Fic: Bury It With You [Due South]
Jun. 29th, 2005 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cherryTitle: Bury It With You
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cherryice
Summary: Ray Kowalski, poco a poco.
Notes: This is a story about Ray Kowalski, and in its course contains RK&S friendship, RK/RV, RV/S, and RK/F. Written forbrooklinegirl, who came through for me with a last-minute beta at one point. This is not the story she asked for, but hopefully it is acceptable. Beta by the wonderful estrella30.
Word Count:8,100
There are days Ray hates his job.
Hates his desk with its one wobbly leg, hates the constant clamour of criminals saying "No, bro, you got the wrong guy," hates Huey and Dewey’s stupid jokes, hates the stupid things people do to each other because of greed and lust and fear.
Then he thinks about Stella, and he thinks -- it could be worse -- because there’s no way someone should have to work on a daily basis with both of her ex-husbands.
"Ray!" she’s not quite hollering, but it’s not his desk she’s slamming a file folder onto, not him that’s got her face red and her eyes snapping. (It’s force of habit and nothing more that turns his head at her voice saying *his* name, because this is one time where he was Ray first.)
Stella’s always been pretty when she’s mad -- she looks younger, somehow, and in her anger less guarded. At the end he used to argue with her just so he could get her mask to slip, and he could see the woman she used to be.
Rat-a-tat-tat she and Vecchio go, slinging insults back and forth over the noise of the bullpen. He can’t quite hear -- criminals in and out, construction on the street outside, phones ringing, victims with splintering voices -- so he’s watching the way Stella’s lips tighten, watching Vecchio’s eyes get flinty.
Frannie’s perched on the edge of Ray's desk and talking with her hands. She’s going on about the station coffee trying to convince him to go in on a new coffee machine (there was in incident with Huey and a llama, and it hasn't been the same since), or at least she was five minutes ago, she’s probably tangented since. (She doesn’t know that Stella used to make him coffee, sometimes, and he’d smile and drink it all, that that was when he started dropping candy in his coffee beneath the kitchen table.)
"Ray!" Frannie snaps, and it’s him she’s talking to. "Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?"
"Uh-huh," Rays says, eyes still on Stella, on Vecchio, and feeling not a little like a peeping Tom. "Llama. Coffee."
Stella’s the one who breaks first, spins on one Gucci heel and walks away. Ray watches her go. Vecchio’s still sitting at his desk, arms braced and his face blank.
"I’m sorry, Frannie," he says, "I gotta –" slamming back from his own desk and heading across the floor. He can feel Frannie's eyes digging into his back and he feels worse than scum, but he goes anyway. He’ll get up early tomorrow morning and bring her in a cup of coffee from the cafe down the block from his apartment.
The door to the lunchroom is closed so he knocks first. Gives Stella a second, then closes the door again behind him. The latch catches with a sharp click. “Stell?” he asks, standing awkwardly by the door, one hand still on the cool metal of the knob. She’s got one hand against the vending machine and the other clenched in a fist. "You want that I should make use of some illicit connections, get him taken care of?"
“I’m fine,” she says, not looking at him and not laughing, not even a little.
“Uh huh,” he says. Nods. He can read every line of tension in her body. “And if I didn’t know you, I might almost believe that."
"Ray," her voice is low and she raises her head. Meets his eyes. The light from the vending machine casts shadows across her face. "Why are you here? You want to swoop in and rescue me? Win me?"
He flinches a little, but it's not her words that hurt him, it's her eyes. They're flat and damaged, and he wants to punch Vecchio in the nose in the worst way. “I thought,” he says. “That you might need a friend.”
She looks a little surprised, and he smiles wryly. Wonders if she remembers flying down the I-90 with the top down on a warm summer night, laughing. "Swear. Just -- look at us, Stella. We used to be friends, and now we’re just --” We bounce off each other like rubber balls, he wants to say, only that's wrong because they're both more brittle than that, now.
He’s got a turtle and a rookie partner with her hopes still untarnished; a bullet lodged in his hip and a scar cutting across his left palm; three commendations for bravery and a total of three years, seven months, and fifteen days practice being someone else.
“I don’t know about you,” he says, staring down at his fingers, at the scar that cuts across his lifeline. The line from his wedding band has faded, though it was burned in deep with years of sun and labour. “But I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to be throwing them away."
*
"Seven."
"Of?"
"Diamonds."
"Go fish."
Ray lets his head thunk against the steering wheel. "This game sucks."
There's what he'd class as a sigh – if he was feeling less generous – from the seat beside him. "It's not the game that sucks," Scott tells him. She's got her head propped against the window at an angle that makes his neck hurt just to look at it.
He grits his teeth and misses the wolf. "Back in my day," he says, eyes closed and forehead still resting against the steering wheel (it's black, and has long since absorbed as much heat as possible from the afternoon sun beating down) "We didn't play go fish. We had rocks. Sometimes, we gave them names."
Ray's never been a big fan of rookies. Mainly, because he remembers just what he was like his first few years, and that isn't anything he'd want to be partnered with.
(Nice try, Welsh said when Ray told him that. But I remember you when you were all bushy-tailed and green, and I've got worse sitting outside my door at this very moment. You're stuck with her.)
So, Ray's got a rookie partner, all clean-scrubbed face and southern drawl. Ashley Scott. She's got a parrot and freckles, and she makes his joints feel like creaking.
"What about twigs?" she asks.
"What about – what sort of question is that?"
"Didn't you have twigs?"
He's pretty sure the steering wheel is burning his forehead. "Only the big kids got to play with the twigs. Keep an eye out for Grutter or any of his guys."
Silence for ten minutes, twenty. Longer than he thought she'd last. He's no longer feeling charitable, so he's going to call the noise a sigh. He misses Dief. Dief and his licking.
"This sucks," she says, finally.
The car is scorching in the summer sun, and his clothes stick to his skin. "Tell me about it," he says and thinks about snow.
*
So, he and Stella try it. They go out for Japanese (she's always preferred it to Chinese, and he spent two years eating the stuff because he figured Fraser liked it), for coffee, occasionally for a show, and sometimes they get half, three-quarters of the way through the evening before they remember that it's been years since they knew how to talk to each other.
The thing about Stella is this: She's as damaged as he is. She just wears it better.
*
"You don't like Detective Vecchio much, do you?"
Ray blinks. Looks around the bullpen. Scott's drawing loops all over the blotter on her desk. "Now, what was your first clue?" Her desk is pushed so that it butts up against the far edge of his, and his paperwork spills over and across. His teeth hurt a bit, from grinding them. Vecchio's still in Welsh's office.
"The shoving match," she says, dryly.
"Was it work like that that got you your shield?" he asks. Pecks at the keys on his computer.
"No," she says, and drops the pen. "It was work like that that got me assigned to working with *you.*"
"Ouch," he says, hand to his heart. "You wound me."
"Yeah, yeah," she replies. "So?"
"So?"
"So? Why don't you like him?"
"He married my ex-wife," he tells her. Vecchio stalks out of Welsh's office, and when their eyes catch across the floor, Ray isn't the first one to look away. What he thinks is: I was undercover as the guy, and I knew him inside and out. The guy who came back and kicked me out of my life, that guy I didn't like much, but him I understood. This guy who came back –
"I guess that wasn't fair," Ray says, finally. "I don’t know him well enough to dislike him."
*
Ray hears from Fraser on a pretty regular basis. Pretty damn regular, considering how often (how rarely) he probably has the opportunity to sit down and write a letter, or write an email. Ray's got a computer at his desk now because Vecchio was the one who used a typewriter, and Ray hates typewriters more than he fails to understand computers.
(Least with a computer, I can go back and fix the stupid mistakes I make, he told the guy when he requisitioned one. It has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn't have one at home, and he'd feel like a tool asking Frannie if he could use hers to see if Fraser'd gotten tired of writing him yet.)
Fraser writes long, rambling letters. Mostly about perps he's caught, the weather, the migration patterns of the local moose and caribou and the magnificent spotted beaver or whatever. Talks about way the ice flow breaks up and the small gardens come up. There's always been something kind of distant about Fraser, but when he writes: Dief misses you; Ray knows exactly what he means.
*
Stella shows up at his door one night. Ray's got a record on and he's dancing by himself across the floor, mind lost in the count and rhythm. It takes two rings of the doorbell before he notices.
When he opens the door, she's just turning to leave. "Hey," he says, and "Hey," again, more softly when she turns to face him. Her hair's in a loose ponytail and there are wisps escaping all over the place. She's wearing jeans, and she looks like she did when they were eighteen and the strip on the test turned pink.
"Hey," he says again, and tugs her inside. He's got hot chocolate powder in the cupboard over the sink sitting right next to the coffee grounds, dust on the tin because he never drinks the stuff. He bought it right after papers were finalized, bought it and brought it back to his apartment before he realized that Stella wasn't going to be around to drink it. The can's a little dented from the way he threw it across the room.
"Sorry about that," he says, heating the milk. Best way to deal with Stell has always been to wait for her. Back her into a corner where she feels like she needs you, and she'll shut down faster than a Pinto being rear ended at a racetrack. "Didn't hear the doorbell. I was –"
"Dancing," Stella says, and of course the record's still playing, upbeat swing in the shadows of his place as it fills with the smell of steaming milk. She's standing in the living room, hands flitting like she can't figure out what to do with them.
"Yeah," he says. Stirs in the chocolate, spoon clanking in time with Stella's tapping fingers in time with the beat. He fills a great big mug (light blue with sunny orange stripes and a chip missing from the handle, they picked it up a garage sale two months after their marriage) right to the top and presses it into her hands, stopping their motion. She's not wearing a ring. "Sit," he says, and only releases her hands when she settles on the couch.
