Author's Notes: Written for the New Environments challenge on ds_flashfiction (with apologies to Lewis Carroll.) Believe it or not, there really are nude beaches in Chicago.

   

"So it's not enough that we chase this Tischler creep all over town on a Saturday. When we're not even supposed to be working. Now he has to desecrate my childhood memories by holding a dirty deal right in the middle of Bay Street Beach? And who voted to make this place clothing-optional? That's insane. It's 85 in the shade and I have to chase a bad guy through a bunch of pasty naked suburbanites. How is this fair, Fraser? I'll tell you. It's not fair."

"Nevertheless, this is definitely the rendezvous point. He's due to meet Rozmar in half an hour."

"Yeah... but he'll spot us if we go out there, we'll spook him. I mean we're not exactly dressed for a day of fun and sun."

"Quite right." Fraser gave a determined nod and began rapidly undoing his buttons.

Ray spun around before he could remember it was better to play it cool and raked the wall of the snack stand with unseeing eyes. "I'll, uh, I'll just keep watch." He heard rustling– pants coming down. "From the car."

"But Ray, what if I need backup?" Spoke the voice of a man who didn't seem to understand that he shouldn't always get what he wanted.

Ray squirmed, but Fraser was right. He pulled off his own shirt, slung it over his shoulder, started to undo his jeans and reluctantly turned back to Fraser. Who had gone from full uniform to almost completely naked in, swear to god, fifteen seconds. Who was now wearing nothing but the most obscene pair of cotton boxers Ray had ever laid eyes on. They were white, fairly see-through, retaining sharp creases from the iron even in this heat, and the fit left little to the imagination just exactly where Ray had been trying, for the last several months, not to imagine.

Not a small where, either. "Christ. You gotta promise me you're not going to get in the water in those," he said.

"Mm?"

"I don't know if you're familiar with a little thing we here in America like to call indecent exposure..."

It seemed like Ray's mouth could handle this one on its own, so he let it, meanwhile trying not to be uneasy being bare-chested right next to bare-chested bare-almost-everything Fraser. He couldn't help wondering for a second. Did he look like the 98-pound weakling next to Charles Atlas there?

Even though he knew he was pretty cut, in good shape for a guy his age. No need to suck in his gut even, at this point he didn't have one, working out being one of his main ways of dealing with having Fraser in his face all day, right up there with jacking off and beating his head against the wall.

Fraser... in his face... jacking off... against the wall. Shut up, brain... Right. The jeans better stay on.

He turned away again, kicked off his shoes and socks, collected them, rolled up the cuffs, and hung his head staring at his crooked toes thinking hard about Stella and her pedicures until he wasn't likely to embarrass himself any more. Except for a brief and bizarre image involving Stella AND Fraser and one of those vibrating reclining chairs that nearly got him up all over again, it sort of worked, and then the hot black pavement started burning his feet and he was good to go.

What the hell was wrong with him these days? Nobody'd had him by the balls like this since high school, and sometimes he honestly wondered if he was going crazy, or maybe just trying to lose his job.

And why this guy? Come on, look at that. That's what's got your fuse lit? Even Ray had to admit Fraser looked ridiculous from the back right now, tight posture like he was trying to balance the Boy Scout Handbook on his head, holding a big ball of clothes under one arm and his boots under the other, silly white boxers and bare feet. Which weren't even curling as he walked, like he couldn't feel the heat.

Ray cussed under his breath and shifted to the outsides of his feet, just moving the burn around. "You're not some expert on walking on hot coals, are you? That one of your special talents?"

"Of course not, Ray. Don't be silly." There was some strain in his voice; maybe his feet hurt too and he just didn't think Mounties hop.

"Oh, my mistake." But Ray felt better.

"I did read a very fascinating book on the subject once, though. If you're interested. It seems the key is to concentrate your breathing..."

Ray listened to the blah blah blah for a while, and smiled. This was the good part. He wasn't always hot for Fraser. Sometimes they were friends, really good friends, buddies, the kind you can count on when the chips are down. Sometimes they were just two guys getting work done.

"Aha. This way."

And sometimes, he realized, as the gulls started squawking overhead, they were two pushing-forty cops walking around in their underwear on a clothing-optional beach getting stared at by college girls. He held the bundle of clothes against his chest and hoped the gun wouldn't fall out.

Fraser sped up and made for the damp part of the sand and they just stood there not frying their feet off for a minute, pretending to be scanning for footprints. Then they were on the trail again, heading north, towards the quieter end where you could really see the factories.

After about five minutes of dodging frisbees and collecting stares, even Fraser had to admit it.

