![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
china_shop posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ds_flashfictionTitle: The Blue and the Dim and the Dark
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
umbrella_half
Team: Whimsy
Prompt: "You are not bringing that thing anywhere near me."
Pairing(s): Fraser/Kowalski
Length: 8800 words
Rating: R
Warnings: Swearing, some sexual content
Summary: While investigating the murder of a politician, the boundaries between waking and sleeping blur for Ray and Fraser.
Author's notes: A thousand beta thanks must go totorra and to slidellra!
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Genre information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
All through La traviata Michelle is restless, and the way David keeps catching her eye and smiling doesn’t help. As soon as the second curtain call ends he takes her hand and pulls her out of the theater. The short heels of her boots make a pleasing, slick click on the wet paving stones as David pulls her round the corner. Her feet hurt and the air is cold outside. It’s raining, and she’s getting wet, but she’s grinning. David’s hand is nice and warm. Her legs are bare under the long coat, and she readjusts her shawl.
“David,” she says. There’s nothing really else to say. He smiles and turns around to face her, kissing her hard. She kisses back. “You know, for a forty-something year-old—” He kisses her again. “—you really—” And again.
“Let’s go back,” he says in her ear. “Now.”
“Yes,” she says, and she kisses him again. But four seconds into the kiss, just as David’s hand is starting to creep up her leg under her coat, a silenced automatic is placed to David’s neck and fired. A second later, before she can blink, the same automatic is fired under her chin, and she dies.
***
In the dream Ray and Fraser are sitting on a couch. The air is salty, as they’re floating in the middle of the sea, and large, loud birds of paradise are circling high above them. The birds are all black, which is a little odd, but Ray knows they’re birds of paradise anyway.
“Fraser,” Ray says, “what’re we doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” says Fraser, smiling at him. “But there’s some good reason, I expect.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Ray. He scratches his armpit and leans back on the cushions. They’re full of some strange, squishy substance he doesn’t really want to think about too hard. Fraser has on a pair of long shorts and one of Ray’s wifebeaters, which seems perfectly normal. He’s got nice arms, thinks Ray. He doesn’t work out, so how does he do it?
“I know!” says Ray, suddenly. “The birds!”
Fraser’s eyes light up. “Of course!”
All at once, three of the black birds of paradise fall from the sky into the ocean with a resounding splash.
***
Ray’s gotten used to fetching Fraser in the early morning. The consulate’s still still: there’s no Mountie standing guard duty outside, no Ice Queen looking disapprovingly from upstairs windows, no Turnbull trying to be helpful. In the wet quiet of a Chicago 8AM the consulate looks almost normal. So then he’s knocking on the consulate door, a cardboard folder under his arm and a paper cup full of strong, sugary coffee in his free hand. Eventually Fraser answers the door, his jacket unbuttoned and his hair ruffled.
“Hey Frase,” he says, using his empty hand to gesture up and down at Fraser’s body. “Are you… OK?”
Fraser’s frowning.
“Good morning, Ray,” he says. “I’m fine.” But his eyes are bloodshot and he looks bleary and beat.
“Fraser… did I wake you up?”
“No.”
“Good,” says Ray. “Great. Great.” He licks his lips. “Look, Frase, can I come in?”
Fraser ushers him into his office and sits down behind his desk, where he stares at the steam rising from Ray’s cup.
“Frase, you sure you’re alright?” He offers the cup. “You want some coffee?”
Fraser shakes his head as if to clear it, and looks at Ray, smiling.
“Just didn’t sleep well. Strange dreams. And no, thank you. I made myself a cup of tea,” he says, reaching for the mug on the desk. “Which is now cold.” He makes a face.
“I didn’t sleep so good either,” says Ray, taking a slurp of coffee. “Weird dreams. But look at this.” He opens up the cardboard file and passes it to Fraser. “Triple homicide.”
“And one of the victims is David Coanes,” Fraser says, nodding, “the Alderman of Ward Thirty-Three.”
“Yeah,” says Ray. “Him, his date and some taxi driver. All down the same alley. Driver had his pants unzipped so we’re assuming he was taking a leak down there. Doesn’t seem to be connected, he probably just got in the way.”
“But the intended victim was Alderman Coanes?”
“That’s the assumption here.”
“And the woman with him?”
“I’m guessing incidental. I’m gonna go give his offices the once-over now. Coming?”
Fraser frowns and rubs his eyes. “I…”
“You can just stay here. Take a nap,” he says, grinning at Fraser, who frowns and stands up, brushing imaginary lint from his uniform jacket.
“I couldn’t shirk my duties, Ray.”
“Ice Queen would rip you a new one, huh?” Ray says, cocking an eyebrow.
Fraser frowns, rubbing his earlobe. “That too.” He looks at Diefenbaker, who’s lying on the floor – The wolf’s got the right idea, Ray thinks – and gestures toward the door. Fraser gets up and nods at Dief, who makes a grumbling noise that Ray doesn’t need to have translated. They leave.
***
So he sort-of gets it, he does. Three birds dead, and that means something to him in the back of his head, but whenever he tries to really have a think about it, it vanishes like cigarette smoke. Fraser doesn’t seem concerned though, he’s just sitting back with his hands clasped behind his head. It’s the most relaxed Ray’s seen him in a long time, and it’s quite weird.
“Y’know, Frase, I’m not really sure about it, actually,” he says. Fraser looks at him. “The birds, I mean.”
“Well,” says Fraser, slowly, like he’s considering how best to put something. “Me neither, Ray. But I know that it is significant. The number, that is. Three.”
“Yeah,” replies Ray. “Yeah.” He shifts a little closer to Fraser on the couch, putting a hand on his arm. “Look, Frase, are we dreaming?”
Fraser looks at him, considering. Careful. He licks his lips, and Ray finds his eyes skirting a little lower to focus on Fraser’s mouth, not his eyes.
“I think,” says Fraser, and Ray can feel Fraser’s breath on his face, “that we are.” He swallows. His breathing is a little deeper than normal, maybe because he’s sleeping. Fraser reaches out and places one broad palm on Ray’s bare chest. Ray looks down and realizes that he’s not wearing a shirt. Just a pair of worn jeans.
“Huh,” he says, and takes Fraser’s hand off his chest. Holds it. “You… wanna go swimming, Frase?”
Fraser looks at him like he’s a little crazy, so he shimmies out of his jeans and puts them on the couch cushion, then slips into the ocean in his boxers. He gets his head under the water, taking some of it into his mouth and tasting it. Salty. The water’s very blue, and the sun is very warm, and there’s a splash behind him, too loud to be another bird – Fraser’s stripped off his undershirt and shorts and is swimming toward Ray. He’s swimming a little awkwardly though – there’s something in his left hand. One of the birds.
Fraser swims up to him and produces it.
“No, Fraser, no. You are not bringing that thing anywhere near me.” he says, recoiling. You don’t touch dead animals, he thinks. Not unless they’re wrapped in plastic and bought in the supermarket. “Frase,” he says. He keeps forgetting to kick his legs to keep himself afloat, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
“Just look, Ray,” says Fraser, patiently. Ray looks. There’s a small hole in its head, near the point where the beak connects to the bird’s throat. Fraser squeezes the dead bird’s throat, gently, and says “Hold out your hands.”
He’s done a lot of weird, gross stuff for Fraser in his time, so he does what Fraser says, and holds out his hands. A small, cold object falls into them.
“It’s like a bullet,” he says, confused. “Like a tiny bullet.”
“Yes,” says Fraser, kicking, moving a little closer to him. “But what does it mean?”
***
The Alderman’s office is chaos, of course. Ray drives them to Ward Thirty-Three and throws the remnants of his coffee onto the sidewalk outside the building. It’s fairly nondescript, all grey and squat. Several posters with the face of the dead man adorn a notice board outside, smiling out at them.
“Someone obviously didn’t tell them,” he says.
“Hmm,” replies Fraser. It’s one of those Frasery things to say – not exactly disapproving, but verging on the Really, Ray, do you think that’s quite appropriate? vibe. Ray ignores him and pushes through the door.
They talk with the Alderman’s personal assistant, a large woman in a pantsuit. She tries to be helpful, but in they end they don’t come up with much. The guy seemed OK: no scandal, no skeletons. He loved his girlfriend. It kinda shakes Ray’s faith in Chicago politicians.
His phone rings, and he fishes for it in the pocket of his coat, clumsy in his gloves.
“Vecchio.”
“Ray,” Frannie’s voice on the other end has the hard, bitter edge of annoyance to it. “Look, the Lieutenant wants to know how the office went. Huey and Dewey checked over Michelle Daley’s place already.”
“They’re eager,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, “and also it looks like the driver just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They checked his apartment, but apparently nothing.”
“Right.”
“So,” she says, pointedly. “The Alderman’s office?”
“Er, yeah. Not a lot. He seems clean and decent. Normal. Did anyone see them go into the alley last night?”
“No, seems they left the opera a few minutes earlier than everyone else in there, and it was pretty deserted. The weather—”
“—yeah. I remember.” He’d been trying to get to sleep, listening to the rain outside the bedroom window.
***
That night he sleeps more soundly. First he can hear Fraser’s voice, and he wonders if they’re back in the sea, swimming and… what else had they been doing? There were birds, weren’t there? But no. It’s not the sea. Fraser and Ray are sitting in a tent. In the logic of the dream, Fraser looks out of the tent and sees desert, but Ray sees arctic tundra, and they can never both look out at the same time.
“What’s going on?” says Ray. Fraser puts an arm around his shoulders.
“Aren’t you cold, Ray?” he asks.
“Well sure,” Ray replies. “It must be minus thirty out there.” He looks at Fraser. “But… aren’t you hot?”
“It’s alright, Ray,” says Fraser.
“No, wait,” he pushes Fraser off. “I know you’ve gotta do the whole Mountie-martyr thing, but you don’t have to—”
“—it’s OK, Ray, really—”
“—c’mon, Fraser, I’m a big boy now—”
Then Fraser kisses him.
***
Frannie tells them that she’s been told to tell them to get in first thing the next morning. An interview with Michelle Daley’s next of kin. When she hangs up, Ray’s stomach growls – no breakfast, no lunch. He checks his watch – it’s one o’clock.
“Fraser, you want some—”
“—lunch?” says Fraser.
“Yeah. Lunch.”
They end up getting hot dogs. Ray notices the way Fraser manages not to get mustard anywhere but in his mouth, whereas Ray himself ends up with stuff everywhere, probably looking like a what-not-to-do diagram on how to eat a hot dog. He gets most of it off his face with a napkin. Fraser looks at him and brushes the tip of his own nose, pointedly. Ray scrubs at it with the back of his hand.
“Better?”
“Better.”
“You want I should drive you back to the consulate? I’ve gotta go back and do some paperwork, touch base with Welsh…” he trails off.
“Sure, Ray. That would be—” Fraser says, losing the end of the sentence in a yawn. Dief makes a noise and sticks his face in between the front seats. Ray bats at him, playfully.
“You should get an early night, too,” he tells Fraser. “I think we both should, really.”
He knows as he drives Fraser back that the bullpen’s going to be busy and loud, and he really wishes sometimes that he could just bail and go back to the consulate with Fraser and relax, shoot the shit. Or back to his place and sleep. Neither was going to happen in a hurry, though.
***
“Fraser!” he says. Fraser’s got one hand on Ray’s chest, the other’s making friendly with the back of Ray’s neck. Not that he minds so much, but this is a little freaky. More than a little. More than a lot, really. “Fraser, what…?” He trails off.
“Ray,” says Fraser in the gentle tone he reserves for old ladies and young delinquents who can do better in life given the chance, “this is just a dream.”
“Yeah,” Ray agrees. “But it’s my dream too, buddy.”
“Oh,” says Fraser. Ray watches the realization of it creep over his face like clouds on the TV weather forecast. “Oh…” he says again, and backs away, skittish and spooked, to the other end of the tent.
