with me until they were out of sight, then said, completely deadpan, "I was serious about the government project, Ray."
"Joke didn't work the first time, Benny. Give it a rest," I said, expecting to feel annoyed, or at least exasperated. I didn't though, so maybe whatever was going on had started affecting me too.
He nodded and said with a smile, "Very well."
I looked at him, shaking my head. "You know what? If this lasts, everything's going to be different around here," I said, feeling a little hopeful about the future.
He put his hand on my shoulder. I'm not sure if he thought he was offering sympathy or strength or what. But it was nice. Reassuring.
I was reminded of an old song, one he'd probably never heard before, growing up at the North Pole with the caribou. "It's the end of the world as we know it, Benny, and I feel fine."
Author: Sara
Word Count: 2700ish
Category and Characters: Gen, Fraser and Ray Vecchio
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Thanks to ladyivy and elmyraemilie for the betas. And thanks to Dave, eh? for the idea, all those years ago. My first due South fic ever...
My first hint of the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as I knew it, was when I saw a guy, one of Frankie Zuko's boys, helping an old lady across the street. Now, I know as well as the next person that made guys are just like you and me. So maybe it was his old grandmother he was helping. I could have seen that. That made sense to me. So I watched. Once he'd gotten her safely across, he made a move like he was tipping a hat to her, only he didn't have a hat on, and walked off without a backward glance. Not his granny, then.
I didn't think much about it after that--in a city of a couple of million people, a one in a million shot is going to happen at least once in a while.
And, besides that, Fraser and I got involved in one of our typical cases around then and spent four days on the trail of a tightrope walking cat burglar. Or make that ferret burglar. With a trained parrot. Fraser assures me it was a Hyacinthine Macaw, like I care. And when it was all done, I had to explain it all to Welsh, which is the worst part about being partnered with Fraser. All this crazy stuff happens and I'm the one standing in Welch's office feeling like a moron, saying things like, "Yes, sir, the parrot was used to transport the jewels after the ferret picked them out of the jewelry boxes." "Yes, sir, we reasoned that the burglar must have something wrong with his hands." "Very severe arthritis, actually, sir." "Yes, sir, at a retirement home for elderly circus performers." So what with Welsh, the old guy, the bird and the ferret, which ruined one of my best Armani coats in disgusting ways I don't even want to think about, my whole week was blown and I forgot all about Zuko's boy and the old lady. Hell, a lot would have been driven out of my mind just by the five minutes I spent watching Fraser walk across a tightrope eight stories over the street.
But when Fraser and I were leaving the 2-7 after booking the tightrope walker and sending the ferret and the macaw to animal control, I noticed a couple of kids, gang bangers it looked like, baggy pants showing off the tops of their underwear and colors flying, picking up trash on the sidewalk. Not just a little bit of it; they were going down the street picking up trash and putting it into big plastic bags they were carrying. Systematically.
I gaped open-mouthed, but Fraser, who never gets anything, smiled. "Ah, youth. Doesn't that give you confidence in the future of the city?" he asked, gesturing to the kids, who had stopped picking up trash and were trying to grab a woman's groceries instead.
"Yeah, kids stealing a lady's groceries. That's very reassuring." I was at least reassured that I wasn't going nuts by the fact that the lady wasn't having any of it, but I didn't say that to Fraser. She was holding onto her bags of food like she had no money to buy more. From her clothes and the neighborhood that could probably have been the case.
"Oh, no, Ray, I don't think so," Fraser said just as I was about to go scare the boys off, and strode over to see if he could help with the situation. I figured I'd wait and watch. Sometimes it's good for Fraser to get reminded of how the city really is. As soon as he got up to them, red serge shining like neon in the late afternoon sun, the lady looked at him with relief and not a little appreciation. I expected that the boys would run off; that's what bangers do when confronted with someone like Fraser. But they didn't; they smiled and shook his hand and started talking, rapid fire. Fraser spoke to the boys and the lady, and before I could get over there, he had them all shaking hands. What the...? By the time he walked away, the boys were carrying the lady's groceries and she was walking beside them with a great big smile on her face.
"Benny, what was that?" I asked when he got back to me.
