I drabbled F/Victoria, F/V, F/K angst... in a ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ds_team_angst vein
Sep. 21st, 2007 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verushka70Even though I missed signing up for Team Angst (which, if there were ever a team I was made for, it would be an angst team...), I wrote a drabble for their drabble tree anyway. But I didn't post it there. I think you're only supposed to post there if you're on the team, which I am not, sadly.
In response to where lights only burn in the rooms of the dying, which was spawned by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nos4a2no9's "The Nightrunner" beginning riff I wrote what's below. Of course, it's not beta-ed, and there are grammatical problems. But, then, I guess that's the point of the drabble as writing exercise. So I exercised.
* * *
That overwhelming sense of failure had only increased upon finding himself flat on his back in a hospital bed, the antiseptic smell not only surrounding him, but becoming part of him and frightening him. Fraser's voyeuristic witnessing of Dr. Carter's romantic betrayal had sounded to its depths the deep well of his own sense of betrayal -- not Victoria's betrayal, but even more wrenchingly, his betrayal of himself.
Somehow, helping prevent a more murderous ending that would otherwise doubtless have occurred after witnessing Dr. Carter's unraveling did not ease his conscience. The first major obstacle to that was Ray's injury. But even witnessing Dr. Carter breaking down did not help Fraser forgive himself for his wretched ambivalence, his failure to draw a line within himself over which he would not step, no matter how badly he wanted to, because it was wrong. Even as he'd seen it in Dr. Carter, pointing a revolver at her young blackmailing lover, he had wanted to believe that he was somehow different from her, that that sort of reckless abandon, that sort of tidal emotionalism, wasn't also in himself.
At first, he'd imagined her rage like Victoria's: revenge, pure and simple, on the lover who betrayed her. But then Ray had reminded him: Benny, not every woman with long, dark hair tries to kill her lover. And then when he heard Dr. Carter speaking bitterly to her lover, describing the piecemeal tearing down of her heart -- it was as if that ache within himself, that down-to-the-bone pain, connected through the ethers to Dr. Carter's.
It was then that Fraser had understood Dr. Carter to be not like Victoria, but like himself. It was then that he had realized his furious pursuit of Victoria through the train station had not been motivated by the dictum "maintain the right" or any other sense of justice, ethics or morals. It was then that he realized he'd never thought far enough ahead as to what exactly he would do with Victoria when he caught her.
Had some part of him always intended to leave with her? Had that part of him viewed her wild lawlessness and righteous revenge not through a prism of moral rectitude, but through the lens she'd been constructing? She'd tied a noose of evidence around him: the money from the robbery in Alaska placed under his father's burnt cabin, in his wallet -- given to Ray! -- the same money used to buy the soap sculpture, wiping her prints from his apartment, using his gun and ammunition. All that evidence painted a picture of Fraser -- and therefore Ray -- that was completely inaccurate, and utterly implacable.
And that, Fraser supposed, was Victoria's point: that things often are not what they seem. That strict adherence to the law could put into motion a sequence of events resulting in an ultimately unfair and unduly harsh judgment of a person -- rendering all shades of gray and all personal knowledge moot, and presenting human behavior starkly in black and white for the purpose of determining punishment. And also, he guessed, her other point was that the consequent sentence -- a surfeit of time in prison to think, to brood, to ruminate, and to plot -- could turn a mildly errant, but still redeemable, young woman into a much more hardened, and determined -- and obsessed -- criminal.
Whereas other sentences -- self-imposed, for example -- could turn a young man's opening heart into a closed chamber. . . a room at the top of the metaphorical stairs of the mind, hardly ever visited, wherein one might find few torn, wrinkled, but memorable photographs pinned to otherwise bare walls, a desk on which lay various odes to emotion started and then stalled, along with a number of love letters begun but never finished, and a heavy layer of dust upon all of it.
Love, desire, wanting, needing were terribly unnerving and potentially harmful -- that much Fraser had learned. Harmful not just to himself, but to those he loved, such as Victoria. Letting himself go, allowing himself to not only feel his feelings, but to act on them, to indulge his desires, seemed to have resulted in a distressing exposure of his animal nature, a giddy delirium not unlike what he imagined a drug high must be -- and the inherent vulnerability attached thereto. It all seemed so simple and right and good while one was engaged in caresses and kisses and touching and being touched. And it was simple and right and good, Fraser knew in some core wild part of himself.
