Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me, and I obviously make no money at this because I still have my day job.
Author: Trudy West
Email: truwest@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Anywhere, just email and let me know.
Spoilers: Victoria's Secret, The Deal.
Categories: Episode related
Summary: What really happened that night in Fraser's apartment?

He lay in bed, listening to the street noise, trying to relax himself into sleep, as his father had described in the journal entry he had read before retiring.

His body ached. He wondered if the aspirin had helped. It was hard to tell. He disliked drugs of any kind and avoided them whenever possible. Perhaps he should reconsider where aspirin was concerned. After all, it was an herbal remedy, abet in a concentrated form.

He remembered Elaine trying to get him to take the aspirin. He objected until he saw her hurt look, then obediently swallowed them.

Elaine. He remembered Elaine's hands on him, touching his chest, her breath on his face as they talked. For the life of him, he couldn't remember what they had talked about. Something about his otter scar. It was the first time that a woman had touched him like that since - he didn't want to think about that.

He had had too much physical contact with too many people recently. Images flashed through his mind, distracting, unsettling, a mix of the dangerously pleasurable and the dangerously violent. Francesca, leaning against him while propositioning him in the church. Zuko, knocking him flat on the basketball court. Elaine. And the beating. He had almost forgotten how obscenely intimate a beating could be, hands on him, immobilizing him, fingers in his hair, fists striking flesh, the men so close he could smell their sweat.

A sound. He snapped alert as he identified it. It was the click of a doorknob turning.

He sat bolt upright as the door swung open. His feet touched the floor as the dark figure entered the room. One person - a gunman, then, come to deliver Zuko's fatal message. He waited for the outstretched arm, the sight of the gunbarrel -

But -

The figure was a woman. It's Francesca Vecchio, noted the observant part of his brain, the part that was always imperturbable, always calm. And he remembered why that name discomfited him more than that of Frankie Zuko. The choir loft - "you wanna have sex?" - his rapid exit over the edge of the balcony in pursuit of the thief. He had thrown himself with extra enthusiasm into finding the miscreant to order to avoid thinking about that encounter.

"Don't be afraid," she whispered. She must have noticed his frightened face - odd for Frannie, who was so oblivious to his usual discomfort around her. As he watched with rising alarm, she unbuttoned the coat and slipped it off to reveal - a black undergarment that looked familiar, but that he couldn't and didn't want to see clearly. He kept his eyes fixed on her face but couldn't help noting the contrast of white skin and black leather.

He felt light-headed as the adrenaline rush faded. He was alive. He was not lying on the floor of his apartment bleeding to death.

It occurred to him that he might have preferred to face Zuko's thugs rather than this woman, under these conditions.

Smiling, she reached for him. He stood up hastily but didn't have time to step away from the bed before she was on him, literally. Her hands were all over him. He captured them and folded them in his own, holding them in between their bodies. At least it gave him a few centimeters of distance. A few millimeters.

She looked up at him coquettishly. "I'll bet - wait a minute! What happened to your face?" she demanded. Her hands were wriggling like agitated little animals, trying to escape his grasp.

She had noticed the cuts and bruises. "I had an encounter with Frankie Zuko's companions earlier this evening."

Shocked into momentary silence, she pulled one hand free and reached up to touch his damaged cheek. "Does it hurt?"

Elaine had asked him the same thing, repeatedly. He didn't understand the need to ask a question that had such an obvious answer. "Yes." He recaptured the errant hand, which had begun straying down his chest.

"Did you see a doctor? How bad is it?"

"No, I didn't see a doctor, it was unnecessary. Elaine cleaned the abrasions and gave me aspirin."

Her face darkened. "Elaine!"

Oh dear, he thought. "It was a humanitarian gesture. Ray was busy at the time, consulting with Leftenant Welsh."

She searched his face. Her expression fell. She looked as if she were about to cry. "Aren't you even a tiny bit glad to see me?"

She sounded like a little girl. Concerned, he bent his head down, and she kissed him eagerly, her lips parting. He held still for an instant, then gently returned the kiss.

He raised his head, broke the connection. Her eyes were closed in bliss. Then she looked at him. "I want this. I want this more than anything -"

"Francesca -"

"I've thought about it for so long, I know we'll be good together -"

"Francesca, you're Ray's sister."

Her face darkened again. "Can we please not talk about that!"

"But you are."

"I've been Ray's kid sister my whole life, and I'm sick of it. Can't you just treat me as me?"

