1. Seamless for _aerye_ (RayK/Fraser, dueSouth, 2500 words, 12/31/04)
2. One Night for rubywisp (Xander/Lindsey, BtVS/Angel, 2000 words, 1/01/04)
Only Fraser could stop to let his wolf take a leak on the side of the
road and stumble on a vanful of bad guys toting guns in an empty field.
Ray could get over a lot of things in this case, but he kept coming
back to that. Side of the road. Empty field. Only Fraser could make a
perp weep like a premenstrual woman on her birthday and confess all in
two seconds flat.
"I wish I could take credit," Fraser said. "But I'm afraid Rusty was caught red-handed and predisposed to, well, dolor."
"Dolor?"
"Dysphoria, perhaps, might be a better word."
"Dysfornica."
Fraser swiveled his neck and gave Ray a sidelong look. One second--half
a boom, half a boom--then like clockwork his gaze returned to the road.
"Dysphoria. A state of feeling unwell, unhappy."
The guy held his chin off his neck in a perfect ninety-degree angle. Scary. "I know what dysformica means, Fraser," Ray lied.
"Dysphoria."
Man, you could really yank Fraser's chain all day. It was a beautiful
kind of thing, one of those meditative things, fly-fishing, maybe,
fishing for trout, not that he went in for sports where you had to sit
still for days at a time and freeze your nuts off and if you're lucky
end up with some cold, squirming thing staring up at you with a round
beady eye while you unzipped its guts, and after all that, what did you
have to show for your trouble but a fish dinner you could get with a
side of fries for four ninety-nine at Sal's?
"I don't even like fish," he irritably told Fraser, who gave the road
unblinking concentration like he was trying to do math in his head
before looking sideways again. This time he kept looking, way too
freaking long.
"Watch the road."
"Ray, at any time during our stay were you," a concerned pause,
"injured? I mean, with so many baseballs flying toward you at such high velocity--"
"Fraser, watch the road."
"--the odds of one eventually connecting increase exponentially over time."
"Watch the road!"
"You would tell me if you'd been hurt, wouldn't you?" Worry creased Fraser's brow and gave his head an owlish tilt.
"I'm gonna tell you in about three seconds! Three! Three! Three! Eyes on the road! Eyes *on* the *road*!"
Somehow Fraser's obedience carried a whiff of disapproval and
disappointment, a whole lot of dis, as if Ray were stubborn and
changing the subject rather than trying to save their lives from the
oncoming semi. Fraser neatly swerved three feet to the right and the
semi passed with a long angry blare.
"You're like a bad movie, Fraser. I can't believe Welsh let you drive
his car." His voice lowered with disgruntlement. "He'd never let me drive it." And he'd have voiced that grievance to the Lieu himself, absolutely, if the man hadn't decided to catch a ride with his brother.
"Simply answer the question, Ray. Do you or do you not have a head injury?"
Whoa. Sharp, high, loud--Fraser pissed off to the point of ultimate
politeness and stopping right before he lost it. And then, creepily,
one hand came spidering across the width of the car and began
feeling around Ray's head.
"Hey," Ray said, flailing, "get off! You don't just touch a man's head
out of the blue, no warning." You'd think they never had this
discussion before. Same with the licking and jumping off buildings and
stepping up to meet bullets. What did it take to make the Mountie
listen?
"I'm checking for lumps." The fingers kept fingering, like a shampoo
girl giving his hair a work-over. Ray felt inclined to slump and close
his eyes. Man. Dangerous.
"I only got the ones I started with."
"Hmm."
From the back seat, Dief yawned and harrumphed. Fraser withdrew his
hand. "I think you're exaggerating," he said in the tone reserved for
Talking with Wolves. A second yawning whine answered him. "Well, you're
hardly typical." Whoof of offense. "Oh, please." Fraser rolled his
eyes. "And don't think I'm stopping again. I know for a fact you're
perfectly capable of holding it for another thirty miles."
Ray hooked a look over his shoulder. "Hang in there, Dief, buddy. He says that to me too."
