crack_van | The Reaching Out One by Alex51324, NC-17

There are more than a few people on my friends list who are there because I could not bear the risk of missing a chapter of one of their works in progress (or, indeed, any of their writing). Back in April, the emotional intensity of the first chapter of this story blew me away, and I signed on to

alex51324's writing journal to be sure to catch the rest. I'd decided to leave it to someone else to put it on the

crack_van some later month, to make room for me to recommend a story which was not post-COTW F/K NC-17, but then today I had one of the big trees in my orchard lose enough branches that I'll probably have to take it down, and and the truth of this story's RayK's words "…every minute of your life is different now” needed to be said.

Fandom: DUE SOUTH
Pairing: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Length: 294K
Author on LJ:

alex51324
Author Website: Alex51324's stories at Due South Archive
Why this must be read: Because life goes on, loss must be accepted or at least endured, and sometimes there are ways to find a new trail. Because middle-age, on the whole, sucks, and it's the people around you who make it suck less.

Fraser stared down at his soup, as if he hadn’t heard. Finally he said, "I’ve come to realize that the difficulty of living a life stripped of all but the essentials is that I have nothing I can afford to lose.”

Took Ray a minute to untangle that, to figure out that Fraser was saying I can’t live like this.

Fraser wouldn’t kill himself; he knew that. But there were plenty of other things he could do. He could take stupid risks--stupider than usual--and get someone to do it for him. Or he could just--decline. Stop being Fraser and start being some shell, some husk, some goddamn walking dead.

Ray wouldn’t let him. He didn’t know what he could do, how he could fix this, but they had three weeks. If that wasn’t enough time--he’d think of something.

“I didn’t feel this way when my father died. I don’t know what that means. I was sad, but I wasn’t…and I knew this would happen. He was an old…but I didn’t know it would feel this way.”

“Your dad wasn’t there every day,” Ray pointed out. “Dief was. It’s…every minute of your life is different now.” When Stella left him, it had been like that. She hadn‘t died, sure, but the whole shape of his life, the life he thought he would have forever, was shattered.

What did he do, then?

He’d spent as long as he could pretending it wasn’t happening, that any minute Stella would realize she’d made a terrible mistake, and then he’d jumped into somebody else’s life. He’d started being Fraser’s partner, and then his friend, and one day he just realized he didn’t have a great gaping hole in his chest anymore.

No help for Fraser there.

“Maybe that’s it,” Fraser was saying. “Maybe I’ll…get used to this. The way it is now.”

“Yeah, maybe.” It had hurt again, when Fraser left, but not all that much, really. They were still partners, like Fraser’d said, even though they didn’t see each other every day. They talked, they wrote, and they always had the next leg of the Quest to think about. For the last ten years, his life had had three seasons: Gearing up for the Quest, doing the Quest, and recovering from the Quest. In between, he did his job, he paid his bills, had Sunday dinner with his parents, but being Fraser’s partner was the important thing.

And he knew it was that way for Fraser, too. Except he was used to having Dief, too. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe you will. Or find a new, you know. A new normal.”

Fraser let out a breath. “If you’d said ‘a new dog’…. A dozen people have offered me puppies. It’s horrible.”

Ray nodded. “That’s…yeah.” Dief wasn’t a pet.

The Reaching Out One