ext_12400 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
rowanfairchild.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ds_flashfiction2004-01-03 09:46 pm
rowanfairchild.livejournal.com) wrote in ds_flashfiction2004-01-03 09:46 pm
Entry tags:
For the Door Challenge
Yeah, been a while. *g* I figured, since I'm the one who came up with this challenge in the first place... I ought to at least take one whack at it. This bit may actually wind up serving as the prologue to a longer story to come, now that I've gotten to thinking about it. Who knows. Anyway, many thanks are due to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bethbethbeth for insisting that I could actually write something in time, and to actizera for Lightning!Beta (tm).
Note: Dialogue is ripped off from the episode "Victoria's Secret". The remaining blither is mine.
At the time, it had seemed such a small thing. Just one moment, in one day, in the march of days that had become Fraser's life. He was walking down a crisply wintery Chicago street in amiable companionship with Ray Vecchio. His errands were complete, and with a little monetary assistance from Ray, Mr. Mustafi's vacuum cleaner had been restored to a working order.
It was a good day, better than average, and as they walked along, Fraser found himself happy to be able to provide an audience for Ray's excited plans to bring his father's prized pool table up from the basement.
"It's my house, and if I want a pool table in the dining room? I'm going to put a pool table in the dining room," Ray announced in a defiant tone that made clear at last the only conceivable set of circumstances brewing in the Vecchio home that would allow for the upstairs move of this fabled pool table.
"How long is she going away for?" Fraser asked, hiding a smile.
"A week," Ray confessed, throwing up his hands in the affectionate gesture of frustration that seemed to accompany most discussions involving his mother. "For years she's been saying how she wants to visit her sister in Florida, how hard it is to be apart. How much she misses her. As soon as I book the hotel room, she's decided she's not speaking to her. I think she's just going up there to glare at her--"
Ray's voice grumbled on but Fraser lost track of the words as his eyes picked up a movement farther up the block.
And for one moment, time seemed to draw still as Fraser stopped to watch a woman getting out of a taxi, her long whip of dark curls tossing in the Chicago wind. It was, of course, impossible. It couldn't be...
The woman turned in from the street, gathering her coat up around her throat. She brushed wild tendrils of hair back from her face, and yes. It was. The strong, sharp, elegantly drawn features that had once fueled a far younger Fraser's hypothermia-addled fantasy: A maiden, fair, encased in ice, shrouded by death. Surely, a creature of destiny.
But here, now, on the streets of Chicago, before he could react, shout, move, Victoria had pushed purposefully through the great glass revolving door of one of downtown's indistinguishably posh business class hotels and disappeared. Without a thought, Fraser ran down the street in pursuit of her.
He came to a halt in front of the revolving door she had vanished behind, following its substantial, measured spin. The rhythmic whap, whap, whap of the chrome-edged panes beat like fan blades as the door cycled around, swallowing and then disgorging smartly dressed pedestrians one at a time into the hotel lobby.
Fraser ignored the people jostling and brushing past him on the sidewalk as he craned his neck to peer through the glass, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her inside. He would be able to distinguish Victoria instantly in any crowd, time's passage notwithstanding. Of that he was certain. She was burned into his senses indelibly.
But, no. There was nothing. No one. No sign of her at all.
He must have been hallucinating. She was a mirage, that was all. A vision conjured by a parched mind that had perhaps, in all these years, never truly lost its fever.
A strange, hollow feeling began to build in the center of Fraser's chest; it took a moment to recognize it as desperation. His heart beat quick and shallow, echoing in his ears as the stream of people shoving past him receded into impressionist blots of color and shape moving through the fractured kaleidoscope revolving before him. He stared dumbly into nothingness until Ray Vecchio’s gloved hand landing on his shoulder finally roused him back to conscious awareness.
“What's going on?”
Fraser started at the touch, then groped for an innocuous sounding explanation as Ray, and the rest of Chicago, blinked into focus around him. His one prior attempt at explaining Victoria to Ray had been a miserable enough failure, and recent enough in memory, to make him leery of another go at it just now.
“Nothing," Fraser demurred, shaking his head. "I just thought I saw a woman I used to know.”
“Thought she needed a vacuum?” Ray asked, indicating Mr. Mustafi's ancient upright, still clutched, forgotten, in Fraser's arms.
“No... I was mistaken.”
Ray seemed satisfied to let it go at that. So, Fraser gratefully took off on foot for the relative solitude of his apartment, leaving Ray with his own fantasies of green felt and the patina of weathered mahogany.
***
Fraser went rotely through the motions of preparing dinner for himself and Diefenbaker in the scarred kitchen of his still nearly empty apartment.
He had, he supposed, been thinking about Victoria more often lately. Certainly since the night of the Bodine stake out -- that poker game with Ray and Detectives Huey and Gardino -- talking about women, relationships, fate, the one. How you recognized the moments of import in your life, the great, defining features. Victoria had been one of those. Fraser had known it instantly then, as surely as he knew it now.
After that night, Fraser had dug through his footlocker and retrieved Victoria's photograph. He hadn't looked at it in years. It was a poor snapshot, taken in horrendous conditions -- storm winds whipping violently through Victoria's hair, snow nearly obscuring her image. But obviously it had been enough to exhume some more deeply held and fully formed memory. Enough to trigger the bizarre and unsettling sighting today.
Of course. Pathetic, but understandable.
"It wasn't her," he sighed to Dief, who whined sympathetically in return.
But when Fraser closed his eyes, he could see her again -- moving now in slow-motion through that door at the hotel. And this time, she saw him too.
