Due South fic - "Chrysalis"

[cherry]

It's possible I forgot to post this here.
(And by 'It's possible' I mean 'oops.')


Title: Chrysalis
Author: cherryice
Summary: The emperor's new clothes. In reverse. [Fraser/Kowalski, PG]
Notes: Written for the 'Naked Without Sex' challenge at the wonderfully friendly ds_flashfiction. Any comments would be adored.



Size eleven. Fila. There's gum smashed into the treads on the left heel.

Ray spends a lot of his time at crime scenes not doing things.

Like not looking when Fraser's checking to see what brand of pen the ink on the dead man's fingers came from. Which Ray usually manages to accomplish by being so busy trying not to slip in the guy's blood and fall on his ass (or throw up) that he doesn't notice that Fraser's licking things that used to be alive. Again.

Staplers and money and hat pins and cats? Those are things he can deal with. 'Don't lick that, it used to be alive' is not a thing he should have to say. It is, in fact, something he works very hard at not having to say.

He spend a lot of time staring at dead people's feet.

"Detective?" and there's one of the officers standing beside. The ambulance guys are standing at the door, looking bored. Like this is something they've seen a hundred times before.

Ray's seen it a hundred and twenty-seven times -- give or take -- but the last guy and the guy before him didn't have gum on their shoes (the last guy had one shoe half-off, laces trailing, and the guy before him was wearing broken-down plaid slippers like his dad used to wear).

"Detective?" the officer asks again, and Ray shakes his head. He's not getting anything else out of the scene.

"Yeah," he says, and he's staring at the bookshelf as a body bag swallows the guy whole. The mashed-up bit of gum is the last thing to disappear. Hard to remember that most of the time it takes time, takes long hours and fine-toothed combs.

Somewhere, at this moment, Fraser is licking things. He knows it.

*

So he's sitting at his desk and flipping through folders, swoosh-swoosh-flipclosed-thunk, fingers tapping on the blotter, when a yo-yo comes flying at his head. Crack against his inbox and it tumbles to the floor, paper wafting gently on the breeze from the ceiling fans.

"Swear to God," Duey says with the look of a man who has just sacrificed a yo-yo to the greater good, "if you do not stop that, I will--"

"You'll what? Whip out the silly string next?" The yo-yo is still rolling around on the surface of his desk. Ray picks it up, slips his finger through the loop. "Did you know that the yo-yo was originally a weapon?" he asks absently. Flicks it up and down the string.

Duey's are looking at him oddly and he shrugs. Makes the yo-yo do a Hydrogen Bomb as the last of the papers hits the floor.

"It was used in the Philippines for four hundred years. 'Course, at that time, it was a four pound rock on a string twenty feet long..."

He's flipping it into an Ursa Minor when he looks around and realizes half the room is looking at him. Huey's frozen with his sandwich halfway to his mouth.

"What?" he asks. Tugs on his bracelet. "I'm not allowed to know stuff?"

His inbox broke when it hit the floor and his papers are scattered across the floor like leaves. He picks them up one by one, reads them and files them away.

Eventually, people start talking again.

*

He needs beer.

Needs beer sausage, too. Or pizza. He opened up his fridge and all he found was a Bud and a half a box of donuts, but that was for Dief, and Dief and Fraser have been gone for a week and a half now. He'd probably have remembered about them if he'd spoken to Frase since. If he'd thought about Frase since.

He feeds his turtle and drinks his beer and flips through the files he brought home. There's a hockey game on and he studies photos of the crime scene in the flickering light of the television. He takes a moment to wish that Fraser had been at there to lick things and find a smoking gun in someone's cookie jar, but that's as far as it goes.

The blinky light on his answering machine is (still) off.

He doesn't give it a second thought. Really.

*

He's got this itch at the back of his neck, like someone's watching him, and it's only after he scratches it that he realizes it's been itching for a year now, all over his body, like there's something wrong with his skin, like it's old and it doesn't fit him anymore.

Like, like, like. He just wants to figure something out.

Ray's a good detective.

He's just not always very good at figuring things out.

Like it takes him three days of flipping through that damn file before he realizes he was waiting for Fraser to point out some key piece of evidence. Frannie squeaks a little and almost drops her coffee when the thunk of Ray's head hitting the desk fills the room.

He closes the case the next day.

*


They were walking out of the station, talking. He held the door for her and she laughed, and his stomach growled and she laughed some more.

So. U2 in the stereo, and he and Stella are sitting on her couch eating kung pao chicken. Her place is nice. She's got nice things, and Ray, surprised, finds he doesn't miss the ones that used to be his as well.

They're not quite comfortable, and Stella's focusing pretty intently on her chopsticks. She talks about the case she's working on right now, about the crazy cat lady at her office who runs files. They're working at it. There are a lot of years between them, and they were friends before everything else.

"You look more like yourself again," she says, finally. Breaking off in the middle of a story about her secretary's run-in with a toboggan, small dog, and large mailbox. "I just wanted to tell you that."