He wonders if she ever finds herself standing the supermarket checkout with a packet of Smarties in her cart.
"You lied," she says, and he blinks.
"Huh?"
She inclines her head towards the terrarium "Squirtle. I was supposed to get him weekends and holidays." Her voice is even, so he pretends not to notice the faint tremble in her hands.
"He's twenty, Stell. I think he's old enough to choose who he wants to live with." Ray taps at the glass and Squirtle sticks his head out of his shell. "Oh, look. He just chose me."
"I'm not so sure that would hold up in court," Stella tells him, pulling her legs up onto the couch.
"I don't think they'd take a turtle case in court," Ray says just as the music cuts out. He can hear the traffic outside; feel the last of the day's fading heat.
"This wasn't how it was supposed to be," Stella says in the silence before the needle finishes its arc and starts the record again.
She sits there and stares down into her hot chocolate. It's still steams, tendrils drifting up to her pinched face. It's a shock to him, to see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. It shouldn't be, because he's noticed the same in himself and she's pushing forty just as fast as he is, but.
To him, in his head, Stella's always going to be twenty-one and laughing. Her graduation day, the sun was bright and hot, and the sky was as blue as he'd ever seen it. He still remember what that felt like, the sense of hope and limitless possibilities.
She's got two failed marriages, a father in the ground, and a mother who might as well be (Alzheimer's, early onset – he still goes with Stella to the home on her mother's birthday, reads a book out loud while Stell holds her mother's hand). Ray, Ray has a turtle and enough regrets that he could spend the rest of his life letting them go.
"No," Ray says. Sits down on the couch beside her, drapes the blanket from the back of the couch around her shoulders. "No, it's not."
*
"You've got to be kidding," Ray says.
"No need to yell, Detective," Welsh says, rubbing his forehead.
"That? That was not yelling? You want to hear yelling?"
"Not in particular, no, Kowalski."
"There is no way in hell that –"
"Stanley," Welsh says. "I don't recall asking for your opinion."
"But –"
"Look," Welsh says. He's clearly wishing he'd decided to become a professional alligator wrestler. "It won't be permanent. Scott's on vacation, and Vecchio –"
Ran off yet another partner, Welsh doesn't have to say.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Ray says, kicking absently at one leg of Welsh's desk.
"Besides," Welsh tells him. "Looks like the case you and Scott were working on is connected to Vecchio's. Also, it gets you off rookie duty."
"Huh," Ray says, and shakes his head. "Kid's kind of starting to grow on me." Gets up and shrugs. "We done here?"
"One more thing," Welsh says. Runs his hand through what's left of his hair and the corners of his mouth tighten. "Vecchio. He –"
"Yeah, I know," Ray says. He saw the file, read the report, saw the picture of the kid with four stitches about his blackened eye. "He tried to come back to work right after he left Vegas."
*
"Chili cheese dog with fries," Ray says as soon as he slides into the diner booth. The waitress is still pulling the menus from her apron. "Kid'll have a BLT and what? A sweet tea?"
"Sweet tea, thank you," Scott says. Folds her hands neatly on the table and looks vaguely nonplussed.
"You wanna talk about it?" he asks her. She came back from Georgia with a sunburn and a chip on her shoulder. Everyone else at the station thinks she's just being polite, but Ray worked with Fraser for long enough to know when 'please' and 'thank you' really mean 'fuck you.'
At least she doesn't bother to deny that there *is* something. She gets points for that. "Not really," she says.
"Uh-huh," he says, and sips his water. The ice hurts his teeth. "Here's the thing. The whole passive-aggressive thing? Not working. Somehow, being passive never really gets rid of the aggression." He just spent a week working with Vecchio, watching the places where his personality didn't mesh, where Lagoustinni still hung off him in shreds, and thinking: that could have been me. They sit, and she looks out the window. He finishes his water, then crunches the ice.
"My last partner was Canadian," he tells her, finally. "I know all about passive-aggressive."
Waitress (name tag reads 'Dorothy' in large block letters) drops down two plates, which neither of them touch. Scott stares out the window, and Ray crunches ice and thinks about dogsleds, frostbite.
"My family didn't want me to become a cop," she says, finally.
"Mine either," he says, and eats his fries. "Still not sure they didn't have the right idea. You gonna let it get to you?"
"I'm good," she says finally, after a pause. "No, I think I'm good."
He lets her steal most of his fries, because he got them out of habit, anyway – something to feed to Dief below the table.
His *last* partner was Canadian, he'd said, and his mouth still feels funny with the words.
*
"You're thinking of hitting me right now," Ray says. Conversation-like. His window is open so the breeze dances through the curtains, and it smells like open spaces. He thinks of the tundra, of the park he used to play in when he was small, of Scott's distant voice and the way her eyes are beginning to tarnish. (You gonna let it get to you?)
Vecchio's standing there, one fist clenched, back straight. He's not wearing his own eyes.
"So right now," Ray says, "you're thinking that this is all my fault, that I made you want it."
"You don’t know jack about me, Kowalski," Vecchio tells him. "You don't know dick."
Ray's thinking: you don't even know what it is you're hiding; thinking that he's still got the imprint from Vecchio's teeth in his shoulder. "I spent a year and a half being you, Vecchio. This, though? This is not you."
"I don't know if you missed the memo, but *I'm* me again. You don't get to –"
"So," Ray says, and wishes for a cigarette, for a gun, for snow. "It's my fault, because I made you want it. Made you want me. And you're thinking: maybe there's something you could do to make sure it doesn't happen again."
"What the fuck are you saying, Kowalski?" Vecchio breathes, low and threatening. His hands are completely still.
Ray misses touch. Misses it like he misses the innocence of walking a beat with shoes not even broken in, knowing he could fix it all. If this is what he can get (fingers tight on his hips, teeth on his collarbone) – well, he's starving for it.
"I'm saying," Ray says. "That you're ramping yourself up to hit me right now, Vecchio. And I'm going to the first person to tell you you're an asshole, but you're not that kind of asshole. So what you do is you find your pants, you say 'thank you,' and you leave."
He sits on his fire escape after Vecchio's gone, metal hot from the sun all the way through his jeans, smoking a cigarette and trying to get his hands to stop shaking.
The next time is easier.
*
"Why'd you decide to become a cop?" Scott asks him. They're on stakeout again, trying to get something solid on Todd McMann. Three bodies, all women, all pretty before he got to them. The cops know he did it, but they haven't been able to nail him yet. The second girl looked like Stella did fifteen years ago, and after Ray left the morgue he punched the wall so hard he almost broke his hand.
"Not really sure," he says. Thinking about the regrets that have piled up so high he can barely see behind him any more. "I was in a bank robbery when I was thirteen. When I was fifteen, my best friend's father got shot working at the liquor store. Just. Pieces here and there. People I know got hurt who shouldn't have, people get away who should have got hurt. "
It's an overcast day, finally, and a cool one. Summer's dying into fall and the temperature in the car is perfect. They're in an undercover squad, because this case is important and McMann is smart enough to figure out what repeat sightings of a black GTO would probably mean.
"My sister was raped," Scott says, staring out the passenger side window. "It was the early eighties, it was the south, she was walking home alone from a party she shouldn't have gone to in an outfit she wasn't supposed to wear. I was the only one she ever told."
Ray closes his eyes, tries to collect his thoughts. "And is she –"
"She's okay," Scott says. "As much as – She married a doctor last year. They live in Los Angeles. She writes, sometimes."
"When we were eighteen, Stella got pregnant," he says. "We were stupidly in love, and we still believed in forever."
"You're not a –"
"No." Opens his eyes. The clouds are getting heavier. "We were stupidly in love, but we weren't stupid. Knew the problems, knew – We sat down and we decided that we couldn't decide anything yet, that we needed to think about it, and –" When he was in the North West Territories, clouds were important, because if you didn't see the storm coming you could get swallowed whole. "Doesn't matter," he says, finally. "Stella got mugged on her way back from her dorm four days later."
"Ray," Scott says, and reaches across to squeeze his hand.
"It was a long time ago," he tells her. One more regret.
The skies open up and weep.
*
Stella's no stranger to Ray's apartment. He's got her at least vaguely interested in hockey, and it's more fun if you have someone to watch the game with. (They eat popcorn from two separate bowls because the amount of salt Stella puts on hers has always kind of turned Ray's stomach.)
She's even got a few things she leaves there – jacket, pair of comfortable shoes, a folder or two of case notes. He's got a copy of the McMann file sitting on her desk at home. No toothbrushes, though, because there are some lines they're not going to cross this time around.
"Beer?" she calls from the kitchen.
"Yeah, sure," he says, feet up on the coffee table and flipping channels. He hasn't been sleeping well the last two weeks. (Regretting the things he hasn't done almost as much as the things he has.) She flops down beside him with two, opens one for herself. She doesn't drink it that much these days, but he remembers when she had Patty Lelond's ID, and they'd sit out on his roof and make their way through a six-pack, both pretending they were drunker than they really were.
"Ray?" she asks, running one finger around the mouth of the bottle, and he knows what's coming. "How was Canada?"
"Cold," he says. He got a letter from Fraser the other day. Mrs. Manji's cookies won at the fair, the first snow of the season fell, Dief's taken an interest in one of the innkeeper's bitches. "Canada was cold."
Stella's picking at the label on her bottle, neatly manicured nails worrying the corner.
"Look," he finally says. "You got something to ask me, go ahead." He's gotten used to this – how everyone tiptoes around the subject with him. No one even mentions their looming geographical neighbour (aside from when they're talking about NHL or the cup), mentions Fraser, like they're afraid he'll snap or something. He got back (got *back*) and Welsh took him aside and said: You need some time; you let me know, okay?
"I was just surprised," she says, finally. "That you came home. Back."
