Author's Notes: Response to the ds_flashfiction Double Take Challenge. Beta from Regina, thank you kindly.

Stupid oriental monks and their dumb meditation mumbo jumbo. Stupid Fraser too, for suggesting that this gig might be "a valuable experience, Ray" - because he'd always found sitting still and thinking so freaking helpful - and for that long lecture on all the different cultures that thought so as well that Ray had tuned out after the fourth word in a foreign language. And while he was at it, damn their suspect to hell for deciding to come on a spiritual retreat right in the middle of a month-long surveillance operation. Like he suddenly needed self knowledge, or something? He wanted to be enlightened scum?

The first day here, Ray felt like he'd been sent to his own worst nightmare. It was like the first day at school with everything unfamiliar and strange, only weirder because 75% of the other people were little and Chinese so he felt like some looming mutant-type person. And the clothes didn't exactly help. It was hard to work a cool attitude in robes, and orange was so not his colour. Bullitt had never had these problems.

Plus when they'd arranged his arrival with the head monk dude, some nimrod had decided that he'd be on a silent retreat so he wouldn't have to learn the chants and stuff on three minutes' notice. What with hours and hours of sitting still and pretending to think deep thoughts thrown into the mix, Ray had decided it was all some huge conspiracy to drive him absolutely nuts from frustration and boredom. Why couldn't someone have invented meditation through dancing? He could have got behind that alright.

The second day was worse. The little mat beds weren't exactly modelled on those in the Ritz so he didn't sleep too good, he'd never voluntarily got up with the sun in his life before and jasmine tea didn't come within a light year of being a coffee substitute. His head hurt and his eyes were blurry (even more than usual), and not being able to shake it out and work up some forward momentum wasn't helping. By the time they got to the third pretend-to-think session, the silence and the tiredness was making him a little loopy, like nothing around him was real. He kept expecting someone to call him grasshopper or imagining Bruce Lee suddenly flying through the window and taking out all the monks with one kick, and then he wanted to giggle, only he couldn't because the one time he hadn't managed to keep it in, everyone had looked at him weird. Which was unfair, considering some of the noises the other students had been making. He could have sworn Mr. Enlightened Scum had been snoring after lunch.

The only time Ray could talk was when one of the monks (Leeming? Limin?) would take him into the office so he could phone Welsh and check in. Not that he ever had anything to say, because apart from the snoring all the guy did was sit, chant, eat and sleep just like the rest of them, and if Welsh hated Ray this much, couldn't he have just killed him instead?

That second night, all the things he hadn't been able to say all day had just come pouring out as soon as the door closed behind them, like he was one of those balloons that you let go of and they go screaming all around the room. The monk had just nodded his shaved head, smiled calmly when he ran down, and suggested that if he listened to the teachers, did the breathing exercises and actually tried to meditate, he might begin to appreciate the experience more. So Ray had said that he didn't believe in all that new age shi... stuff and that he'd always been more about action because thinking never changed anything anyway, and Liming had just raised an inscrutable eyebrow like a mystic dude from a kungfu film and said almost exactly the same thing Fraser had. Meditation was actually old age stuff and a powerful technique for understanding one's life and decisions, for resolving issues and problems, and perhaps you should try it Detective, before you decide if you believe.

Yeah, right. Whatever.

The thing is, there wasn't anything else to do. Scumball wasn't doing anything entertaining and neither was anyone else. He'd already gone over the case details until his eyes crossed and then back over all of Vecchio's that he could remember. He'd thought up several things he'd like to say to the Lieu for sending him here (only he never would because he wasn't suicidal), a whole pile of new insults to annoy Dewey with (which he definitely would say because some of them were classics) and fifteen surefire ways of distracting Fraser from an Inuit story (because he could always use a few more of them).

So, okay, might as well think about his life, his issues.

Well, no surprises here. Issue number one: Stella and the disaster-movie end of their marriage, the two of them trapped while it all burned down around them and no Steve McQueen coming to the rescue. It's not like he hadn't thought about it before so he figured he knew what was coming - a big old pile of pain and guilt and wanting to kick himself in the head for messing up.