"My... attire is somewhat inappropriate for a bathing costume, isn't it," he said.

"Looks like fetish wear for grannies, Frase."

"Well I regret not coming prepared for this venue, but, it was a surprise."

"That it was."

"We thought he was headed for Charlie's Oyster Bar."

"We did think that."

"Ah. Pardon me."

Fraser had veered off like Dief spotting a poodle and pulled up in front of some long-legged beach babe, folding chair, umbrella, cooler, the works. She was wearing a bikini. Shame about that. "Ma'am, I wonder if you could help us."

She lowered her sunglasses. "'Ma'am?'"

"–Miss. You see my partner and I, well, I'm afraid our desire to visit this fine beach was a rather sudden–"

"We're impulsive," Ray said. "Whee. A beach."

"And we overlooked the importance of carrying along proper protection. As we may be here for another half hour or so, I'm concerned about the possible consequences."

She slipped the glasses off entirely and gave him the once-over. "Did you say protection?'

"Yes. If I might make use of some of yours? Thank you." Fraser snagged the bottle like a freshman at a frat party and filled his palm with sunscreen. He gave her the little nod that was supposed to make her feel like a national hero. "It's in a good cause."

"You're..." she trailed off as Fraser started rubbing himself up with the stuff, never more than two smooth strokes in the same place, unhesitating and efficient. "Welcome..."

"Ray?"

Ray followed Fraser's eye line to the bottle and realized he was supposed to do himself. "Oh. Right." Better a little grease than a lecture on skin cancer. He slapped some on his shoulders and the back of his neck and, more shyly, up and down his chest, and called it a day.

"If you wouldn't mind?"

Fraser had his back to him.

"Huh?"

Fraser looked over his shoulder. "Could you get my back, please. There, between the shoulder blades."

"Are you crazy?"

"Well, I can't reach it, Ray."

"You don't have some special Mountie flexibility training or something?"

"In a sense, but I think dislocating my shoulder just to apply sunscreen would be a little extreme, don't you?"

"No. Maybe," Ray said shortly. "Whoops! Duty calls!"

He splashed out and caught the frisbee that had gone by his nose, feeling his jeans drag as he waded back and located the knot of girls from whence it had come.

"You, ah, you ladies lose something?" They were young and reasonably pretty, and two of them were topless. He held the frisbee like a proud dog and grinned at them.

After some silent group communication, one spoke up. "Um, yeah, that's ours. I, like, can't throw."

"Aw, I wouldn't say that," Ray said, being a gentleman.

"Thanks for getting it for us. I didn't want to get in the water."

Ray tried not to say "I can see that." Those weren't the kind of suits you want to swim in.

"Okay, well, thanks..." Another round of secret girl looks and then the nearest one made a lunge and pulled the frisbee out of his hand. "Thanks a lot!" They clumped closer together, and one of them waved goodbye.

Oh. Right. Ray nodded and waved back, still grinning, backed up, turned around and started walking off.

"Oh my god! Can you believe it? I'm so sure!" Giggles.

"I thought he was kind of cute," one of them said through the shrieky noises. "He looks like Stacey's dad."

The main problem with beaches is there aren't any walls to beat your head on.

Okay, and a secondary problem is you get distracted and now he'd lost track of Fraser.

A solid male body caught his eye, just like Fraser, only naked, and he wondered if Fraser thought this was more inconspicuous for tailing purposes or if he'd just finally gone off his last hinge, before catching up to the fact that the face was wrong. Maybe 'cause it took him so long to look at the face.

Going up on his elbows, the random naked man looked back, not unfriendly.

"Hi. Uh. You see a guy my height, same height as me, in white shorts with a lot of stuff under his arm?"

Random Naked Man moved his random naked chin to the left. "Yeah. Your boyfriend went thataway."

"He's not my..." WRONG. ANSWER. Shut the fuck up, nimrod, yes, Thanks, maybe, but not that. Now the guy was giving him a speculative look that was one part 'Oh yeah, that mean you got time to rub lotion on my pecs?' and two parts 'Oh yeah, and how much would he kick your skinny ass if he heard you say that?'

Ray opened his mouth again to insist "He's– no, see–", jogging backwards as the guy looked at him down the length of his glistening, muscle-y chest, then realized this was the kind of argument you lost just by having it and turned around and took off, feeling like a jerk. But what could he have said. 'Sorry, I'd be a little more polite, but it's getting kinda stuffy in this closet lately.'

In the end Fraser had to catch up to him, putting a big meaty hand on his shoulder, all sweat and grab. "Ray! I'm here!"

Ray shook him off. "Jeez, you got pores in your hands or something? Since when do you sweat?"