Standing pressed against each other, their hands clenched together, she was pushing, trying to use her weight to topple the two of them backwards onto the bed. He braced his feet and had a sudden memory of watching sumo wrestlers.

"Francesca, I can't do this."

She stopped pushing. "What?"

"What you want from me - I can't do it."

She bit her lip and looked distraught. "Why? Just why not? I mean, you don't have a girlfriend." She looked thunderstruck. "Are you gay?"

He sighed.

"Aren't you attracted to me? What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing's wrong with you, and yes, you're a very attractive woman."

"Then WHAT?" she wailed.

He had no idea what to say, but he had better think of something. "May we sit down? Please, we need to talk about this."

She nodded, aware at last that her initial attempt at sweeping him into sex had failed. They sat on the edge of the bed. He continued to hold her hands, now in her lap. He felt her naked thighs under the skin of his wrists.

"Francesca, have you been outside of Chicago?"

"Sure I have, plenty of times. Well, often enough. Family trips and stuff. Why?"

"Where I'm from, in the Territories, it's very different from Chicago. It - there aren't many people. Anywhere. The distances are huge. Most people live in small settlements that can only be reached by air, by water, or by extended and arduous overland treks."

"Yeah, Ray said you grew up on some godforsaken piece of snow and ice somewhere. Tuck something."

"Tuktoyaktuk. It's one of the towns where we lived. Actually we moved fairly often, my grandparents and I. And I learned something from having to change schools and make new friends frequently."

"What?"

"That these communities are very small. Everyone knows each other. People know which couples are fighting, who's been unfaithful. And they remember. Feuds continue for decades, and people can recite every slight, every hurt. As a new addition, it was important for me to be on good terms with everyone, to not disturb the social balance. So there weren't many people to begin with, still fewer girls near my age, still fewer where there might be a mutual interest."

"So did you ever have a girlfriend?"

"No. Well - once, there was a girl - but then, we moved. We wrote letters for a while, but then she stopped writing, and that was that."

"So you never had a girlfriend?" She was wide-eyed. "Then have you, you know, never done it, you know, it?"

"Yes, yes I have." He didn't want to tell her any of this, but at least she had stopped trying to grope him. Best to keep talking. "But it was later, after I finished school, after I joined the RCMP."

"What happened?" she whispered.

"Well, it's not really the kind of thing - that is, it's not -"

"Fraser, will you just tell me what happened?" she demanded, much more loudly.

It was at times like these that he wished he were a more capable liar. He could never make up plausible fictions, particularly in the heat of the moment. He had wanted to distract her, and she was for the moment distracted. And to be honest, he was hesitating from cowardice, not chivalry. There was only one person other than himself who might care about this story being told, and she had made it clear that she did not care, not anymore.

Frannie was looking at him expectantly.

He sighed, closed his eyes and began. He couldn't look at anyone, least of all her, when he talked about this.

He had replayed the events in his mind thousands of times. "Her plane crashed and the pilot abandoned her. I tracked her through a snowstorm and found her half-frozen, huddled against the side of a mountain. By that point I had lost everything: my pack, my supplies. I staked a lean-to with my rifle and coat and held on to her while the storm blew through. It snowed for a day and a night and a day. I gave up; I thought we were going to die. But the storm finally broke, and we were still alive. It took us four days to reach the nearest town. That last night..." He took a deep breath. "Our last night together, we . . . made love. At first I didn't want to. I mean, I did want to but...then she said it was what she wanted..."

What she had actually said was, she wanted something to bond them, to ease the memory of the storm and the fear, a memory to take with her as she faced what was to come. Something to remember him by. He had wanted her desperately, for days, but restrained himself - she was a prisoner, he her guard and protector. It would be an abuse of trust to even hint at his desire. He had held her every night, keeping her warm, his emotions working feverishly, but his body discreet and comforting.

It had been the poem that gave him away. He asked her what she had been reciting during the storm, and she had laughed and told him, repeating it for him until he knew it by heart. He was reciting it back to her when he saw a look on her face that he couldn't interpret. Much later, he realized that something in that conversation had revealed his feelings. All he knew then was that she smiled and touched him, in a friendly way, on the arm. And he smiled back.