“No,” says Ray, thinking You dope, Ray, you freaking idiot, “No, Fraser, I…” he moves forward. Fraser’s reached the canvas wall, which is deceptively solid. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I meant it to mean…” He likes Fraser, he likes Fraser a lot. And kissing in a tent that doesn’t really exist works for him.
“Yes, Ray?” Fraser’s looking at him intently, head cocked and a frown on his face. Ray considers the angle of his face and realizes that it would be very easy to lean forward and kiss him like this. “Are you alright, Ray?”
Ray nods, and leans forward. The angles work.
***
When the alarm clock wakes him he rolls over and hits at it. It’s cold and wet outside, he can tell. And now he has to get up and deal with the reality of showering, clean clothes and morning erections.
Damn.
He’d been dreaming, too. Some strange shit, what was it? He tries to remember, all through the shower, through rummaging through his drawers for clean boxers, through brushing the taste of morning coffee from his mouth with the last of the tube of toothpaste. It was definitely something to do with Fraser. Something. But he couldn’t remember anything more than that.
He’s still thinking when he picks up Fraser, hoping that Fraser’s being there in the car with him will help, but it doesn’t, and he forgets it. Fraser seems a little on edge as well.
“D’you not sleep so well? Last night?” he asks.
“Hmm?” Fraser says, looking up. “Oh, no. I slept fine, Ray. Thank you.”
Sometimes talking to Fraser is like talking to quicksand, however light and casual and disinterested you try to be, he sucks you in and starts animatedly talking about whatever shit he finds interesting (and that’s a lot of shit) and you have no choice but to join in. Sometimes, however, talking to Fraser is like talking to a brick wall.
The wipers whir back and forth across the windshield.
***
Phillipa Daley is a thin woman with thin hair, who sits in the chair in the interview room clutching the Styrofoam cup of police standard-issue coffee like a lifeline. She looks curiously at Fraser and Dief, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears, absent-mindedly, but her gaze slides over Ray like water on oil.
“Ms. Daley,” he says quietly. “I...erm.” She looks up at him, and her eyes are pale grey like tent canvas. “I’m Detective Vecchio. I need to ask you about your sister.”
“I…” She coughs, clears her throat. “I know. What would you like to know, Detective?”
“When was the last time you saw her?” he asks.
“Three days before she died. Before she was murdered,” she answers, brushing her bangs away from her eyes with a hand. “We had lunch.”
“Did you notice anything unusual in her behavior? Did she say anything strange?”
“No. Nothing at all,” she says. He nods.
“Ms. Daley, we… we need to know about your sister’s relationship with Mr. Coanes,” he says. She smiles a little.
“Dave. He’s… he was a nice guy, Detective. He and Michelle, they were good for each other.”
“Did she ever express any unhappiness, frustration?”
“Sure,” she says, nodding. “Now and then she’d call me, complaining about how he’d not been listening to her, or how they’d had a stupid row,” she smiles, tired and wan. “But it was normal. They’d always make up the next day, and she’d call me and it’d all be sweetness and roses.” She takes a sip of the coffee and grimaces.
“Police coffee,” says Ray, nodding at the coffee cup and smiling apologetically. “So there wasn’t anything… abnormal about their relationship?”
“Abnormal?” she frowns. “No, well…no. They were fine.”
Ray sighs and looks over at Fraser, standing in a corner.
“Well,” she says, and his head snaps back to face her. “He did have this one ex.”
“An ex?” asks Ray, carefully.
“Yeah. She was a bit of a…”
“Psycho?”
“Yeah. Well put, Detective,” she smiles. “A psycho. She’d call round his place when they were having dinner together, conveniently bump into them on the street and act surprised, that sort of thing.”
“And did they report it to the police?”
“I don’t think they thought of it. They might’ve done, I suppose. I didn’t ask.”
He glances at Fraser, who nods and leaves.
“And do you know this woman’s name, Ms. Daley?” he asks. This could be something. She frowns.
“Kim? Maybe?”
He smiles. “Thanks.”
***
While they’re kissing Ray finds Fraser’s hand and holds it, grips it firmly. He can feel the cold air around him, can feel Fraser lips and his face, his tongue and the fine sandpaper-stubble of Fraser’s chin against his own. Fraser makes a soft noise, and they break apart.
“I didn’t think that… Well, I didn’t know. Is this real?”
“Fraser, you dumbass,” he grins at his partner. “This is a dream.”
“But,” Fraser says, confused and hopeful. “But, Ray, consider: if it is a dream—” But then Ray kisses him again and slips a hand around into his hair. There are no more speculations.
***
He’s rubbing his chin when he gets out, trying to remember whether or not he forgot to shave this morning, and finds Fraser sitting at Francesca’s desk with a slight smile on his face.
“Anything?” he asks.
“Well it would appear that Ms. Daley was correct in her assumption,” says Fraser, looking up. “No complaint was filed by the Alderman.”
“Right.”
“However, I called his office, and his personal assistant gave me the woman’s address.” He hands a torn-off piece of notepad paper to Ray.
“Kim Sanders,” he says. “Shall we go pay a visit?”
***
Kim Sanders lives on the 15th floor of a fancy apartment building complex. The doorman lets them in and gazes at them, surly and wary. His eyes flick from Fraser to Ray to Dief and then at the door, and then back to them. He’s a big guy, blond hair and broad shoulders. Can’t be more the twenty, Ray guesses.
“Excuse me, son,” says Fraser. Ray rolls his eyes. “We’re looking for a Ms. Sanders. Kim Sanders.” He takes the paper from Ray’s hand and shows it to the doorman. He looks at it, and then at Fraser, and then at Ray, and finally at Dief.
“She’s not here,” he says. “Went away a week ago. To Oakland. Her mother. Something like that.”
“Then you won’t mind if we have a look around her apartment,” says Ray, smiling pleasantly at him.
“I…” the guy hesitates. Ray reaches into his pocket and the guy holds up his hands, backing away. “OK, OK.”
“Not a gun, doofus,” Ray says, pulling out his badge to show the guy. “No one carries guns in their pockets.” He rummages some more and pulls out a crumpled warrant.
“Actually, Ray,” says Fraser in conversational tones, “I believe that it’s actually quite common—”
“—Fraser.”
“Understood.”
Fraser takes the key the doorman offers, and, as expected, begins to question the ethics of intimidating well-meaning members of the public. Ray nods and yeah-yeahs back at him, because, c’mon, this is murder here, this is triple homicide. They can catch the girl. Or the guy. Or whoever. Ride off into the sunset and be big heroes.
***
Another dream, and Fraser’s here again. He gives Ray a hug when sees him. No, that’s not the way it happens – he looks at Ray when he sees him. Really looks at him, all close and considered, and then he hugs him. Fraser is the king of freaks, but Ray’s glad he’s here.
But there’s a shadow outside the room.
But… it’s not a room. The space they’re in is much too big. Huge. Huge and mostly dark, with a few flickering lights. Outside the windows the stars are glinting, winking. On one wall, painted in dark blue are two words and an exclamation mark: I vanished!
Ray turns around, checking the place out. “Fraser? Where are we?”
“Don’t you recognize it?” Fraser says, standing next to him.
“Well… I think so. It’s a church, right?”
“We’re in Chicago,” says Fraser.
Right. Chicago.
“Where?” he looks up, taking in the ceiling, the darkness.
“St. Michael’s Church, Ray.”
“In Old Town?” he asks. Fraser nods. Ray frowns, trying to remember if he’s been here before. “Why are we here?”
“I’m not sure,” says Fraser, frowning. “But then, why were we in the middle of the ocean on a piece of household furniture? Why were we in a tent?”
“You kissed me!” Ray says, triumphant. “Yeah, Fraser! You kissed me. I remember.”
Fraser might’ve blushed in the darkness, Ray couldn’t tell.
“But hey,” he says, “What’s outside this room?”
“The shadows?”
“More than one? I thought it was just one, Frase.”
“You may be right,” says Fraser. He’s thinking, but thinking here in the dream is hard, like chewing through gristle. So Ray kisses Fraser, and solves that problem.
***
The apartment’s empty, like the doorman said. They look around, and Dief takes an unusual interest in the houseplants. There’s a ripe banana in the fruit bowl, a few plates in the sink. Nothing exciting. He checks her bedroom while Fraser checks the bathroom and the study. In half an hour they’ve come up with very little.
“Anything?” Ray asks, perching on the leather armchair while Fraser looks out of the window.
“Not that I can see. She seems to work from home,” Fraser replies. Not helpful.
“Right, well. Dead end,” he says, getting up and heading for the door. “I guess we’ll just wait ‘til she gets back. From Oakland. Assuming she’s coming, of course.”
He pauses by the answer phone. The light’s flashing. What harm can it do? he thinks, and pushes the play button.
“You have one new message,” it says. “Message one:” There’s a loud, high beep that makes him wince, and then a man’s voice.
“Kim, it’s Mike. Look, we… look, we need to talk, baby. We need to talk. There’s trouble. There’s trouble with Daley. Come down to the warehouse on North Broadway on Thursday evening. We need to talk. I… I love you, baby.”
Another beep.
“Message ends,” says the phone, helpfully. “To delete all messages, press delete.”
“Huh,” says Ray.
“Well,” says Fraser, rubbing his eyebrow. “The plot thickens.”
***
“Right,” says Welsh. “It’s simple. We pulled up her rap sheet, and Kim Sanders has a list as long as your arm. Drug dealing, extortion, assault. Been clean for the better part of ten years, apparently, but she was recently photographed at this little tête-à-tête.”
He puts a black and white photograph on the table. A group of suited men entering a building, with Sanders on the arm of one of them, looking over her shoulder, just to the right of the camera.
“Actually, Lieutenant,” says Fraser. He says ‘left-enant’. Ray wonders if there’s a right one too. “A tête-à-tête is usually a conversation between—” he breaks off, looking at the expression on Welsh’s face. “Who are these gentlemen?”
“Lowlifes, drug dealers, mobsters. The underbelly of the Chicago criminal class, Constable.”
Huey reaches over and points with his index finger to each figure in turn.
“Joey Villani, Michael Franks, Aaron the Spike,”
Ray snorts. “Aaron the Spike.”
“I think ‘Villani’’s way worse,” says Francesca. “What kind of self-respecting Italian is called Villani?”
“Could Michael be the one who left the message on Ms. Sanders’ answering machine?” asks Fraser. “She is on his arm, here. And it did sound like they were engaged in a romantic relationship.”
Ray nods. Makes sense.
“Right,” says Welsh. “We’ve got an ex-girlfriend of a murdered politician who has anti-social tendencies and mob connections.”
“She was in Oakland at the time, Lieutenant,” says Fraser. “Or so we were told.”
“She could’ve arranged it,” replied Welsh. “Or she could’ve been here the whole time. Miss Vecchio, call the airports and find out.”
Frannie nods. “You know,” she says, “she could’ve just leaned on her boyfriend to do it. Big mobster like Michael Franks?” she raises her eyebrows meaningfully, and points two fingers at Welsh. He nods, his face set.
“When she gets back, we’re taking her in,” he says.
***
When he lay in bed that night, Ray should’ve known it was a little too smooth of a plan to work so well. Instead he dreamed a dream of Fraser and corn fields in the desert. He wakes up hungry and hard as hell again, and sits up in bed for two minutes thinking about curling. When he’s not in danger of poking someone’s eye out, he gets up and gets ready for work.
Sanders had been booked on a flight from Oakland that morning, but she hadn’t shown, Frannie informs them. Welsh tells her to look for bus and train tickets, rental cars, and soon they have a registration number of the car she’s driving.
“When did she get it?” he asks.
“Two days ago,” she replies, her mouth downturned. Welsh swears, quietly.
“Looks like we’re waiting for her at the warehouse,” he says.
***
Ray notices the blond girl with the long legs at once. Sanders. She’s standing off to the side with wide, wide eyes and clenched fists, staring, open mouthed at the four uniforms. She’s been shot in the left arm, red blood running down her hand.