"Stella," he says, and blinks. "Why would I stay in Canada?"
On the TV, someone scores and the tinny roar of the crowd fills the room.
Yeah, Canada's got a few things going for it, like good beer and air quality, but – "You didn't think we were... Did you?" He looks at her, at tightness at the corners of her mouth and the tension in her neck, and there are a few things that make a lot more sense all of a sudden, especially the way Stella's never really liked Fraser.
He's never liked anyone he thought she was dating, either.
"Stell," he says, softly. "I've crossed a lot of lines, but that? That is one I have not." He's seen what happens to people who get involved with their partners. It never ends well. Your partner's gotta have your back, and you've got to trust them. It's a little harder when they're your reason for breathing, or whatever, and you're spending half your time worrying. You try not to, but when it's someone you love, you can't always help it.
You end up dead, or you end up hating each other. It's inevitable.
Fastest way to end a partnership there is.
"And after?" she asks.
He looks around, at the TV and the terrarium, the lights he's got strung up and the woman sitting beside him. Fraser needs caribou and sky and lots of frost, Ray needs swing music and blacktop and side street pizza dealers. "It's kind of my home here," he says. He knows that's not what she was asking. "Vecchio?" he asks, and the name catches in his throat a little.
Stella takes a pull of her beer. "I love him. I just." She stares down at her hands, clasped around the brown glass. "Sometimes," she says, and breaks off.
"Sometimes, he's not Vecchio," Ray says. He's been there himself, a bit. When the cover was too deep or went too long, and every word that left his mouth tried to come out of him as someone else's. The FBI may have spent years grooming Vecchio, but they never taught him to detox.
"I miss him," Stella says in this little, broken voice. He wants to punch Vecchio in the face. He wants to punch himself in the face.
Neither Ray nor Stella has ever been cutout for short-term commitments. He thinks someone should have taken him aside and told him: You watch it, boy, because neither of you knows when to let go. Sometimes letting go's the only way to keep what you have.
"I know, Stella, I know," he says, and wraps his arms around her.
He thinks about Canada. How everything tasted better cooked over a fire when you hadn't eaten since dawn. About Tearson, where Fraser was assigned, the cabin with the small wood stove; about the town with its lack of meaningful job openings. Thinks about falling asleep with Dief curled up beside him and the northern lights overhead, listening to Fraser singing softly.
He could have stayed. Fallen a little further into Fraser until one day they came together easily, a ship sliding into port, and it no longer bothered him that there were murderers back home he wasn't helping take off the streets.
"I could have stayed in Canada," he says. "Yeah, I could have stayed." Stella doesn't cry, but she's holding onto him tight, and her face is buried in his shoulder. "But who would I have been then?"
Chicago is loud outside, beneath the hockey game on the TV in front of them. The side of her face is hot against his neck, and her hair still smells like lemon grass.
"Who would I have been?" he whispers.
The power flickers and goes out, TV cutting out and neighbour's radio going dead.
Silence.
*
"I can't do this any more," Ray says. He's up against the wall with Vecchio's breath against his neck and Stella's face behind his eyes. He wonders what Fraser would say. Probably something like: Am I your absolution, or am I your sin?
Then again, Fraser would never have gotten himself into a mess like this.
"Tired already?" Vecchio asks, and Ray closes his eyes.
"I'm a hypocrite," he says. Opens his eyes and it's Vecchio he's looking at, looking through. He wonders who it is that shows in his face. "I thought I could help you, Vecchio. I thought – I don't know, I thought I could help you make the pieces fit."
"Help me, Kowalski?" Vecchio asks. One fist tightens (it's when they still that there's a danger), and Vecchio's still got the other hand braced on the wall beside Ray's head. He's still wearing his ring.
Ray's thinking about all the guys he's ever been. "The feds, they taught you how to be someone else. Never told you to stop being yourself first, did they?" He's just so tired. "It's not me you want," Ray says. "It's the guy you used to be. I'm not – I thought I could help you, but fuck, Vecchio, I don't even know where all my pieces *are.*"
Ray feels like nothing more than a piñata; battered, loose skin stuffed with of all the guys he's ever been.
"You should talk to Stella," he says, finally.
Vecchio leaves, and Ray lets himself go to pieces.
*
It's two a.m. by the time he's together enough to drive, two a.m. before he shows up at Stella's door.
This is not a conversation for the telephone.
Stella looks concerned when she opens the door (it's two a.m. and he's leaving little pieces of himself all over everything he touches) and all he can do is stand in the hall in a pile of regrets.
"I did a bad thing, Stella," he says. "I did a real bad thing."
*
So Stella's not talking to him, and Vecchio's not talking to him (not that he and Vecchio ever really *talked*) but hey, at least he has work. Where he gets to deal with both Stella and Vecchio. On the extra-special days, at the same time. He's not sure how he did it, when he first came back from Canada and he didn't have anyone but Squirtle, who isn't a great conversationalist even at the best of times.
Fraser hasn't written in two weeks.
"Watch it!" he snaps. The paramedic rolls her eyes at him. Being shot always makes him a little testy.
Actually, no, being shot and being not dead gives him an adrenaline rush. Letting a creep like McMann slip through his fingers tends make him a bit testy.
"It's a clean shot," the paramedic says, trying off the thread and cutting off a piece of gauze. "If you're careful, it shouldn't scar too badly." The bullet passed right through his tattoo, neatly striking out CHAMPION. He thinks he probably had it coming.
Scott was hovering over him, eyes trained on the blood soaking through his jacket (olive, military, second-hand at the thrift store – he got it for five bucks in Edmonton on his stopover on the way back from Canada), didn't listen when he said: Not your fault, for christsakes. Welsh sent her off to canvas the neighbourhood with a beat cop.
"Thanks," he tells the medic weakly. Not her fault that when the dust cleared he had a hole in him and McMann was gone. Plus, the paramedics are not people you want to be pissing off. Those in Ray's line of work tend to need them on a semi-regular basis, even when they don't have crazy Mounties for partners.
"We'll get him," Welsh says, settling on the back of the ambulance beside Ray. "We will catch the bastard and nail him to the wall."
They've been closing in on McMann for four months, and all it took to get them to a confrontation was two more bodies in the morgue.
"I know," Ray says. They offered him something for the pain but he prefers the clarity. "The girl –"
"Is going to be okay," Welsh tells him. No nonsense lieutenant's voice.
"She is not going to be *okay,*" Ray snarls. "She's going to be fucking *damaged.*" Ray saw her eyes, as he untied the ropes. She wasn't really tracking anything, just kind of. Existing. He's willing to bet his pension that the first sign she's come out of it will be when she starts screaming.
"She's not going to be *dead,*" Welsh says. "Couple of years of therapy is nothing next to dead."
"I just – " Ray doesn't remember the last time he wanted a cigarette this bad, but that would mean unclenching his fingers from the edge of the ambulance.
Somewhere in the distance a car backfires.
Backfires five times, and the police scanners in the patrol cars parked around them scream: Officer down!
*
The station is all bad coffee and worse moods. Frannie changes the bandage on his arm (silent for once) because he bled through it when he went tearing off towards the shots.
McMann's had Scott for almost three hours.
Most of the stations in the city are turned out. Patrol officer is in the hospital with a belly wound and a shot to the knee. Doctors think he'll make it.
Hour three (down to the minute) he figures out where McMann's probably got her. "Welsh!" he hollers on his way out the door, shoving the folder with the bill of sale into Frannie's arms.
He runs four red lights in the GTO. Warehouse is down by the docks – they always are – and there's no time to wait for backup. Hooker outside runs her (his?) fingernails up Ray's arm, jerks the hand back at the bullet hole and still-tacky blood.
Place smells like rotting wood and all the neigbouring buildings that've gone up in smoke. There's dust hanging in the shaft of diffuse city light that stabs through a crack in the boards covering the windows. First thing it shows him is the silver of a knife.
"Police!" he's hollering, gun out, and: "Freeze!" but McMann's not freezing. Ray's eyes adjust and he sees Scott, sees the ropes digging into her skin, the hair plastered to her neck.
Red is the first colour to disappear in the dark, but Ray knows blood when he sees it. There's a gun in McMann's other hand, and there are bullets everywhere.
The knife is arcing downwards, Scott's not blinking, Ray's stitches are tearing out.
He empties his clip.
*
IAB is asking him the same old questions, most of which boil down to: you sure you didn't do anything that could get our asses sued? They're on him in a side room in the fucking *hospital.* Doctors got him while he was waiting to hear about Scott, IAB got him while an intern was re-stitching the wound.
Todd McMann was not an unimportant person.
Did you have to do it? they're asking him and: Did it get too personal?
"He killed five women," he tells them. Gritted teeth.
"And you thought you'd take him out?"
"He *shot* at me," Ray says, and another stitch pulls through. "Never mind that he had a knife and he was going to use it to make my partner number six."
"You –" the one guy starts. Big man, drooping sports coat, fine sheen of perspiration on his upper lip.
"You done here?" Welsh asks from the doorway. "Because you've got no call to be bothering my guy."
"That's not your decision, Lieutenant," the other guy says. Looks like there was only enough body mass for two normal people between them, and his partner got the lion's share.
Another stitch. "How's she doing?" Ray asks.
Welsh nods, comes into the room. "She's gonna be fine. Couple weeks, she'll be right as rain."
"Look," the first IAB guy says. "I don't think that either of you realize just how –"
"You want something to show the mayor, show him Detective Scott," Stella says. She's standing at the doorway with her arms crossed and attack-dog eyes.
"Miss Kowalski," the little guy says. Small twist of his lips indicates exactly what he thought a woman who looks like that did to get to be a State's Attorney.
The big guy seems a little quicker on the uptake, on things like matching last names and the look of DOOM promised in the pretty lady's posture.
