ds_flashfiction | space challenge, by eledhwenlin

Title: Filler
Author:

eledhwenlin
Pairing: F/K

Wordcount: 2.8k
Notes: a really big thank you goes to my two awesome betas

bluebrocade! You both kicked ass during the beta. Needless to say, all remaining mistakes are mine.
I should say beforehand that this is not Ray how I generally see him. This is a more jaded version of him. That might be important to know.
Feedback is longed for. Concrit is welcome - if you feel uncomfortable pointing out flaws in this story publicly, drop me an email at eledhwenlin AT gmail DOT com.

After Stella left, Ray had so much space to fill. He moved out of their old apartment as soon as he could and got himself a new one, hoping that in the smaller apartment there’d be less space to fill than in their old home and fewer memories occupying every room.

It worked for a while, until he became aware of the open spaces. He bought a set of chili pepper lights and hung them in his hall, so he wouldn’t notice there weren’t any family pictures hanging there. A bike went on the wall, a really stupid idea, what grown man hangs a bike on his wall instead of, say, riding it? But it filled the place where Ray had imagined Stella’s flower painting would be, the one she’d inherited from her grandmother, the one Ray had grown to like. He strategically cluttered up his apartment to disguise the lack of another person in his life.

But then there were the open spaces in his time. Dinner for one took less time than making a full-blown candle-light dinner - mostly because Ray didn’t much care about real dinners anymore. He either had Sandor delivering him pizza or ate some deep-fried ready-made dish or other. There was no one to talk to, so he watched a lot of TV to fill the silence. It didn’t help and he could feel himself going crazy.

So Ray started going to the gym more often. Stella had wanted him to stop boxing altogether, but he couldn’t do that, couldn’t give up that part of his life so completely. He’d gone less regularly, had gone when Stella wasn’t at home and hoped she wouldn’t notice. It never worked - she had always noticed, and every time they fought afterwards. Now he also took up coaching some of the kids, taught them how to box properly and how to keep out of trouble, remembering the lessons he had gotten as a kid from someone more experienced than him. It wasn’t just fun, it was also a fulfilling task and, more important still, the kids took up a lot of Ray’s time. He didn’t feel quite as alone after he’d spent a long evening at the gym.

Ray also started working a lot. He came in early - no point in staying in bed late, when there was no one to share it with. He stayed late because there was only the turtle to come home to. Granted, he loved Tucker, but he wasn’t a very good conversationalist, so he wasn’t missing anything. On top of that, he felt like he was making a difference, felt the old joy of being a cop again. But the most gratifying feature was that Ray could fill spaces.

He didn’t even mind the paperwork - it had boxes of empty space where you put your information. Name of complainant, type of crime, date, statement, sign here. Every filled sheet of paper made Ray feel confirmed, like he was really there.

But even that bore its own problems. Ray slowly but surely worked his way through the backlog of paperwork he’d accumulated during his divorce. He spent so much time at the station that he could solve all his cases in record time. After a while he even started picking up his colleagues’ work - he wasn’t outright snatching their collars, but he took their overflow and ended up doing more than his fair share of work.

Deep down Ray knew that this would have to end someday, but he hoped that this day was still far away, because it worked for him, right? And he had the top solve rate, too. What were innumerable hours of overtime and perhaps a little too much force used during interviews in face of that? Nothing, that’s what they were.

Nevertheless, he saw the frowns and noticed the quiet conversations that stopped when he entered a room. Not everyone felt as good as Ray about him being the new Supercop and it soon started to show its more hideous sides. People avoided him, and when he went out with the guys, he wasn’t quite shunned, but he felt like an outsider. Soon his system stopped working. The more he tried to fill all the spaces around him, the more spaces there seemed to be, and Ray often worked himself into a stupor trying to rid himself of all of them. But no matter how much he worked, there always was emptiness left that glared at him and nagged at his sanity.

Unfortunately that “someday” came much sooner than Ray had anticipated. When his lieu called him to his office and closed the door, Ray knew what to expect. In hindsight, he often thought that he should have seen it coming. Something would have to happen, but Ray hadn’t been quite ready for it then. Not yet. “I got a job for you”, his lieu said and told him about this wacky undercover assignment where one cop would replace another to fool the criminals. Totally absurd and weird, which was probably one of the reasons why Ray picked it. Later he always suspected that his lieu had worded the offer the way he did on purpose - “You’ll fill in for another cop” - there had been more than one occasion when Ray had been drunk on a rare night out or sleep-deprived-crazy while working on a hard case and blathered on and on about how he had to fill the spaces.