"I'm sorry." Fraser looked hurt enough to spare him a biology lecture.

"Never mind, no, I just– I gotta get off this beach." He scrubbed at his shoulder absently. He could still feel Fraser's paw there, like, the individual fingers. "Giving me a headache."

Fraser nodded. "The glare. I understand. Well, I believe I have good news. I spotted our quarry."

"Good, great. Tally-ho."

Following Tischler was getting easier, since he'd made for the farthest end of the beach, where the least people were, because of that fine factory view making them think too much. The sun beat down on them as the air went quiet, not even birds any more. Fraser trudged along with his shoulders hunched, his head forward like a turtle, ready for action.

Ray was sweating.

"This'd be easier if there weren't any people here," he said. "You ever wonder what a beach would look like with no people?"

"Can't say that I have."

"What if I tried to make 'em go away, screamed fire, or something. How long do you think it'd take?"

"I have... really no idea what you're talking about."

"Yeah, me neither. There he is." They ducked behind an outlying couple of dog-walkers and then scurried forward to crouch behind a low rock, some big chunk of concrete mostly buried in the sand. Tischler had stopped, facing away, his hands hidden under the bright beach towel.

Got a piece under there, Ray thought, you can see he's not packing in those trunks. He took a moment out for a juvenile snigger and so lost out to Fraser, who was the first to spot Rozmar coming down the steep trail from the far parking lot. A big tubby man in a grey suit, the former Hungarian mobster watched his feet all the way down, so the two of them had a chance to get low on the sand and back up until the water was just touching their toes.

Tischler waited in silence, but it was a good bet they'd be in earshot as long as nobody lowered their voices. Fraser started going up on his knees; Ray started trying to get the gun out. Hard to do without looking, it was stuck in a sleeve or something.

The two men met, nodded, and immediately turned towards the rock. Ray and Fraser threw themselves flat. Yeah, but Ray was already down, so Fraser ended up on top of him. He weighed a lot. It was a bitch.

"Mr. Tischler, I presume," the big guy was saying as they came closer.

"You brought the money?"

"You will show me the merchandise?"

Voices were muffled by the air around him being 68% Fraser. Ray squirmed, trying to get a grip on the gun, but his arm was pinned in a bad way, he couldn't do it. He could feel a lot of bare skin against his back, though, and a lot of hard prickly sand shoving up against his front and working its way down into his jeans. Good... bad... good... bad... bad.

"Come on, you know the deal. Money first."

"The payment is in here." Sound of something, probably the briefcase, hitting the rock. Fraser was moving against Ray's back, inching higher up the beach, gathering his legs, getting ready to spring. 'Course it would be a better plan to wait until Ray had access to weaponry and could do something useful against two armed tough guys, if you asked Ray, but of course he hadn't asked Ray, because he never did, which was something they were really going to have to work out one of these days, if they managed not to get Swiss cheesed by a Hungarian in the next thirty seconds.

"I want to see it."

"And I told you, I want to see the capsule." Fraser scooted forward a little more and– "Did you hear something?"– flattened again suddenly, which... whoa. Ray's eyes flew wide open. What you might call a compromising position. Don't make eye contact afterwards kind of thing. Especially since Fraser obviously got off on going into action.

"I see no one."

They were stuck.

With Ray's face in the sand and Fraser's trigger half-cocked and definitely not a gun in his pocket.

FREEBIE, thought a deep, instinctive, totally unregenerate part of Ray's brain.

Shit, he's gonna freak now, get all weird, avoid me, came the panicky, steer-for-the-rest-of-us part, and a wussy embarrassing piece of him wanted to cry, because now he'd never get off this beach– never be free of it, no amount of showers would scrub this off him, he'd be back here again and again, when it was dark, when he was alone, on stakeouts, every time Fraser lowered his head to sniff at something and Ray could look right down the back of his collar. He was burned for good now, and this beach was the beginning of his hell.

Then Fraser moved again and the vast majority of Ray's brain cells and nerve endings went FREEBIE again. Okay. Fine. Cry later.

"Very well, you may look at the money. You may even count. But you have thirty seconds to show me the capsule, or I let the fresh air into your chest."

There was the click of a latch, and a moment when both pairs of scumbag eyes were looking at the same place, and Ray could feel Fraser decide to take his chance. He vaulted up onto the rock and somersaulted forward (and you knew he wouldn't get a single scrape out of it, not if he'd been naked as a jaybird), disarming Rozmar by the old crash-on-top method and bearing him to the ground. Ray was over the top a moment later, ready to fire, shouting at Tischler not to try it as the beach towel fell away and he nearly shot Fraser in the back and Ray had to tackle him after all.

