ds_flashfiction | Secrets challenge from spuffyduds

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Title: Talking Back to Vecchio
Characters: RayK and Fraser
Author:

spuffyduds
Rating: R for language
Length: 1600 words
Disclaimer: I own nothing. My brain is rented, even.

Ray only has a week after he takes the Vecchio gig before the Canadian’s supposed to show back up. And on his first visit to the station Elaine hands him three banker’s boxes full of case files and notes, and Welsh says, “These perpetrators have an odd tendency to reappear, so you should have more than a passing familiarity with their history, Detective Vecchio.” Three boxes. Jesus.

The weird thing is, though, Ray’s actually pretty good at this kind of cramming. You couldn’t have convinced him of that when he was just barely making it through high school. But it turned out that he was just studying wrong. See, the worse his grades got, the more he got assigned to special study halls where you had to sit still and be quiet, and the more his mom hovered over him at home and tried to make him stay at his desk and just read, no radio, no singing along, no arguing with the math book, and everything he tried to read just went white in his head, and his grades got worse and he got more study halls. So he tried to talk his dad out of even wasting his money on community college, but good luck with talking him out of anything. And the first week of school he did study, because he had promised his mom he would. But he did it how he felt like it, because he was going to flunk out anyway, so what difference did it make? His roommate spent most of his time in bars, so Ray would crank up the stereo, hum along while he was reading, jump up and dance a little every couple of pages, do drum riffs with his pencil, yell at the stupid book.

And it stuck. His first trig test, he looked at question one, and all of a sudden he could hear the Costello he was listening to when he studied that part, and feel the drumbeat twitching through his pencil, and he could see the answer. Holy shit.

He had almost a 4.0 that first semester. His teachers liked him. Weird.

He was starting to freak out by December, though, because Stell had only made it down from her smart-kids college a couple of times, and had been too busy studying for him to bus up since late October. And sometimes when he called there were lots of people in her room, most of them sounding like girls but some not, and when she talked about her study groups there were guys she was impressed with, and, you know, Ray wasn’t going to exactly brag that he was making an A in the trig she’d aced in 10th grade. And he started to have a really bad feeling about what was going to happen over Christmas break, like maybe Stell would have something she needed to tell him about the two of them Taking a Break. So he sold most of his record collection and bought a ring, and…

But that’s not him anymore. Some other guy. Goodbye Kowalski, hello Vecchio.

He spends the week swilling coffee and dancing around his apartment and reading case files, and there are some fucking doozies. Nuclear trains? Straitjackets? Falling elevators? He even wonders briefly if somebody put an incredible amount of effort into playing a joke on him. (“You bought the SuperMountie story? Jesus, Kowalski, go back to Vice.”) But no, three boxes with photos and fingerprint cards and sign-offs from Welsh, who seems like a straight-up guy.

Ray yells at Vecchio a lot that week, arguing over collars that he’s pretty sure he would have made faster, witnesses he would have threatened a little harder. He informs Vecchio loudly that he knows there’s stuff missing in the Metcalf case file, because that just doesn’t make any sense. And he really loses it when he gets to Fraser’s personal file, because there’s a note on the front of it in Vecchio’s loopy scrawl that just says, “You better fucking take care of him, Kowalski.”

“You SHOT the guy!” Ray yells. “It’s not like I could do WORSE!” And the guy who lives downstairs pounds on the floor again. He probably thinks Ray’s in the Mob.

He reads through Fraser’s whole file and geez, weird life. There’s a quick summary of why he came to Chicago (and Vecchio’s written in the margin “Get used to THIS, haha!”—huh?) Doesn’t seem to have any relatives around, or any real friends except Vecchio, at least as far as Ray can tell from the file. He hopes the guy's not gonna be too freakin’ needy, because Ray can liase as much as anybody wants and maybe spare the guy a night out once in a while—although apparently he doesn’t drink, that’s gonna be fun—-but he’s sure not babysitting him 24-7, because it is time for Ray to get back on that dating horse. He’s gonna be bumping into Stella from time to time here, and when he does he’ll sure as hell have girlfriend-name-dropping to do, not “Oh, hey, I spent all my evenings this week hanging out with a pathetic Mountie.”

And then he gets to the pictures in the back of the file, and Jesus Christ, WHY has this guy been hanging out with Vecchio? There are a couple of official “liase” shots, and a copy of his Canadian driver’s license, and shit, the guy could be a model or something. Not that Ray notices notices, but he’s not blind.

And then there are some injury-documentation shots, marked on the back that they go with that mob-guy Paulie case. Which, as near as he can tell, is another time when Vecchio managed to get the Mountie fucked over. Fraser’s face looks like hell, and he’s got a lot of rib bruising—probably some broken ones, there. There are shots from lots of different angles--Fraser’s just in boxers so you can see the bruised legs too--but one of the shots is weird. It’s from the back and there’s not much damage back there, looks like the goons were going for the front or maybe he was on the floor for most of it. So almost no bruising showing, and Fraser’s got his head swiveled back toward the camera, showing the less-battered side of his face and looking—confused and a little annoyed at the photographer. And Ray starts laughing, because he gets it. This was probably the same police photographer that took his new Vecchio i.d. shot. And if she slipped Ray a business card about her “tasteful, artistic” after-hours photography business, she sure as hell gave one to this guy. And took as many pictures as she possibly could, even if the poor guy was swaying on his feet.

Ray fans the pictures out again to see if he missed anything important, and his fingers tell him there’s something else odd about that one shot, it feels different, and when he looks more closely at it the edges are all soft and frayed; the other ones from that same session, the ones where Fraser looks like hell, all have crisp edges.

“Huh,” he says, and it takes him a minute, but then it hits him: this one was carried around in a wallet. It’s soft around the edges like his wallet photo of Stell. Which he is getting rid of, when he gets back on the dating horse. So….

“Shit, were you guys partners partners?” he asks Vecchio. Or, you know, Vecchio’s boxes. He gets up and stretches while he thinks it through—his back is getting sore from all the hunching over files. So, okay, if they were, he could deal with that, because no way were they public-displaying all over the place, not cops, so he wouldn’t have to fake that, and obviously in private Fraser would know that his filling-in-for-Vecchio doesn’t go that far. But it seems like Welsh would have at least mentioned it, especially since Vecchio bailed while the guy was gone, Fraser’s not even finding out until he gets back. Nobody would expect Ray to step into the middle of that, would they? And even then the picture wouldn’t make sense. If they were boyfriends Vecchio would have been able to just ask Fraser for a half-naked picture, right?

Oh. Fraser didn’t know. Vecchio had a thing for him and Fraser didn’t know, and Vecchio got so desperate about it he lifted this weird, pissed-off looking shot from the files and carried it around with him and snuck it back in when he left.

“Vecchio, my friend,” Ray says, “that is fucked up.”

He packs up the boxes and spends the last day before the Mountie gets back putting the files back into the cabinets in the station, learning everybody’s names, hitting on Elaine and reminding himself that he doesn’t get to hit on Frannie.

And then the Mountie gets back, and the files? The files were normal, the files were totally fucking de-weirdicated compared to what life is actually like with Fraser in it. And somehow after a day of complete loony-tunes it seems like a comedown to be calling up some woman he barely even knows and trying to make conversation and trying to impress her, when he could be sitting in a bar with Fraser laughing about the Bizarre Explosion of the Day. Even if Fraser orders milk. And, uh, gets a milk mustache and licks it off really slowly.

Ray lasts about six weeks before he finds himself rummaging through the file again, glancing around the station, hiding that photo in his wallet behind Stella’s. And he whispers to himself, “Vecchio, my friend, that is fucked up."