But one couldn't stay in that state forever. Life went on, placed demands; duty called, work had to be done, and cases had to be solved. Even had Fraser found a lover who could understand and tolerate his unique (and, he knew, more than occasionally arcane and bizarre) personality quirks -- and he doubted such a person existed in this world for him -- he knew he was shockingly bad at disengaging.
Not in the breaking-up sense, but in the every-day, bye-honey-see-you-after-work sense. It had taken up so little chronological time out of the many minutes and hours that made up his life so far, but the moments with Victoria here in Chicago had been almost intoxicating. It wasn't merely the alternating feverish and slow lovemaking. It wasn't only that moving inside her made him feel both unutterably weak and yet toweringly strong. But it was also the theoretically less intimate moments -- lying side by side, listening to her breathing, feeling the warmth of another body (another body!) beside him in bed, quietly murmuring while simply holding each other skin to skin -- that made him call in sick to work the day after Victoria had first spent the night. That made him forget all about Ray's evening with "the guys" playing pool. That made him forget everything. Parting was not "such sweet sorrow." Parting was nearly impossible.
Fraser knew, on a logical level, that the less often he allowed his heart freedom to feel, to want, to desire, and the less often he let his body engage in any level of intimacy, the more difficult he made it for himself both to be intimate with anyone in the future and to disengage appropriately, back to "normal life." But such logical knowledge did not help him. It quietly stepped back and let pure fear control nearly all post-Victoria decisions on whether or not to make his feelings known to anyone, whether or not to act on feelings, whether or not to engage.
He knew that he often seemed cool and aloof, even sometimes cold and unemotional, in comparison with both Rays. They were impulsive. Undisciplined. Emotional. They loved, they hated -- they lived. He admired that and longed for it in himself, even as he viewed it as (at best) unlikely and (more realistically) impossible for him to develop such unrestrained emotionality this late in life. They were products of their environments, he supposed -- and he was a product of his. That he knew them as well as he did was a product of them allowing him to know them. He knew he didn't fully reciprocate that openness. He knew that both Rays had sensed but not stated this. He suspected that was the ultimate cause of Ray Vecchio's acceptance of the undercover position.
That, and the incrementally increasing warmth and intimacy between them, which he felt powerless to stop -- and powerless to take to another level, the level he read in the flat line of Ray Vecchio's lips, the squint at the corner of those green, green eyes, in the easy way Ray was always there for him, more than a partner, more than a friend, more than family. With that much between them, however, Fraser felt doubly frozen: besides risking the fear of being truly known, taking things to the next level between them risked everything they already had with each other, which was much more than Fraser had ever expected in a life that had certainly not turned out as planned.
Fraser had considered it. Thousands of times. In fantasies. In day dreams. In nightmares. He concluded that he, himself, had too much to lose. And, probably arrogantly, he had concluded that Ray Vecchio also had too much to lose because Ray would probably not be able to hide a double life forever, which had certain consequences for an Italian Catholic from a large family who also happened to be an officer of the CPD.
And so Ray Kowalski. More mercurial than Ray Vecchio -- if that were possible. Edgier, rawer, and much more obviously in need. If it were possible to admire the gusto with which anyone took on life more than Fraser had admired it in Ray Vecchio, it had to be in the way he admired Ray Kowalski's willingness to throw himself out there, again and again, in the face of rejection. From Stella. From various female CPD officers and clerks. To Fraser, this required levels of optimism, stoicism and bravery far greater than those required to walk out one's door wearing a gun in a shoulder holster and carrying a badge every day, to some of the meaner streets of Chicago.
With Ray Kowalski, from the beginning, there had been a certain required pretending. This led to an early insincere intimacy, as they both played along, that unexpectedly (for Fraser, anyway) blossomed into authentic. It was as if playing the roles of best friends somehow forced both men to know things about each other (or quickly learn them) that only best friends would know. Having done so, having survived the awkwardness, having accepted each other's quirks, and having protected each other in moments of vulnerability and danger from very early on, Fraser supposed it was somewhat inevitable that playing the roles of partners and friends led them to truly become partners and friends.