It’d been a fine stakeout until they’d heard gunfire and rushed in.
Ray’s standing up, unseen, on the metal walkway that rings the warehouse, his gun in hand, safety off. They’re telling Sanders to freeze, to put her hand up and just relax, just relax now, ma’am. But they don’t see the gun in the back of her jeans, don’t seem to notice the right fist scraping across the denim and the metal rivets to the back of her pants. She’s got long fingernails painted dark blue.
“Gun!” he yells. “She’s got a gun!”
Bang. There’s another bullet in her, and she yells in pain and falls. Ray hears the muffled click-clunk of her gun against the smooth concrete floor and leans over the railing to see. She’s wincing in pain and moaning curses, moaning fuck, fuck, fuck as her right hand holds the fresh bloody wound in the opposite shoulder. His mouth is dry. He blinks, pushes his glasses back up his nose – he’s sweaty despite the cold – and carries along the walkway. There’s a flash of Fraser-red somewhere in the distant half-light of the warehouse, and he runs after it, without thinking much. All instinctive, like Dief after a donut. His boots meet the metal walkway one after another, clang clang clang, and he leaps down steps onto the ground to follow his partner. Probably holding up a group of perps with a pleasant smile, he thinks, calling them ‘gentlemen’. If he hasn’t gotten himself killed yet.
And when he rounds a wall made by the crates, Fraser is doing exactly that. Of course. He’s found the group; five of them. Big, bad mobsters to a man, all shaved heads and ugly faces and silenced handguns. They turn to look at Ray as he appears, and two of the guns smoothly turn to point at him. Fraser now has three of the guys staring at him.
The fattest of the group, an old man in a large leather jacket, clears his throat.
“Now then,” he says. “That was probably a bad move on your part. Drop your gun.”
Ray hesitates, but drops it. It makes a crashing noise on the floor.
“Gentlemen,” Fraser says. I knew it, Ray thinks. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to lower your guns and raise your hands.”
A few of the men on the right laugh, and the fat man turns to snarl at them, expensive dentistry exposed. Fraser snaps his fingers, and Ray hears Dief’s bark, sees the wolf come tearing out of the shadows like his tail’s on fire. The men wheel round and Diefenbaker leaps onto the nearest one, a tall guy, at least 6’7”, knocking him down. Dief must be heavier than he looks, Ray thinks, and crouches for his gun.
“Freeze!” He yells at the nearest man. He wheels round, surprised, frowning, gun at his side. Ray hears the uniforms running around the corner. “Drop it! Now, drop it!” His gun’s pointed square at the man’s chest. The mobster lets it go.
He assesses the others. Uniforms have two of them dropping their guns. Dief is sitting on another, growling. The fat man and Fraser are nowhere to be seen.
***
Ray falls asleep like a dead weight falling into water. In his dreams, he and Fraser are drinking coffee and arguing about whether or not to take it black. Fraser says that a little caribou milk in a cup of coffee is quite delicious, and Ray calls him unhinged.
“I’m quite sane,” Fraser insists. “Go on, Ray, try it!” He smiles at Ray. And Ray would refuse, but the sight of Fraser’s black eye and his hopeful little smile get to him.
“OK, OK…” he gives in and sips. It’s not that bad, really. The milk makes it taste weird, almost thick. “Huh,” he says.
“Told you.” Fraser grins smugly, then winces, touching the bruises under his eye. Ray doesn’t think very much, just reaches out to touch it, gingerly. Fraser closes his eyes, as if asleep. “It’s not so bad, Ray. Don’t look like that.”
“Fraser, you’ve got your eyes closed,” says Ray. “How d’you know what I’m looking like?”
“I know,” says Fraser. His voice is all quiet in the hush of the space they’re in. Ray looks around. A log cabin. It’s snowing outside.
***
Ray hears the shout. It’s loud and mad, coming from the back of the long hall. Could be the fat guy, he thinks, so he starts running, Dief on his heels. He’s pushing his glasses back up his nose, breathing hard in the cold air. Fraser, he thinks, why you gotta be so dumb sometimes?
There’s the two of them, by the big metal doors. Gun’s on the floor, and Fraser’s calmly telling him that he’s making a citizen’s arrest. Ray points his gun in their direction, and Dief’s running over, and he feels and initial rush of satisfaction, warm in his belly. Then, out of the blue, the man balls his fist and slugs Fraser in the face. Fraser reels and falls over, but Dief’s already on the fat guy, and Ray points the gun and shouts, and the hands go up. Ray feels like punching him back on Fraser’s behalf.
“Ray,” says Fraser. His voice sounds thick.
“You OK?” The uniforms are running over and Ray shoves the man into their midst, moving on. Fraser’s sitting up, one hand covering his eye and the other dabbing at his bloody nose. Ray hauls him up and pulls Fraser’s hand away from his eye to take a look. The eye’s swelling, beginning to close up. The flesh around it is bright red. Seeing red, Ray thinks. God damn seeing red.
“Fine,” Fraser says. “Thank you, Ray.” He’s got his cheery ‘no harm done’ voice on, and Ray’s torn between raving and grinning at him, because, hey, they won, they got their men and no one got killed. He settles on grinning, and Fraser gives him a small smile in return.
***
“Wait,” Ray says, thinking. He reaches out to gently touch the other cheek. “Wait. Fraser, wasn’t it the other eye? Your left…no, right. Your right. I remember.” Fraser takes Ray’s hands away from his face and holds them, skin on skin. His hands are cold, and he frowns.
“I suppose you’re right, Ray.” He reaches to touch his left eye with the back of his left hand, without letting go of Ray’s. Then he touches the other.
“This is weird,” Ray says. It is weird. “Fraser, your hands are cold.”
“Of course,” Fraser says, looking at him and smiling. “It’s snowing.”
“I know that,” says Ray, nodding at the window and the arctic landscape outside. “But aren’t we inside? Shouldn’t you be warm?” And normally he was warm. Warmer than Ray, at least. Probably something to do with wearing the red suit all the time. That and a Canadian upbringing – making stew from beavers and milking caribou and calling sweeping a frozen lake with a broom a sport. That’s gotta keep you warm, right?
“It’s snowing inside, Ray,” says Fraser, patiently. He’s right, too.
They’re still holding hands.
***
“Where’s Sanders?” asks Welsh, urgently.
“What?” Ray’s confused, one hand on Fraser’s shoulder, the other clutching his gun. Welsh arrived with the backup, the cavalry, and they’re putting mobsters in squad cars and taking them away. Picture-perfect, good vs. evil. Ding ding. Round two. “She was shot,” he says. “In the shoulder. They shot her in the shoulder.”
“Yes, Detective,” says Welsh “so I understand. But she’s now nowhere to be seen.”
Shit, thinks Ray. “But how can a woman with two bullets in her shoulder—”
“—Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?” snaps Welsh. “Now I need her found. What happened to your face, Constable?” he asks, turning to Fraser.
“Your eye matches your suit,” Dewey says. Ray hadn’t noticed him stroll in.
“I… was punched.”
“Feeling a little embarrassed, Fraser?” says Huey. “Maybe a little… red-faced?”
He and Dewey start snickering. Ray rolls his eyes.
“Enough!” says Welsh. “Just find Sanders. Follow the trail of blood, if you have to. Get police dogs. Surely that wolf of yours is good for something, Constable?”
“Actu… of course, sir,” says Fraser.
Ray follows him out of the warehouse and looks around, watches Dief sniff in the shadows and on the wet ground. Huey and Dewey take off in the car to her apartment, and gradually Ray and Fraser widen the circle of their search.
Ray realizes that they’re not going to find anything about the same time that his feet start to ache like a bitch. He screws up his free hand into a fist and breathes a tight sigh out of his nose. They’ve been going at it half an hour, and Dief has nothing. He and Fraser have even less, and she hasn’t turned up at her apartment. Welsh calls him to tell him that they’ve staked-out Franks’ place, and there’s been nothing.
“She vanished,” says Ray.
“People don’t vanish, Ray,” says Fraser, reasonably. Ray sort of wants to punch him.
“So where’d she go, genius?”
“Ray, there’s really no need to be flippant,” says Fraser. Ray really is going to punch him.
“She vanished,” he states. Vanished. It sounds familiar – where’s he heard that before? Vanish vanish vanish…
Fraser’s thinking, his lips forming silent words and his eyes closed, all concentration.
“Ray,” he says. “Does something about this seem familiar to you?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “Yeah, it does, but… why? Why should it?”
“Where would a woman running from the police go to?” asks Fraser.
“She vanished,” Ray says, suddenly. “It was in a church.” That’s it!
“A church?” says Fraser. He’s frowning, but he’s nodding, nodding like it makes sense. Which, of course, Ray knows it doesn’t. Doesn’t make any sense in the same way that late night films with subtitles don’t make sense when you’ve had one too many glasses of wine, in the same way that those South American novels Stella used to read didn’t make sense.
“In Old Town?” Ray asks, déjà vu hitting him between the eyes like a freight train. “Maybe she’s in Old Town. In a church, in Old Town.”
“Which one?” asks Fraser, like it’s a simple logic puzzle. “Well, I suppose it couldn’t be…well, Michael Franks, so… St. Michaels?”
And then he, Ray and Dief are running for the car.
***
He parks opposite the entrance and gets out, and he can see her, lying there on the steps. The doors are well lit, and there are lots of blood stains on the stone. He looks at Fraser, who nods. He and Dief veer right, into the dark, and he crosses the street toward the steps, goes in between two of the parked cars. Ray figures that she must know that he and Fraser are here. He draws his gun and edges closer, toward the lights.
“Ms. Sanders,” he says, “I’m gonna have to ask you to put your hands up.”
There’s a shot from the darkness on the left of the door, and he ducks and runs, gets behind a car and fires a few shots blindly toward whoever’s firing at him. Fraser’s on the wrong side of the building. He crouches, then kneels behind the hood of a car, looking into the shadow by the side of the door and making sure he’s got Sanders’ body in his sights too – she’s not moving, and he can’t tell if she’s breathing or not. She might be dead.
“Right,” he says to himself, then “Put the gun down, and come into the light with your hands up! Now!”
Nothing happens. Ray considers his options, and risks a look over to his right for Fraser. The Mountie is carefully inching around the building to get to Sanders, but her arm twitches. She’s still got a gun, and Ray gets another, sickening feeling of déjà vu.
“Gun!” he yells again, but Fraser’s already running. There’s a red blur in the floodlit doorway, and Fraser is kneeling over Sanders, one hand neatly removing the gun from hers. It’s at this time that the guy – Michael Franks – with the gun chooses to come out of the shadows. He’s pointing the gun at Fraser’s head before Ray can think, and so he points his own gun at Franks’ scummy little head and starts toward him.
“Hey!” he yells. Franks wheels around.
“Back off. Drop your gun and back off!” he yells at Ray. Fraser stands up, moves toward him. Franks wheels around again. “And you, both of you stop moving. Stop it, or—”
“—I’m sure we can be reasonable about this,” Fraser says, at the same time as Ray is saying “Drop the gun, drop it, Franks, drop it now!”
By this time he’s on top of Franks, and Ray’s gun is practically at the back of the guy’s head. Franks moves toward Sanders, quickly, cursing. Then Ray aims a kick at the back of his knee and he falls on top of Sanders. She makes a pained sound, too soft for a yell, and Ray pulls Franks off of her and cuffs him.
***
Ray gets off work with the same feeling as a kid leaving school on Friday. He finds Fraser in the corridor, talking to Dief about the US constitution.
“Hey,” he says, clapping Fraser on the shoulder. His eye’s begun to go black and yellow, like a beat-up banana. “We did it. She confessed. Sanders was dumped by the Alderman a while back, and then got into bed with Mike, and leaned on him to whack Michelle Daley. Didn’t tell him that she was dating the Alderman. Then the hitman they hired killed the Alderman too, and the taxi driver, and so Franks tried to kill her to get rid of the messy trail. Only it didn’t work.”