He looked back over his shoulder at the kids loading groceries in the woman's car. "They were offering to help her. She misunderstood, as you did, Ray," and with that he gave me a scolding glance just like Ma does when I get in the kitchen while she's cooking. "I just explained their offer of assistance to her. They do speak in the rather peculiar idiom of the young so a certain amount of translation was necessary. Once she understood they simply wanted to help, the situation was resolved."
He started walking down the street, away from the boys, who had gone back to picking up trash. I followed him. What else could I do? You can't arrest bangers for acting like Canadians, even if you want to.
That made me aware, though, and I started paying more attention for a few days. Gathering evidence. And once I was looking, I saw the craziness all over Chicago. People letting others in through doorways first. "Oh, no, Miss, after you." People with only one item getting to the head of the line in the grocery store. "You go right ahead, sir." The people in Fraser's building, Mr. Mustafi and all the others, the same ones who had slammed their doors in his face when he greeted them, started having impromptu parties in the hallway. Which I heard about in detail the next day at the station. Fraser-ness was spreading out from my partner to everyone in town, like a disease.
About a week after the incident with the bangers, I went to Fraser's for pizza after work. His place isn't nice, or even comfortable, but sometimes the peace and quiet is worth more than the TV and sofa at Ma's house. I almost tripped as soon as I walked in the building, though; Fraser's slumlord had cleaned and painted the hallway. That was the final straw, so, as we were going into Fraser's apartment, I finally said something. "Okay, Fraser, what have you done to my city?"
"Ray? I simply live and work here. I haven't done anything..." His voice trailed off and he looked away. "Oh, you noticed the..." he made a vague gesture out toward the street.
"Yeah, that..." I shook my hand in a mimic of his gesture. "What have you done to my city?"
He flushed a little and said, "I apologize, Ray. I sincerely didn't think you'd notice. It was just a little thing." He looked at his hands, folded in his lap now like he was sitting in church.
"A little thing," I shouted. "A little thing. It is not a little thing when Americans are letting people go through doors ahead of them." He opened his mouth to speak, but I kept talking, not giving him a chance. "Do not say that it only takes a moment to be polite." He shut his mouth. I paced around the room as I spoke, waving my arms. "It's not American. I haven't heard a horn honk on the street in a week. In Chicago."
He looked at me blankly, a wrinkle between his eyebrows showing that he was confused. "All I did was fix the bench out front, Ray. I don't see how that's having an effect on the patience of the city's drivers."
I stopped in my tracks and turned to look at him. "What are you talking about?"
He sat up even straighter, and stiffer, like a big red board, and said, "You asked what I did to your city." He paused and I nodded. "The only thing I can think of that would fit that description is that I sanded and painted the bench outside at the bus stop. Ms. Krezjapolou was complaining that the old wood was splintering and catching her clothes." He paused again while I goggled at him, then said, "I take it that you're referring to something else."
"Hell, yes, I'm referring to something else. I'm referring to the fact that everyone in Chicago, apparently, has gotten polite all of a sudden." I waved at the window, through which I could see a bus waiting for someone who was running from half a block away. "Look out there. It's just not natural the way people are behaving. I heard half a dozen people say 'Thank you kindly' just between my car and my desk this morning. It's like we've been invaded by Canadians or something."
"Oh, that. I had nothing to do with that," he said, walking over to stand next to me. He paused, rubbed his eyebrow, and continued, "Well, very little. All I've done in that regard is set a positive example. I don't feel that I am to be blamed if others are following it. In fact," and here he stood and looked out at the clean streets in front of his house, "I'm not at all certain that it's appropriate for an officer of the law to be complaining about an outbreak of public civility."
The fact that he was right only made that more irritating. "That is not the point," I said, right up in his face, before walking away from the window. "The point is that this is not the Chicago I've known my whole life. And I'm gonna find out why." I started walking toward the door, planning to fix whatever was wrong, but was startled by a loud knock. I jumped back, bumping into Fraser, who was pulling money out of his hat.