He doesn't feel like it. He feels scratchy and bare. "Don't know how to take that," he says, spearing a piece of her chicken. "Not sure if you got the memo, but I'm supposed to be looking more like Vecchio."

She purses her lips and he smiles. "It's just --" she starts, and pokes at her food with her chopstick.

"I know," he says. He doesn't want to hear it, so he smiles. His cheeks are tight. He doesn't like how easy it was for her to forget how good a cop he was. He doesn't like how easy it was for *him* to forget.

She doesn't like it, either. "How's Fraser enjoying Ontario?" she asks instead. Drops her carton on the coffee table and pulls her feet up beneath her.

"Don't know," he says.

"He's been gone for two and a half weeks and he hasn't called?"

Ray shrugs and steals her abandoned container of food. "Nope." The blinky light on his answering machine hasn't burned out. He checked, but only once.

She looks at him long and hard. Stella knows him better than just about anyone, but she doesn't know this guy he's become any more than he does.

It's always been harder for him to slide back into himself than it was for him to become someone new. Doesn't know what that says about himself, but he tugs on his bracelet and smiles.

His skin is itching and he's starting to feel more like a guy with two commendations for bravery.

*

Ray may not always be good at figuring things out, but he does occasionally find himself being mown down by the clue bus.

He's got to find a better way of figuring things out, because he's not as young as he used to be and the tire tracks are killing his back.

If this is the way Fraser wants to play it, it's fine by Ray. Probably for the best anyway. Fraser licks dead things, for Christ's sake. Licks dead things, drinks tea, and can't even dance.

Not to mention that since he met Fraser, he's spent way too much time staring at dead people's shoes.

"Whatever," he says. Feeds the turtle and grabs his jacket from the closet. He might not have spoken with Fraser for three weeks, but he's still got the arrival time of Fraser's flight stuck on his fridge.

He'll pick up Fraser's mounty ass and drive him back to the consulate, and Dief will lick the back of his head and ruin his hair. Fraser will beg jet lag, and they won't grab supper for a week or two, but things will go back to normal eventually. Fraser's too damn polite for anything else, and Ray's been getting better at moving on. He was just tired of spending so much of his time not doing things.

"It'll get better," he says, and the turtle blinks at him slowly. "I'm talking to a turtle. It's a just a short step to pumpkin pants and jumping off of buildings."

He steps out the door and stops dead. Blinks. He suspects he looks rather like the turtle just did. "Fraser. You look --"

Because Fraser's sitting in his hall with his hands on his knees and looking like hell. Given, Fraser looking like hell looks better than most people on their best days. "-- your plane get in early?" Ray asks, and pulls him up. "Because, you know --"

"I'm not sure."

"-- Frase, you could have called. You didn't have to take a cab."

"I didn't take a cab," Fraser says, and Ray can't help but notice how pale he is. His knuckles, where he clenches the Stetson, are like chalk.

"Where's Dief?"

"Consulate," Fraser says. He's got a wave in his hair out of place, and there are circle beneath his eyes. "May I come in?"

"Since when did you need to ask?" This might be harder than Ray thought. "Wait a second," he says as Fraser hangs his hat. "You don't know if your plane was early?"

Fraser's just standing there, hovering at the entrance to his living room. His eyes flicker from the corner of Ray's mouth to his ear to his hand, still on the doorknob. "Please," he says.

"Are you all right? Because I've got to tell you, buddy, you're beginning to freak me out." Ray can feel his eyebrows wrinkling, and he gets the feeling the clue bus is sneaking up on him again.

"I walked," Fraser says. Back straight. "I changed my flight to an earlier one. I changed it and I walked here. I've been walking all day. Please," he says, motioning towards the door.

"You've got to tell me what's going on," Ray says, turning and shutting it. "Look, I'm sorry if I freaked you out before, it's just that --"

"How do you do it?" Fraser interrupts.

Interrupts.

Ray boggles.

"I've tried, but I just can't --"

"Fraser, what are you --"

And he never finishes the thought because he's up against the wall and Fraser's right there, talking, words running into and over each other.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," Ray finally picks up. "I wanted to," Fraser says. "You have no idea."

"Hey, hey, shhh."

"You kissed me, Ray. You kissed me, and I thought it was a joke or I was imagining it or it couldn't possibly mean what I thought and --"

"Fraser. Stop." And, of course, Ray's never been able to get Fraser to shut up. "How many people do I kiss?"

Fraser's got his forehead against Ray's, and he's talking with his eyes closed and a pained look on his face. "I couldn't stop thinking about you," he says, and it's like his words are rushing across Ray's skin. "I couldn't stop thinking about you, and I couldn't call because what if you told me that it was all a mistake--"

"Hey," Ray says, and touches Fraser's cheek. Brushes a thumb over his lips and smiles. "It's okay." He wonders what Fraser knows about undercover and being someone else. Wonders if he'll change his mind when he see Ray falling back into himself.

"Ray," Fraser whispers and opens his eyes --

-- and Ray realizes who Fraser was seeing all along.