“Will Ms. Sanders be alright?” asks Fraser. “Her arm?”
“Oh yeah, yeah” he says, waving his hand in the air. “In a sling, on meds for a while. She’ll be right as rain. Anyway. I’m clocking off, Fraser: the weekend starts here. You wanna go grab a bite to eat?”
“Sounds good,” says Fraser.
“Anything you had in mind? Chinese? Or there’s that Vietnamese take out near my place. Smells a bit funky sometimes though, like socks. Socks and licorice.”
“Star anise…” says Fraser, frowning.
“Star what?”
“Star… would you like some coffee, Ray?”
Ray blinks, taken aback. Way to change the subject. Coffee.
“Sure, uh…”
“I’ve just been craving some all day. I haven’t managed to actually get to the coffeemaker,” he licks his lips, still frowning.
“Sure, Fraser. Let’s go out for coffee,” he says. Grins, thinks of yesterday’s interview. “The stuff here is swill anyway.”
“Has anyone considered changing the machine?” asks Fraser. “Or even just cleaning it out once in a while, I’m sure, would improve the flavor.” Such a Canadian thing to say.
So they drive to a little 24-hour restaurant near his apartment, and leave Dief in the car with the promise that they’ll bring him back a doggy bag. It’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the only other people there are a hairy trucker type drinking soda and a little old lady hunched over a table, a cup of coffee in her hand. Ray gives the waitress a winning smile and asks for coffee and pie, and Fraser asks for the same, “With cream in the coffee, if you please. Thank you kindly.” She blushes a little and nods, walking off.
“You always have cream in your coffee?” Ray asks.
“Usually, yes.”
“Fraser, how’d you think… last night, how did we know? Why did we go to the church? I mean,” he pauses, searches for words, and Fraser’s nodding. “I mean, how did we do that? We both felt something, right? It wasn’t just me?”
“It was like I’d done it before,” Fraser says. “Like I’d read it in a book the night before.”
“I wonder,” says Ray. “I mean… could it be some weird psychic thing? Like on TV?” He grins at Fraser, who grins back. The waitress brings them their orders, and Ray stirs sugar into his coffee.
“We both felt something though, that’s weird,” he says.
“Well maybe we have some sort of connection,” says Fraser, taking a forkful of pie. Ray snorts.
“Yeah, maybe we do,” he says. “Maybe we do, Fraser.”
“Ray, I’m serious,” Fraser replies. “I know that some people are skeptical about this sort of thing, but I also know that in my experience, things that are sometimes outside the normal range of probability—”
“—Fraser, c’mon—”
“—are quite, quite possible. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.”
“I don’t know about that, Fraser,” he says, a little testily. “I’ve been dreaming some pretty weird stuff recently.”
***
Later, after a bowl of noodle soup and a few more hours of increasingly awkward conversation,
Ray takes Fraser back to the Consulate. It’s dark outside and it’s raining again. He turns the key and kills the GTO’s engine, turns his body and looks at Fraser.
“So,” he says, his hand on the gear stick.
“So,” replies Fraser, looking at him somewhere in the region of his collarbone.
“Frase,” he says, quietly. “Do you ever get the feeling… the feeling that sometimes life takes you in really weird directions?”
“Well, sure Ray,” says Fraser.
“Frase, look. I… I mean, I… you’re my friend, Fraser.”
“I am,” says Fraser. His voice is dark and warm; a little proud and a little happy. Ray looks at him in the face, it’s got an odd expression on it. The kind that he gets when he talks about the North and frozen tundra. The kind Turnbull gets when he dusts the picture of the Queen on the wall of the consulate. Proud. Ray swallows.
“You’re my friend,” he says again. “And, you being here, and being here with you, well… Well, I like that. I like being your partner.”
“I like being your partner too, Ray,” says Fraser, but he starts to sounds tense and nervous.
“And I think, in these… look, I… Recently, Fraser…” He falters. What’s he gonna say? “Look. Recently, I’ve been having these dreams.”
“Right,” says Fraser, his face expressionless.
“And, well, these dreams. I never really remember them, but… well, you’ve been in them too.”
“Right.”
“And… they’ve been pretty whacked out, Fraser. But there was one in St. Michael’s Church. I remember that, and I remembered that when we were looking for Sanders.”
Fraser nods grimly. “Which seems a little unlikely, to say the least.”
“Yeah. It does. But I wanted to know, Frase, if you’ve been having these kinda dreams too. Or if you’ve ever had something like that. Because it sort of freaks me out, Frase, and, well, I like you, a lot, and I trust you, Frase, and,” he pauses, looks into Fraser’s eyes. “Am I going crazy?”
“Well,” says Fraser, blushing a little. “Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s commonly believed in some cultures that precognition – of whatever form – is a spiritual gift.”
“I don’t know about spiritual,” says Ray. “But… look, have you had these dreams? Because you’re always in mine.” He flushes red, Great choice of words, Kowalski. “I mean, you always… Well, have you?”
“I have been dreaming odd dreams of late, yes,” he says, quietly.
“And have I been in any of these dreams?” Ray continues.
“Well, yes,”
“And how do we act in these dreams, Fraser? I know things are different, but how? And—”
“—I would never want anything to come between us, Ray. Between our friendship,” says Fraser.
I don’t want anything to come between us either, Fraser, he thinks. But, well… recently, I’ve been thinking, and having these dreams, and, look,
“No Frase. Me neither.”
“So,” Fraser swallows. Coughs. “I’ll…er… see you tomorrow?”
“It’s my day off,” he says “but sure.”
“Oh,” says Fraser, opening the door. “Then on Monday?”
“No,” Ray says, a little exasperated. “No, I’ll come tomorrow.”
“You don’t… I don’t want to bother—”
“—No, no, Fraser,” Ray says. Smiles.
“OK then,” Fraser says, smiling back at Ray. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gets out of the car, pulls the seat forward for Diefenbaker and nods at Ray. “Good night, Ray.”
“Night Fraser.”
The door slams, and Fraser goes up the steps.
***
Tonight is a little different. They’re walking through the forest, and neither he nor Fraser has shoes or socks on. He can feel the pressure of the ground with every inch of skin on his toes, his heels, the balls of his feet. Everything is very, very green, and it smells good.
In the clearing, on the green felt-covered poker table, are hundreds of small, brown star-shaped objects. Fraser puts one hand over Ray’s eyes and holds some of them under his nose, and Ray sniffs and grins broadly.
“Licorice!” he says, louder than he means to. “That star-thing you were talking about. Star… antiques?”
“Anise,” says Fraser, his laughter puffing against the back of Ray’s neck. “Star anise. It’s a spice often used in Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, with an aroma redolent – as you said – of licorice.”
“Fraser?” Ray says, turning around, his brain working.
“Hmm?”
“Are we dreaming again?”
“I believe so, Ray,” Fraser says, slipping his arms down to Ray’s waist. The hands, the arms, the pressure of Fraser is strange, welcome and familiar, but also almost uncomfortable. Like touching something wrapped in saran wrap or brown paper. He wants to tear at the corners, to open it up.
“Huh,” says Ray.
“Why’d you ask?” says Fraser. His nose moves to nuzzle at Ray’s neck.
“Well,” Ray says, trying really hard – oh man, hard – to think against Fraser’s attack on the soft bit under Ray’s earlobe. “Well, you’re…ah… you’re a lot more friendly when we’re dreaming.”
“Hmm?” says Fraser again, very quietly in Ray’s ear. The hair on his arms is standing up.
“An…any idea why?”
“Well,” says Fraser, stopping briefly. “I’m not sure, really. Maybe we’re just… I mean, we’re asleep, Ray. Asleep in separate beds. And like I said, I would never want anything to come in between our friendship.” He rubs his scratchy chin against the base of Ray’s neck. Ray curls his toes.
“But… Fraser,” he says, a little more than exasperated. “Fraser, you’re getting very fresh here, and I like it, but… on the one hand you’re telling me you don’t want to… well, y’know. But on the other you’re giving me what I can only assume is the Mountie equivalent of a… ah… of a teenage grope, and…well, it doesn’t add up.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” admits Fraser. A bird caws, somewhere.
“Fraser, you’re Fraser. Super-Mountie. Detective extraordinaire. Defender of Canada. Maintainer of the Right. You always think about it.”
Fraser spins him around and pushes him against a tree trunk. “Not this time,” he says. Fraser kisses him, hard, his hand traveling up Ray’s shirt. It’s warm and he’s hard as hell now, rubbing up against Fraser while they kiss.
“Oh man,” he says, breaking for air. Fraser is flushed and warm in front of him, and Ray moves forward and kisses him again. He pushes and Fraser backs him up, and they crash into the poker table in the middle of the clearing. It falls over, the spices on it falling and rustling, turning into puffs of cigarette smoke and butterflies and birds as they tumble to the ground. Fraser’s left hand moves down his spine to the small of his back. Ray can see the argument for not really thinking about things.
“But, wait, wait!” he says. “Look, how come we’ve never done this in… well, when we’re awake?”
“Well,” says Fraser, considering. “Things tend to be more complicated. Life gets in the way, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Ray answers, grinning. “Duh. Of course.”
“So…?” asks Fraser.
“So let’s do it. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas – c’mon, Fraser! Let’s try it out, at least.”
“Alright,” says Fraser. “But will we remember any of this when we wake up?”
“Maybe not,” says Ray, sagging. “But maybe something’ll bleed through, like with the church?”
“Maybe,” says Fraser. He smiles, and kisses Ray.
***
Ray wakes up. Outside, it’s raining again. He can hear it but he doesn’t really care. It’s warm in bed and he stretches, scratches at his belly, his armpit. He rolls over, pushes his face into the pillow and sighs. There’s a quiet moment in which nothing happens. Then, next to him, someone echoes the sigh. He feels a hand brushing his thigh, and the gesture is oddly familiar, warm and gentle and nice, and it’s like Stella again. Only he’s divorced, Stella’s gone and he’s not seeing anyone else. So who’s in bed with him? He rolls onto his back, props himself up and is greeted by the back of Fraser’s head.
“Huh,” he says to himself. Fraser mumbles something incoherent and turns over. Ray smiles, because Fraser looks younger when he sleeps. Part of his brain is trying to work through the reality of having Fraser in his bed, apparently as naked as him. Another part is working through the idea of Fraser being here in the first place. He gets up and stretches, goes to the bathroom and pisses. He comes out, checks the apartment – there’s no sign of boots or shoes that aren’t his. Nothing unusual in the bedroom either. Fraser hasn’t folded up his stuff and put it in the wardrobe. So unless he walked here as he was now – and surely someone would complain if a naked Mountie had been walking through the streets of Chicago, right? – there was no real explanation for Fraser’s being here.
He lies back on the bed, grinning, because this is as whacked out as things come. But with Fraser, he guesses, they always are. Nothing new here. He shuffles a little closer until he’s pressed up against Fraser’s side, warm skin to warm skin, and then he gently puts one hand over Fraser’s eyes, to try and keep him in whatever dream he’s having.
END
**
[Poll #1253215]
Author:
umbrella_halfTeam: Whimsy
Prompt: "You are not bringing that thing anywhere near me."
Pairing(s): Fraser/Kowalski
Length: 8800 words
Rating: R
Warnings: Swearing, some sexual content
Summary: While investigating the murder of a politician, the boundaries between waking and sleeping blur for Ray and Fraser.
Author's notes: A thousand beta thanks must go to
torra and to slidellra!Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Genre information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
All through La traviata Michelle is restless, and the way David keeps catching her eye and smiling doesn’t help. As soon as the second curtain call ends he takes her hand and pulls her out of the theater. The short heels of her boots make a pleasing, slick click on the wet paving stones as David pulls her round the corner. Her feet hurt and the air is cold outside. It’s raining, and she’s getting wet, but she’s grinning. David’s hand is nice and warm. Her legs are bare under the long coat, and she readjusts her shawl.