"Oh, I do not." Huh. Wolf Tone was turning into Ray Tone. What the hell
did that mean? But just he was about to figure it out, his thoughts
caught on memory and drifted another direction. He smiled to himself.
"Man, I was really seeing the ball. Count the seams, count the seams. You saw that, right?"
"I did. It was a proud moment."
"You didn't see it."
"Well, no. I did hear the distant sounds of cheering, however, before the fireworks began."
"'S all right. I've got it on tape."
"Ahh." There might have been a faint sound of alarm in Fraser's faraway
voice, but it was always hard to tell and Ray usually ignored it
anyway, which made it, like, moot.
"Funny how I was the star, but you had all the chicks on the
sidelines." Funny wasn't the word, and why something like that was
still on his mind to pop up out of the blue like a touch on the head,
he had no idea. He tried counting the seams in the road, to see if he
could.
"I think you're misremembering."
Of course he did. "Tomato, tomahto, Fraser."
Two seams went by in which Fraser's puzzled mouth opened, locked itself open
with tongue in cheek, then hazarded, "And when you say 'tomato'..."
"A and B, night and day." As reminders went it was cryptic, but Fraser spoke cryptic.
"Ray, I." Another seam, and a deep breath. "I simply." Boy, you could
see the struggle, not just hear it. "Many women look at you
admiringly," he finally said, sidestepping the topic of argument by a
hair.
"Not the way they look at you. Plus you've got an accomplice. That wolf really pulls the trim for you."
A silence bloomed and closed down talk for a while. Fraser had nothing
to say to that, or couldn't get it out through compressed lips, and
after getting his foot stuck between his own lips Ray wasn't sure what
to say either. They brooded separately the rest of the way back to
Chicago, not much looking at each other.
Ray counted the seams. There were a lot, but he wasn't sure there were enough.
***
Home again, Ray felt better. Prouder. In his element and with a story
to tell. He told it with videotape evidence and, later, with beer and
hand gestures. As the night went on his listeners dwindled, and only
Fraser was left. Fraser, sitting patiently and out of his element at
the bar table, with Dief at his feet. The Mountie had one glass of
beer, nearly full; he'd had it all night. If his expression was
strained--well, the bar was dim and Fraser was Fraser.
***
On any given day, Ray had a lot of Huey and Dewey in his periphery, and
Francesca and Welsh and smart-mouthed perps and vague witnesses and
stray goats that were in no way evidence, so someone should please get
them out of the breakroom before he shot one of the things in its hairy
little ass, because he would, oh yeah, he would, just give him a
reason, as if stray goat wasn't reason enough.
Sometimes though, at night, he had Fraser. Just hanging out, couple of
guys catching the game ("What game is that, Ray?" -- "*The* game,
Fraser.") or even a flick, not like a date or anything, but you could
only go to so many bars on so many nights to try and pick up a woman,
and unless someone cut off his hands, he had alternatives to sex.
Fraser hated his couch, this Ray could tell from the way he sat on it,
and shifted his shoulders on it as if scratching an itch, but Fraser
didn't scratch his itches in front of other people.
One day, Ray got a new couch. "Got sick of the old one," he said.
Fraser, being after all a guy under all that red serge, seemed to take
it in stride. No questions, and none of those girly Stella comments,
like, "It doesn't go with the rug."
They settled in to watch the game, and if Fraser seemed to blank out
for long periods of time while Ray was yelling at the screen, well,
that was Fraser.
Other nights, Fraser did mysterious stuff--errands for neighbors and
strangers that Ray knew better than to ask about. Rescuing cats from
trees, painting fences, ladling out soup in soup kitchens, helping
little old ladies across the street, and liberating the occasional
crackwhore from her pimp.
When Ray answered the door, he took in the other man's black eye.
"Please tell me you did not run down a mugger for five dollars and a
lipstick, Fraser, because so help me I will punch your other eye just
on principle."
"It was three hundred dollars," he said, stepping in, "for her son's
braces, hard-earned money which was being unfairly withheld by a
gentleman known in certain circles as Fast Willie."