Intern ties off his last stitch.
"ASA Kowalski," Stella says. "If you want, we can do it your way. Bring in interrogation lighting if it makes you feel more like men. You just keep in mind, though – at the end of the day, you're going to be explaining why it was you were hassling a guy with three commendations."
"Now, Miss Kowalski," the little guy says, all greased-hair charm. "I don't think you understand –"
"It's ASA Kowalski, and understand this," Stella says. "You're the only one in this room not already aware he's about to get a fourth commendation."
"Todd McMann –"
"Was a man who needed killing," Stella says, eyes like chips of ice. "Get out."
"Look –"
"Why don't you go ask Detective Scott for a corroborating story," Stella says. "I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you exactly what happened when she wakes up from the sedation."
The door slams behind them.
Ray said 'partner' and he didn't even flash on Fraser.
"Look," Welsh says with a hand on her arm. "I don't know that –"
"I'm not here as a lawyer, Lieutenant," Stella says. "I just..."
She sits on the gurney beside Ray, looks at his second set of stitches.
"Yeah," Welsh says. "You need me, I'm going to be outside, guarding the door from assholes."
The adreneline has long since worn off, Ray feels kind of like he's moving underwater. Everything is far away and shocky. "Lieu?" he asks.
"I'll let you know if there's any change," Welsh tells him. He closes the door quietly behind him, and he and Stella just sit there.
"I killed him," Ray says, finally. Stella puts her hand on his back, like she used to, rubbing small circles with the heel of her hand. "Look, I'm sorry about everything."
She stops rubbing his back and squeezes his shoulder. "It doesn't matter," she tells him.
"They offered me another undercover gig," he tells her, finally.
"You going to take it?"
"Wasn't."
"Now?"
He doesn't answer her, staring at the ceiling and thinking about northern lights.
"It's going to scar," she tells him.
He looks at his fingers; gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles are white. "It always does," he says.
It takes awhile before he realizes she's talking about the stitches.
*
Ray is half-asleep beside Scott's bed when Vecchio finds him. "How is she?" Vecchio asks, standing at the door with one hand on the frame.
"Doctors say she'll be fine," Ray tells him, rolling his neck. "I say we'll know when she wakes up."
"You think she's –"
"Nah," Ray says, still drifting. "She's a tough kid." He's got his feet up on the chair beside him and his back crammed into a corner. The hum of the machines is comforting, like the rush of the sled's runners. "Shoulda been there."
"You did good," Vecchio says.
"I shoulda –"
"You did good," Vecchio repeats. Grabs a blanket out of the closet and drops it over Ray.
"I –"
"You're an asshole, Stanley, so I'm not going to say it again," Vecchio says, but his gaze is easy. (Tucks the blanket in, just a little, after checking to make sure no one's walking by the doorway.)
Ray's eyes are heavy and he wants nothing more than to sleep. "Vecchio," he gets out, before the man leaves.
"What?"
"Let it got. Just." His tongue is tied. "Leave it all behind you," Ray says, and he can feel thirty-six hours without any sleep dragging at his mind.
Vecchio is nothing more than a shadow at the door.
"Lagoustinni, the nine kilos, the guy you used to be. Just. Let it be." The room keeps getting darker, and he couldn't force his eyes open if there were twelve beautiful women stripping before him. "You can't take it with you."
Steady beep of the monitor and smell of orange disinfectant. He can still smell the gunpowder on his clothes.
Ray sleeps.
*
"Hey," someone says softly.
Ray was dreaming of the northern lights dancing over Chicago. "Hey," he says, suddenly awake. Scott's sitting up in her bed, magazine on her lap. There are coats he doesn't recognize on the room's other chairs. He looks around, confused. Either it's still dark (it was near dawn when he dropped off) or – "How long was I out?" he asks.
"Awhile," she says. Starts to shrug but stops half way through the motion. "You haven't been sleeping lately, so I thought –"
"Yeah," he swallows. "Thank you." There's gauze covering the right side of her forehead and a butterfly clip above her eyebrow.
"I'm told it will leave a handsome scar," she tells him. Flips the pages of her magazine with the hand that doesn't have any broken fingers. "Tattoos for the brave."
Ray sits there and watches her. "Scott – " he starts.
"You saved my life, Ray," she tells him, not looking up from her magazine.
The lump in his throat makes it hard to swallow. "Patch things up with your folks?" he asks, finally.
"Kind of," Scott says. Looks up at him from her magazine. "I'm going back to Georgia for a bit."
Ray shifts in his chair, trying to untangle his protesting limbs. "Look, I –"
"Not your fault," she tells him. "Not your fault, for christsakes," she says, and he managed to conjure up the ghost of a smile. "Promise me my desk will still be here when I get back."
Ray snorts. "Like you're going to be gone for long enough for me to get rid of the paperwork I'm keeping on it. Look, Scott –"
"Don't," she says. "I'm just – I'm not ready, yet."
"Okay," he says, and sits back. "You ever notice the scar on my hand?" he asks.
She nods.
"No one's ever asked me how I got it," he tells her. Doesn't say anything about how stupidly, pathetically grateful he was for that. "Didn't have it when I went to Canada, was stuck with it when I came back. You ask me some time, and I'll tell you what happened."
She nods, staring down at her splinted fingers.
The air is warm and soft. He can feel Chicago rushing right outside the windows, but in the room it's still. "You want to hear an Inuit story?" he asks.
She nods her head, and Ray pretends like the brightness of her eyes is only from the lighting.
"So," he says. "There was this old woman..."
*
Ray spends five days carefully tearing himself apart. Isolating his mannerisms and quirks and forms of speech, locking them away in the small corners of his brain. You start being someone else before you stop being yourself and the two get tangled up and trip on each other.
He doesn't see Stella until the night before he leaves, when she shows up at his door with Chinese in cardboard containers. It doesn't mean they're not okay, though okay is probably more than he deserves. Just means that she's always hated watching him go through the process of stripping everything away and she's no longer contractually obligated to stick around while he does it.
Took him a long time (too long, much too long) to figure out that it was at least part because every time he built himself back up, he made himself a little more like the guy he thought she needed.
He's got the radio on when he lets her inside (news-talk radio, not salsa on the record player). The smell of Chinese food strikes him somewhere around a memory that he didn't have tucked away as neatly as he thought, and he closes his eyes and lets himself miss Fraser, just for a minute or two.
"Ray?" Stella asks, and he shakes his head.
"Nothing," he tells her, stabbing at his ginger chicken with his chopsticks. "Stuff you're eating right now was Fraser's favourite."
"Oh," she says, then "oh."
"Just funny," he says. "Two of you have something in common after all."
"Fraser and I have at least one other thing in common," she says, and he can tell that she has to make herself meet his eyes.
"Lines, Stell," he reminds her, and feels his mouth twist wryly. They sit there, with the announcer droning on in the background and chopsticks clicking in some sort of rhythm.
"I just wanted to be the guy you needed," he says finally. Some regrets you need to put voice to before you can let them go.
"I know, Ray, I know." Stella's voice is a little unsteady. "But the man I fell in love with wasn't the man I was supposed to need."
"Look." He's starting to think that they choose radio hosts on their ability to put commuters to sleep, so he turns off the radio. Stands there with his hands braced on the counter for a minute more. Stella's wearing her ring on a chain beneath her shirt. "If you're not here when I get back, I'll understand."
"Ray –"
"I can talk all the smack I want, but," he says, and the words are hard. "You could do worse than Vecchio."
"Thanks for your permission," she tells him dryly, but her hand is on his shoulder. "Hey," she says softly, and he lets himself be turned around. "I love you. Always remember that."
"I love you too, Stell," he says, and folds her into his arms. She hugs him, hard. God, he missed her when they weren't even friends. "We were really something, weren't we?"
"Yeah," she whispers into his neck. "Yeah, we were."
*
Five days tearing himself apart for one week, two weeks, three weeks of being some other guy. Coming up from under this time is like a hundred hangovers all rolled into one, like his skin's too loose and his head's too small.
Ray rips through his apartment and ends up with half his stuff in boxes for the Salvation Army or black plastic bags he hauls down the fire escape and drops the remaining story to the dumpster. Lets his regrets fall away with them.
Dust in his hair and a fine sheen of sweat on the back of his neck, he stands in the middle of the room, just breathing. When he opens his eyes, he looks around and sees his apartment like a clean expanse of snow, stretching out to the sky. Out his open window, Chicago sings.
There's a knock at the door and he blinks. Stella and Vecchio are sipping on margaritas in Mexico (Stella's sipping margaritas, anyway, she sent a postcard), and Scott's not due back in until the end of the week. "Whatever you're selling," Ray hollers as he starts towards the door. "I'm not buyi –"
Only, it's not someone looking to unload season White Sox tickets, or bibles in a beaten suitcase, or a pizza guy with the wrong order. It's –
"Fraser, hi," Ray says, blinking slowly. "You look good." Of course Fraser looks good, he's *Fraser,* and even if he doesn't, Ray hasn't seen him for so long that any sight of him would probably strike him as good.
"As do you, Ray," Fraser says. He's in street clothes, Stetson held between his hands.
"Frase," Ray says, still blinking slowly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but what are you doing here?"
"I," Fraser starts. Trails off. "I received a phone call from Stella," he says. "She indicated to me that there was perhaps a matter on which we might wish to speak."
Ray can feel a grin starting to spread across his face. "That's my girl," he says, and Fraser shifts in the hall. There's not a line in sight.
"Come on in," Ray tells him. Steps back and waves grandly at his near-empty apartment. "I've made a few changes. Why don't you pull up a chair and stay a while?" He holds the door open and lets Fraser take the next step.
Out his open window, Chicago is all rhythm, horns and traffic and distant music; and Ray?