“David,” she says. There’s nothing really else to say. He smiles and turns around to face her, kissing her hard. She kisses back. “You know, for a forty-something year-old—” He kisses her again. “—you really—” And again.
“Let’s go back,” he says in her ear. “Now.”
“Yes,” she says, and she kisses him again. But four seconds into the kiss, just as David’s hand is starting to creep up her leg under her coat, a silenced automatic is placed to David’s neck and fired. A second later, before she can blink, the same automatic is fired under her chin, and she dies.
In the dream Ray and Fraser are sitting on a couch. The air is salty, as they’re floating in the middle of the sea, and large, loud birds of paradise are circling high above them. The birds are all black, which is a little odd, but Ray knows they’re birds of paradise anyway.
“Fraser,” Ray says, “what’re we doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” says Fraser, smiling at him. “But there’s some good reason, I expect.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Ray. He scratches his armpit and leans back on the cushions. They’re full of some strange, squishy substance he doesn’t really want to think about too hard. Fraser has on a pair of long shorts and one of Ray’s wifebeaters, which seems perfectly normal. He’s got nice arms, thinks Ray. He doesn’t work out, so how does he do it?
“I know!” says Ray, suddenly. “The birds!”
Fraser’s eyes light up. “Of course!”
All at once, three of the black birds of paradise fall from the sky into the ocean with a resounding splash.
Ray’s gotten used to fetching Fraser in the early morning. The consulate’s still still: there’s no Mountie standing guard duty outside, no Ice Queen looking disapprovingly from upstairs windows, no Turnbull trying to be helpful. In the wet quiet of a Chicago 8AM the consulate looks almost normal. So then he’s knocking on the consulate door, a cardboard folder under his arm and a paper cup full of strong, sugary coffee in his free hand. Eventually Fraser answers the door, his jacket unbuttoned and his hair ruffled.
“Hey Frase,” he says, using his empty hand to gesture up and down at Fraser’s body. “Are you… OK?”
Fraser’s frowning.
“Good morning, Ray,” he says. “I’m fine.” But his eyes are bloodshot and he looks bleary and beat.
“Fraser… did I wake you up?”
“No.”
“Good,” says Ray. “Great. Great.” He licks his lips. “Look, Frase, can I come in?”
Fraser ushers him into his office and sits down behind his desk, where he stares at the steam rising from Ray’s cup.
“Frase, you sure you’re alright?” He offers the cup. “You want some coffee?”
Fraser shakes his head as if to clear it, and looks at Ray, smiling.
“Just didn’t sleep well. Strange dreams. And no, thank you. I made myself a cup of tea,” he says, reaching for the mug on the desk. “Which is now cold.” He makes a face.
“I didn’t sleep so good either,” says Ray, taking a slurp of coffee. “Weird dreams. But look at this.” He opens up the cardboard file and passes it to Fraser. “Triple homicide.”
“And one of the victims is David Coanes,” Fraser says, nodding, “the Alderman of Ward Thirty-Three.”
“Yeah,” says Ray. “Him, his date and some taxi driver. All down the same alley. Driver had his pants unzipped so we’re assuming he was taking a leak down there. Doesn’t seem to be connected, he probably just got in the way.”
“But the intended victim was Alderman Coanes?”
“That’s the assumption here.”
“And the woman with him?”
“I’m guessing incidental. I’m gonna go give his offices the once-over now. Coming?”
Fraser frowns and rubs his eyes. “I…”
“You can just stay here. Take a nap,” he says, grinning at Fraser, who frowns and stands up, brushing imaginary lint from his uniform jacket.
“I couldn’t shirk my duties, Ray.”
“Ice Queen would rip you a new one, huh?” Ray says, cocking an eyebrow.
Fraser frowns, rubbing his earlobe. “That too.” He looks at Diefenbaker, who’s lying on the floor – The wolf’s got the right idea, Ray thinks – and gestures toward the door. Fraser gets up and nods at Dief, who makes a grumbling noise that Ray doesn’t need to have translated. They leave.
So he sort-of gets it, he does. Three birds dead, and that means something to him in the back of his head, but whenever he tries to really have a think about it, it vanishes like cigarette smoke. Fraser doesn’t seem concerned though, he’s just sitting back with his hands clasped behind his head. It’s the most relaxed Ray’s seen him in a long time, and it’s quite weird.
“Y’know, Frase, I’m not really sure about it, actually,” he says. Fraser looks at him. “The birds, I mean.”
“Well,” says Fraser, slowly, like he’s considering how best to put something. “Me neither, Ray. But I know that it is significant. The number, that is. Three.”
“Yeah,” replies Ray. “Yeah.” He shifts a little closer to Fraser on the couch, putting a hand on his arm. “Look, Frase, are we dreaming?”
Fraser looks at him, considering. Careful. He licks his lips, and Ray finds his eyes skirting a little lower to focus on Fraser’s mouth, not his eyes.
“I think,” says Fraser, and Ray can feel Fraser’s breath on his face, “that we are.” He swallows. His breathing is a little deeper than normal, maybe because he’s sleeping. Fraser reaches out and places one broad palm on Ray’s bare chest. Ray looks down and realizes that he’s not wearing a shirt. Just a pair of worn jeans.
“Huh,” he says, and takes Fraser’s hand off his chest. Holds it. “You… wanna go swimming, Frase?”
Fraser looks at him like he’s a little crazy, so he shimmies out of his jeans and puts them on the couch cushion, then slips into the ocean in his boxers. He gets his head under the water, taking some of it into his mouth and tasting it. Salty. The water’s very blue, and the sun is very warm, and there’s a splash behind him, too loud to be another bird – Fraser’s stripped off his undershirt and shorts and is swimming toward Ray. He’s swimming a little awkwardly though – there’s something in his left hand. One of the birds.
Fraser swims up to him and produces it.
“No, Fraser, no. You are not bringing that thing anywhere near me.” he says, recoiling. You don’t touch dead animals, he thinks. Not unless they’re wrapped in plastic and bought in the supermarket. “Frase,” he says. He keeps forgetting to kick his legs to keep himself afloat, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
“Just look, Ray,” says Fraser, patiently. Ray looks. There’s a small hole in its head, near the point where the beak connects to the bird’s throat. Fraser squeezes the dead bird’s throat, gently, and says “Hold out your hands.”
He’s done a lot of weird, gross stuff for Fraser in his time, so he does what Fraser says, and holds out his hands. A small, cold object falls into them.
“It’s like a bullet,” he says, confused. “Like a tiny bullet.”
“Yes,” says Fraser, kicking, moving a little closer to him. “But what does it mean?”
The Alderman’s office is chaos, of course. Ray drives them to Ward Thirty-Three and throws the remnants of his coffee onto the sidewalk outside the building. It’s fairly nondescript, all grey and squat. Several posters with the face of the dead man adorn a notice board outside, smiling out at them.
“Someone obviously didn’t tell them,” he says.
“Hmm,” replies Fraser. It’s one of those Frasery things to say – not exactly disapproving, but verging on the Really, Ray, do you think that’s quite appropriate? vibe. Ray ignores him and pushes through the door.
They talk with the Alderman’s personal assistant, a large woman in a pantsuit. She tries to be helpful, but in they end they don’t come up with much. The guy seemed OK: no scandal, no skeletons. He loved his girlfriend. It kinda shakes Ray’s faith in Chicago politicians.
His phone rings, and he fishes for it in the pocket of his coat, clumsy in his gloves.
“Vecchio.”
“Ray,” Frannie’s voice on the other end has the hard, bitter edge of annoyance to it. “Look, the Lieutenant wants to know how the office went. Huey and Dewey checked over Michelle Daley’s place already.”
“They’re eager,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, “and also it looks like the driver just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They checked his apartment, but apparently nothing.”
“Right.”
“So,” she says, pointedly. “The Alderman’s office?”
“Er, yeah. Not a lot. He seems clean and decent. Normal. Did anyone see them go into the alley last night?”
“No, seems they left the opera a few minutes earlier than everyone else in there, and it was pretty deserted. The weather—”
“—yeah. I remember.” He’d been trying to get to sleep, listening to the rain outside the bedroom window.
That night he sleeps more soundly. First he can hear Fraser’s voice, and he wonders if they’re back in the sea, swimming and… what else had they been doing? There were birds, weren’t there? But no. It’s not the sea. Fraser and Ray are sitting in a tent. In the logic of the dream, Fraser looks out of the tent and sees desert, but Ray sees arctic tundra, and they can never both look out at the same time.
“What’s going on?” says Ray. Fraser puts an arm around his shoulders.
“Aren’t you cold, Ray?” he asks.
“Well sure,” Ray replies. “It must be minus thirty out there.” He looks at Fraser. “But… aren’t you hot?”
“It’s alright, Ray,” says Fraser.
“No, wait,” he pushes Fraser off. “I know you’ve gotta do the whole Mountie-martyr thing, but you don’t have to—”
“—it’s OK, Ray, really—”
“—c’mon, Fraser, I’m a big boy now—”
Then Fraser kisses him.
Frannie tells them that she’s been told to tell them to get in first thing the next morning. An interview with Michelle Daley’s next of kin. When she hangs up, Ray’s stomach growls – no breakfast, no lunch. He checks his watch – it’s one o’clock.
“Fraser, you want some—”
“—lunch?” says Fraser.
“Yeah. Lunch.”
They end up getting hot dogs. Ray notices the way Fraser manages not to get mustard anywhere but in his mouth, whereas Ray himself ends up with stuff everywhere, probably looking like a what-not-to-do diagram on how to eat a hot dog. He gets most of it off his face with a napkin. Fraser looks at him and brushes the tip of his own nose, pointedly. Ray scrubs at it with the back of his hand.
“Better?”
“Better.”
“You want I should drive you back to the consulate? I’ve gotta go back and do some paperwork, touch base with Welsh…” he trails off.
“Sure, Ray. That would be—” Fraser says, losing the end of the sentence in a yawn. Dief makes a noise and sticks his face in between the front seats. Ray bats at him, playfully.
“You should get an early night, too,” he tells Fraser. “I think we both should, really.”
He knows as he drives Fraser back that the bullpen’s going to be busy and loud, and he really wishes sometimes that he could just bail and go back to the consulate with Fraser and relax, shoot the shit. Or back to his place and sleep. Neither was going to happen in a hurry, though.
“Fraser!” he says. Fraser’s got one hand on Ray’s chest, the other’s making friendly with the back of Ray’s neck. Not that he minds so much, but this is a little freaky. More than a little. More than a lot, really. “Fraser, what…?” He trails off.
“Ray,” says Fraser in the gentle tone he reserves for old ladies and young delinquents who can do better in life given the chance, “this is just a dream.”
“Yeah,” Ray agrees. “But it’s my dream too, buddy.”
“Oh,” says Fraser. Ray watches the realization of it creep over his face like clouds on the TV weather forecast. “Oh…” he says again, and backs away, skittish and spooked, to the other end of the tent.
“No,” says Ray, thinking You dope, Ray, you freaking idiot, “No, Fraser, I…” he moves forward. Fraser’s reached the canvas wall, which is deceptively solid. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I meant it to mean…” He likes Fraser, he likes Fraser a lot. And kissing in a tent that doesn’t really exist works for him.
“Yes, Ray?” Fraser’s looking at him intently, head cocked and a frown on his face. Ray considers the angle of his face and realizes that it would be very easy to lean forward and kiss him like this. “Are you alright, Ray?”
Ray nods, and leans forward. The angles work.
When the alarm clock wakes him he rolls over and hits at it. It’s cold and wet outside, he can tell. And now he has to get up and deal with the reality of showering, clean clothes and morning erections.
Damn.
He’d been dreaming, too. Some strange shit, what was it? He tries to remember, all through the shower, through rummaging through his drawers for clean boxers, through brushing the taste of morning coffee from his mouth with the last of the tube of toothpaste. It was definitely something to do with Fraser. Something. But he couldn’t remember anything more than that.
He’s still thinking when he picks up Fraser, hoping that Fraser’s being there in the car with him will help, but it doesn’t, and he forgets it. Fraser seems a little on edge as well.
