Author's website: http://unhinged.0catch.com

Disclaimer: We all know the drill; not mine, never will be.

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This story is a sequel to: Real

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

When I was a kid, I had a stuffed rabbit.

Yeah I know; most kids have a teddy bear or Raggedy Ann or something like that. Me? I had this stuffed rabbit my Grandma Kowalski bought the day I was born. When I think about it now, I realize it must've been pretty expensive because it wasn't a floppy toy; it looked almost like a real rabbit, right down to the whiskers and the ears. It was white with black spots on it, and I called it "Rabby."

When I was three or four my mom read "The Velveteen Rabbit" to me for the first time and I was hooked. Maybe cause the rabbit in the book looked just like Rabby. I used to cry when the kid got sick and they had to take all the toys away and burn them, even though I knew everything would come out okay in the end, that the boy would get better and the rabbit would get to become Real. The old man wasn't real fond of Rabby, used to grumble about how I was too damn old to be lugging dolls around with me. Mom would just to sigh and say, "For heaven's sake, Damien, he's a little boy. If he's still carrying it around with him when starts high school, then you can complain."

The year I turned six we moved, and somehow or other Rabby got lost in the shuffle. I would've cried about it if I'd thought crying would do any good, but I was old enough to know that the old man'd just get sore at me for crying over a mangy fur rabbit, so I kept it to myself. And eventually I decided I hadn't lost Rabby at all, he'd just become Real. The idea that I'd loved him enough to make him Real made it easier to sleep without him tucked under my blanket.

I was going through some boxes the other day, sorting stuff out to be thrown away or given to the Salvation Army, and I came across "The Velveteen Rabbit". I'd completely forgotten mom had given it to me when Stella and I got married; told me pretty soon it'd be my turn to read it to our kids at bedtime. That never happened, but I thumbed through it anyway, and it was funny how much of the story I still remembered and how much the rabbit made me think of Rabby. I showed it to Fraser that night, when he came home, and he got that pleased look on his face he always gets when ya share something with him and told me that his grandmother used to read it to him as well. "Of course, I read it myself once I was old enough." He said.

So I told him bout Rabby and how I'd pretended he was real after I lost him, and he just hugged me, like I was still the little boy who'd lost his stuffed rabbit.

"You know," he told me later. "While you may or may not have made the rabbit Real, you certainly made me Real."

And I got to thinking he was right. When I took the Vecchio gig and they showed me his picture all I could think was "This guy's too pretty to be real." And when I meant him, not only was he too pretty he was too perfect. Plus he licked electrical sockets.

But then I got to know him and I started realizing that being too pretty and too perfect was like a mask; that he was afraid to let people see that he could get messed up and hurt and make mistakes, because if they knew he was human they wouldn't like him anymore. And knowing that made me want to dig, to see if I could crack the shell and get underneath to where the Real Benton Fraser lived.

And it turned out I was right; he'd been there all the time, buried under duty and trying to live up to his father's legacy and all those layers of red Serge. He could get messed up (and damn if he didn't look good even then), and hurt, and make mistakes, and the world didn't come to an end. He could lie if he needed to, and do it so smooth and easy you never saw it coming.

And he could love like nobody's business. Took a few times to break down the last of the reserve, and it's still hard to get him to talk and tell me what he wants, but he doesn't really have to tell me because I know from the way he touches me here, or here, or here, and the way he moans, and the way he goes fucking batshit when he comes. I can tell what he wants from the way his eyes light up when I ask him to fuck me.

But the biggest kick of all? Knowing that now that he's Real, he can never go back to being unreal. Cause the Skin Horse said so.

FIN

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

End Real, Redux-Ray's POV by MR: psykaos42@yahoo.com

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