Only maybe there was something in this after all, because when he tried focusing on it in the meditation, it didn't really go like that. It was like he was looking at all that tangled mess from somewhere outside it so he could start straightening out the snarls without hurting too much. He just kept on thinking about it, all that day and the next, all through the sessions and exercises and meals, dreamt about it all night.

At first it was all the things he could have done different, the ways he could have made it right, but sometime in the second day it hit him that he couldn't. Because most of that stuff was coming from who he was now, what he learned afterwards and time only moves one way. And then he realised that even if he could go back, it probably still would have ended because it was down to the two of them, Ray and Stella, not just him. Who they were then couldn't be changed so what happened couldn't either. It was really, really over and that was OK. He could be happy remembering the good stuff without feeling the gut-punch of the bad at the same time. He still felt kind of sad, he figured he always would, but the mess was gone, he was clean and clear from it for the first time since he'd felt his golden girl start to slip away.

Huh. It actually worked. That night he'd felt like he was floating, walking in the sky like Fraser's dead dad had said. He'd practically danced into the office, he felt so good. Liming had given him the biggest, most cheerful grin Ray had ever seen and he'd smiled back so wide that his face hurt and Welsh had actually got worried enough at how happy he sounded to ask if he was sure the monks weren't drugging their tea. He slept like a baby too, and woke up practically purring and so energised he should probably have been glowing.

Of course, that's when it all went horribly wrong. Because he was still there, still having to meditate and his big issue was already done and dusted. So he did one of the things Liming had suggested, tried to watch whatever thoughts came into his mind and see where they led him, or something. Big mistake. He could see that now, because he had stupid thoughts and the first thing they thought of was Fraser.

Benton Fraser, RCMP, first came to Chicago when his dad got murdered and stayed because top brass is top brass even when they're Mounties, and they don't like having their noses rubbed in the fact that one of their people has gone bad without them noticing. So here Fraser was, six-odd feet of bright red shoot-me-here-please and working with Ray. (And hadn't the people who did their uniforms ever seen Star Trek? The guys in red always bought it first.)

Fraser, with his deaf, lip-reading, flower-loving, ear-obsessed wolf that he talked to and argued with like Dief was an annoying little brother or something. With his weird anecdotes and random stories about Inuit legends and caribou that never seemed to mean anything until about three days later. The way he got excited about curling and could talk for hours about how to move big stones across ice. How he could use polite and nave as a weapon and deliberately confuse everyone into doing what he wanted without them ever realising they'd been snowed.

Fraser, with the way he knew something about everything except how to relax and just be friends with people and the way he did let go and play with Ray. The way he could tease and snark and Ray could tell it was for fun from his voice and the little smile at the corner of his lips. His deadpan jokes, where the only thing that would give him away would be the way he grinned with his eyes. The way he just got uncomfortable when all the women in Chicago fell panting at his feet, so Ray couldn't be jealous and usually ended up trying to rescue him before he stroked out from embarrassment.

Fraser, with his need to do the right thing and believe in people that made Ray want to believe as well. The way he'd pretend that he wasn't homesick and that he didn't need family and people to love him, only to give it away in his eyes so Ray just wanted to hug him. How he'd stayed in Chicago when he could have left and never said why, and didn't that make Ray's mind go in directions that it really shouldn't.

And worst of all, how Ray felt when he made Fraser smile or heard Fraser say they were friends. How being around Fraser was more fun than Ray had ever had, even when he was being a total freak and endangering their lives in bizarre ways, because Ray was actually starting to enjoy the surreal methods he would come up with to get them back out. How scared he got when Fraser was confronting mad people with large guns, like Fraser always did because he thought the Uniform was a shield, not a big ass target the way everyone else saw it. The way Ray wanted to stop Fraser from ever being lonely or sad again and wished he could go and get medieval on all the people who had left him that way before.

The way Ray couldn't hide from himself anymore that he knew what Fraser's skin smelled like, that he wanted to kiss a smile onto Fraser's lips sometime, learn how he tasted and what his hair felt like on his fingers. How he wanted to wrap himself around Fraser's strength and hold him all night through, hold onto him forever.

Fraser, Fraser, Fraser, Fraser.

Oh, yeah. Big mistake. He didn't want to know this. He wanted to go back to being unenlightened because understanding himself this well kind of sucked.

Stupid monks. Stupid meditation.

Stupid Ray.