“D’you not sleep so well? Last night?” he asks.
“Hmm?” Fraser says, looking up. “Oh, no. I slept fine, Ray. Thank you.”
Sometimes talking to Fraser is like talking to quicksand, however light and casual and disinterested you try to be, he sucks you in and starts animatedly talking about whatever shit he finds interesting (and that’s a lot of shit) and you have no choice but to join in. Sometimes, however, talking to Fraser is like talking to a brick wall.
The wipers whir back and forth across the windshield.
Phillipa Daley is a thin woman with thin hair, who sits in the chair in the interview room clutching the Styrofoam cup of police standard-issue coffee like a lifeline. She looks curiously at Fraser and Dief, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears, absent-mindedly, but her gaze slides over Ray like water on oil.
“Ms. Daley,” he says quietly. “I...erm.” She looks up at him, and her eyes are pale grey like tent canvas. “I’m Detective Vecchio. I need to ask you about your sister.”
“I…” She coughs, clears her throat. “I know. What would you like to know, Detective?”
“When was the last time you saw her?” he asks.
“Three days before she died. Before she was murdered,” she answers, brushing her bangs away from her eyes with a hand. “We had lunch.”
“Did you notice anything unusual in her behavior? Did she say anything strange?”
“No. Nothing at all,” she says. He nods.
“Ms. Daley, we… we need to know about your sister’s relationship with Mr. Coanes,” he says. She smiles a little.
“Dave. He’s… he was a nice guy, Detective. He and Michelle, they were good for each other.”
“Did she ever express any unhappiness, frustration?”
“Sure,” she says, nodding. “Now and then she’d call me, complaining about how he’d not been listening to her, or how they’d had a stupid row,” she smiles, tired and wan. “But it was normal. They’d always make up the next day, and she’d call me and it’d all be sweetness and roses.” She takes a sip of the coffee and grimaces.
“Police coffee,” says Ray, nodding at the coffee cup and smiling apologetically. “So there wasn’t anything… abnormal about their relationship?”
“Abnormal?” she frowns. “No, well…no. They were fine.”
Ray sighs and looks over at Fraser, standing in a corner.
“Well,” she says, and his head snaps back to face her. “He did have this one ex.”
“An ex?” asks Ray, carefully.
“Yeah. She was a bit of a…”
“Psycho?”
“Yeah. Well put, Detective,” she smiles. “A psycho. She’d call round his place when they were having dinner together, conveniently bump into them on the street and act surprised, that sort of thing.”
“And did they report it to the police?”
“I don’t think they thought of it. They might’ve done, I suppose. I didn’t ask.”
He glances at Fraser, who nods and leaves.
“And do you know this woman’s name, Ms. Daley?” he asks. This could be something. She frowns.
“Kim? Maybe?”
He smiles. “Thanks.”
While they’re kissing Ray finds Fraser’s hand and holds it, grips it firmly. He can feel the cold air around him, can feel Fraser lips and his face, his tongue and the fine sandpaper-stubble of Fraser’s chin against his own. Fraser makes a soft noise, and they break apart.
“I didn’t think that… Well, I didn’t know. Is this real?”
“Fraser, you dumbass,” he grins at his partner. “This is a dream.”
“But,” Fraser says, confused and hopeful. “But, Ray, consider: if it is a dream—” But then Ray kisses him again and slips a hand around into his hair. There are no more speculations.
He’s rubbing his chin when he gets out, trying to remember whether or not he forgot to shave this morning, and finds Fraser sitting at Francesca’s desk with a slight smile on his face.
“Anything?” he asks.
“Well it would appear that Ms. Daley was correct in her assumption,” says Fraser, looking up. “No complaint was filed by the Alderman.”
“Right.”
“However, I called his office, and his personal assistant gave me the woman’s address.” He hands a torn-off piece of notepad paper to Ray.
“Kim Sanders,” he says. “Shall we go pay a visit?”
Kim Sanders lives on the 15th floor of a fancy apartment building complex. The doorman lets them in and gazes at them, surly and wary. His eyes flick from Fraser to Ray to Dief and then at the door, and then back to them. He’s a big guy, blond hair and broad shoulders. Can’t be more the twenty, Ray guesses.
“Excuse me, son,” says Fraser. Ray rolls his eyes. “We’re looking for a Ms. Sanders. Kim Sanders.” He takes the paper from Ray’s hand and shows it to the doorman. He looks at it, and then at Fraser, and then at Ray, and finally at Dief.
“She’s not here,” he says. “Went away a week ago. To Oakland. Her mother. Something like that.”
“Then you won’t mind if we have a look around her apartment,” says Ray, smiling pleasantly at him.
“I…” the guy hesitates. Ray reaches into his pocket and the guy holds up his hands, backing away. “OK, OK.”
“Not a gun, doofus,” Ray says, pulling out his badge to show the guy. “No one carries guns in their pockets.” He rummages some more and pulls out a crumpled warrant.
“Actually, Ray,” says Fraser in conversational tones, “I believe that it’s actually quite common—”
“—Fraser.”
“Understood.”
Fraser takes the key the doorman offers, and, as expected, begins to question the ethics of intimidating well-meaning members of the public. Ray nods and yeah-yeahs back at him, because, c’mon, this is murder here, this is triple homicide. They can catch the girl. Or the guy. Or whoever. Ride off into the sunset and be big heroes.
Another dream, and Fraser’s here again. He gives Ray a hug when sees him. No, that’s not the way it happens – he looks at Ray when he sees him. Really looks at him, all close and considered, and then he hugs him. Fraser is the king of freaks, but Ray’s glad he’s here.
But there’s a shadow outside the room.
But… it’s not a room. The space they’re in is much too big. Huge. Huge and mostly dark, with a few flickering lights. Outside the windows the stars are glinting, winking. On one wall, painted in dark blue are two words and an exclamation mark: I vanished!
Ray turns around, checking the place out. “Fraser? Where are we?”
“Don’t you recognize it?” Fraser says, standing next to him.
“Well… I think so. It’s a church, right?”
“We’re in Chicago,” says Fraser.
Right. Chicago.
“Where?” he looks up, taking in the ceiling, the darkness.
“St. Michael’s Church, Ray.”
“In Old Town?” he asks. Fraser nods. Ray frowns, trying to remember if he’s been here before. “Why are we here?”
“I’m not sure,” says Fraser, frowning. “But then, why were we in the middle of the ocean on a piece of household furniture? Why were we in a tent?”
“You kissed me!” Ray says, triumphant. “Yeah, Fraser! You kissed me. I remember.”
Fraser might’ve blushed in the darkness, Ray couldn’t tell.
“But hey,” he says, “What’s outside this room?”
“The shadows?”
“More than one? I thought it was just one, Frase.”
“You may be right,” says Fraser. He’s thinking, but thinking here in the dream is hard, like chewing through gristle. So Ray kisses Fraser, and solves that problem.
The apartment’s empty, like the doorman said. They look around, and Dief takes an unusual interest in the houseplants. There’s a ripe banana in the fruit bowl, a few plates in the sink. Nothing exciting. He checks her bedroom while Fraser checks the bathroom and the study. In half an hour they’ve come up with very little.
“Anything?” Ray asks, perching on the leather armchair while Fraser looks out of the window.
“Not that I can see. She seems to work from home,” Fraser replies. Not helpful.
“Right, well. Dead end,” he says, getting up and heading for the door. “I guess we’ll just wait ‘til she gets back. From Oakland. Assuming she’s coming, of course.”
He pauses by the answer phone. The light’s flashing. What harm can it do? he thinks, and pushes the play button.
“You have one new message,” it says. “Message one:” There’s a loud, high beep that makes him wince, and then a man’s voice.
“Kim, it’s Mike. Look, we… look, we need to talk, baby. We need to talk. There’s trouble. There’s trouble with Daley. Come down to the warehouse on North Broadway on Thursday evening. We need to talk. I… I love you, baby.”
Another beep.
“Message ends,” says the phone, helpfully. “To delete all messages, press delete.”
“Huh,” says Ray.
“Well,” says Fraser, rubbing his eyebrow. “The plot thickens.”
“Right,” says Welsh. “It’s simple. We pulled up her rap sheet, and Kim Sanders has a list as long as your arm. Drug dealing, extortion, assault. Been clean for the better part of ten years, apparently, but she was recently photographed at this little tête-à-tête.”
He puts a black and white photograph on the table. A group of suited men entering a building, with Sanders on the arm of one of them, looking over her shoulder, just to the right of the camera.
“Actually, Lieutenant,” says Fraser. He says ‘left-enant’. Ray wonders if there’s a right one too. “A tête-à-tête is usually a conversation between—” he breaks off, looking at the expression on Welsh’s face. “Who are these gentlemen?”
“Lowlifes, drug dealers, mobsters. The underbelly of the Chicago criminal class, Constable.”
Huey reaches over and points with his index finger to each figure in turn.
“Joey Villani, Michael Franks, Aaron the Spike,”
Ray snorts. “Aaron the Spike.”
“I think ‘Villani’’s way worse,” says Francesca. “What kind of self-respecting Italian is called Villani?”
“Could Michael be the one who left the message on Ms. Sanders’ answering machine?” asks Fraser. “She is on his arm, here. And it did sound like they were engaged in a romantic relationship.”
Ray nods. Makes sense.
“Right,” says Welsh. “We’ve got an ex-girlfriend of a murdered politician who has anti-social tendencies and mob connections.”
“She was in Oakland at the time, Lieutenant,” says Fraser. “Or so we were told.”
“She could’ve arranged it,” replied Welsh. “Or she could’ve been here the whole time. Miss Vecchio, call the airports and find out.”
Frannie nods. “You know,” she says, “she could’ve just leaned on her boyfriend to do it. Big mobster like Michael Franks?” she raises her eyebrows meaningfully, and points two fingers at Welsh. He nods, his face set.
“When she gets back, we’re taking her in,” he says.
When he lay in bed that night, Ray should’ve known it was a little too smooth of a plan to work so well. Instead he dreamed a dream of Fraser and corn fields in the desert. He wakes up hungry and hard as hell again, and sits up in bed for two minutes thinking about curling. When he’s not in danger of poking someone’s eye out, he gets up and gets ready for work.
Sanders had been booked on a flight from Oakland that morning, but she hadn’t shown, Frannie informs them. Welsh tells her to look for bus and train tickets, rental cars, and soon they have a registration number of the car she’s driving.
“When did she get it?” he asks.
“Two days ago,” she replies, her mouth downturned. Welsh swears, quietly.
“Looks like we’re waiting for her at the warehouse,” he says.
Ray notices the blond girl with the long legs at once. Sanders. She’s standing off to the side with wide, wide eyes and clenched fists, staring, open mouthed at the four uniforms. She’s been shot in the left arm, red blood running down her hand.
It’d been a fine stakeout until they’d heard gunfire and rushed in.
Ray’s standing up, unseen, on the metal walkway that rings the warehouse, his gun in hand, safety off. They’re telling Sanders to freeze, to put her hand up and just relax, just relax now, ma’am. But they don’t see the gun in the back of her jeans, don’t seem to notice the right fist scraping across the denim and the metal rivets to the back of her pants. She’s got long fingernails painted dark blue.
“Gun!” he yells. “She’s got a gun!”
Bang. There’s another bullet in her, and she yells in pain and falls. Ray hears the muffled click-clunk of her gun against the smooth concrete floor and leans over the railing to see. She’s wincing in pain and moaning curses, moaning fuck, fuck, fuck as her right hand holds the fresh bloody wound in the opposite shoulder. His mouth is dry. He blinks, pushes his glasses back up his nose – he’s sweaty despite the cold – and carries along the walkway. There’s a flash of Fraser-red somewhere in the distant half-light of the warehouse, and he runs after it, without thinking much. All instinctive, like Dief after a donut. His boots meet the metal walkway one after another, clang clang clang, and he leaps down steps onto the ground to follow his partner. Probably holding up a group of perps with a pleasant smile, he thinks, calling them ‘gentlemen’. If he hasn’t gotten himself killed yet.