He realized gradually and then with alarm (when it finally dawned on him) that this also explained why film actors and actresses playing lovers so often became lovers. By the time he realized what had happened, he'd already been on the receiving end of more than a couple of Ray's clear-eyed stares. He'd already had his own disturbing dreams and day time reveries focused on Ray. He'd seen enough of Ray wrestling with his own emotions over others to know when he was observing it again. He just hadn't expected to be the cause of it himself. The accusatory looks, the occasional longing sighs, the peeks in sidelong glances and from under the long fringe of Ray's eyelashes didn't help.
Fraser certainly hadn't expected to be betrayed by his own physical responses. He had thought himself only vulnerable to Francesca's unsubtle leveraging of her feminine attributes and Inspector Thatcher's unnerving swings from steely Inspector to softer woman. But stammering and blushing and fidgeting began as a consequence of some rather spectacularly explicit memories of a disturbing dream that popped into his head just as Ray began a long, unbroken clear-eyed stare, accompanied by the palpable frustration of his long, drawn-out sigh.
These public -- and embarrassing -- indicators of his did not lessen over time, as Fraser had hoped. They worsened. As they worsened, Ray got incrementally bolder -- came closer, touched Fraser more often and more unnecessarily, kept his hands on Fraser longer -- and Fraser's distress ratcheted up a notch each time. It became necessary to keep his eyes front and center nearly all the time when he and Ray drove together. If he got any closer to the passenger door, he'd be outside the car. He felt he and Ray heading toward an inevitable crisis, himself being backed into a corner by the terror that came with feeling what he felt, knowing what he knew about himself and his past, seeing all that could go so terribly wrong no matter what he chose to do -- to return Ray's feelings and advances or to reject them.
And so late at night, Fraser runs, hoping against hope that there will be some way to escape this brewing disaster without going forward into all that Ray's unspoken heat offers, and yet without inflicting pain by turning away from that. He runs and runs.
While he runs, he glances in at the warm, yellow light of kitchens and bedrooms, of lives lived together in small, urban spaces. He longs to have what those people have, but feels himself distinctly outside and separate from that kind of life.
This does not make Fraser feel sorry for himself, not as such. Rather, to briefly look in on such warmth, from the outside, as he dashes past through cool autumn air -- it feels safe to know that such a life can never be his.
In response to where lights only burn in the rooms of the dying, which was spawned by
nos4a2no9's "The Nightrunner" beginning riff I wrote what's below. Of course, it's not beta-ed, and there are grammatical problems. But, then, I guess that's the point of the drabble as writing exercise. So I exercised.* * *
That overwhelming sense of failure had only increased upon finding himself flat on his back in a hospital bed, the antiseptic smell not only surrounding him, but becoming part of him and frightening him. Fraser's voyeuristic witnessing of Dr. Carter's romantic betrayal had sounded to its depths the deep well of his own sense of betrayal -- not Victoria's betrayal, but even more wrenchingly, his betrayal of himself.
Somehow, helping prevent a more murderous ending that would otherwise doubtless have occurred after witnessing Dr. Carter's unraveling did not ease his conscience. The first major obstacle to that was Ray's injury. But even witnessing Dr. Carter breaking down did not help Fraser forgive himself for his wretched ambivalence, his failure to draw a line within himself over which he would not step, no matter how badly he wanted to, because it was wrong. Even as he'd seen it in Dr. Carter, pointing a revolver at her young blackmailing lover, he had wanted to believe that he was somehow different from her, that that sort of reckless abandon, that sort of tidal emotionalism, wasn't also in himself.
At first, he'd imagined her rage like Victoria's: revenge, pure and simple, on the lover who betrayed her. But then Ray had reminded him: Benny, not every woman with long, dark hair tries to kill her lover. And then when he heard Dr. Carter speaking bitterly to her lover, describing the piecemeal tearing down of her heart -- it was as if that ache within himself, that down-to-the-bone pain, connected through the ethers to Dr. Carter's.
It was then that Fraser had understood Dr. Carter to be not like Victoria, but like himself. It was then that he had realized his furious pursuit of Victoria through the train station had not been motivated by the dictum "maintain the right" or any other sense of justice, ethics or morals. It was then that he realized he'd never thought far enough ahead as to what exactly he would do with Victoria when he caught her.
