Work Text
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“Okay, time for a list.” Frannie tapped her pencil on her jotter, all business. “What do women like?”“You’re a woman, apparently. You oughta know.” Ray pushed himself off the break-room wall and went to perch on the table instead, smirking down at her. He and Fraser had skipped lunch, his blood sugar was at rock bottom, and he was ready to pick a fight with any sentient being at this point. Even Frannie.“I know what I like,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I was asking what other women like, and I wasn’t asking you.” She leaned around him. “Hi, Fraser!”Fraser took a hurried step back, but it was too late; Frannie had jumped to her feet and gotten in his personal space before Ray had even seen her move. How did she do that?“Ah,” Fraser said. “Good afternoon, Francesca.”“Hey, Frase.” She sidled closer, jotter in hand. “You must’ve dated loads of women, right?”He tilted his head noncommittally. Yeah, Ray thought, good luck getting a personal history there.“So what’s the trick?” Frannie asked. “I don’t mean, y’know…” She waved a hand at Fraser in a vague gesture that made him blush. “I just mean in general, if you wanna impress someone and get their attention, how do you do that?”Fraser cleared his throat. “Well, that’s an interesting question, although not one I think I’m really qualified to answer.”Ray swung himself up onto the table and sat there cross-legged. “Come on, Fraser, I wanna know too! Mountie dating procedure in ten easy steps. Go!”Fraser ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “Well, conventional wisdom would suggest that women respond positively to small tokens of appreciation. A bouquet of flowers, for example, artistically arranged.”“Flowers?” Frannie repeated doubtfully.Fraser shot Ray a pleading glance: Help me out here, buddy.“Flowers, right,” Ray said, nodding loyally. “Chicks love flowers. I used to buy ’em for Stella all the time.”Frannie snorted. “Yeah, till she served you papers.”“Hey, she liked them!” he said, stung. “She always said she did.”“Sure, that’s what she said.”“It’s true that the language of flowers is open to misinterpretation,” Fraser interjected, coming to stand by the table, his tunic sleeve brushing against Ray’s knee. That was one of the things Ray liked most about him: when he took someone’s side, he literally took their side. “Successful floriographic communication depends on the giver and recipient attaching the same cultural value to the gift, as well as the same specific floral meaning. If someone were to give a bouquet of aquilegias for the sake of their beauty, for example, but the object of their affection were to take it as a symbol of faithlessness, the outcome might be quite unfortunate.”“Huh,” Frannie said. “Sounds complicated.”“Oh, it certainly was, back in Victorian days when floriography was at its height.”“Hmm.” She scribbled a note. “Okay, flowers, maybe. What else? ’Cause I don’t know about you guys, but I’m living in the twentieth century here.”“Chocolates, perhaps?” Fraser suggested.“Seriously?” Ray said. “These are your hot dating tips?”“My grandmother once told me that one of the finest gifts my grandfather ever gave her was a box of chocolates.”Ray frowned. “She did?”Fraser nodded. “Oh yes. Of course, he’d traveled over two hundred kilometers from Tuktoyaktuk and back by dogsled through a blizzard to fetch them from Inuvik for her, and he lost two toes and an earlobe to frostbite in the process, but still…”“Wow,” Ray said. “Just, wow.”“Yes.” Fraser gazed down at him, his eyes bluer than ever. “Yes, they were very much in love.”Frannie coughed loudly. “Okaaay, back in the room…flowers, chocolates, what else?”Fraser blinked hard. “Oh. Well, leaving aside patriarchal symbols of economic dependence for a moment, you might perhaps try creating common ground by cultivating an interest in the person’s hobbies.”“Hobbies?” Frannie said. “Like what?”“It’s difficult to say in the absence of further data. It might be helpful if we were to define our parameters here.”“Yeah,” Ray cut in, “like, who are we even talking about here, Frannie? Who are you trying to ensnare?”“Whom are you trying to ensnare,” Fraser muttered.“Zip it, Frase.”“Understood.”Ray stabbed both forefingers at Frannie. “Hey, you! Back away from the door! Who are we talking about here?”“Nothing,” she said. “No one. None of your beeswax.”“I’m your fake brother, I got a right to know!”She stuck her tongue out at him, and he couldn’t help smiling. She might be as annoying as hell, and the way she treated Fraser bugged the crap out of him sometimes, but she was still real cute when she wasn’t trying to be. Not Mountie levels of cute, but cute all the same.“Come o-o-on,” he wheedled. “You can tell your big bro.”He felt Fraser nudge him and glanced up to see him touch a surreptitious thumb to his nose. Right. Time for good cop, bad cop.“You better cough up a name,” he said, “or I’m gonna tell everyone you got the hots for Dewey.”