Ray feels like dancing.
Author:
cherryiceSummary: Ray Kowalski, poco a poco.
Notes: This is a story about Ray Kowalski, and in its course contains RK&S friendship, RK/RV, RV/S, and RK/F. Written for
brooklinegirl, who came through for me with a last-minute beta at one point. This is not the story she asked for, but hopefully it is acceptable. Beta by the wonderful estrella30.Word Count:8,100
There are days Ray hates his job.
Hates his desk with its one wobbly leg, hates the constant clamour of criminals saying "No, bro, you got the wrong guy," hates Huey and Dewey’s stupid jokes, hates the stupid things people do to each other because of greed and lust and fear.
Then he thinks about Stella, and he thinks -- it could be worse -- because there’s no way someone should have to work on a daily basis with both of her ex-husbands.
"Ray!" she’s not quite hollering, but it’s not his desk she’s slamming a file folder onto, not him that’s got her face red and her eyes snapping. (It’s force of habit and nothing more that turns his head at her voice saying *his* name, because this is one time where he was Ray first.)
Stella’s always been pretty when she’s mad -- she looks younger, somehow, and in her anger less guarded. At the end he used to argue with her just so he could get her mask to slip, and he could see the woman she used to be.
Rat-a-tat-tat she and Vecchio go, slinging insults back and forth over the noise of the bullpen. He can’t quite hear -- criminals in and out, construction on the street outside, phones ringing, victims with splintering voices -- so he’s watching the way Stella’s lips tighten, watching Vecchio’s eyes get flinty.
Frannie’s perched on the edge of Ray's desk and talking with her hands. She’s going on about the station coffee trying to convince him to go in on a new coffee machine (there was in incident with Huey and a llama, and it hasn't been the same since), or at least she was five minutes ago, she’s probably tangented since. (She doesn’t know that Stella used to make him coffee, sometimes, and he’d smile and drink it all, that that was when he started dropping candy in his coffee beneath the kitchen table.)
"Ray!" Frannie snaps, and it’s him she’s talking to. "Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?"
"Uh-huh," Rays says, eyes still on Stella, on Vecchio, and feeling not a little like a peeping Tom. "Llama. Coffee."
Stella’s the one who breaks first, spins on one Gucci heel and walks away. Ray watches her go. Vecchio’s still sitting at his desk, arms braced and his face blank.
"I’m sorry, Frannie," he says, "I gotta –" slamming back from his own desk and heading across the floor. He can feel Frannie's eyes digging into his back and he feels worse than scum, but he goes anyway. He’ll get up early tomorrow morning and bring her in a cup of coffee from the cafe down the block from his apartment.
The door to the lunchroom is closed so he knocks first. Gives Stella a second, then closes the door again behind him. The latch catches with a sharp click. “Stell?” he asks, standing awkwardly by the door, one hand still on the cool metal of the knob. She’s got one hand against the vending machine and the other clenched in a fist. "You want that I should make use of some illicit connections, get him taken care of?"
“I’m fine,” she says, not looking at him and not laughing, not even a little.
“Uh huh,” he says. Nods. He can read every line of tension in her body. “And if I didn’t know you, I might almost believe that."
"Ray," her voice is low and she raises her head. Meets his eyes. The light from the vending machine casts shadows across her face. "Why are you here? You want to swoop in and rescue me? Win me?"
He flinches a little, but it's not her words that hurt him, it's her eyes. They're flat and damaged, and he wants to punch Vecchio in the nose in the worst way. “I thought,” he says. “That you might need a friend.”
She looks a little surprised, and he smiles wryly. Wonders if she remembers flying down the I-90 with the top down on a warm summer night, laughing. "Swear. Just -- look at us, Stella. We used to be friends, and now we’re just --” We bounce off each other like rubber balls, he wants to say, only that's wrong because they're both more brittle than that, now.
He’s got a turtle and a rookie partner with her hopes still untarnished; a bullet lodged in his hip and a scar cutting across his left palm; three commendations for bravery and a total of three years, seven months, and fifteen days practice being someone else.
“I don’t know about you,” he says, staring down at his fingers, at the scar that cuts across his lifeline. The line from his wedding band has faded, though it was burned in deep with years of sun and labour. “But I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to be throwing them away."
*
"Seven."
"Of?"
"Diamonds."
"Go fish."
Ray lets his head thunk against the steering wheel. "This game sucks."
There's what he'd class as a sigh – if he was feeling less generous – from the seat beside him. "It's not the game that sucks," Scott tells him. She's got her head propped against the window at an angle that makes his neck hurt just to look at it.
He grits his teeth and misses the wolf. "Back in my day," he says, eyes closed and forehead still resting against the steering wheel (it's black, and has long since absorbed as much heat as possible from the afternoon sun beating down) "We didn't play go fish. We had rocks. Sometimes, we gave them names."
Ray's never been a big fan of rookies. Mainly, because he remembers just what he was like his first few years, and that isn't anything he'd want to be partnered with.
(Nice try, Welsh said when Ray told him that. But I remember you when you were all bushy-tailed and green, and I've got worse sitting outside my door at this very moment. You're stuck with her.)
So, Ray's got a rookie partner, all clean-scrubbed face and southern drawl. Ashley Scott. She's got a parrot and freckles, and she makes his joints feel like creaking.
"What about twigs?" she asks.
"What about – what sort of question is that?"
"Didn't you have twigs?"
He's pretty sure the steering wheel is burning his forehead. "Only the big kids got to play with the twigs. Keep an eye out for Grutter or any of his guys."
Silence for ten minutes, twenty. Longer than he thought she'd last. He's no longer feeling charitable, so he's going to call the noise a sigh. He misses Dief. Dief and his licking.
"This sucks," she says, finally.
The car is scorching in the summer sun, and his clothes stick to his skin. "Tell me about it," he says and thinks about snow.
*
So, he and Stella try it. They go out for Japanese (she's always preferred it to Chinese, and he spent two years eating the stuff because he figured Fraser liked it), for coffee, occasionally for a show, and sometimes they get half, three-quarters of the way through the evening before they remember that it's been years since they knew how to talk to each other.
The thing about Stella is this: She's as damaged as he is. She just wears it better.
*
"You don't like Detective Vecchio much, do you?"
Ray blinks. Looks around the bullpen. Scott's drawing loops all over the blotter on her desk. "Now, what was your first clue?" Her desk is pushed so that it butts up against the far edge of his, and his paperwork spills over and across. His teeth hurt a bit, from grinding them. Vecchio's still in Welsh's office.
"The shoving match," she says, dryly.
"Was it work like that that got you your shield?" he asks. Pecks at the keys on his computer.
"No," she says, and drops the pen. "It was work like that that got me assigned to working with *you.*"
"Ouch," he says, hand to his heart. "You wound me."
"Yeah, yeah," she replies. "So?"
"So?"
"So? Why don't you like him?"
"He married my ex-wife," he tells her. Vecchio stalks out of Welsh's office, and when their eyes catch across the floor, Ray isn't the first one to look away. What he thinks is: I was undercover as the guy, and I knew him inside and out. The guy who came back and kicked me out of my life, that guy I didn't like much, but him I understood. This guy who came back –
"I guess that wasn't fair," Ray says, finally. "I don’t know him well enough to dislike him."
*
Ray hears from Fraser on a pretty regular basis. Pretty damn regular, considering how often (how rarely) he probably has the opportunity to sit down and write a letter, or write an email. Ray's got a computer at his desk now because Vecchio was the one who used a typewriter, and Ray hates typewriters more than he fails to understand computers.
(Least with a computer, I can go back and fix the stupid mistakes I make, he told the guy when he requisitioned one. It has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn't have one at home, and he'd feel like a tool asking Frannie if he could use hers to see if Fraser'd gotten tired of writing him yet.)
Fraser writes long, rambling letters. Mostly about perps he's caught, the weather, the migration patterns of the local moose and caribou and the magnificent spotted beaver or whatever. Talks about way the ice flow breaks up and the small gardens come up. There's always been something kind of distant about Fraser, but when he writes: Dief misses you; Ray knows exactly what he means.
*
Stella shows up at his door one night. Ray's got a record on and he's dancing by himself across the floor, mind lost in the count and rhythm. It takes two rings of the doorbell before he notices.
When he opens the door, she's just turning to leave. "Hey," he says, and "Hey," again, more softly when she turns to face him. Her hair's in a loose ponytail and there are wisps escaping all over the place. She's wearing jeans, and she looks like she did when they were eighteen and the strip on the test turned pink.
"Hey," he says again, and tugs her inside. He's got hot chocolate powder in the cupboard over the sink sitting right next to the coffee grounds, dust on the tin because he never drinks the stuff. He bought it right after papers were finalized, bought it and brought it back to his apartment before he realized that Stella wasn't going to be around to drink it. The can's a little dented from the way he threw it across the room.
"Sorry about that," he says, heating the milk. Best way to deal with Stell has always been to wait for her. Back her into a corner where she feels like she needs you, and she'll shut down faster than a Pinto being rear ended at a racetrack. "Didn't hear the doorbell. I was –"
"Dancing," Stella says, and of course the record's still playing, upbeat swing in the shadows of his place as it fills with the smell of steaming milk. She's standing in the living room, hands flitting like she can't figure out what to do with them.
"Yeah," he says. Stirs in the chocolate, spoon clanking in time with Stella's tapping fingers in time with the beat. He fills a great big mug (light blue with sunny orange stripes and a chip missing from the handle, they picked it up a garage sale two months after their marriage) right to the top and presses it into her hands, stopping their motion. She's not wearing a ring. "Sit," he says, and only releases her hands when she settles on the couch.
He wonders if she ever finds herself standing the supermarket checkout with a packet of Smarties in her cart.