Well, now he had a very clear-cut space to fill. Ray’d said yes to the assignment, because he had nothing to reject the offer for, and the very next day he got a load of files. He carefully read each and every one of them and memorised what he could. He just hoped no one was going to ask him where Vecchio had been born, because he couldn’t keep that one straight at all. But even despite all that studying and memorising, the task seemed fairly easy beforehand. Ray was good at undercover and he was good at being a cop, so this should work out fine, right? He could fill in here.

Ray truly believed so until he met the Vecchios for the first time. During their talk, when they resolved some outstanding matters like Ray living in his own apartment instead of at the Vecchio house, because that would have been awkward beyond words, Mrs Vecchio was quite grief-stricken and the looks his “sister” was throwing him made Ray want to hide. He was neither son nor brother here and he felt it sorely. They were in this just to keep the “real” Ray alive and Ray was just a substitute and not even a good one, too, what with him being blond and Polish. At least he was Catholic, he thought.

When Ray came home that night, he felt stupid for not having anticipated this. Yeah, he could be Vecchio, but he couldn’t be the whole Vecchio. Total loss on the family front, so Ray hoped that would at least he’d make a decent Detective First Grade Ray Vecchio. And he actually did. Okay, at first everyone was giving him the eye, checking out the new guy, but as soon as he’d proven he was a good cop, everyone relaxed.

It was going okay until the Mountie came along. Ray had been a little bit afraid of their encounter because your partner wasn’t just the guy to keep you entertained on long stake-outs, he was also your back-up, your second gun, and you had to trust him with your life. This wasn’t going to be easy, that much was sure.

But what happened in the end was worse than anything he could have imagined. Ray caught on pretty early that Fraser really hadn’t talked to Welsh, that he had no idea what the fuck was going on here, but there wasn’t any way they could just go back to the station and clear that up, not with some lunatic trying to burn both their lives down.

So Ray spent all day being measured out and with every step he noticed just how much he didn't fit into the hole Vecchio had left here. It was depressing if you stopped for a moment and thought about it, so Ray didn’t stop at all and drove a burning car into a lake.

Despite all that, though, Ray was amazed they closed the case so fast and pretty easily, too. Fraser and him, they had this kind of connection going on and it was good. They were good and all of that didn’t make Ray feel any better, when he saw Fraser going into Welsh’s office. He was afraid of what would come. Welsh had already told him that the 2-7 needed another good detective with Vecchio off to do better things, but that Ray’s ticket in was the Mountie. If they could work it out, Ray was good to stay, if not... If not, it would really put a damper on their plans, but they’d think of something else.

Ray tried not to pay too much attention to the closed door. He heard them talking, but it was too muted for him to make out any distinct words. What was Fraser telling Welsh? That his new Ray came up seven millimetres short and that he was incapable of working with that?

Thinking and worrying was driving Ray crazy, so he started cleaning out his inbox. When he saw the postcard, he knew instantly who had written it. He stared at it until he heard a door close and open, then looked up just in time to see Fraser standing in the middle of the bullpen looking lost. He was too familiar with that feeling himself, so he grabbed the postcard and got up. No harm in delivering some mail, right?

When the hidden picture appeared, Fraser looked at it with so much longing that Ray took himself away after making sure that Fraser was all right. He had no right to watch that moment. There was no place for him here. Ray turned toward his desk with a sinking feeling in his stomach. No, he wasn’t fitting in at all here.

“Ray?”

Turning around, he saw Fraser looking at him with determination and something else in his eyes that Ray couldn’t quite name.

“Would you like to get something to eat with me?”

The offer came as such a surprise to Ray that at first he didn’t know how to answer. But then it came out all at once.

“Yeah, I’ll just put those files away and meet you at the car.”

He didn’t know what to expect, but it could only be a good sign, right? And dinner was fun. There was an awkward silence at first, but after they had sniffed each other out, they got talking.

Ray found out that Fraser had a quirky sense of humour and bad taste in hockey teams. He heard more Inuit stories than he ever thought existed. And he had the privilege to share part of his chicken with one hungry half-wolf who could look very pleadingly and starved.

