unfinished due South fic
Name: Charlotte
Length of fragment: (Word count)
Fandom: due South
Main characters and/or pairing(s): Fraser. Victoria.
Rating: G
May changes be made to what you've already written? If necessary.
Other notes: Ghostfic. Futurefic (four or five years down the road). I hadn't planned for either Ray to appear in this one, or decided whether Victoria had committed suicide or been murdered: I wanted to play with psychological ghost-story themes (think The Turn of the Screw) and the obsessive aspect of the Fraser/Victoria relationship. Had no idea how to resolve it, which is probably why this didn't come out, but I'm still very fond of the idea.
(that's how you sing) amazing grace
Three and a half weeks later, he comes in to find her sitting cross-legged on his bed, dressed in heavy-weather gear, sipping tea from a china teacup he doesn't recognize as his own: Diefenbaker is huddled under the bed, whimpering.
Victoria shoves back the hood of her parka: "Look at this." She holds out her teacup; it has a pattern of stars painted around the rim. Her hands are bare. "This was my mother's. I remember breaking it when I was five. See the cracks?"
The last four years have changed her. (Had changed, and now they've stopped altogether.) Her skin is perceptibly darker, suntanned; there are lines around her eyes, her mouth; her hair, what he can see of it under her wool cap, is beginning to be shot through with grey. And she's thinner, alarmingly so, at least around the face, and her eyes - all pupil - shine like two mad stars.
She is, as ever, radiant.
"Why are you dressed like that?" he says; it's not what he'd like to have said. He wants to close his hands around hers and tell her - tell her what? Almost certainly nothing she doesn't know.
"I'm cold." As if to say: what other reason is there?
"Victoria -" It's the first time he's said the name and meant it, meant her, since he saw her last, and his voice breaks on it. "It's the middle of August."
"God, Ben." She sets her empty teacup down on his nightstand. "Have you done this before or not?" Her feet make no noise on the floor as she stands up, even in her boots.
"Point taken." He hardly wonders how she knows about his father.