And when he rounds a wall made by the crates, Fraser is doing exactly that. Of course. He’s found the group; five of them. Big, bad mobsters to a man, all shaved heads and ugly faces and silenced handguns. They turn to look at Ray as he appears, and two of the guns smoothly turn to point at him. Fraser now has three of the guys staring at him.
The fattest of the group, an old man in a large leather jacket, clears his throat.
“Now then,” he says. “That was probably a bad move on your part. Drop your gun.”
Ray hesitates, but drops it. It makes a crashing noise on the floor.
“Gentlemen,” Fraser says. I knew it, Ray thinks. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to lower your guns and raise your hands.”
A few of the men on the right laugh, and the fat man turns to snarl at them, expensive dentistry exposed. Fraser snaps his fingers, and Ray hears Dief’s bark, sees the wolf come tearing out of the shadows like his tail’s on fire. The men wheel round and Diefenbaker leaps onto the nearest one, a tall guy, at least 6’7”, knocking him down. Dief must be heavier than he looks, Ray thinks, and crouches for his gun.
“Freeze!” He yells at the nearest man. He wheels round, surprised, frowning, gun at his side. Ray hears the uniforms running around the corner. “Drop it! Now, drop it!” His gun’s pointed square at the man’s chest. The mobster lets it go.
He assesses the others. Uniforms have two of them dropping their guns. Dief is sitting on another, growling. The fat man and Fraser are nowhere to be seen.
Ray falls asleep like a dead weight falling into water. In his dreams, he and Fraser are drinking coffee and arguing about whether or not to take it black. Fraser says that a little caribou milk in a cup of coffee is quite delicious, and Ray calls him unhinged.
“I’m quite sane,” Fraser insists. “Go on, Ray, try it!” He smiles at Ray. And Ray would refuse, but the sight of Fraser’s black eye and his hopeful little smile get to him.
“OK, OK…” he gives in and sips. It’s not that bad, really. The milk makes it taste weird, almost thick. “Huh,” he says.
“Told you.” Fraser grins smugly, then winces, touching the bruises under his eye. Ray doesn’t think very much, just reaches out to touch it, gingerly. Fraser closes his eyes, as if asleep. “It’s not so bad, Ray. Don’t look like that.”
“Fraser, you’ve got your eyes closed,” says Ray. “How d’you know what I’m looking like?”
“I know,” says Fraser. His voice is all quiet in the hush of the space they’re in. Ray looks around. A log cabin. It’s snowing outside.
Ray hears the shout. It’s loud and mad, coming from the back of the long hall. Could be the fat guy, he thinks, so he starts running, Dief on his heels. He’s pushing his glasses back up his nose, breathing hard in the cold air. Fraser, he thinks, why you gotta be so dumb sometimes?
There’s the two of them, by the big metal doors. Gun’s on the floor, and Fraser’s calmly telling him that he’s making a citizen’s arrest. Ray points his gun in their direction, and Dief’s running over, and he feels and initial rush of satisfaction, warm in his belly. Then, out of the blue, the man balls his fist and slugs Fraser in the face. Fraser reels and falls over, but Dief’s already on the fat guy, and Ray points the gun and shouts, and the hands go up. Ray feels like punching him back on Fraser’s behalf.
“Ray,” says Fraser. His voice sounds thick.
“You OK?” The uniforms are running over and Ray shoves the man into their midst, moving on. Fraser’s sitting up, one hand covering his eye and the other dabbing at his bloody nose. Ray hauls him up and pulls Fraser’s hand away from his eye to take a look. The eye’s swelling, beginning to close up. The flesh around it is bright red. Seeing red, Ray thinks. God damn seeing red.
“Fine,” Fraser says. “Thank you, Ray.” He’s got his cheery ‘no harm done’ voice on, and Ray’s torn between raving and grinning at him, because, hey, they won, they got their men and no one got killed. He settles on grinning, and Fraser gives him a small smile in return.
“Wait,” Ray says, thinking. He reaches out to gently touch the other cheek. “Wait. Fraser, wasn’t it the other eye? Your left…no, right. Your right. I remember.” Fraser takes Ray’s hands away from his face and holds them, skin on skin. His hands are cold, and he frowns.
“I suppose you’re right, Ray.” He reaches to touch his left eye with the back of his left hand, without letting go of Ray’s. Then he touches the other.
“This is weird,” Ray says. It is weird. “Fraser, your hands are cold.”
“Of course,” Fraser says, looking at him and smiling. “It’s snowing.”
“I know that,” says Ray, nodding at the window and the arctic landscape outside. “But aren’t we inside? Shouldn’t you be warm?” And normally he was warm. Warmer than Ray, at least. Probably something to do with wearing the red suit all the time. That and a Canadian upbringing – making stew from beavers and milking caribou and calling sweeping a frozen lake with a broom a sport. That’s gotta keep you warm, right?
“It’s snowing inside, Ray,” says Fraser, patiently. He’s right, too.
They’re still holding hands.
“Where’s Sanders?” asks Welsh, urgently.
“What?” Ray’s confused, one hand on Fraser’s shoulder, the other clutching his gun. Welsh arrived with the backup, the cavalry, and they’re putting mobsters in squad cars and taking them away. Picture-perfect, good vs. evil. Ding ding. Round two. “She was shot,” he says. “In the shoulder. They shot her in the shoulder.”
“Yes, Detective,” says Welsh “so I understand. But she’s now nowhere to be seen.”
Shit, thinks Ray. “But how can a woman with two bullets in her shoulder—”
“—Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?” snaps Welsh. “Now I need her found. What happened to your face, Constable?” he asks, turning to Fraser.
“Your eye matches your suit,” Dewey says. Ray hadn’t noticed him stroll in.
“I… was punched.”
“Feeling a little embarrassed, Fraser?” says Huey. “Maybe a little… red-faced?”
He and Dewey start snickering. Ray rolls his eyes.
“Enough!” says Welsh. “Just find Sanders. Follow the trail of blood, if you have to. Get police dogs. Surely that wolf of yours is good for something, Constable?”
“Actu… of course, sir,” says Fraser.
Ray follows him out of the warehouse and looks around, watches Dief sniff in the shadows and on the wet ground. Huey and Dewey take off in the car to her apartment, and gradually Ray and Fraser widen the circle of their search.
Ray realizes that they’re not going to find anything about the same time that his feet start to ache like a bitch. He screws up his free hand into a fist and breathes a tight sigh out of his nose. They’ve been going at it half an hour, and Dief has nothing. He and Fraser have even less, and she hasn’t turned up at her apartment. Welsh calls him to tell him that they’ve staked-out Franks’ place, and there’s been nothing.
“She vanished,” says Ray.
“People don’t vanish, Ray,” says Fraser, reasonably. Ray sort of wants to punch him.
“So where’d she go, genius?”
“Ray, there’s really no need to be flippant,” says Fraser. Ray really is going to punch him.
“She vanished,” he states. Vanished. It sounds familiar – where’s he heard that before? Vanish vanish vanish…
Fraser’s thinking, his lips forming silent words and his eyes closed, all concentration.
“Ray,” he says. “Does something about this seem familiar to you?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “Yeah, it does, but… why? Why should it?”
“Where would a woman running from the police go to?” asks Fraser.
“She vanished,” Ray says, suddenly. “It was in a church.” That’s it!
“A church?” says Fraser. He’s frowning, but he’s nodding, nodding like it makes sense. Which, of course, Ray knows it doesn’t. Doesn’t make any sense in the same way that late night films with subtitles don’t make sense when you’ve had one too many glasses of wine, in the same way that those South American novels Stella used to read didn’t make sense.
“In Old Town?” Ray asks, déjà vu hitting him between the eyes like a freight train. “Maybe she’s in Old Town. In a church, in Old Town.”
“Which one?” asks Fraser, like it’s a simple logic puzzle. “Well, I suppose it couldn’t be…well, Michael Franks, so… St. Michaels?”
And then he, Ray and Dief are running for the car.
He parks opposite the entrance and gets out, and he can see her, lying there on the steps. The doors are well lit, and there are lots of blood stains on the stone. He looks at Fraser, who nods. He and Dief veer right, into the dark, and he crosses the street toward the steps, goes in between two of the parked cars. Ray figures that she must know that he and Fraser are here. He draws his gun and edges closer, toward the lights.
“Ms. Sanders,” he says, “I’m gonna have to ask you to put your hands up.”
There’s a shot from the darkness on the left of the door, and he ducks and runs, gets behind a car and fires a few shots blindly toward whoever’s firing at him. Fraser’s on the wrong side of the building. He crouches, then kneels behind the hood of a car, looking into the shadow by the side of the door and making sure he’s got Sanders’ body in his sights too – she’s not moving, and he can’t tell if she’s breathing or not. She might be dead.
“Right,” he says to himself, then “Put the gun down, and come into the light with your hands up! Now!”
Nothing happens. Ray considers his options, and risks a look over to his right for Fraser. The Mountie is carefully inching around the building to get to Sanders, but her arm twitches. She’s still got a gun, and Ray gets another, sickening feeling of déjà vu.
“Gun!” he yells again, but Fraser’s already running. There’s a red blur in the floodlit doorway, and Fraser is kneeling over Sanders, one hand neatly removing the gun from hers. It’s at this time that the guy – Michael Franks – with the gun chooses to come out of the shadows. He’s pointing the gun at Fraser’s head before Ray can think, and so he points his own gun at Franks’ scummy little head and starts toward him.
“Hey!” he yells. Franks wheels around.
“Back off. Drop your gun and back off!” he yells at Ray. Fraser stands up, moves toward him. Franks wheels around again. “And you, both of you stop moving. Stop it, or—”
“—I’m sure we can be reasonable about this,” Fraser says, at the same time as Ray is saying “Drop the gun, drop it, Franks, drop it now!”
By this time he’s on top of Franks, and Ray’s gun is practically at the back of the guy’s head. Franks moves toward Sanders, quickly, cursing. Then Ray aims a kick at the back of his knee and he falls on top of Sanders. She makes a pained sound, too soft for a yell, and Ray pulls Franks off of her and cuffs him.
Ray gets off work with the same feeling as a kid leaving school on Friday. He finds Fraser in the corridor, talking to Dief about the US constitution.
“Hey,” he says, clapping Fraser on the shoulder. His eye’s begun to go black and yellow, like a beat-up banana. “We did it. She confessed. Sanders was dumped by the Alderman a while back, and then got into bed with Mike, and leaned on him to whack Michelle Daley. Didn’t tell him that she was dating the Alderman. Then the hitman they hired killed the Alderman too, and the taxi driver, and so Franks tried to kill her to get rid of the messy trail. Only it didn’t work.”
“Will Ms. Sanders be alright?” asks Fraser. “Her arm?”
“Oh yeah, yeah” he says, waving his hand in the air. “In a sling, on meds for a while. She’ll be right as rain. Anyway. I’m clocking off, Fraser: the weekend starts here. You wanna go grab a bite to eat?”
“Sounds good,” says Fraser.
“Anything you had in mind? Chinese? Or there’s that Vietnamese take out near my place. Smells a bit funky sometimes though, like socks. Socks and licorice.”
“Star anise…” says Fraser, frowning.
“Star what?”
“Star… would you like some coffee, Ray?”
Ray blinks, taken aback. Way to change the subject. Coffee.
“Sure, uh…”
“I’ve just been craving some all day. I haven’t managed to actually get to the coffeemaker,” he licks his lips, still frowning.
“Sure, Fraser. Let’s go out for coffee,” he says. Grins, thinks of yesterday’s interview. “The stuff here is swill anyway.”
“Has anyone considered changing the machine?” asks Fraser. “Or even just cleaning it out once in a while, I’m sure, would improve the flavor.” Such a Canadian thing to say.