"Was this woman wearing fishnet stockings?"
"I think that's irrelevant, Ray. In any case, even streetwalkers have families."
They argued a bit, or possibly bantered, and he offered Fraser a
pork-chop for his eye, which was politely declined and went in the
frying pan instead. Fraser didn't turn down eating it; say what you
would about him, the guy had down-to-home tastes. Well, pemmican,
lichen, and elk. There you had it in a Canadian nutshell.
***
Fraser was what you'd call prim if you used words like that.
Buttoned-up. Like a woman with too many layers of clothes, and
underwear you couldn't get off without a pen-knife. Ray had never been
with a woman with short hair, and when he studied Fraser's hair he
couldn't imagine what to do with it. Not much to grab onto, barely a
sniff's worth of shampoo, and it wasn't like Fraser used some flowery
kind. Ray had verified this with discreet testing, witnessed only by
Dief, who was bribed to silence with a box of donuts. He smelled like fir
trees--Fraser did. At some point in time unbeknownst to Ray, this had
started to turn him on.
That was wrong on so many levels. The partner level, the buddy level, the sanity level.
Red serge, it made no sense, and that lanyard thingy, and the hat. And
the boots, holy fuck, the boots. Okay, what man didn't pop a woody at
the sight of well-oiled leather? But worn by a Mountie, that was
different. That was a bad, bad thought. A queer thought, and Ray had
sworn off those, because there were men and women in the world, and you
had to choose. It was that simple.
Except for Fraser, who made everything so goddamn complicated.
"What have I told you?" he asked as he let Fraser into his apartment
one night. "Do I ask much? Don't wear the serge, I've said it like a
hundred times. It's--" He waved a hand.
"Red?"
"No, the other."
"Formal."
"Right, that."
"I'm sorry, Ray. I didn't want to be late for our dinner, but was
unavoidably detained at the Consulate for a meeting on the
continentalization of telecommunications and multi-jurisdictional law
enforcement in North America."
"I do not have enough aspirin in the house for that sentence."
"Understood."
It was on that note that Ray drank a pint and a half of bad gin that
soaked into his bloodstream and pounded his light middleweight frame to
the mat, and then turned to Fraser during a commercial and asked, "You
ever think about sex?"
Fraser cracked his neck, tugged his collar, and stroked his right brow,
a trifecta of discomfort. "Well, as you know, Ray, any man in the prime
of life, with a healthy libido and no medical or psychological
dysfunction--in point of fact, yes."
"I meant with me, Fraser."
The other man glanced at him, glanced away, glanced back. The last
glance stuck. "I don't understand. Do I think of sex while I'm with
you, or--" Despite his hesitation, his eyes were sharp and steady, not
glazed with the captive deer-in-headlight look he got around Frannie.
"Sex with me. Me. Sex. Two thoughts in the same bed. Head. Whatever."
Articulation was strangling itself in Fraser's throat and he spent a
few moments clearing it out. "I'm not sure what the correct answer
would be," he said with care.
"The correct answer would be the truthful answer."
"Then yes."
So many things could make a man's head hurt, it wasn't even fair. But what you asked for, you got. "Yes."
"Yes, Ray."
"Yes." He had to be sure.
"Yes." With grave, but possibly distracted attention Fraser watched the TV, where women were laughing and sharing about tampons.
"Repeat the sentence back to me."
"I beg your pardon."
"Yes, I've thought about having sex with you, Ray."
Fraser grew still and kept staring ahead. "Yes." A long pause. "I've
thought about having sex with you, Ray." Another pause. "In bed at
night, when I'm alone. On the occasional stake-out, or over dinner, during long
our talks. In car rides, of course." He appeared to be warming up to
confession, or getting caught up in the importance of making an
accurate list. He tilted his head. "Once during the interrogation of a
suspect, when you were wearing a particularly fetching pair of blue
jeans--no, correction--I'd have to say at least twice. And, oh, once
during a very long and unremarkable autopsy, when my thoughts
wandered--"
"Stop now."