Had some part of him always intended to leave with her? Had that part of him viewed her wild lawlessness and righteous revenge not through a prism of moral rectitude, but through the lens she'd been constructing? She'd tied a noose of evidence around him: the money from the robbery in Alaska placed under his father's burnt cabin, in his wallet -- given to Ray! -- the same money used to buy the soap sculpture, wiping her prints from his apartment, using his gun and ammunition. All that evidence painted a picture of Fraser -- and therefore Ray -- that was completely inaccurate, and utterly implacable.
And that, Fraser supposed, was Victoria's point: that things often are not what they seem. That strict adherence to the law could put into motion a sequence of events resulting in an ultimately unfair and unduly harsh judgment of a person -- rendering all shades of gray and all personal knowledge moot, and presenting human behavior starkly in black and white for the purpose of determining punishment. And also, he guessed, her other point was that the consequent sentence -- a surfeit of time in prison to think, to brood, to ruminate, and to plot -- could turn a mildly errant, but still redeemable, young woman into a much more hardened, and determined -- and obsessed -- criminal.
Whereas other sentences -- self-imposed, for example -- could turn a young man's opening heart into a closed chamber. . . a room at the top of the metaphorical stairs of the mind, hardly ever visited, wherein one might find few torn, wrinkled, but memorable photographs pinned to otherwise bare walls, a desk on which lay various odes to emotion started and then stalled, along with a number of love letters begun but never finished, and a heavy layer of dust upon all of it.
Love, desire, wanting, needing were terribly unnerving and potentially harmful -- that much Fraser had learned. Harmful not just to himself, but to those he loved, such as Victoria. Letting himself go, allowing himself to not only feel his feelings, but to act on them, to indulge his desires, seemed to have resulted in a distressing exposure of his animal nature, a giddy delirium not unlike what he imagined a drug high must be -- and the inherent vulnerability attached thereto. It all seemed so simple and right and good while one was engaged in caresses and kisses and touching and being touched. And it was simple and right and good, Fraser knew in some core wild part of himself.
But one couldn't stay in that state forever. Life went on, placed demands; duty called, work had to be done, and cases had to be solved. Even had Fraser found a lover who could understand and tolerate his unique (and, he knew, more than occasionally arcane and bizarre) personality quirks -- and he doubted such a person existed in this world for him -- he knew he was shockingly bad at disengaging.
Not in the breaking-up sense, but in the every-day, bye-honey-see-you-after-work sense. It had taken up so little chronological time out of the many minutes and hours that made up his life so far, but the moments with Victoria here in Chicago had been almost intoxicating. It wasn't merely the alternating feverish and slow lovemaking. It wasn't only that moving inside her made him feel both unutterably weak and yet toweringly strong. But it was also the theoretically less intimate moments -- lying side by side, listening to her breathing, feeling the warmth of another body (another body!) beside him in bed, quietly murmuring while simply holding each other skin to skin -- that made him call in sick to work the day after Victoria had first spent the night. That made him forget all about Ray's evening with "the guys" playing pool. That made him forget everything. Parting was not "such sweet sorrow." Parting was nearly impossible.
Fraser knew, on a logical level, that the less often he allowed his heart freedom to feel, to want, to desire, and the less often he let his body engage in any level of intimacy, the more difficult he made it for himself both to be intimate with anyone in the future and to disengage appropriately, back to "normal life." But such logical knowledge did not help him. It quietly stepped back and let pure fear control nearly all post-Victoria decisions on whether or not to make his feelings known to anyone, whether or not to act on feelings, whether or not to engage.
He knew that he often seemed cool and aloof, even sometimes cold and unemotional, in comparison with both Rays. They were impulsive. Undisciplined. Emotional. They loved, they hated -- they lived. He admired that and longed for it in himself, even as he viewed it as (at best) unlikely and (more realistically) impossible for him to develop such unrestrained emotionality this late in life. They were products of their environments, he supposed -- and he was a product of his. That he knew them as well as he did was a product of them allowing him to know them. He knew he didn't fully reciprocate that openness. He knew that both Rays had sensed but not stated this. He suspected that was the ultimate cause of Ray Vecchio's acceptance of the undercover position.
That, and the incrementally increasing warmth and intimacy between them, which he felt powerless to stop -- and powerless to take to another level, the level he read in the flat line of Ray Vecchio's lips, the squint at the corner of those green, green eyes, in the easy way Ray was always there for him, more than a partner, more than a friend, more than family. With that much between them, however, Fraser felt doubly frozen: besides risking the fear of being truly known, taking things to the next level between them risked everything they already had with each other, which was much more than Fraser had ever expected in a life that had certainly not turned out as planned.
