This is part of a series regarding the adventures of Thatcher and Fraser at Disney World.. The due South characters belong to Alliance, not me. Disney World belongs to some huge publicly owned conglomerate, not me. Its just my idea to put them all together and subject them to bizarre situations.

RATING: G

COMMENTS: tomato_3@excite.com

"Fraser, I've been trying to figure out what's different about you, and I think I've finally got it." Inspector Margaret Thatcher stated, having stared thoughtfully at her breakfast companion for longer than he had felt comfortable with.

"By the way, these eggs are delicious. What did you put in them?"

She felt a little slow on the uptake this morning. She'd had a difficult time getting to sleep the night before. Hours after saying goodnight, she'd found herself staring at the leaf shadows on the bedroom ceiling, once again trying to fine tune her coping strategies for this trip.

She was disturbed because all of the approaches that she relied on to get her through one-on-ones with Fraser were failing her. Not only had she exhausted her standard set - staring at non-vital body parts, recalling poems she'd memorized in high school, imagining the details of Fraser's bare left foot, calculating the length of the edge of his right ear. All of these had failed by the time they'd made it through the grocery store.

Niggling doubts had turned to little teeny screeches in her mental ears as she sat at the kitchen counter performing dramatic readings of the course handouts. She'd look up and notice the shape of his cheekbones highlighted in the florescent glare of the ceiling light, or the way his hand held the cucumber he was caressing - sorry, washing, and she'd get a little wonky inside. She seemed to hear little whistles going off in her head. While it could be the old head wound from basic training flaring up again, she felt as though she was surrounded by a pack of maniacal obedience school instructors with blowing their brains out with dog whistles by the time they sat down to dinner.

Anyway, all of her strategies for not losing it were failing her and she was discomfited by the prospect of failing to control her urges. Failure was too weak a concept to describe what was happening - they were flaming out on her, usually at about 15,000 feet. This shouldn't be happening! She should be able to deal with anything that a silly management seminar could throw at her. My God, she'd been early-selected for Inspector! This was nuts. So, why was she staring at the ceiling, her mind skittering around like a rabid mouse high on Surge cola! She needed a fallback strategy.

~ Oh good, Freudian slips are now peaking out from under the overcoats of my mind. Just what I need.~ She muttered this as she tried to bury the image the term 'fallback' had triggered in her imagination. Okay, so falling back on a huge waterbed as Benton Fraser loomed over you was not a bad image to have floating around, it was not helping the situation, either.

Okay, so things were a little different this trip. Before, when the two of them had traveled it was always straight 'up & back' trips to Ottawa or Toronto. The purpose of the trip defined the scope of their interactions, presenting very limited opportunities for personal exchanges. Or, perhaps, they had kept it that way. So that wasn't quite the case now, but it shouldn't be that different. Well then, why couldn't she get it out of her mind that Benton Fraser was sleeping not more than 20 feet away from her? She wondered if he had brought his red long johns. She wondered what he looked like when he slept. Did he sleep on his stomach? Side? Back? Did he snore? Did he dream? Did he ever dream of her? Was she ever going to get a good night's sleep again? Was she ever going to sleep with him? Was she ever going to feel his lips on - ~ She sat bolt upright in bed, her fingers digging into her hair to try and wipe out the image that had flashed through her mind.

~ STOP!!!!! Where did that come from? You have to stop letting your mind drift. First it drifts when you're trying to get to sleep, and next thing you know you're thinking like that in the daytime. Then, before you know it, you'll realize that you've touched him or walked too close to him, or run your hand over his thigh while he's driving. You have to be careful. You're on a tightrope Meg. One false move and you could fall right off and loose everything! ~

There - the rationale side was engaged and trying desperately to steer the course of her thoughts into safer waters. However, the other participant in these conversations was ready to weigh in, too.