So they drive to a little 24-hour restaurant near his apartment, and leave Dief in the car with the promise that they’ll bring him back a doggy bag. It’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the only other people there are a hairy trucker type drinking soda and a little old lady hunched over a table, a cup of coffee in her hand. Ray gives the waitress a winning smile and asks for coffee and pie, and Fraser asks for the same, “With cream in the coffee, if you please. Thank you kindly.” She blushes a little and nods, walking off.
“You always have cream in your coffee?” Ray asks.
“Usually, yes.”
“Fraser, how’d you think… last night, how did we know? Why did we go to the church? I mean,” he pauses, searches for words, and Fraser’s nodding. “I mean, how did we do that? We both felt something, right? It wasn’t just me?”
“It was like I’d done it before,” Fraser says. “Like I’d read it in a book the night before.”
“I wonder,” says Ray. “I mean… could it be some weird psychic thing? Like on TV?” He grins at Fraser, who grins back. The waitress brings them their orders, and Ray stirs sugar into his coffee.
“We both felt something though, that’s weird,” he says.
“Well maybe we have some sort of connection,” says Fraser, taking a forkful of pie. Ray snorts.
“Yeah, maybe we do,” he says. “Maybe we do, Fraser.”
“Ray, I’m serious,” Fraser replies. “I know that some people are skeptical about this sort of thing, but I also know that in my experience, things that are sometimes outside the normal range of probability—”
“—Fraser, c’mon—”
“—are quite, quite possible. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.”
“I don’t know about that, Fraser,” he says, a little testily. “I’ve been dreaming some pretty weird stuff recently.”
Later, after a bowl of noodle soup and a few more hours of increasingly awkward conversation,
Ray takes Fraser back to the Consulate. It’s dark outside and it’s raining again. He turns the key and kills the GTO’s engine, turns his body and looks at Fraser.
“So,” he says, his hand on the gear stick.
“So,” replies Fraser, looking at him somewhere in the region of his collarbone.
“Frase,” he says, quietly. “Do you ever get the feeling… the feeling that sometimes life takes you in really weird directions?”
“Well, sure Ray,” says Fraser.
“Frase, look. I… I mean, I… you’re my friend, Fraser.”
“I am,” says Fraser. His voice is dark and warm; a little proud and a little happy. Ray looks at him in the face, it’s got an odd expression on it. The kind that he gets when he talks about the North and frozen tundra. The kind Turnbull gets when he dusts the picture of the Queen on the wall of the consulate. Proud. Ray swallows.
“You’re my friend,” he says again. “And, you being here, and being here with you, well… Well, I like that. I like being your partner.”
“I like being your partner too, Ray,” says Fraser, but he starts to sounds tense and nervous.
“And I think, in these… look, I… Recently, Fraser…” He falters. What’s he gonna say? “Look. Recently, I’ve been having these dreams.”
“Right,” says Fraser, his face expressionless.
“And, well, these dreams. I never really remember them, but… well, you’ve been in them too.”
“Right.”
“And… they’ve been pretty whacked out, Fraser. But there was one in St. Michael’s Church. I remember that, and I remembered that when we were looking for Sanders.”
Fraser nods grimly. “Which seems a little unlikely, to say the least.”
“Yeah. It does. But I wanted to know, Frase, if you’ve been having these kinda dreams too. Or if you’ve ever had something like that. Because it sort of freaks me out, Frase, and, well, I like you, a lot, and I trust you, Frase, and,” he pauses, looks into Fraser’s eyes. “Am I going crazy?”
“Well,” says Fraser, blushing a little. “Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s commonly believed in some cultures that precognition – of whatever form – is a spiritual gift.”
“I don’t know about spiritual,” says Ray. “But… look, have you had these dreams? Because you’re always in mine.” He flushes red, Great choice of words, Kowalski. “I mean, you always… Well, have you?”
“I have been dreaming odd dreams of late, yes,” he says, quietly.
“And have I been in any of these dreams?” Ray continues.
“Well, yes,”
“And how do we act in these dreams, Fraser? I know things are different, but how? And—”
“—I would never want anything to come between us, Ray. Between our friendship,” says Fraser.
I don’t want anything to come between us either, Fraser, he thinks. But, well… recently, I’ve been thinking, and having these dreams, and, look,
“No Frase. Me neither.”
“So,” Fraser swallows. Coughs. “I’ll…er… see you tomorrow?”
“It’s my day off,” he says “but sure.”
“Oh,” says Fraser, opening the door. “Then on Monday?”
“No,” Ray says, a little exasperated. “No, I’ll come tomorrow.”
“You don’t… I don’t want to bother—”
“—No, no, Fraser,” Ray says. Smiles.
“OK then,” Fraser says, smiling back at Ray. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gets out of the car, pulls the seat forward for Diefenbaker and nods at Ray. “Good night, Ray.”
“Night Fraser.”
The door slams, and Fraser goes up the steps.
Tonight is a little different. They’re walking through the forest, and neither he nor Fraser has shoes or socks on. He can feel the pressure of the ground with every inch of skin on his toes, his heels, the balls of his feet. Everything is very, very green, and it smells good.
In the clearing, on the green felt-covered poker table, are hundreds of small, brown star-shaped objects. Fraser puts one hand over Ray’s eyes and holds some of them under his nose, and Ray sniffs and grins broadly.
“Licorice!” he says, louder than he means to. “That star-thing you were talking about. Star… antiques?”
“Anise,” says Fraser, his laughter puffing against the back of Ray’s neck. “Star anise. It’s a spice often used in Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, with an aroma redolent – as you said – of licorice.”
“Fraser?” Ray says, turning around, his brain working.
“Hmm?”
“Are we dreaming again?”
“I believe so, Ray,” Fraser says, slipping his arms down to Ray’s waist. The hands, the arms, the pressure of Fraser is strange, welcome and familiar, but also almost uncomfortable. Like touching something wrapped in saran wrap or brown paper. He wants to tear at the corners, to open it up.
“Huh,” says Ray.
“Why’d you ask?” says Fraser. His nose moves to nuzzle at Ray’s neck.
“Well,” Ray says, trying really hard – oh man, hard – to think against Fraser’s attack on the soft bit under Ray’s earlobe. “Well, you’re…ah… you’re a lot more friendly when we’re dreaming.”
“Hmm?” says Fraser again, very quietly in Ray’s ear. The hair on his arms is standing up.
“An…any idea why?”
“Well,” says Fraser, stopping briefly. “I’m not sure, really. Maybe we’re just… I mean, we’re asleep, Ray. Asleep in separate beds. And like I said, I would never want anything to come in between our friendship.” He rubs his scratchy chin against the base of Ray’s neck. Ray curls his toes.
“But… Fraser,” he says, a little more than exasperated. “Fraser, you’re getting very fresh here, and I like it, but… on the one hand you’re telling me you don’t want to… well, y’know. But on the other you’re giving me what I can only assume is the Mountie equivalent of a… ah… of a teenage grope, and…well, it doesn’t add up.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” admits Fraser. A bird caws, somewhere.
“Fraser, you’re Fraser. Super-Mountie. Detective extraordinaire. Defender of Canada. Maintainer of the Right. You always think about it.”
Fraser spins him around and pushes him against a tree trunk. “Not this time,” he says. Fraser kisses him, hard, his hand traveling up Ray’s shirt. It’s warm and he’s hard as hell now, rubbing up against Fraser while they kiss.
“Oh man,” he says, breaking for air. Fraser is flushed and warm in front of him, and Ray moves forward and kisses him again. He pushes and Fraser backs him up, and they crash into the poker table in the middle of the clearing. It falls over, the spices on it falling and rustling, turning into puffs of cigarette smoke and butterflies and birds as they tumble to the ground. Fraser’s left hand moves down his spine to the small of his back. Ray can see the argument for not really thinking about things.
“But, wait, wait!” he says. “Look, how come we’ve never done this in… well, when we’re awake?”
“Well,” says Fraser, considering. “Things tend to be more complicated. Life gets in the way, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Ray answers, grinning. “Duh. Of course.”
“So…?” asks Fraser.
“So let’s do it. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas – c’mon, Fraser! Let’s try it out, at least.”
“Alright,” says Fraser. “But will we remember any of this when we wake up?”
“Maybe not,” says Ray, sagging. “But maybe something’ll bleed through, like with the church?”
“Maybe,” says Fraser. He smiles, and kisses Ray.
Ray wakes up. Outside, it’s raining again. He can hear it but he doesn’t really care. It’s warm in bed and he stretches, scratches at his belly, his armpit. He rolls over, pushes his face into the pillow and sighs. There’s a quiet moment in which nothing happens. Then, next to him, someone echoes the sigh. He feels a hand brushing his thigh, and the gesture is oddly familiar, warm and gentle and nice, and it’s like Stella again. Only he’s divorced, Stella’s gone and he’s not seeing anyone else. So who’s in bed with him? He rolls onto his back, props himself up and is greeted by the back of Fraser’s head.
“Huh,” he says to himself. Fraser mumbles something incoherent and turns over. Ray smiles, because Fraser looks younger when he sleeps. Part of his brain is trying to work through the reality of having Fraser in his bed, apparently as naked as him. Another part is working through the idea of Fraser being here in the first place. He gets up and stretches, goes to the bathroom and pisses. He comes out, checks the apartment – there’s no sign of boots or shoes that aren’t his. Nothing unusual in the bedroom either. Fraser hasn’t folded up his stuff and put it in the wardrobe. So unless he walked here as he was now – and surely someone would complain if a naked Mountie had been walking through the streets of Chicago, right? – there was no real explanation for Fraser’s being here.
He lies back on the bed, grinning, because this is as whacked out as things come. But with Fraser, he guesses, they always are. Nothing new here. He shuffles a little closer until he’s pressed up against Fraser’s side, warm skin to warm skin, and then he gently puts one hand over Fraser’s eyes, to try and keep him in whatever dream he’s having.
END
**
[Poll #1253215]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 11:34 pm (UTC)I enjoyed the story, and I love the last sentence.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 11:55 pm (UTC)“Fraser, you’re getting very fresh here,
Hee! I can so see Ray using that word.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 02:21 am (UTC)I like the way Fraser "bleeds through" when Ray wakes. Hee!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 08:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-06 05:40 am (UTC)I loved the star antiques and this:
“I believe so, Ray,” Fraser says, slipping his arms down to Ray’s waist. The hands, the arms, the pressure of Fraser is strange, welcome and familiar, but also almost uncomfortable. Like touching something wrapped in saran wrap or brown paper. He wants to tear at the corners, to open it up.
Wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-06 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-06 03:46 pm (UTC)I also loved the fact that Ray was at first reticent to the kiss in the dream, but then it was Fraser who had trouble with it in real life. So like them that Fraser would be willing to make the first move when it doesn't count, but that Ray is the one ready to pursue it when it does.
And the way that the dreams were spilling into real life until it led to the ending. Which was so unexpected and just perfect.
I can't wait till I have time to read this again, so that I can pick up all the things that I know I missed.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-06 07:59 pm (UTC)I think the weaving of the realistic elements of casefic with the supernatural plot was a clever and interesting plot device. This was really just intensely interesting and a great read. :) Enjoyed it muchly!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-09 02:41 am (UTC)The story had this great dreamy (sorry, but it is the right word for it) vibe and it was fun to drift along between the dreams and the case, with the case itself feeling like just another aspect of the dream: you get off the couch, get into the ocean, go to the crime scene, walk into the cabin....
Wonderful. Can't wait to read it again.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-09 07:34 am (UTC)I like that Fraser has not hesitation to take clues from the dream to solve the case, but doesn't trust the dream to take the next step in his and Ray's relationship.
It's Ray (who has to be coaxed into kissing Fraser in the dream) who trusts in their dream and wants to move it to reality (and succeeds).
no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 09:30 pm (UTC)Beautifully done!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 04:42 am (UTC)my favorite line: There’s a flash of Fraser-red somewhere in the distant half-light of the warehouse, and he runs after it, without thinking much. All instinctive, like Dief after a donut.