"You lied," she says, and he blinks.
"Huh?"
She inclines her head towards the terrarium "Squirtle. I was supposed to get him weekends and holidays." Her voice is even, so he pretends not to notice the faint tremble in her hands.
"He's twenty, Stell. I think he's old enough to choose who he wants to live with." Ray taps at the glass and Squirtle sticks his head out of his shell. "Oh, look. He just chose me."
"I'm not so sure that would hold up in court," Stella tells him, pulling her legs up onto the couch.
"I don't think they'd take a turtle case in court," Ray says just as the music cuts out. He can hear the traffic outside; feel the last of the day's fading heat.
"This wasn't how it was supposed to be," Stella says in the silence before the needle finishes its arc and starts the record again.
She sits there and stares down into her hot chocolate. It's still steams, tendrils drifting up to her pinched face. It's a shock to him, to see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. It shouldn't be, because he's noticed the same in himself and she's pushing forty just as fast as he is, but.
To him, in his head, Stella's always going to be twenty-one and laughing. Her graduation day, the sun was bright and hot, and the sky was as blue as he'd ever seen it. He still remember what that felt like, the sense of hope and limitless possibilities.
She's got two failed marriages, a father in the ground, and a mother who might as well be (Alzheimer's, early onset – he still goes with Stella to the home on her mother's birthday, reads a book out loud while Stell holds her mother's hand). Ray, Ray has a turtle and enough regrets that he could spend the rest of his life letting them go.
"No," Ray says. Sits down on the couch beside her, drapes the blanket from the back of the couch around her shoulders. "No, it's not."
*
"You've got to be kidding," Ray says.
"No need to yell, Detective," Welsh says, rubbing his forehead.
"That? That was not yelling? You want to hear yelling?"
"Not in particular, no, Kowalski."
"There is no way in hell that –"
"Stanley," Welsh says. "I don't recall asking for your opinion."
"But –"
"Look," Welsh says. He's clearly wishing he'd decided to become a professional alligator wrestler. "It won't be permanent. Scott's on vacation, and Vecchio –"
Ran off yet another partner, Welsh doesn't have to say.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Ray says, kicking absently at one leg of Welsh's desk.
"Besides," Welsh tells him. "Looks like the case you and Scott were working on is connected to Vecchio's. Also, it gets you off rookie duty."
"Huh," Ray says, and shakes his head. "Kid's kind of starting to grow on me." Gets up and shrugs. "We done here?"
"One more thing," Welsh says. Runs his hand through what's left of his hair and the corners of his mouth tighten. "Vecchio. He –"
"Yeah, I know," Ray says. He saw the file, read the report, saw the picture of the kid with four stitches about his blackened eye. "He tried to come back to work right after he left Vegas."
*
"Chili cheese dog with fries," Ray says as soon as he slides into the diner booth. The waitress is still pulling the menus from her apron. "Kid'll have a BLT and what? A sweet tea?"
"Sweet tea, thank you," Scott says. Folds her hands neatly on the table and looks vaguely nonplussed.
"You wanna talk about it?" he asks her. She came back from Georgia with a sunburn and a chip on her shoulder. Everyone else at the station thinks she's just being polite, but Ray worked with Fraser for long enough to know when 'please' and 'thank you' really mean 'fuck you.'
At least she doesn't bother to deny that there *is* something. She gets points for that. "Not really," she says.
"Uh-huh," he says, and sips his water. The ice hurts his teeth. "Here's the thing. The whole passive-aggressive thing? Not working. Somehow, being passive never really gets rid of the aggression." He just spent a week working with Vecchio, watching the places where his personality didn't mesh, where Lagoustinni still hung off him in shreds, and thinking: that could have been me. They sit, and she looks out the window. He finishes his water, then crunches the ice.
"My last partner was Canadian," he tells her, finally. "I know all about passive-aggressive."
Waitress (name tag reads 'Dorothy' in large block letters) drops down two plates, which neither of them touch. Scott stares out the window, and Ray crunches ice and thinks about dogsleds, frostbite.
"My family didn't want me to become a cop," she says, finally.
"Mine either," he says, and eats his fries. "Still not sure they didn't have the right idea. You gonna let it get to you?"
"I'm good," she says finally, after a pause. "No, I think I'm good."
He lets her steal most of his fries, because he got them out of habit, anyway – something to feed to Dief below the table.
His *last* partner was Canadian, he'd said, and his mouth still feels funny with the words.
*
"You're thinking of hitting me right now," Ray says. Conversation-like. His window is open so the breeze dances through the curtains, and it smells like open spaces. He thinks of the tundra, of the park he used to play in when he was small, of Scott's distant voice and the way her eyes are beginning to tarnish. (You gonna let it get to you?)
Vecchio's standing there, one fist clenched, back straight. He's not wearing his own eyes.
"So right now," Ray says, "you're thinking that this is all my fault, that I made you want it."
"You don’t know jack about me, Kowalski," Vecchio tells him. "You don't know dick."
Ray's thinking: you don't even know what it is you're hiding; thinking that he's still got the imprint from Vecchio's teeth in his shoulder. "I spent a year and a half being you, Vecchio. This, though? This is not you."
"I don't know if you missed the memo, but *I'm* me again. You don't get to –"
"So," Ray says, and wishes for a cigarette, for a gun, for snow. "It's my fault, because I made you want it. Made you want me. And you're thinking: maybe there's something you could do to make sure it doesn't happen again."
"What the fuck are you saying, Kowalski?" Vecchio breathes, low and threatening. His hands are completely still.
Ray misses touch. Misses it like he misses the innocence of walking a beat with shoes not even broken in, knowing he could fix it all. If this is what he can get (fingers tight on his hips, teeth on his collarbone) – well, he's starving for it.
"I'm saying," Ray says. "That you're ramping yourself up to hit me right now, Vecchio. And I'm going to the first person to tell you you're an asshole, but you're not that kind of asshole. So what you do is you find your pants, you say 'thank you,' and you leave."
He sits on his fire escape after Vecchio's gone, metal hot from the sun all the way through his jeans, smoking a cigarette and trying to get his hands to stop shaking.
The next time is easier.
*
"Why'd you decide to become a cop?" Scott asks him. They're on stakeout again, trying to get something solid on Todd McMann. Three bodies, all women, all pretty before he got to them. The cops know he did it, but they haven't been able to nail him yet. The second girl looked like Stella did fifteen years ago, and after Ray left the morgue he punched the wall so hard he almost broke his hand.
"Not really sure," he says. Thinking about the regrets that have piled up so high he can barely see behind him any more. "I was in a bank robbery when I was thirteen. When I was fifteen, my best friend's father got shot working at the liquor store. Just. Pieces here and there. People I know got hurt who shouldn't have, people get away who should have got hurt. "
It's an overcast day, finally, and a cool one. Summer's dying into fall and the temperature in the car is perfect. They're in an undercover squad, because this case is important and McMann is smart enough to figure out what repeat sightings of a black GTO would probably mean.
"My sister was raped," Scott says, staring out the passenger side window. "It was the early eighties, it was the south, she was walking home alone from a party she shouldn't have gone to in an outfit she wasn't supposed to wear. I was the only one she ever told."
Ray closes his eyes, tries to collect his thoughts. "And is she –"
"She's okay," Scott says. "As much as – She married a doctor last year. They live in Los Angeles. She writes, sometimes."
"When we were eighteen, Stella got pregnant," he says. "We were stupidly in love, and we still believed in forever."
"You're not a –"
"No." Opens his eyes. The clouds are getting heavier. "We were stupidly in love, but we weren't stupid. Knew the problems, knew – We sat down and we decided that we couldn't decide anything yet, that we needed to think about it, and –" When he was in the North West Territories, clouds were important, because if you didn't see the storm coming you could get swallowed whole. "Doesn't matter," he says, finally. "Stella got mugged on her way back from her dorm four days later."
"Ray," Scott says, and reaches across to squeeze his hand.
"It was a long time ago," he tells her. One more regret.
The skies open up and weep.
*
Stella's no stranger to Ray's apartment. He's got her at least vaguely interested in hockey, and it's more fun if you have someone to watch the game with. (They eat popcorn from two separate bowls because the amount of salt Stella puts on hers has always kind of turned Ray's stomach.)
She's even got a few things she leaves there – jacket, pair of comfortable shoes, a folder or two of case notes. He's got a copy of the McMann file sitting on her desk at home. No toothbrushes, though, because there are some lines they're not going to cross this time around.
"Beer?" she calls from the kitchen.
"Yeah, sure," he says, feet up on the coffee table and flipping channels. He hasn't been sleeping well the last two weeks. (Regretting the things he hasn't done almost as much as the things he has.) She flops down beside him with two, opens one for herself. She doesn't drink it that much these days, but he remembers when she had Patty Lelond's ID, and they'd sit out on his roof and make their way through a six-pack, both pretending they were drunker than they really were.
"Ray?" she asks, running one finger around the mouth of the bottle, and he knows what's coming. "How was Canada?"
"Cold," he says. He got a letter from Fraser the other day. Mrs. Manji's cookies won at the fair, the first snow of the season fell, Dief's taken an interest in one of the innkeeper's bitches. "Canada was cold."
Stella's picking at the label on her bottle, neatly manicured nails worrying the corner.
"Look," he finally says. "You got something to ask me, go ahead." He's gotten used to this – how everyone tiptoes around the subject with him. No one even mentions their looming geographical neighbour (aside from when they're talking about NHL or the cup), mentions Fraser, like they're afraid he'll snap or something. He got back (got *back*) and Welsh took him aside and said: You need some time; you let me know, okay?
"I was just surprised," she says, finally. "That you came home. Back."
"Stella," he says, and blinks. "Why would I stay in Canada?"