Victoria stopped the door in mid-revolution, regarding him through the pane as though trapped there in a coffin of glass. Her beautiful face crumpled into an expression of confusion and pain, and he could only watch helplessly, as her lips formed a single word.
"Why?"
Why.
bethbethbeth for insisting that I could actually write something in time, and to actizera for Lightning!Beta (tm). Note: Dialogue is ripped off from the episode "Victoria's Secret". The remaining blither is mine.
At the time, it had seemed such a small thing. Just one moment, in one day, in the march of days that had become Fraser's life. He was walking down a crisply wintery Chicago street in amiable companionship with Ray Vecchio. His errands were complete, and with a little monetary assistance from Ray, Mr. Mustafi's vacuum cleaner had been restored to a working order.
It was a good day, better than average, and as they walked along, Fraser found himself happy to be able to provide an audience for Ray's excited plans to bring his father's prized pool table up from the basement.
"It's my house, and if I want a pool table in the dining room? I'm going to put a pool table in the dining room," Ray announced in a defiant tone that made clear at last the only conceivable set of circumstances brewing in the Vecchio home that would allow for the upstairs move of this fabled pool table.
"How long is she going away for?" Fraser asked, hiding a smile.
"A week," Ray confessed, throwing up his hands in the affectionate gesture of frustration that seemed to accompany most discussions involving his mother. "For years she's been saying how she wants to visit her sister in Florida, how hard it is to be apart. How much she misses her. As soon as I book the hotel room, she's decided she's not speaking to her. I think she's just going up there to glare at her--"
Ray's voice grumbled on but Fraser lost track of the words as his eyes picked up a movement farther up the block.
And for one moment, time seemed to draw still as Fraser stopped to watch a woman getting out of a taxi, her long whip of dark curls tossing in the Chicago wind. It was, of course, impossible. It couldn't be...
The woman turned in from the street, gathering her coat up around her throat. She brushed wild tendrils of hair back from her face, and yes. It was. The strong, sharp, elegantly drawn features that had once fueled a far younger Fraser's hypothermia-addled fantasy: A maiden, fair, encased in ice, shrouded by death. Surely, a creature of destiny.
But here, now, on the streets of Chicago, before he could react, shout, move, Victoria had pushed purposefully through the great glass revolving door of one of downtown's indistinguishably posh business class hotels and disappeared. Without a thought, Fraser ran down the street in pursuit of her.
He came to a halt in front of the revolving door she had vanished behind, following its substantial, measured spin. The rhythmic whap, whap, whap of the chrome-edged panes beat like fan blades as the door cycled around, swallowing and then disgorging smartly dressed pedestrians one at a time into the hotel lobby.
Fraser ignored the people jostling and brushing past him on the sidewalk as he craned his neck to peer through the glass, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her inside. He would be able to distinguish Victoria instantly in any crowd, time's passage notwithstanding. Of that he was certain. She was burned into his senses indelibly.
But, no. There was nothing. No one. No sign of her at all.
He must have been hallucinating. She was a mirage, that was all. A vision conjured by a parched mind that had perhaps, in all these years, never truly lost its fever.
A strange, hollow feeling began to build in the center of Fraser's chest; it took a moment to recognize it as desperation. His heart beat quick and shallow, echoing in his ears as the stream of people shoving past him receded into impressionist blots of color and shape moving through the fractured kaleidoscope revolving before him. He stared dumbly into nothingness until Ray Vecchio’s gloved hand landing on his shoulder finally roused him back to conscious awareness.
“What's going on?”
Fraser started at the touch, then groped for an innocuous sounding explanation as Ray, and the rest of Chicago, blinked into focus around him. His one prior attempt at explaining Victoria to Ray had been a miserable enough failure, and recent enough in memory, to make him leery of another go at it just now.
“Nothing," Fraser demurred, shaking his head. "I just thought I saw a woman I used to know.”
“Thought she needed a vacuum?” Ray asked, indicating Mr. Mustafi's ancient upright, still clutched, forgotten, in Fraser's arms.
“No... I was mistaken.”
Ray seemed satisfied to let it go at that. So, Fraser gratefully took off on foot for the relative solitude of his apartment, leaving Ray with his own fantasies of green felt and the patina of weathered mahogany.
***
Fraser went rotely through the motions of preparing dinner for himself and Diefenbaker in the scarred kitchen of his still nearly empty apartment.
He had, he supposed, been thinking about Victoria more often lately. Certainly since the night of the Bodine stake out -- that poker game with Ray and Detectives Huey and Gardino -- talking about women, relationships, fate, the one. How you recognized the moments of import in your life, the great, defining features. Victoria had been one of those. Fraser had known it instantly then, as surely as he knew it now.
After that night, Fraser had dug through his footlocker and retrieved Victoria's photograph. He hadn't looked at it in years. It was a poor snapshot, taken in horrendous conditions -- storm winds whipping violently through Victoria's hair, snow nearly obscuring her image. But obviously it had been enough to exhume some more deeply held and fully formed memory. Enough to trigger the bizarre and unsettling sighting today.
Of course. Pathetic, but understandable.
"It wasn't her," he sighed to Dief, who whined sympathetically in return.
But when Fraser closed his eyes, he could see her again -- moving now in slow-motion through that door at the hotel. And this time, she saw him too.
Victoria stopped the door in mid-revolution, regarding him through the pane as though trapped there in a coffin of glass. Her beautiful face crumpled into an expression of confusion and pain, and he could only watch helplessly, as her lips formed a single word.
"Why?"
Why.