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[nifra-idril.livejournal.com]

Title: Always the Bridesmaid
Sin: Envy
Wordcount: 624

Stella looks really, really nice in her wedding dress.

It’s an expensive one, designer, Ray says, though he didn’t see it until Stella walked down the aisle. Frannie was in front of her, so she didn’t see what Stella’s face looked like as she walked toward Ray, but she must have looked happy. Ray’s face was about to split open he was smiling so wide and behind him all the groomsmen were looking Stella over and grinning – even the other Ray, or maybe especially him. His head’s all craned around as he watches Stella from his seat in the third row, and he ‘s got that funny look on his face that he always used to get when Stella was around – sort of angry and hopeful all at once. Enough that Fraser was a little uncomfortable, anyway.

Frannie could tell because he kept pulling on his collar, and his lips were all creased together.

See, Frannie knows all of Fraser’s expressions. She’s spent enough time watching him, so she knows that when he looked at Stella, he didn’t much like her, and when he looked at her brother, he was proud and happy, and when he looked at Ray Kowalski, he was worried and a little sad and a little angry and a lot –

A lot in love.

Yeah, love, and it’s taken Frannie a little while to figure that out, even after the pair of them came back from the North. Fraser’d seemed softer, and less closed off, and Ray Kowalski had sure been a lot more fun than before. She’d seen Fraser look at Ray that way before the trip to Canada, too – she’d always just thought it was frustration.

So now she knows better, and she also knows that when Fraser left, she didn’t completely get rid of the way she feels about him. She gets that it’s not going to happen between them, she’s gotten that for a long time, really, and okay, so it makes *sense* that Fraser is that way. It’s just that she’s got a lot of time and energy invested in being love with him,
and even if she kind of never expected him to end up with her, she’s pretty okay with it because she didn’t expect him to end up with just *anybody*.

Frannie’s happy for him and Ray, she *is*, and she’s happy for Ray and Stella, and she’s just happy for everybody. Really.

But it’s just that she’s never been married, and nobody’s ever loved her back, and *her* wedding dress is really pretty, too, and she’s never going to get wear it as she walks toward a Fraser who would be smiling like Ray smiled earlier. That’s why she’s crying into her daiquiri as Ray leads Stella around the dance floor and the other Ray kicks Fraser’s feet into place as he tries to teach Fraser how to move with the music.

It’s okay though; Vecchio women always cry at weddings, and Frannie’ll be all right. Sometimes, though, she just wants what they have – what all *four* of them have – so much she could shriek. It can eat a girl up a little, this kind of thing, and Father Clemente always says that envy’s the most dangerous out of all the mortal sins.

Frannie thinks he’s probably right, too, because if she didn’t love all of them so much – or at least three of them anyway, she’s got her doubts about Stella sometimes which is kind of her job as Ray’s little sister – if she didn’t love them all so much, she’d probably hate them. She’d probably hate them a lot.