Oh, yeah, the pizza guy. Who apologized for being thirty seconds late with the delivery and offered, offered to let us have the pizza for free. He would have insisted, except that Fraser pressed the money into his hand and thanked him kindly. He looked at the money, Canadian of course, and didn't comment on it being red. My head was swimming. Maybe I'd been knocked out and was in the hospital hallucinating all of this. I could have gotten beaned by the crazy parrot, run over by a car, hit by a random brick falling from a building, anything. Right?
I sat down heavily at the table, resting my head in my hands. If I was in the hospital, it probably wasn't good for me to get all worked up like this. Once the door had closed behind the delivery boy, I said, without moving my head from my hands, "And you're telling me everything is normal?"
He looked from me to the door and then back to me before setting the pizza on the table and collecting plates and napkins for us. Once he had the table set, he said, "I never said normal, Ray. But it doesn't appear to be anything to complain about."
I lifted my head out of my hands to see Fraser put a slice of pizza onto a plate and hand it to me before taking a slice of his own. He was looking at me blandly, waiting for me to start eating before he did so, when I realized that he was looking too bland, too innocent. "Wait. Wait a minute. You're not involved in this..." I waved again at the window and all the strangeness beyond, "but you sure as hell know what's going on. Don't you?"
He flushed a little again, just a hint of color on his cheeks barely visible in the blue tinted light of his apartment. Then he pressed his lips together and nodded. "Yes. Yes, I do. But it is not something I'm at liberty to discuss."
"Not at lib.... What the hell does that mean?" I held up a hand for silence before he started explaining the meaning of the phrase to me and I had to pop him. I set my pizza down, wiped off my fingers, and leaned toward him. "Fraser, you are going to explain this to me, or I am going to assume that you are putting chemicals in the water and poisoning the good people of Chicago and I am going to arrest you."
He took a deep breath, then said, reasonable as you please, "There are no chemicals involved, I assure you. And, really, I don't know the details of the project. I'm just a very minor, trivial even, cog in the machine."
A machine? There was a machine doing this? I took a deep breath, then got up and started pacing again. "What are you talking about, Fraser? In plain English, please?"
He stared straight ahead, like he does when he's on guard duty. After a moment, when I thought he was going to totally clam up on me and I was going to have to make good on my threat to arrest him, he finally said, "All I can tell you is that Canadians have been introducing our values into your country through television, movies, music and comedy. This," he waved at the city again, "is the fruition of a decades long government project to subvert American culture."
Damn him, he was jerking my chain. Again. "Yeah, and there are dog sleds waiting at the border for cars without snow chains." I glared at him. "And you think Canadians are funny?" He smiled at me, then laughed, covering his mouth and I knew he was shitting me. "Sure, Benny. If you don't know what's going on, just say so, okay? Don't give me a cock-and-bull story about a bunch of snowsuits and eskimos subverting the greatest culture in the world."
"Please, Ray, they're Inuit," he said automatically, that chiding look on his face again. Then he smiled, saying, "Forgive me. Just my little joke." He gave me a great big grin, then stood and walked to the window and looked out over the city. "It really doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me, not even in Chicago."
"Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. But it's just not right, Chicagoans being nice to each other." I leaned against the wall next to the window, looking out on the night streets. A couple walked along holding hands. A man and a woman. I could hear a faint peal of laughter from her as she responded to something her boyfriend, husband maybe, said. There was no hint that they were afraid of being jumped, even in this neighborhood after dark. They weren't looking over their shoulders, hurrying, carrying their keys as possible weapons. They were just happy together. Weird.
Fraser watched with me until they were out of sight, then said, completely deadpan, "I was serious about the government project, Ray."
"Joke didn't work the first time, Benny. Give it a rest," I said, expecting to feel annoyed, or at least exasperated. I didn't though, so maybe whatever was going on had started affecting me too.
He nodded and said with a smile, "Very well."
I looked at him, shaking my head. "You know what? If this lasts, everything's going to be different around here," I said, feeling a little hopeful about the future.
He put his hand on my shoulder. I'm not sure if he thought he was offering sympathy or strength or what. But it was nice. Reassuring.
I was reminded of an old song, one he'd probably never heard before, growing up at the North Pole with the caribou. "It's the end of the world as we know it, Benny, and I feel fine."