Ray Kowalski, through the years. The world's not falling apart.
Many thanks to Sprat for last-minute beta. RK/F, RK/SK. 14A.BREATHE (DON'T FORGET TO)
By Cherry Ice
There is a police station between Ray's house and school. He walks by it twice a day without really seeing it, without noticing it any more than he notices the library and the men sleeping on the benches in the park.
Now, he thinks he's never going to be able to walk by it again without thinking of this moment.
They're sitting in the police station in cracked vinyl chairs; Ray's pants sticking wetly to the material. He has his hands wrapped around the chair's metal arms, and they have long since warmed to body temperature. The sun is setting, something they can only tell by the colour of the light spilling through the tiny windows way up at the top of the wall.
"You were very brave," Stella tells him, and leans forward to press her lips to his cheek. He turns to blink at her in surprise -- her face a golden blur because he'd tripped on the curb outside the police station and broken his glasses -- and she leans in and kisses him. Her lips are warm and soft. He always kind of thought that she'd taste like strawberries, but she's tired and she's been crying and any lip gloss she'd been wearing had long since worn off. (She bites her lip when she's tired or angry. Or sad. This is how he will remember this first kiss: salt and exhaustion and warmth.)
"Yeah," he says, staring down at his hands so tight around the metal chair arms. "I—" He's not sure what he's trying to say. I'm sorry, maybe. Or: I wish that I had done it for you. He can taste her tears and he knows there are tell-tale tracks on his face as well. There is nothing he could say that won't be damning, or a lie.
Stella says nothing, just pries his hand from the chair and winds her fingers though his.
Stella wasn't Ray's first kiss, but she was the first one that mattered.
*
It's bright and clear, and the smoke from Ray's cigarette is out of place, like he's in this localized bit of winter with his breath freezing as it leaves his mouth.
The other side of the wall, he can hear girls talking and the pound and rebound of basketballs on the pavement. Lunch is almost over and the bricks are still cool against his back. The grass has been in the shade all day and the dew is soaking through his pants. Jason is lying on his back further out, in the sun, smoking one of Ray's cigarettes and talking about the White Sox.
Ray's thinking about the letter from Prairie State College shoved in the top shelf of his closet. It had been there for two weeks before Stella found it, unopened, when she was looking for the beer he usually hid there.
He tried to explain to her that sometimes, no news was better than good news. She was supposed to get it, that he didn't want what his parents wanted for him but he didn't ever want to be them, either.
We're seventeen, she told him. No one knows what they want to be at seventeen.
You do, he said. You do.
Her face went closed there, closed and tight and the letter, still in her hand, got crumpled.
You really don't know anything, do you? she asked.
Ray, Ray just stood there with his arms braced on his dresser watching her in the mirror, because that was exactly what he was trying to tell her.
You know, Stella said, and her eyes were bright, too bright (Ray knows he's an asshole); you're not the only one who doesn't want to become your parents.
Ray has always liked it better when they yell, because loud words stumble and trip and crash between them. It's the quiet ones that hurt the most.
So Ray sits, and he smokes, and tries to care that his pants are soaked through and that he's going to be late for class again, or that he has no clue what he wants to do with his life. He sits and thinks about Stella and doesn't notice that Jason's t-shirt has ridden up, exposing an inch and a half of his stomach as he lies sprawled on his back, watching the clouds.
Watching the clouds, yeah, Ray's watching the clouds, and thinking about the now slightly crumpled letter shoved in his closet.
Stella just doesn't get it. Sometimes not knowing is better.
*
Lights pierce the room. Red and yellow, sweeping across the dance floor and up the walls of the club. Husker Du are playing on-stage, Bob Mould riding the microphone. He and Stella are dancing in the dark and the heat and the second-hand smoke. Stella is laughing and more than a little drunk; her hands on his hips and fingertips worked up beneath his shirt, brushing across his skin.
Laughing. They're laughing, and singing. Stella drops her head to his shoulder and moves her hands to his back, and Ray watches the crowd as they dance. There's a couple dancing next to them, woman spinning so that her skirt whips wide around her and her dark hair flies. The man is wearing tight jeans, faded and well-worn, and an even tighter t-shirt.
Ray is watching them, the pale skin exposed by the fan of the woman's skirt, the line of the man's back, the hollow of his throat, the curve of her calves.
They are beautiful.
(They.)
Oh, Ray thinks, then: OH.
As revelations go, he thinks it should be more earth shattering.
He looks down at Stella, and she's watching him watch them. "Stell –" he starts. He's shouting and the noise barely carries to her.