That last night, when she asked him to let her go and he refused, her anguished face broke the wall he had built inside himself. He cried silently as he shook his head, tears first on his cheeks, then on hers. Then her tears stopped, and she took his face in her hands, and she kissed him, and asked him to make love to her. He cried even harder then, until he finally responded to her caresses. He pulled back at one point, told her haltingly that he had never, he had never - and she whispered that it was all right, it was all right, she would show him. And she did. And he lost himself in her.

"What happened to her?"

"She was charged with a crime and found guilty. She was incarcerated."

"She was a criminal?"

The following day, she asked him to let her go, again, and he refused, again. Watching her being taken away, he remembered what she had said. *Wait for me...* Then he saw something hard and dark in her eyes, and part of him began to doubt what he had done. Only he wasn't certain if it was his act of love or his act of duty that he regretted.

Her sentence was much longer than either of them had expected. He tried to speak to her at the prison; she refused. His letters were returned unopened, and eventually he stopped writing. She obviously didn't want him to wait for her, not anymore, after what he had done. He had made his choice. But he still wondered, if someday...and when he met another woman and felt an attraction, there was always a perfectly good reason not to act on the feeling: it was the wrong time, or the wrong place, or...something.

Under the terms of her sentence, she would be released soon. Might even have been released already. When she had rebuffed his attempts to contact her, he decided to honor her wishes and not to intrude upon her life. He never tried to find out anything about her, after that.

But during his shifts on guard duty at the Consulate, he would recite the poem to himself, over and over, hearing her voice...

"You really loved her." He came back to himself. Francesca. Trust her not to keep quiet for long.

"Yes, I, I -" I did, I do...

"Are you waiting for her?"

"No. No, she, she- " Yes, forever.

"It's over now, huh?"

"Yes." It hurt, unexpectedly, to say it aloud. "Yes, it's over, it's been...years." Years gone by and he could still see her, still hear her. His precise memory, his ally in all else, betraying him in this. Did she ever think of him, and if so, what did she remember? He hoped that she believed what he wrote in his letters, that his feelings were true, and the greatest agony of his life was what had happened between them. He hoped that any memory of him would not add to the bitterness he had seen in her face in that last moment.

He was deluding himself. She had cut him out of her heart and her thoughts. He would never see her again. He would die with his guilt and his apologies unspoken.

He heard a deep sigh and opened his eyes. Francesca was looking at him, with a fond rather than lustful expression. "It's ok, I understand." She squeezed his hands. "We need to take it slow. I always knew you weren't one of those one-night-stand kind of guys." He winced internally, but she was oblivious to the irony. "It's one of the things I love best about you, that you're such a gentleman, not like some of those other sleasebags, boy, could I tell you some stories. Once there was this guy - but we're talking about us. It's ok, I can wait. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, and good things are worth waiting for. So I want you to know, I understand." She stood up. He followed. "I am so glad we can talk this way," she said.

He hesitated. "Francesca, what I told you...it's very private, and I'd rather it not-"

"Oh, of course, of course, I would never -" She pulled an imaginary zipper over her mouth.

They looked at each other. She said, "Well, I guess I better be getting home."

"Please, let me escort you. It's quite late, and this neighborhood is not entirely safe."

"Oh no, I drove. Car's right downstairs."

"At least allow me to walk -"

"No, no, I'm fine, really. I got here all right, didn't I?" He thought guiltily that if it were any other woman, he would insist on accompanying her; but in this instance, he was only too glad to get her out of his apartment.

She picked her coat up off the floor, put it on, buttoned it.

At the door, she turned. "Well, things didn't turn out like I expected, not yet anyway, but...could I kiss you again? To give me something to remember the evening by."

To remember you by . . .

His heart contracted, but he said, "It would be my pleasure" and inclined his head again to kiss her. It was sweet, lingering.

"Bye," she whispered and slipped out the door.

He stood there for a moment, then turned and went to the window, looking at the sky. The stars that were so brilliant in the Territories were faint here. The sky looked empty. He felt exhausted, body and soul. And lonely. The hollowness in his chest was more painful than the bruises.

Dief whined behind him.

"Oh, now you wake up."

Dief looked at him.

"Thank you for your concern, but I'm fine, really."

Dief looked at him.

"There's nothing you can do. Go back to sleep." Dief blinked and turned away.

He stood looking out the window at the empty sky for a long time.

As she drove, she thought, well of course she wouldn't tell anybody the story that he had told her! She had promised! But things up to that point - well, he hadn't said anything about THAT. Happily, she began to rehearse: "So there I was-"