So Ray got himself a Mountie and wolf who started to fill his spaces all on their own. They had lunch and dinner together, watched hockey and bam! all the big spaces vanished. There was a Mountie sitting on his couch watching an apparently very interesting documentary about some dead guys with ships. Dief lay on his rug on the armchair neither of them ever used. Instead of just coffee, there were strange kinds of tea in his cupboard and there was food, even some vegetables which Fraser had talked him into buying by making Ray feel guilty about his habitually bad way of eating. It was kind of like his marriage with Stella, how they’d been like in the beginning. They took care of each other and practically spent all their time together, which only served to make them feel even more connected, which then made them understand each other even better, and in the end they were even better together.

All in all, life was good.

At least until Ray Vecchio came back. In that moment, when Fraser so joyfully exclaimed “Ray!”, he felt the walls closing in on him, but he could also feel the spaces popping up again. Ray saw his life falling apart.

So when Fraser said “if you’ll have me”, there was no question what Ray would do - he’d say yes to about everything. He tried to prolong their time together at all costs. Jumping onto a moving plane seemed easy compared to trying to live without Fraser, just himself, with all those empty spaces.

It was damn cold up there and there was all this snow. It should have felt empty to Ray, but the thing was that it didn’t. In Chicago he couldn’t help but notice the emptiness around himself. But Canada defied all that. Ray didn’t have to fill the space here, it just was there, non-threateningly, giving him room to breathe rather than suffocating him. He fell in love with that.

It lasted only too short a time. They caught Muldoon and then it should have been “Thank you kindly, Ray, for your partnership, and I hope we’ll stay in touch”.

Only it didn’t come. All through the chaos coming in the wake of Muldoon’s arrest - Mounties on parachutes, which was wacky even for something involving Fraser, apparently required a lot of paperwork - Ray waited for it. First at Frobisher’s posting where they put up a tentative camp for a while, then in Yellowknife, where they were waiting for further orders.

Ray was tense, bracing himself for the inevitable until he finally realised that Fraser was just as keen on bidding Ray goodbye as Ray was on leaving. It puzzled and confused him.

He sat on his bed thinking about it. Fraser was now where he had wanted to be for the last three years, he was back home. There hadn’t been concrete conversations yet, but Thatcher had already said that Fraser could pick his own detachment now. Canada was going to take him back with honors - he could return home to all the snow and ice and solace. Fraser should want to get on with his life and for this Ray needed to go.

But Fraser made no moves. They had been in Yellowknife for a week already and not once had Fraser mentioned the future. But, unlike Ray, he didn’t have anything to lose; no, he could only gain. So why didn’t Fraser give Ray the boot?

Ray couldn’t answer that question for himself, so he did the only sensible thing: he decided to ask Fraser. After all, he was just across the hallway. It didn’t take Fraser long to answer the door, even though he was slightly surprised to see Ray. They normally hung around in Ray’s room for whatever reasons Fraser might have for that.

But inside Fraser’s room with Fraser just there, wearing one of those flannel shirts that ought to make Fraser look ridiculous, not hot, and Dief snoring on the rug, words failed him. To bridge the gap and work up some courage, Ray sat down on the edge of Fraser’s bed and stared at the floor. He felt the bed dip when Fraser sat down next to him. And still the words wouldn’t come. They sat in silence for some minutes until Fraser spoke up.

“Ray, is there something you want to talk about?”

Ray sighed. It had seemed a lot easier in his own room, but now he was afraid of what his answer would be.

“I... why aren’t you sending me home?”

Fraser’s surprise was palpable. “Ray, why should I do such a thing?”

Ray stood up and started pacing.

“You could be up here and chase poachers instead of purse-snatchers and find yourself a Mountie woman. But I, I need to go home first, because I’m cramping up your style here, what with the hypo-thing and the non-existent snow kills, and I ain't going until you tell me to, ‘cause there’s not really much in Chicago to return to, and you’re not telling me to get lost. Why?”

With that last word, he turned to face Fraser. When he looked into his eyes, though, he finally got it. He got why Fraser hadn’t sent him home to get on with his life and he realised Fraser wouldn’t ever send Ray away - there was a Ray-Kowalski-sized space in Fraser’s life just as there was a Benton-Fraser-sized one in Ray's.

“Ray, I...”

Fraser broke off. Then he smiled.

“I thought you wanted to have an adventure.”

And what could Ray say in answer to that except: “Fuck, yes, let’s leave right now”?

Of course, they didn't find Franklin’s hand. But they found someone to fill their spaces with, and in Ray’s opinion that was much better.