“Ray!” Fraser chided. “Francesca, I can assure you Ray will do no such thing. You’re fully entitled to maintain your privacy in such matters. It does make it rather more difficult for us to assist you, of course, but…”Frannie threw up her hands. “Okay, okay! Enough with the double act! It’s Elaine, alright? I just wanna get to know her better, that’s all.”“Officer Besbriss?”“Yeah. I think she’d be fun to hang out with ’cause she’s smart and funny, and since she came back from the Academy I’ve been kinda noticing her more, and it’d be kinda nice if she noticed me more too. Or, y’know, at all.” Frannie paused, frowning. “I dunno, maybe it’s just the uniform.”Ray nodded. He got that.Fraser coughed and straightened his serge. “Well, finding common interests with Elaine should be easy enough. You could sign up to the women’s self-defense classes at Ray’s gym, for example. I happen to know she assists with those on a regular basis.”“She does?” Ray asked, surprised.“Yes. The last time I arrived early, I got roped into acting the part of hostile attacker for her class. I still have a few bruises, actually.”Frannie perked up. “You go to the gym, Fraser?”“Oh, just to watch Ray train his protégés. To show, um, moral support.”“Uh-huh.” Frannie winked at him, for no reason Ray could fathom, and gathered her coat and bag. “Thanks, Frase. I’m gonna go check out those classes. You guys have fun.”Fraser touched his hat politely as the break-room door swung shut behind her. “Need a drink?” he asked Ray, heading for the vending machine.“You have no idea.”Fraser came back with two plastic cups: a coffee for Ray and a tea for himself. Sitting down at the table, he fished in his belt pouch and produced a box of the Canadian Smarties to which Ray had gotten addicted. Coffee didn’t really taste like coffee anymore without a jolt of the sugar-coated chocolate in it.“Thanks,” Ray said, taking a handful.“You’re welcome.” Fraser gazed thoughtfully at the door. “Do you suppose Francesca will be successful in her courting?”Ray dropped half a dozen candies into his coffee, swirled it, and looked up, grinning. “She’s taking dating advice from a guy who calls it ‘courting’, Frase. She hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.”
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For the rest of the week, Ray had no time to wonder how Frannie’s love life was faring. He and Fraser were up to their necks in casework—literally up to their necks by Friday afternoon, thanks to their investigation of the notorious Volscino drug-running network. In an attempt to prove the gang had taken to smuggling bricks of heroin inside commercial-sized vats of pasta sauce, they’d tailed a delivery truck all the way across Illinois and right into the sauce factory itself. One perilous foot-chase and a scuffle later, they had the truck driver safely handcuffed to the nearest pipework, while they themselves were not-so-safely floundering inside the industrial vat of pureed tomatoes into which the driver had flung his last package of drugs.“Hey, Fraser!” Ray yelled, treading sauce as he tried to stop sinking. “You found it yet? It’s gotta be down there somewhere!” He paused, waiting. “Frase, you there? Fraser?”There was an obscene sucking sound, and Fraser stuck his head back out of the reddish goop, his hair plastered flat to his scalp. “Ray, please, you have to stop yelling. The echo in here is very jarring, and it’s giving me déjà-vu.”“Sorry.”Fraser ducked his head again, and the surface of the sauce roiled as he dove downwards. He resurfaced a few seconds later with a shrink-wrapped package in one hand.“Got it,” he said, shaking the tomato juice off and tucking it into his tunic pocket. “Unfortunately I can’t quite reach the vat’s rim to get us out of here, but I’d estimate that the contents are at approximately forty degrees centigrade at this point in the production process, so we shouldn’t be in any danger of either hypo- or hyperthermia. All we need to do is wait for backup to arrive.”“Great,” Ray said. “You’re just forgetting one tiny detail.”“Yes?”“How the hell am I supposed to stay afloat?”“Oh,” Fraser said. “Well, if you swim over here, you can balance on the stirrer with me.”“That’s the whole point, Fraser, I can’t swim!”“We’ve already established that you can. Just imagine you’re kicking a particularly dense, tomatoey suspect in the head.”“Goddammit…” Thrashing his legs, Ray managed to flounder across the vat until his shin struck something metal. “Ow!”“That would be the stirrer.” Fraser grabbed him by his waistband and hauled him onto the steel contraption. “Remind me to put some calendula ointment on your bruise when we get out. I think I have a tube of it in my belt pouch.”Ray hooked an elbow over the stirrer’s topmost pole. “Some what now?”“Calendula ointment. It’s an extract of marigold petals.”Ray narrowed his eyes. “Just petals? No frogspawn or eye of newt?”“Not this time.”“Hmm. Okay.” He shifted, making the stirrer wobble, and his foot nearly slipped off its lower rung.“Careful,” Fraser said, hugging him closer so there was no way he could fall. “Better?”Ray laughed, getting a mouthful of pureed tomato. He was covered from head to toe in pasta sauce, his hair was going to stink of oregano for weeks, and he was entirely wrapped in a Mountie hug. This, he was pretty sure, was as good as life got.