~ Yeah, but Meggie, you could fall right into his arms, too. Come on, you can't run from your feelings forever - it will make you way too weird. Face them, give them a chance to breathe. You can't stay scared of commitment forever or you'll end up like Great Aunt Florence. Yes, I know you loved her, but do you really think that raising 7000 guinea pigs in a two bedroom house was a good way to live? You and I both know it was her thwarted love for the pet food salesman when she was 25 that turned her head inside out. Given Fraser's attachments, God only knows what which way you'd tork! ~

She rolled over onto her side, punched her pillow until it whimpered into submission, and tried again to settle down.

Unfortunately, her racing mind would give her no peace as she replayed all the images from the evening. Fraser fixing dinner, smiling, describing his grandmother's cooking, explaining how he taught himself how to cook. All of it. All the little pieces that seemed to float to the surface like flames from the bottom of a deep blue lake. She could feel herself being drawn to him. At times it seemed as if every molecule in her body had some kind of charge that was attracted to Benton Fraser. She could almost feel herself being drawn across the space between them. Then she'd get scared, when she realized that she didn't know - or couldn't admit to herself - what she wanted to do if she gave into that drive.

~ Oh, God. You are going to be crazy as a march hare by the end of the day if you keep this up. You have to have confidence in yourself, that you are not going to completely loose it the next time he calls you Meg. That you are sufficiently mature to be able to handle this situation, and that you won't do anything so damn dumb that you won't be able to work together by the time this is over. ~

The last was essential to her fear. While she might not find their working relationship as personally fulfilling as she desired, she was scared that any attempt to change it would drive him away, or force her into making him leave. A transfer back to the North hung in the back of her mind all of the time, like the cloak of Darth Vader.

~ Maybe I just need something to drink a glass of water, juice, tequila . . . ? ~ Eventually she fell asleep reciting the section of the RCMP field manual describing the proper conduct of searches of deep draft coal mines.

It might or might not have been any solace to her to find out that her seminar partner was taxed with comparable difficulty in getting to sleep. At that moment, he was staring at his ceiling, listening to the night creatures moving outside his bedroom window, trying to identify them by their footsteps. He had been in this position for so long that his eyes were beginning to feel like fried marbles. The problem was that when he blinked, he saw her as she'd been tonight. It was frustrating any attempt he made to get to sleep.

Fraser was usually the early to bed/early to rise type. This could be attributed to the fact that in his formative years the cycles of the communities in which he lived were largely defined by the sun. Needless to say, wintertime was the worst, since there was so little sunlight. Over the years, he had adapted his internal clock to take into account the availability of sunlight. It had led to his determination to try to gain more deliberate control over his autonomic systems, after he had inadvertently gone into hibernation a couple of times. While that helped when one was stuck in an ice crevasse, it could also come in handy when standing sentry duty in the Chicago winters. These skills had come made the difference in his continued survival many times during his stay in Chicago - no more so when he was around Margaret Thatcher. He rated her right up there with climbing ice cliffs as challenges requiring intense concentration in order to avoid losing one's footing.

While he no longer was actively unnerved by her, having slowly come to understand the underlying concerns that drove her, he found it hard to relax around her. He'd come to understand, as he pondered these issues while standing at attention for four hours at a time, that it wasn't her, and it wasn't his ears, or sunspot activities or increased bombardment of tachyon particles. No, it was him.

Deep down, in places he'd never thought existed in him, he wanted her. It wasn't just that he wanted to get to know her better, although that was clearly part of it. Or that he wanted to do things with her, both the exotic and the mundane. Or that he loved the way she looked as she stood in the hall of the consulate, the sun shining down on her chestnut hair from the paladian windows, throwing light into the warm chocolate depths of her eyes. No, it seemed to be more along the lines of merging his soul with hers in some kind of elemental way. He also wanted to taste every inch of her, run his hands over -

~ STOP!!! You have to stop this. You can't let yourself think about her this way. Not unless you are willing to do something about it. ~