Long story short. The good guys won. Fraser remanded custody of Rozmar to Ray, who stood nervously trying to cover both targets at once, while he patted down Tischler for the capsule.

"Check for inside pockets." Unlike, say, any member of the 2-7, Fraser adopted this suggestion without complaint, but even a thoroughly invasive search of the inside of the skinny man's swim trunks turned up nothing. There was nothing sewn into the towel, either, or taped to the gun, or pinned in his thinning hair, and that was it– there was nowhere else to look.

"You lied, you son of a..." Rozmar devolved into Hungarian.

Fraser shook his head. "He had it on him."

"He, uh, hid it on the beach somewhere?"

"No, it's too valuable. He wouldn't risk anything happening to it, would you, Mr. Tischler? Therefore, the most likely remaining hiding place..."

"Oh, no no. No Fraser. No. Don't make me watch this, don't make me know about it." Fraser moved around behind the sullen, scrawny villain and shook his arms out like an orchestra conductor. "Gah, will you wait til we get back to the station at least?"

"Too dangerous, Ray, he may have found a chance to dispose of it by then." Fraser clamped a sudden grip on Tischler's head just as he started to bolt and pried his mouth open with two fingers, reaching inside with the other hand. "A shame I didn't... bring... gloves... There." He flourished it, a small gel-rubber thingy like a million-dollar cough drop. "Behind the second molar."

"Okay, not as bad as I thought it was gonna be."

"Oh, there was no need to worry, Ray. Once you've force-fed a wolf antibiotics... no jaw is too stubborn."

"Yeah, that's not really– HEY!" He twisted Rozmar's arm behind his back and hooked the briefcase out of range with his foot. "No funny stuff! Frase, you wanna go get the cuffs out of my shirt?"

 

The drive back to the station was quiet. Aside from "Do not even think of putting those damp, sandy, criminal asses directly on my leather seats" and some useful follow-up instructions, he hadn't said much, and Fraser hadn't said anything.

Ray stole a glance at him when they stopped at a light. Fraser was facing straight ahead, wool parts of the uniform bundled in his lap, sitting on his shirt, looking stiff and martyred. It was his idea to take it all off in the first place, but you might have known he'd be sorry.

The salt water had dried on both of them, and the glare was gone, and Ray was starting to feel the day pulling away. The cuffs, the car, the street, they were driving back into regular life, but with him and Fraser still stranded side by side, half-naked and burnt and gritty, like a couple of refugees from another planet.

He'd thought nothing could wash this off him, but by the time they got back to the station maybe it would all be gone, and he wouldn't even think anything had happened out there. Fraser being bashful wouldn't seem like it meant anything. He'd button that jacket back up and there they'd be. But just for a few more minutes here, he knew Fraser, and he knew something was up.

"Hey," he said, before he could think. "How's the shower at your place?"

Fraser didn't say anything.

"Fraser? The shower? At the Consulate?"

"Mm?"

"'Cause I was just thinking, maybe it's small, you could come over to my place, we could clean up. Maybe do something."

Fraser looked at him. "Do something?" he asked, almost suspiciously.

"Yeah, hang out, you know, uh, take the wolf out. Start fires in the park. I don't know." Ray rolled a shoulder and started to get pink. "Saturday stuff."

"Ah."

"It's a good day for golf," Tischler suggested from the back, and Ray slapped back at the cuffed hands and barked at him to shut up if he didn't want a hole-in-one through his head without consciously registering the exchange.

"Yes, thank you, Ray, I believe I'd like to do that."

"Great, great." They hung out all the time– Fraser'd never had to think about it before. Definitely something up. That was probably good, right? Book these scumballs, get home, get some cold drinks, get the sand off. Maybe there'd be something left after they got clean.

Uncharacteristically, Fraser shifted in his seat.

And again.

Ray couldn't stop thinking about showers, Fraser in his shower, even both of them in the same shower, soaping each other up, like that would happen. But some inner what-the-fuck prompted him to look over and say, "Hey. Maybe I'll get your back this time." He threw in a leer to show he was kidding.

Fraser looked at him, real thoughtful, like he was lining up a shot.

"Ray," he said slowly. "You've always had my back."

Compliment. Huh. That's nice. Ray tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Damn smoky voice, made you start seeing things. He didn't know if that was a compliment or a come-on.

Actually, pretty nice either way, though, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it really was. He snuck another look at Fraser just as Fraser was sneaking a look at him, and their eyes met and they both jerked face front again and started grinning like kids.

Ray gunned the motor a little and they shot down the road. Oh yeah, nothing like a day at the beach.