"I know," she says. Eyes bright. She stands on her tiptoes and tugs on his lip with her teeth. His hands are on her lower back, and her skin is hot through her shirt. "I know," she says, and kisses him.
He loves her so fucking much.
*
Ray loves Stella and Stella loves Ray. If sometimes he wants things she can't give him, well, sometimes she needs things like space and time and someone to argue Socrates with her.
He can see it now, where they're heading, because it's been years since they knew how to talk to each other. They never seemed to need the words, and now that they need them, they're too long gone.
Every time Ray comes back from an undercover gig, he can see it more clearly; see where they changed (evolved, grew) when they were apart. They grew up together, around and into each other, and it's like neither of them really became all of the person they were supposed to be.
Ray can see where they're heading and there is absolutely nothing he can do to stop it. (Stella, Stella is smarter than Ray is, and she can see it too. They hold onto each other a little more tightly at night.)
Yeah, they know where they're going, and each kiss is a bit more desperate.
*
Ray is aware that he is not unattractive.
Stella, Stella is not entirely unattractive either.
Ray is pretty sure that this time it's really over because lately they have been nothing but ugly. The last time he saw her, there were no harsh words (loud and angry or soft and sharp) and her eyes were as wounded as his.
He feels ripped open and ripped apart, and he tries to remember that just because she's the one who ended it doesn't mean that she doesn't feel the same way. That she doesn't hurt as badly. (Stella has a circle of friends, her work, her parents and his. Ray ended up with Squirtle the turtle, his gun, and all the records.)
Ray is – needy, touch-starved, kinetic. He dreams about the way her hair whips in the wind when they're driving too fast on the I-55, her hands on the dashboard and the speedometer needle spinning, spinning. He's concentrating on the curves and when he turns to look she's gone, nothing left but her fingerprints melted into the dash.
Ray goes to bars with low lighting and certain reputations, sits at the bar with a glass of something (whatever someone wants to buy him) in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and watches women and men as they walk by.
Ray is aware that he is not unattractive.
Hands are hands and mouths are mouths and he misses Stella so fucking much that all he can process is 'not her.'
Ray only smokes when he and Stella are on the rocks.
It's a nasty habit.
*
Fraser is kind of like a fire truck. Big and red and made for looking after people.
This is assignment is nothing like what Ray was looking for – he wanted some time away from himself.
(Son, his lieutenant at the fifty-fifth said, son, you need to take bit of time off.
Ray had a hickey on his neck and still smelled like smoke from the night before, smoke and back alleys. The hollows beneath his eyes made it look like he'd been fighting. Fighting, and losing.
Now, he said, there's an undercover gig coming up. Sounds like a piece of cake.)
Fraser's holding doors and helping little old ladies cross the street, and soon Ray is jumping off buildings and running into rubber ducks in a stupidly large number of places.
Fraser makes Ray want to drink for an entirely new set of reasons.
*
Ray has never much been a fan of the outdoors – yeah, they're good for sports, and for plants, and for all sort of animals he wouldn't want living in his house, but it's never been something he sought out. He's kind of always identified where he was more strongly by the people around him than anything else.
Fraser and Ray are sitting in the park. A park. Whatever. Fraser probably knows what its called, and what whoever it was named for did to get a few hundred yards of green in the centre of Chicago dedicated in their honour.
Dief is chasing pigeons, and Fraser is telling an Inuit story, voice even despite the constant sounding of horns around them. Ray's sitting there in the grass, leaning back on his elbows and staring at the sky. He doesn't really hear Fraser's words, just listens to the rise and fall of his voice. Wind rustles the leaves in the trees around them.
He's not thinking about Stella. Not really.
It's been a good year, he thinks.
*
"DUCK!" Ray is yelling. It seems an odd thing to be yelling while having an earth-shattering revelation, but that's the way his life works these days.
The warehouse is huge and filled with dust and a maze of boxes, the ceiling so far above them Ray can hardly see it. Fraser is already ducking, Ray throwing himself toward him. Dief is in mid leap from the top of the boxes, toward the perp.
The last gunshot is still echoing in the building.
So everyone's moving and Ray's looking at Fraser (ducking, Ray hopes he's ducking, not going down shot) and thinking: Oh, god, no. Let him be safe.
Thinking: No.
Then they hit the ground, Fraser then Ray, half on top of him. Ray is vaguely aware of Dief making the snarly noises he makes when he's got someone cornered, and the perp making the scared noises that people tend to make when Diefenbaker has them pinned down.