No reply, just compliance. It made Ray's guts twist, though it could have been the gin. And then Fraser said:
"Was that a rhetorical question?"
There was an out if he'd ever heard one, but it would be chickenshit to
take it. "What do you think, Fraser? Do I look seem like a rhetorical
kind of guy to you?"
"Now is really not the time," Fraser said in a sharp voice, gaze
angling to the far side of the room in the direction of the single
potted plant Ray still owned.
"Yeah, I know." Ray shifted forward on the couch, elbows on knees, head
in hands. He gave a little laugh. "Believe me, I didn't plan it."
"Not you, Ray. I have put up with your meddlesome, voyeuristic
proclivities--yes, proclivities--that would strain the will of the most
forbearing man. This is neither the time, nor the place. No, no."
"Fraser, what are you--"
"You're insufferable," Fraser said cuttingly to the aspidistra. "If you
want to continue this conversation, it will be without me. And if you
think I won't indulge in carnal acts in the constitutionally protected
privacy of a man's home, well, you're in for a deep shock."
"Carnal acts?" Ray said hopefully.
"Carnal, uninhibited, spirited acts," Fraser said firmly, as if daring the aspidistra to challenge him.
Ray swallowed, leaned toward Fraser, then pulled back. "It's not just the gin talking, is it?"
Fraser, body pointedly turned away from the far corner of the room, smiled at Ray like he never quite had before. "I haven't had any gin," he said seriously.
"Yeah." Ray smiled back. "Me too."
"...and then I took off. Got in my truck, thinkin' I'd end up back in Oklahoma."
Xander tuned in halfway through the conversation, the way you do--a few words strung together sparkle and catch your attention and suddenly you wish you'd been listening from the beginning. The low and serious tone, the leaning of their bodies, should have cued him in that something deep was being talked about.
He flicked a covert glance up from his book over to where Lindsey and Wren sat. Wren, their latest adopted stray, was curled on one end of the couch, limbs twined, like something washed up from a shipwreck. Lindsey had turned a straight-backed chair around and crossed his arms along the top. The chair looked sturdy; so did he. His gaze was fixed on Wren as if trying to make a connection, as if he was figuring out that she might be important to him.
"But you didn't."
"Well, cops stopped me for speeding just outside of Barstow and they didn't have a sense of humor. And once I slowed down and had time to think, I knew I couldn't go back. What was I gonna do, hang my shingle above the old drugstore, get some of those good ol' boys off on wife-beatin' charges, then see their faces down the bar for the rest of my life? Wouldn't make it to forty before I'd take the easy way out."
Wren hooked a strand of hair behind one ear. She always looked so serious, as if she were musing on three things at once. "Where'd you go?"
"Here and there. Drifted till something snagged me, then I'd stop for a while. Sooner or later, I'd get to know the faces passin' on the street, and it'd be time to move on." A tight smile. "Took me a while to figure out it wasn't just coincidence."
This was the story. Lindsey's life story, that he'd always said he'd tell Xander one day. Obviously he'd just needed a listening girl to tell it to. It made Xander knotted up inside, too hyper-aware of his own breathing and the dim Hyperion drawing room with its handful of lamps. He shouldn't be here. He hadn't been an intruder before now--he'd been the first one in the room, actually--but suddenly he was.
He stood up from his armchair quietly with his book in hand, turned to leave, and tripped over the rug. Staggering into the end table, he managed just in time to catch the lamp before it fell, though the rest of the table and its contents overturned.
"Sorry," he said, managing a smile for the others, who were looking at him curiously. "I ordered these feet a size too large."
Escape became distance and distance would put things in perspective, for at least a few hours. He wasn't cut out for another unrequited crush, not at this time in his life. He was young, good-looking, a mild-mannered carpenter by day, a superhero's sidekick by night. He deserved better breaks. He diligently chatted up any pretty girls he ran into during cases, gave them his phone number, occasionally dated one long enough to rate an entry or two in her diary, and then zombies laid siege to the hotel, or he busted his knee falling off a building, and it seemed pointless to continue--how did you turn that sort of thing into dinner conversation?
