vital clue challenge by exbex
Title: epiphanies
Author: exbex
Characters: Ray K, Ray V, Fraser, Welsh, Frannie, Thatcher, Stella
Rating: G
Summary: our beloved characters and their epiphanies
Length: 958 words
A/N: Thanks to prudence_dearly for beta (and for reminding me to post this).
Post divorce, Ray spent a few sleepless nights driving around and thinking instead of drinking, though sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t almost as dangerous. He told people the split-up was about him wanting kids, and Stella not. The truth was simply that Ray was, once again, a glaring disappointment, a worn down detective who couldn’t give Stella what she wanted.
It seemed to be a pattern.
It had taken Ray a long time to piece together what was wrong between him and his dad. He knew his father was disappointed in him for joining the academy, but Ray had figured he’d get over that soon enough. Several years on the force and even making detective didn’t diminish that disappointment in his father’s eyes. It was a bitter truth to swallow when the one vital clue, the missing piece of the puzzle, clicked into place. It turns out that people don’t have kids because they want to build families. People have kids to create what they couldn’t be, to live out their own dreams in someone else. Ray had just added to his dad’s pile of shattered hopes.
Maybe it was a good thing after all that Ray hadn‘t had kids.
*********
Ray was surprised to find that he wasn‘t that scared in Vegas. When the feds brought the case to him, at first he couldn’t figure out what made him have the balls to take it on, such a risky undercover operation. He wondered if it wasn’t two years of crazy as Fraser’s partner, making him feel a little more bullet-proof.
He gets a clue after a few months in the desert. It wasn’t courage. It was the same thing that made him leave Chicago in the first place, the same thing that made him skip town without telling Benny face to face.
You’re not scared to die when you’ve spent your whole life being scared to live.
***********
When he thinks back on it, Benton realizes he never learned how to love. His memories of his parents together are vague, and his grandparents seemed to favor stoicism. He often wonders if people can choose with whom they fall in love, or if it‘s something beyond one‘s control. Either way, Benton doesn’t trust whatever it is that makes people believe they’re in love, and he certainly doesn’t trust himself on the matter.
***********
Ask Harding Welsh why he does this job, and he’ll look at you like you’ve asked a stupid question, like the answer should be obvious. The answer should be obvious, but the older he gets, the harder it is to dig one up. God help him the day someone doesn’t back down from his glare when they ask the question. Truth is, at one time Welsh was just like all the young recruits. But just like all of them, he got a little jaded when the system started failing more often than it worked. That was why Welsh didn’t understand the Mountie. No one has that kind of unwavering faith. But over the years Welsh saw Fraser face things a lot worse than litterbugs in the frozen North, and he also noticed something else. Fraser’s presence had an effect on his precinct, a surprisingly good one. Harding Welsh is no fool; when a crack began in the fortress, he didn’t let Fraser down. He went after Warfield without so much as a second thought.
***********
Frannie wasn’t as clueless as people thought she was. You didn’t spend a few years relentlessly pursuing a guy without getting a sense of how he really felt. No, Frannie’s problem wasn’t that she couldn’t take a hint, but that she’d believed the people who told her to chase her dreams when she was a kid, and she didn’t know how to find her way back after chasing rainbows and fairy tales for so long. The truth is hard to swallow, and it takes a hell of a long time to let go of what’s always going to be out of your reach.
But Frannie is getting it, realizing that she has a lot to offer the world. It’s time to start chasing something else.
************
Meg Thatcher had grown cynical over the years. She had never wanted anything more than to be a Mountie. Some days she wondered if it had been worth it, working twice as hard to earn half the respect.
Her attraction to Fraser bewildered her, until it occurred to her that he gave her what she had learned not to expect, and he never wavered, no matter what she said or did that would make a lesser man resent her.
Perhaps that was all she had wanted all along.
************
Stella wanted to put bad guys away. She and Ray used to talk about it all the time, when he was a beat cop and she was in law school. They both ate, slept, and breathed it, and Stella took a great deal of comfort in the fact that she had someone to share her dreams with.
A few years and she was left bruised, battered, and jaded by a system she’d believed in, and separated from the man she loved because their dreams were taking them in different directions. Ray Vecchio understood her. He was in the same place with the same broken dreams. It seemed perfectly reasonable to run away from it all, once she’d found someone to run away with.
But she forgot to draw a map, forgot to leave the clues, and when everything had fallen apart, she found that there were no clues, nothing to tell her or anyone else who she was.
Strangely enough, it’s like a weight off of her shoulders. She’ll figure it out, with time.