Fraser had considered it. Thousands of times. In fantasies. In day dreams. In nightmares. He concluded that he, himself, had too much to lose. And, probably arrogantly, he had concluded that Ray Vecchio also had too much to lose because Ray would probably not be able to hide a double life forever, which had certain consequences for an Italian Catholic from a large family who also happened to be an officer of the CPD.
And so Ray Kowalski. More mercurial than Ray Vecchio -- if that were possible. Edgier, rawer, and much more obviously in need. If it were possible to admire the gusto with which anyone took on life more than Fraser had admired it in Ray Vecchio, it had to be in the way he admired Ray Kowalski's willingness to throw himself out there, again and again, in the face of rejection. From Stella. From various female CPD officers and clerks. To Fraser, this required levels of optimism, stoicism and bravery far greater than those required to walk out one's door wearing a gun in a shoulder holster and carrying a badge every day, to some of the meaner streets of Chicago.
With Ray Kowalski, from the beginning, there had been a certain required pretending. This led to an early insincere intimacy, as they both played along, that unexpectedly (for Fraser, anyway) blossomed into authentic. It was as if playing the roles of best friends somehow forced both men to know things about each other (or quickly learn them) that only best friends would know. Having done so, having survived the awkwardness, having accepted each other's quirks, and having protected each other in moments of vulnerability and danger from very early on, Fraser supposed it was somewhat inevitable that playing the roles of partners and friends led them to truly become partners and friends.
He realized gradually and then with alarm (when it finally dawned on him) that this also explained why film actors and actresses playing lovers so often became lovers. By the time he realized what had happened, he'd already been on the receiving end of more than a couple of Ray's clear-eyed stares. He'd already had his own disturbing dreams and day time reveries focused on Ray. He'd seen enough of Ray wrestling with his own emotions over others to know when he was observing it again. He just hadn't expected to be the cause of it himself. The accusatory looks, the occasional longing sighs, the peeks in sidelong glances and from under the long fringe of Ray's eyelashes didn't help.
Fraser certainly hadn't expected to be betrayed by his own physical responses. He had thought himself only vulnerable to Francesca's unsubtle leveraging of her feminine attributes and Inspector Thatcher's unnerving swings from steely Inspector to softer woman. But stammering and blushing and fidgeting began as a consequence of some rather spectacularly explicit memories of a disturbing dream that popped into his head just as Ray began a long, unbroken clear-eyed stare, accompanied by the palpable frustration of his long, drawn-out sigh.
These public -- and embarrassing -- indicators of his did not lessen over time, as Fraser had hoped. They worsened. As they worsened, Ray got incrementally bolder -- came closer, touched Fraser more often and more unnecessarily, kept his hands on Fraser longer -- and Fraser's distress ratcheted up a notch each time. It became necessary to keep his eyes front and center nearly all the time when he and Ray drove together. If he got any closer to the passenger door, he'd be outside the car. He felt he and Ray heading toward an inevitable crisis, himself being backed into a corner by the terror that came with feeling what he felt, knowing what he knew about himself and his past, seeing all that could go so terribly wrong no matter what he chose to do -- to return Ray's feelings and advances or to reject them.
And so late at night, Fraser runs, hoping against hope that there will be some way to escape this brewing disaster without going forward into all that Ray's unspoken heat offers, and yet without inflicting pain by turning away from that. He runs and runs.
While he runs, he glances in at the warm, yellow light of kitchens and bedrooms, of lives lived together in small, urban spaces. He longs to have what those people have, but feels himself distinctly outside and separate from that kind of life.
This does not make Fraser feel sorry for himself, not as such. Rather, to briefly look in on such warmth, from the outside, as he dashes past through cool autumn air -- it feels safe to know that such a life can never be his.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-22 05:15 pm (UTC)This does not make Fraser feel sorry for himself, not as such. Rather, to briefly look in on such warmth, from the outside, as he dashes past through cool autumn air -- it feels safe to know that such a life can never be his.
Well, the recognition of this feels like a kick in the gut.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-23 01:12 am (UTC)Since I was going for angst, I guess that's good. . . *g*
Dude! Thanks for reading & commenting.