Somewhere between "chatting up pretty girls" and "crush on your male coworker" he seemed to have a little problem.
His romantic life in no way resembled the lives of his friends, who dramatically hooked up and broke up and broke each other's bones and sobbed on his shoulder with broken-hearted anguish before making up again, and this didn't go unnoticed. They felt sorry for him and his incurable normality, and often exchanged looks when they didn't think he was paying attention.
"Have you ever thought," Buffy had said to him one day. "You know..." There was, he could tell, more to come. "Maybe of dating...guys?" He'd hung his head in his hands while she rattled on. "I mean, you don't have to be gay to date guys. You could be experimenting. Plus, you'd have an edge, because you're a guy." Her tone suggested he might have forgotten this. "You'd know all the stuff guys do, what they like. And oh, you could say 'yo' to each other!"
There was no way he could tell her he'd already been thinking about it, because then she'd try to set him up. Maybe with people he already knew. Like Lindsey people. He could just imagine that conversation. *"Okay, maybe you're both straight, but that's not a deal-killer. Just don't think of this as a date, think of it as...."* As hell, Xander thought. As in oh, hell no.
So he'd simply asked her to stop, please stop talking, and she did, and she didn't bring the suggestion up again.
"You left in a hurry."
Startled, Xander turned to find Lindsey standing in the doorway of his suite, hands in pockets. The way he stood there made his arm muscles bunch under his shirt, and if you noticed that, you might find yourself having associative thoughts about the way a guy moved and lifted weights and hefted battle-axes. Yes, he had arms. Rolled-up sleeves over a tee, jeans and boots, everything well-worn, all muscle and cockiness, a walking itch for a fight.
Xander swallowed. "Yeah, well. I thought I'd leave you two alone."
That got him a little frown that smoothed out after a moment, as if a thought had been dismissed. "She had to meet Cordelia. Something about chick flicks and finding the right shade of toenail polish."
"Ah. Many a battle's been lost for the want of a...well-chosen nail polish." Oh, yeah. He was in fine form tonight. Not at all circling the drain.
"You all right?" Lindsey ambled in, looking around in a restless way, gaze edging in Xander's direction and then edging off.
"Define 'all right'. Is it that feeling you get right before eating an entire ice cream cake and listening to every Johnny Cash song ever recorded? Because if so, this is as good as it gets."
Lindsey was starting to look at Xander as if he were insane. Ah, he knew that look well.
"Xander--"
It wasn't fair when they said your name, especially when they were just a friend and had no idea you jerked off exactly to that tone of voice.
"I'm about to turn in," he interrupted, sounding curt to his own ears, the way his father used to after a long day at work. For a moment he wanted to soften things, but didn't know how.
"It's only nine o'clock." Lindsey had a direct gaze and after a pause his voice was direct too. "You pissed off?"
There were two ways you could go on the cusp of an argument--cut the other guy some slack in the interest of maintaining the peace, or bring it on. Then again there was the middle way: the weasel's dance.
"Why would I be pissed?" he asked.
He could tell that had ignited Lindsey's temper by the way he tightened his face. "Why are you answering a question with a question?"
"Did you walk circles around juries with that lightning-fast repartee?"
"Are you gonna stop being a dick any time soon?"
Xander ducked his head away, ceding the contest. It occurred to him that he needed something to fiddle with absently, but he was standing in the middle of his room with nothing at hand. Damn it.
Frustration shimmered off the other man, rolled itself into a right-handed fist. "I don't know what I was thinking," he muttered, turning to go.
Wait--what? "You were thinking?"
"Ha ha," Lindsey said with distinct sourness, stalking doorward.
"No, I mean, thinking of what?"
Lindsey paused, head half turned back over his shoulder, but not meeting Xander's eyes. "Look, I'm not going to get all flowery here," he said belligerently, as if Xander had asked him to.