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, trying to press away the images dancing behind his eyelids. Meg at dinner was a very different person than the woman he reported to at the consulate. Tonight, it was as if the person who must be hiding behind the rules and the driving ambition stepped out of the shadows. His problem was that this person was even more alluring then the woman he already knew. And he was already in deep trouble with his existing feelings. There was little more that she could do to stop him from being swept away completely. He recalled one of the times he'd been swept over a waterfall. That sense of falling, and bouncing off of rocks, tree branches, and old animal carcasses seemed to effectively portray how he felt tonight. Sitting across the table from her. It had been all he could do to not just drift off into stunned silence, so he'd over compensated, as he tended to do, by talking. Only, unlike normal, when he called up one of the Inuit tales he stored in his capacious memory, he'd talked about himself.

~ Now why did you do that? You never talk about your life growing up, especially not to Meg Thatcher. So, why did you do it tonight? You know, if you start losing it this soon, you will be caribou scat by the time you get back on the plane. So why did you start letting down your guard now? ~ He couldn't get a grip on his instincts in this situation.

He wondered sometimes if this was how his father had felt about his mother. This wanting feeling - as if being with her put everything else in a better balance. He wanted to be with her, to touch her to hold her to make love to her. He'd never stopped wanting that since the time it had first dawned on him that he could want that with her. The train had done it. Kissing her just once on that train had done him in. It was as if he'd gone through some kind of dimensional warp. Before, he'd been one way; after he'd been another way and he could never go back to before. All he could do was try to manage to not give into his feelings. The problem was that the more he was around her, the more embedded the feelings became.

He sometimes thought that he should just go back north. Things might have eased enough for him to be able to manage back in Canada. Two things held him back. First, he would see that as giving up, and he had been trained to never give up, to work to resolving the situation - to close the case. Second, although he loved the territories, and would always consider them home, he had come to realize that he could be more than he had been at home. That he could grow and change and learn, and love. And he didn't want to walk away from that, from Meg, or Ray or the other people who had come to be woven into the fabric of his existence. So, he wouldn't leave, not without some resolution.

Having finally settled his mind, he was able to claim the sleep that had eluded him.

~ Whoever programmed that alarm clock with the Tarzan Yell should be drawn and quartered with a belt buckle.~ Meg lay in bed, her pillow wrapped around her head, gathering her inner forces to face the day. Suddenly the smell of coffee burrowed its way under the pillow, too.

~ Thank God! He's up and has once again done another eminently civilized act - he's made coffee. God is he a wonderful man or not! ~

She said to herself. She had stopped having him make coffee for her in the mornings; it had come to seem inappropriate. But he made really great coffee and she loved coffee. She would have made it herself, except that she made the most godawful sludge that no one in their right mind would drink the stuff. She didn't know how she managed to screw up something as simple as making coffee. She only knew that despite having read directions, bought little booklets on "The Joy of Brewing" and "The Secret Life of the Coffee Bean" every pot she made seemed equally undrinkable. It hadn't always been that bad. But her lack of talent in this area had degraded in the last two years to the point where she never even tried anymore, it was a waste of raw materials. She haunted the little coffee places in her neighborhood instead, waiting for them to open on weekend mornings and stopping by on the way to work on other days. She sometimes thought that she must look like a junkie waiting for a fix as she stood outside ChiChi's Coffee Shack, snapping her fingers as she waited for the door to be unlocked.

After last night's dinner, she shouldn't have been surprised that Fraser had taken charge of breakfast.

~ I should get up and help him.~

She thought to herself. But then the thought of going out to see what was going on led her to recall that she was wearing her pink silk pajamas.

~ Okay, so they do look more like a camisole and shorts than anything else. I bought them because I like them. There is no deep underlying reason why I chose to bring them with me on this trip, other than that I was packing light. ~ She could participate in self deception with the best of them.

Instead of continuing to examine her underlying motives, she just lay there and basked in the smell of coffee. She knew that ahead of her lay a day full of risks, uncertainties, pitfalls to avoid, and most likely at least one run in with Chip and Dale. However, the coffee would make the difference between giving into the temptation to stand under the shower until she looked like a giant raisin or going out and facing Fraser like a man, over a plate of eggs.