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Ray scrubbed his hands idly through his hair as he watched Frannie flirting with Elaine at the far end of the bullpen. He’d showered approximately twenty-seven thousand times already since the Bolognese sauce incident, but his hair still smelled weirdly Italian. It could have been worse, he supposed. The next vat along had been full of carbonara. Meanwhile, Fraser just smelled…well, like Fraser always did.Ray sighed and tried to focus on the stack of case notes in front of him. In his peripheral vision, he saw Elaine nudge Frannie and lean in to murmur in her ear as if no one else was in the room. He pulled his notes closer, scowling. Maybe it wasn’t jealousy he was feeling, exactly, but it kinda sucked that they got to be so cute and happy and oblivious of everyone around them, and meanwhile…“Ray? Ray? Ray? Ray?”Ray swung round. “What?”Fraser was standing by his desk, holding up the latest copy of Hemmings Motor News. “Sorry to interrupt your work, Ray, but I noticed an advertisement in here for original 1967 Pontiac GTO parts, so I contacted the dealer and he’s going to be at the rally in Rockford this Saturday. I was wondering whether you’d like to go to the show and purchase that replacement lamp housing you were looking for? We could pick up some dinner on the way back, perhaps.”Ray frowned. “Lamp housing?”“You had a damaged one, didn’t you?”“Yeah, but…”“But what?”“Since when did you give a shit about auto repairs?”“Since I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father, I suppose,” Fraser said, “or perhaps a couple of years after that.”Ray stared at him. Then he got to his feet and poked him hard in the chest. “You. Janitor’s closet. Now.”He stomped down the corridor, with Fraser following obediently on his heels. Hauling him into the closet, he slammed the door behind them and wedged it shut with the broom handle. For a moment they stood toe-to-toe in the darkness, breathing in the stale, dusty air, until he found the light-cord and the bulb blinked on. Fraser was standing at parade rest with his back against the shelving.“Is something wrong, Ray?”“Yeah, something’s wrong! I’ll tell you what’s wrong!”Fraser shifted nervously. “As you wish.”“Wrong thing number one,” Ray said, ticking it off on his fingers, “the Smarties, of which you just happen to have an endless supply whenever I happen to want them. Wrong thing number two: the flower petal goop, which is the only stuff in the world that stinks worse than oregano right now. Wrong thing number three: the goddamn lamp housing, which you apparently wanna give up your Saturday to go fetch, even though you can’t drive for shit and don’t know a GTO from a hole in the ground.”Fraser’s expression had morphed from worried to downright baffled.“You gave me chocolates, Fraser,” Ray said. “You gave me flowers. You took an interest in my hobbies.”“Ah,” Fraser said, in the Canadian way that meant “oh shit.”“Yeah, ‘ah’. I’m a detective, Frase. Sometimes I actually figure stuff out.”Fraser tipped his head to one side, considering him for a long moment. Then he leaned in until only an inch or two of hot, dusty air was separating them. “Can you tell what I’m thinking now?”“Uhhhhh, I…” Ray swallowed hard. “I’m kinda hoping it’s stuff a Mountie shouldn’t be thinking.”For a second or two Fraser stared back at him, his face sentry-duty blank. Then he broke into a smile, and it was hands-down the most gorgeous thing Ray had ever seen. “It might be,” he conceded. “Also, I might be thinking that this closet is far too cramped for any of it.”“Yeah?” Ray edged nearer, feeling Fraser’s arms come up to curl round him.“Yes.” Warm hands traced a line down Ray’s back, tugging his shirt loose and stopping tantalizingly short of his waistband. “Given that we’re in a space measuring less than one meter by two and filled with janitorial supplies, a certain amount of bruising would inevitably ensue, and I’m running out of flower petal goop to treat it.”“Huh.” Ray pushed forward a little more, pressing Fraser against the shelving, and grinning as he felt Fraser grind back against him. “So maybe we should…”“Maybe we should indeed.”“’Cause, y’know, I got an apartment we could be using right now. I got a bed, even.”“So you do,” Fraser murmured, bending to nip at Ray’s ear.“Hey, quit it!” Ray pulled away, breathing hard. “Okay, we gotta get out of here before someone arrests us for lewd conduct. Here’s the plan: parking lot, car, apartment, bed. Sound good?”Fraser straightened Ray’s shirt with expert hands. “Very much so, yes.”“Okay.” Ray shoved the broom out of the way and grabbed the light-cord. “Ready?”“Ray,” Fraser said, reaching for the door handle, “I’ve been courting you for two solid years. You have no idea how ready I am.”