"Are you okay?" Ray asks Fraser, and Fraser is warm and solid beneath him.
"I'm fine, Ray," Fraser says, completely unruffled. "Yourself?"
Ray's heart is in his throat and he puts his forehead down on Fraser's shoulder. "Fine," he says, with the serge rough against his skin and Fraser's breath ghosting across his neck.
"Fine and dandy," he says. Fine and dandy, he says, but things are not fine (though perhaps a bit dandy), because he is in love with Fraser.
This is so many kinds of not good.
*
Air escapes from his nose and mouth in plumes, freezes in the sunlight. The sky is as bright as any he's ever seen, and the air is so cold it hurts his lungs to breathe. He's standing on the edge of a cliff and staring at the horizon, following it around and around until it gets back to where it started and keeps right on going.
There's snow everywhere (everywhere, hills and trees and Dief's fur, in the sled and in his boots and melting down the back of his neck) and Ray thinks he could learn to like the outdoors.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Fraser asks, footsteps loud in the snow as he makes his way over from the fire.
Ray laughs. "You'd be getting seriously ripped off there, buddy."
"Ray –" Fraser starts, and Ray can tell that this going to be one of THOSE lectures, about self-worth and self-respect.
Ray is getting there, but most of what he knows about self-worth and self-respect he learned through co-dependency and self-destructive impulses, and he really doesn't want to hear the Brady Bunch version.
"Ray –" Fraser starts again, looking uncertain, and Ray shakes his head. Presses one hand to Fraser's cheek. His mittens are blue and yellow, and Fraser's cheeks are ruddy with the cold. "Ray..." Fraser says again, but there's a lowness to his voice that wasn't there before.
It's a perfect moment. They're standing there, knee deep in snow, breath frozen against the bright blue sky. Like time doesn't stand a chance against fields and fields of ice.
Fraser has snowflakes caught in his eyelashes.
It's a perfect moment, and Ray is afraid that if he moves it will shatter to pieces around them, that he will cut himself on the edges and never be the same.
"Ray," Fraser says, and when he presses his lips to Ray's the world doesn't fall apart.
*
Ray's first kiss happened when he was twelve years old. He was a scrawny kid, all elbows and knees and sticking-up hair.
Kid who lived next door to him was a year younger. Richard. Small for his age, gentle, and smart like Ray's parents wished he was. One day at school, Ray found him in the middle of a circle of kids. His books were lying open in the dirt, second-hand sweatshirt torn.
Ray may have been scrawny, and a bit of a loner, but he knew how to fight.
That night he went home with a bloody nose and cracked glasses. His father yelled at him for fighting, and his mother yelled at him because they were going to have to get him new glasses. Richard went home with a rip in his t-shirt and a bit of dirt on the cover of his books but no further damage.
Then on, the other kids knew: you messed with Richard, you messed with Kowalski.
Richard used to do Ray's math homework for him. Not like Ray asked or anything. Said he liked the challenge. Ray's mom used to send him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which Ray hated but Richard loved, so they'd switch and Ray would get to eat honey sandwiches almost every day.
(Ray's mother thought that as easily excitable as her son was, feeding him sugar wasn't the best idea.)
But Richard's father was in the army, and got transferred to a base in California.
"You're the best friend I've ever had," Richard said. Standing awkwardly at the door to Ray's room. "I think I might miss you forever."
"Yeah," Ray said, because he was twelve and had never lost someone close to him before, had them leave. "Yeah."
And Richard kissed him – short and awkward, a collision of noses and a quick press of lips, before he ran out of the room.
More slowly, Ray followed him down the stairs.
Ray stood on the curb and watched them pull away, waved until they were long out of view and sat on the curb for a long time after that.
What Ray has learned is this: you don't get to pick and choose the things that are important.
*
Sunlight pours in through the windows of the cabin because, of course, Fraser doesn't have any curtains. There's dust floating in the air, and the light catches on it. There are still flames flickering in the hearth and the room smells of wood smoke.
It's warm and quiet and peaceful, Dief asleep by the door and Fraser asleep wrapped around him. The blankets on top of them are heavy and comforting.
He should be up, he should be feeding the fire or feeding Dief, but he is tangled up in Fraser and doesn't want to wake him.
"Go back to sleep," Fraser says, arm tightening drowsily across Ray's chest.
"Yeah," Ray says, but it's a while before he drops off, watching the sunlight creep across the floor and listening to Fraser's heart beat.
All is full of love.
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