On the TV, someone scores and the tinny roar of the crowd fills the room.
Yeah, Canada's got a few things going for it, like good beer and air quality, but – "You didn't think we were... Did you?" He looks at her, at tightness at the corners of her mouth and the tension in her neck, and there are a few things that make a lot more sense all of a sudden, especially the way Stella's never really liked Fraser.
He's never liked anyone he thought she was dating, either.
"Stell," he says, softly. "I've crossed a lot of lines, but that? That is one I have not." He's seen what happens to people who get involved with their partners. It never ends well. Your partner's gotta have your back, and you've got to trust them. It's a little harder when they're your reason for breathing, or whatever, and you're spending half your time worrying. You try not to, but when it's someone you love, you can't always help it.
You end up dead, or you end up hating each other. It's inevitable.
Fastest way to end a partnership there is.
"And after?" she asks.
He looks around, at the TV and the terrarium, the lights he's got strung up and the woman sitting beside him. Fraser needs caribou and sky and lots of frost, Ray needs swing music and blacktop and side street pizza dealers. "It's kind of my home here," he says. He knows that's not what she was asking. "Vecchio?" he asks, and the name catches in his throat a little.
Stella takes a pull of her beer. "I love him. I just." She stares down at her hands, clasped around the brown glass. "Sometimes," she says, and breaks off.
"Sometimes, he's not Vecchio," Ray says. He's been there himself, a bit. When the cover was too deep or went too long, and every word that left his mouth tried to come out of him as someone else's. The FBI may have spent years grooming Vecchio, but they never taught him to detox.
"I miss him," Stella says in this little, broken voice. He wants to punch Vecchio in the face. He wants to punch himself in the face.
Neither Ray nor Stella has ever been cutout for short-term commitments. He thinks someone should have taken him aside and told him: You watch it, boy, because neither of you knows when to let go. Sometimes letting go's the only way to keep what you have.
"I know, Stella, I know," he says, and wraps his arms around her.
He thinks about Canada. How everything tasted better cooked over a fire when you hadn't eaten since dawn. About Tearson, where Fraser was assigned, the cabin with the small wood stove; about the town with its lack of meaningful job openings. Thinks about falling asleep with Dief curled up beside him and the northern lights overhead, listening to Fraser singing softly.
He could have stayed. Fallen a little further into Fraser until one day they came together easily, a ship sliding into port, and it no longer bothered him that there were murderers back home he wasn't helping take off the streets.
"I could have stayed in Canada," he says. "Yeah, I could have stayed." Stella doesn't cry, but she's holding onto him tight, and her face is buried in his shoulder. "But who would I have been then?"
Chicago is loud outside, beneath the hockey game on the TV in front of them. The side of her face is hot against his neck, and her hair still smells like lemon grass.
"Who would I have been?" he whispers.
The power flickers and goes out, TV cutting out and neighbour's radio going dead.
Silence.
*
"I can't do this any more," Ray says. He's up against the wall with Vecchio's breath against his neck and Stella's face behind his eyes. He wonders what Fraser would say. Probably something like: Am I your absolution, or am I your sin?
Then again, Fraser would never have gotten himself into a mess like this.
"Tired already?" Vecchio asks, and Ray closes his eyes.
"I'm a hypocrite," he says. Opens his eyes and it's Vecchio he's looking at, looking through. He wonders who it is that shows in his face. "I thought I could help you, Vecchio. I thought – I don't know, I thought I could help you make the pieces fit."
"Help me, Kowalski?" Vecchio asks. One fist tightens (it's when they still that there's a danger), and Vecchio's still got the other hand braced on the wall beside Ray's head. He's still wearing his ring.
Ray's thinking about all the guys he's ever been. "The feds, they taught you how to be someone else. Never told you to stop being yourself first, did they?" He's just so tired. "It's not me you want," Ray says. "It's the guy you used to be. I'm not – I thought I could help you, but fuck, Vecchio, I don't even know where all my pieces *are.*"
Ray feels like nothing more than a piñata; battered, loose skin stuffed with of all the guys he's ever been.
"You should talk to Stella," he says, finally.
Vecchio leaves, and Ray lets himself go to pieces.
*
It's two a.m. by the time he's together enough to drive, two a.m. before he shows up at Stella's door.
This is not a conversation for the telephone.
Stella looks concerned when she opens the door (it's two a.m. and he's leaving little pieces of himself all over everything he touches) and all he can do is stand in the hall in a pile of regrets.
"I did a bad thing, Stella," he says. "I did a real bad thing."
*
So Stella's not talking to him, and Vecchio's not talking to him (not that he and Vecchio ever really *talked*) but hey, at least he has work. Where he gets to deal with both Stella and Vecchio. On the extra-special days, at the same time. He's not sure how he did it, when he first came back from Canada and he didn't have anyone but Squirtle, who isn't a great conversationalist even at the best of times.
Fraser hasn't written in two weeks.
"Watch it!" he snaps. The paramedic rolls her eyes at him. Being shot always makes him a little testy.
Actually, no, being shot and being not dead gives him an adrenaline rush. Letting a creep like McMann slip through his fingers tends make him a bit testy.
"It's a clean shot," the paramedic says, trying off the thread and cutting off a piece of gauze. "If you're careful, it shouldn't scar too badly." The bullet passed right through his tattoo, neatly striking out CHAMPION. He thinks he probably had it coming.
Scott was hovering over him, eyes trained on the blood soaking through his jacket (olive, military, second-hand at the thrift store – he got it for five bucks in Edmonton on his stopover on the way back from Canada), didn't listen when he said: Not your fault, for christsakes. Welsh sent her off to canvas the neighbourhood with a beat cop.
"Thanks," he tells the medic weakly. Not her fault that when the dust cleared he had a hole in him and McMann was gone. Plus, the paramedics are not people you want to be pissing off. Those in Ray's line of work tend to need them on a semi-regular basis, even when they don't have crazy Mounties for partners.
"We'll get him," Welsh says, settling on the back of the ambulance beside Ray. "We will catch the bastard and nail him to the wall."
They've been closing in on McMann for four months, and all it took to get them to a confrontation was two more bodies in the morgue.
"I know," Ray says. They offered him something for the pain but he prefers the clarity. "The girl –"
"Is going to be okay," Welsh tells him. No nonsense lieutenant's voice.
"She is not going to be *okay,*" Ray snarls. "She's going to be fucking *damaged.*" Ray saw her eyes, as he untied the ropes. She wasn't really tracking anything, just kind of. Existing. He's willing to bet his pension that the first sign she's come out of it will be when she starts screaming.
"She's not going to be *dead,*" Welsh says. "Couple of years of therapy is nothing next to dead."
"I just – " Ray doesn't remember the last time he wanted a cigarette this bad, but that would mean unclenching his fingers from the edge of the ambulance.
Somewhere in the distance a car backfires.
Backfires five times, and the police scanners in the patrol cars parked around them scream: Officer down!
*
The station is all bad coffee and worse moods. Frannie changes the bandage on his arm (silent for once) because he bled through it when he went tearing off towards the shots.
McMann's had Scott for almost three hours.
Most of the stations in the city are turned out. Patrol officer is in the hospital with a belly wound and a shot to the knee. Doctors think he'll make it.
Hour three (down to the minute) he figures out where McMann's probably got her. "Welsh!" he hollers on his way out the door, shoving the folder with the bill of sale into Frannie's arms.
He runs four red lights in the GTO. Warehouse is down by the docks – they always are – and there's no time to wait for backup. Hooker outside runs her (his?) fingernails up Ray's arm, jerks the hand back at the bullet hole and still-tacky blood.
Place smells like rotting wood and all the neigbouring buildings that've gone up in smoke. There's dust hanging in the shaft of diffuse city light that stabs through a crack in the boards covering the windows. First thing it shows him is the silver of a knife.
"Police!" he's hollering, gun out, and: "Freeze!" but McMann's not freezing. Ray's eyes adjust and he sees Scott, sees the ropes digging into her skin, the hair plastered to her neck.
Red is the first colour to disappear in the dark, but Ray knows blood when he sees it. There's a gun in McMann's other hand, and there are bullets everywhere.
The knife is arcing downwards, Scott's not blinking, Ray's stitches are tearing out.
He empties his clip.
*
IAB is asking him the same old questions, most of which boil down to: you sure you didn't do anything that could get our asses sued? They're on him in a side room in the fucking *hospital.* Doctors got him while he was waiting to hear about Scott, IAB got him while an intern was re-stitching the wound.
Todd McMann was not an unimportant person.
Did you have to do it? they're asking him and: Did it get too personal?
"He killed five women," he tells them. Gritted teeth.
"And you thought you'd take him out?"
"He *shot* at me," Ray says, and another stitch pulls through. "Never mind that he had a knife and he was going to use it to make my partner number six."
"You –" the one guy starts. Big man, drooping sports coat, fine sheen of perspiration on his upper lip.
"You done here?" Welsh asks from the doorway. "Because you've got no call to be bothering my guy."
"That's not your decision, Lieutenant," the other guy says. Looks like there was only enough body mass for two normal people between them, and his partner got the lion's share.
Another stitch. "How's she doing?" Ray asks.
Welsh nods, comes into the room. "She's gonna be fine. Couple weeks, she'll be right as rain."
"Look," the first IAB guy says. "I don't think that either of you realize just how –"
"You want something to show the mayor, show him Detective Scott," Stella says. She's standing at the doorway with her arms crossed and attack-dog eyes.
"Miss Kowalski," the little guy says. Small twist of his lips indicates exactly what he thought a woman who looks like that did to get to be a State's Attorney.
The big guy seems a little quicker on the uptake, on things like matching last names and the look of DOOM promised in the pretty lady's posture.
Intern ties off his last stitch.