"There's floweriness?" Xander was flummoxed. Moxful of flum.
"What'd I just say?"
"But you *thought* flowers. You said the word, 'flowery'."
"I'm out on a limb here, Xander. Climb out or climb down."
Somehow they'd ended up more or less close. "I thought, you and Wren--"
"Excuse me?" Outrage snapped and crackled in Lindsey's eyes, made his accent twang. "That little bit of a girl? She's barely eighteen."
"Have you met my friend Buffy and her two-hundred year old boyfriend?" he asked tongue-in-cheek. The pair of whom were probably banging away on the bedsprings just down the hall.
"I try not to take vampires as a moral example."
"Right. I knew that. So, I'm sensing you're saying we have a thing here. A you-and-me thing."
"What are you, an idiot? I've been making meaningful eye contact for a month now. We went to dinner together. I played my guitar for you. What the hell did you think was going on?"
"Look, I'm sorry. I haven't had a lot of male bonding in my life. I misread things. I thought it was homosocial ambiguity."
A silence wriggled in between them and they both shifted their weight, stared at the carpet, and failed to do useful things with their hands.
"Well, okay," Lindsey said at last. "You know, sex clears up a lot of ambiguity." And when there was no protest, he cradled the back of Xander's neck and kissed him. It was a pretty thorough kiss. Xander was twenty-four now and figured he could give as good as he got, even if all his kissing had been with girlfriends. Mid-kiss, Lindsey wedged a leg between Xander's and pushed against him like a small wave smacking the sand. Xander whited out and grabbed the back of Lindsey's tee, yanking it from his jeans, past his belt, while trying to get the other shirt off his shoulders, or maybe that was Lindsey, helping things along. It was a complicated, clashing set of maneuvers, during which Lindsey back-kicked the door shut. They stumbled like this toward the bed, breaking apart somewhere on the area rug to wrestle their own clothes off.
"How did you do that?" Xander asked breathlessly, shucking his jeans and nearly taking down his shorts in what would have been a premature debriefing.
"What?"
"Pull your boots off, like--whoosh."
"Practice." Lindsey kicked out of his own jeans and tackled Xander to the bed, punctuating their collapse with a wide grin. Then there was more kissing, and a fit of grinding, and gasping.
Xander watched Lindsey's lashes flutter in irregular distraction, and his face change, mere inches away, one expression wiping out into a new, more intense one. His own distraction was how the ripe, compact muscles of Lindsey's shoulders and back filled his hands, and though it seemed weird and daring, he ended his grope by cupping Lindsey's ass through his boxer-briefs.
"Oh, fuck yeah," Lindsey breathed, hitching up against him. "Right there, Xander." When his voice got soft, it got high and feathery, almost like a woman's, and that made things in Xander's brain fire, like lava spilling up through the folds, cracking everything open.
Startled by wild need, he shoved Lindsey off and onto his back and kissed the hell out of him and roughly pushed his boxers down and then clenched a handful of the bed covers to brace himself and began driving hard across the other man's belly and cock. Lindsey writhed like a rattlesnake, working his own briefs down and fucking upwards with his hips, never breaking the kiss.
It had to last at least another minute--Xander's pride was at stake--but then he felt himself slip into the approach, like a TIE fighter arrowing through the trench to the thermal exhaust shaft, target in sight, sweetness building, a hit inevitable.
"Oh god," he said as his hips began jerking beyond his control, nudging the glossy head of his cock into an almost excruciating bliss along Lindsey's skin. "Oh fuck, oh god, oh holy fuck--"
Lindsey arched and shouted and came spattering up between their bodies and in the rush of sweat and slickness and heat Xander kept going, another minute, yes, before coming in ragged shots.
Then the orgasm fairy came and touched him with her wand and he might have slept for a while. When he floated up to full consciousness, he found Lindsey next to him, both of them in a sticky tumble, still on top of the bedding.
The man, Xander thought, was fucking gorgeous.
This one might be the jack-pot.
eliade @ drizzle.com
http://www.drizzle.com/~eliade/