"ASA Kowalski," Stella says. "If you want, we can do it your way. Bring in interrogation lighting if it makes you feel more like men. You just keep in mind, though – at the end of the day, you're going to be explaining why it was you were hassling a guy with three commendations."
"Now, Miss Kowalski," the little guy says, all greased-hair charm. "I don't think you understand –"
"It's ASA Kowalski, and understand this," Stella says. "You're the only one in this room not already aware he's about to get a fourth commendation."
"Todd McMann –"
"Was a man who needed killing," Stella says, eyes like chips of ice. "Get out."
"Look –"
"Why don't you go ask Detective Scott for a corroborating story," Stella says. "I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you exactly what happened when she wakes up from the sedation."
The door slams behind them.
Ray said 'partner' and he didn't even flash on Fraser.
"Look," Welsh says with a hand on her arm. "I don't know that –"
"I'm not here as a lawyer, Lieutenant," Stella says. "I just..."
She sits on the gurney beside Ray, looks at his second set of stitches.
"Yeah," Welsh says. "You need me, I'm going to be outside, guarding the door from assholes."
The adreneline has long since worn off, Ray feels kind of like he's moving underwater. Everything is far away and shocky. "Lieu?" he asks.
"I'll let you know if there's any change," Welsh tells him. He closes the door quietly behind him, and he and Stella just sit there.
"I killed him," Ray says, finally. Stella puts her hand on his back, like she used to, rubbing small circles with the heel of her hand. "Look, I'm sorry about everything."
She stops rubbing his back and squeezes his shoulder. "It doesn't matter," she tells him.
"They offered me another undercover gig," he tells her, finally.
"You going to take it?"
"Wasn't."
"Now?"
He doesn't answer her, staring at the ceiling and thinking about northern lights.
"It's going to scar," she tells him.
He looks at his fingers; gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles are white. "It always does," he says.
It takes awhile before he realizes she's talking about the stitches.
*
Ray is half-asleep beside Scott's bed when Vecchio finds him. "How is she?" Vecchio asks, standing at the door with one hand on the frame.
"Doctors say she'll be fine," Ray tells him, rolling his neck. "I say we'll know when she wakes up."
"You think she's –"
"Nah," Ray says, still drifting. "She's a tough kid." He's got his feet up on the chair beside him and his back crammed into a corner. The hum of the machines is comforting, like the rush of the sled's runners. "Shoulda been there."
"You did good," Vecchio says.
"I shoulda –"
"You did good," Vecchio repeats. Grabs a blanket out of the closet and drops it over Ray.
"I –"
"You're an asshole, Stanley, so I'm not going to say it again," Vecchio says, but his gaze is easy. (Tucks the blanket in, just a little, after checking to make sure no one's walking by the doorway.)
Ray's eyes are heavy and he wants nothing more than to sleep. "Vecchio," he gets out, before the man leaves.
"What?"
"Let it got. Just." His tongue is tied. "Leave it all behind you," Ray says, and he can feel thirty-six hours without any sleep dragging at his mind.
Vecchio is nothing more than a shadow at the door.
"Lagoustinni, the nine kilos, the guy you used to be. Just. Let it be." The room keeps getting darker, and he couldn't force his eyes open if there were twelve beautiful women stripping before him. "You can't take it with you."
Steady beep of the monitor and smell of orange disinfectant. He can still smell the gunpowder on his clothes.
Ray sleeps.
*
"Hey," someone says softly.
Ray was dreaming of the northern lights dancing over Chicago. "Hey," he says, suddenly awake. Scott's sitting up in her bed, magazine on her lap. There are coats he doesn't recognize on the room's other chairs. He looks around, confused. Either it's still dark (it was near dawn when he dropped off) or – "How long was I out?" he asks.
"Awhile," she says. Starts to shrug but stops half way through the motion. "You haven't been sleeping lately, so I thought –"
"Yeah," he swallows. "Thank you." There's gauze covering the right side of her forehead and a butterfly clip above her eyebrow.
"I'm told it will leave a handsome scar," she tells him. Flips the pages of her magazine with the hand that doesn't have any broken fingers. "Tattoos for the brave."
Ray sits there and watches her. "Scott – " he starts.
"You saved my life, Ray," she tells him, not looking up from her magazine.
The lump in his throat makes it hard to swallow. "Patch things up with your folks?" he asks, finally.
"Kind of," Scott says. Looks up at him from her magazine. "I'm going back to Georgia for a bit."
Ray shifts in his chair, trying to untangle his protesting limbs. "Look, I –"
"Not your fault," she tells him. "Not your fault, for christsakes," she says, and he managed to conjure up the ghost of a smile. "Promise me my desk will still be here when I get back."
Ray snorts. "Like you're going to be gone for long enough for me to get rid of the paperwork I'm keeping on it. Look, Scott –"
"Don't," she says. "I'm just – I'm not ready, yet."
"Okay," he says, and sits back. "You ever notice the scar on my hand?" he asks.
She nods.
"No one's ever asked me how I got it," he tells her. Doesn't say anything about how stupidly, pathetically grateful he was for that. "Didn't have it when I went to Canada, was stuck with it when I came back. You ask me some time, and I'll tell you what happened."
She nods, staring down at her splinted fingers.
The air is warm and soft. He can feel Chicago rushing right outside the windows, but in the room it's still. "You want to hear an Inuit story?" he asks.
She nods her head, and Ray pretends like the brightness of her eyes is only from the lighting.
"So," he says. "There was this old woman..."
*
Ray spends five days carefully tearing himself apart. Isolating his mannerisms and quirks and forms of speech, locking them away in the small corners of his brain. You start being someone else before you stop being yourself and the two get tangled up and trip on each other.
He doesn't see Stella until the night before he leaves, when she shows up at his door with Chinese in cardboard containers. It doesn't mean they're not okay, though okay is probably more than he deserves. Just means that she's always hated watching him go through the process of stripping everything away and she's no longer contractually obligated to stick around while he does it.
Took him a long time (too long, much too long) to figure out that it was at least part because every time he built himself back up, he made himself a little more like the guy he thought she needed.
He's got the radio on when he lets her inside (news-talk radio, not salsa on the record player). The smell of Chinese food strikes him somewhere around a memory that he didn't have tucked away as neatly as he thought, and he closes his eyes and lets himself miss Fraser, just for a minute or two.
"Ray?" Stella asks, and he shakes his head.
"Nothing," he tells her, stabbing at his ginger chicken with his chopsticks. "Stuff you're eating right now was Fraser's favourite."
"Oh," she says, then "oh."
"Just funny," he says. "Two of you have something in common after all."
"Fraser and I have at least one other thing in common," she says, and he can tell that she has to make herself meet his eyes.
"Lines, Stell," he reminds her, and feels his mouth twist wryly. They sit there, with the announcer droning on in the background and chopsticks clicking in some sort of rhythm.
"I just wanted to be the guy you needed," he says finally. Some regrets you need to put voice to before you can let them go.
"I know, Ray, I know." Stella's voice is a little unsteady. "But the man I fell in love with wasn't the man I was supposed to need."
"Look." He's starting to think that they choose radio hosts on their ability to put commuters to sleep, so he turns off the radio. Stands there with his hands braced on the counter for a minute more. Stella's wearing her ring on a chain beneath her shirt. "If you're not here when I get back, I'll understand."
"Ray –"
"I can talk all the smack I want, but," he says, and the words are hard. "You could do worse than Vecchio."
"Thanks for your permission," she tells him dryly, but her hand is on his shoulder. "Hey," she says softly, and he lets himself be turned around. "I love you. Always remember that."
"I love you too, Stell," he says, and folds her into his arms. She hugs him, hard. God, he missed her when they weren't even friends. "We were really something, weren't we?"
"Yeah," she whispers into his neck. "Yeah, we were."
*
Five days tearing himself apart for one week, two weeks, three weeks of being some other guy. Coming up from under this time is like a hundred hangovers all rolled into one, like his skin's too loose and his head's too small.
Ray rips through his apartment and ends up with half his stuff in boxes for the Salvation Army or black plastic bags he hauls down the fire escape and drops the remaining story to the dumpster. Lets his regrets fall away with them.
Dust in his hair and a fine sheen of sweat on the back of his neck, he stands in the middle of the room, just breathing. When he opens his eyes, he looks around and sees his apartment like a clean expanse of snow, stretching out to the sky. Out his open window, Chicago sings.
There's a knock at the door and he blinks. Stella and Vecchio are sipping on margaritas in Mexico (Stella's sipping margaritas, anyway, she sent a postcard), and Scott's not due back in until the end of the week. "Whatever you're selling," Ray hollers as he starts towards the door. "I'm not buyi –"
Only, it's not someone looking to unload season White Sox tickets, or bibles in a beaten suitcase, or a pizza guy with the wrong order. It's –
"Fraser, hi," Ray says, blinking slowly. "You look good." Of course Fraser looks good, he's *Fraser,* and even if he doesn't, Ray hasn't seen him for so long that any sight of him would probably strike him as good.
"As do you, Ray," Fraser says. He's in street clothes, Stetson held between his hands.
"Frase," Ray says, still blinking slowly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but what are you doing here?"
"I," Fraser starts. Trails off. "I received a phone call from Stella," he says. "She indicated to me that there was perhaps a matter on which we might wish to speak."
Ray can feel a grin starting to spread across his face. "That's my girl," he says, and Fraser shifts in the hall. There's not a line in sight.
"Come on in," Ray tells him. Steps back and waves grandly at his near-empty apartment. "I've made a few changes. Why don't you pull up a chair and stay a while?" He holds the door open and lets Fraser take the next step.
Out his open window, Chicago is all rhythm, horns and traffic and distant music; and Ray?
Ray feels like dancing.