So there they sat. Drinking juice, eating eggs, well rested, relaxed, ready to charge forth to meet whatever challenges confronted them. Well, it was at least true that they were eating eggs.

"Feta cheese and onions. If I may ask, Si- Meg, what part of different have you figured out, aside from the heat, humidity, amount of sunlight, clothes, naming conventions, or the fact that we are having breakfast together. As far as I can determine, the list of different is far longer than the list of familiar."

He was genuinely puzzled. She actually laughed at his observation, a difference he chose not to point out. With almost glacial slowness, Benton Fraser was learning to identify social situations in which less is better.

"Well aside from all of that, and the absence of Diefenbaker sitting there staring at me, trying to entice me into feeding him, it is the fact that I haven't seen your Stetson. I hadn't realized till now that it was the part of my mental picture of you that was missing."

He tried not to be unsettled by the realization that she had a mental image of him at all. He was delighted that she seemed to miss Diefenbaker. After their less than cordial beginning, Fraser had hoped that Meg had developed some tolerance, if not affection for the wolf. He had noticed that she no longer made comments indicating that the wolf had a far brighter future as a rug then as a member of the RCMP. For a moment Fraser wondered if Meg had somehow been recruited into Diefenbaker's junk food supply chain, but dismissed the idea as outlandish. On the other hand, Fraser's concept of outlandish, impossible situations was taking major hits, so now he didn't really know what was possible. Befuddled, he focused on responding to her question. It did, however, bring back the whole 'hat' issue.

"Ah, well, Ray and I had extensive discussions regarding the suitable headgear for this trip. While I felt that the Stetson was adequate and appropriate, providing excellent sun protection, Ray pointed out that since it is part of our uniform and since we were directed to wear civilian clothes, that it would be inappropriate."

While he said this with the gravity it deserved, he could not help noticing the twinkle of merriment in Meg's eye at this explanation.

"Admirable concern for maintaining proper uniform protocol. So - where is it? I can't believe that you actually let him talk you into leaving it behind. On the other hand, I also can't believe that you could fit it into your backpack. That is unless it is actually a Tardis, which I've always suspected." Curiosity was brimming and about to burst the banks of her self control. She was not sure he recognized the reference to the time machine, since his face could have clouded for any number of reasons.

"Well you are partially correct. It is not in my backpack. I sent it by Federal Express." She burst out laughing. While she truly appreciated his attachment to his Stetson, she couldn't believe that - -

"You had to sneak it out of town! Well, I think you should wear it if you want to, regardless of Detective Vecchio's fashion sense. But, until it is delivered, what are you going to wear." She loved the idea of Fraser resisting is friend's advice. Even though Detective Vecchio had his good points, she grudgingly admitted, he was still a loud abrasive American. Besides, she was responsible for overseeing the protection of her associate, she told herself.

Fraser reached behind his back and pulled something out of his pocket an RCMP baseball cap, usually worn by the urban bike force.

"Excellent, RCMP affiliation and functionality, too. Of course, we will look like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, but we'll be able to spot each other in crowds, too." With a small smile, she reached into her voluminous purse and brought out her very own RCMP baseball cap. Clearly, there were times when one needed just a little bit of home to get through the day. . . .

As before, Meg cleaned up after breakfast, while Fraser gathered their folders together in preparation for heading out to the seminar. It was a bright, sunny warm typical September morning in central Florida, and he found himself staring out the window of their balcony at the seeming jungle beyond. He felt as though he'd been dropped on another planet. He kept having to do little reality checks, difficult since there was so little of his reality around right now. Turning he watched as Meg finished drying her hands. She smiled at him. He had a flash that perhaps this was really all a dream, and he was back at Cook County in a coma. He tried to remember if he'd been shot or sustained a serious concussion lately, perhaps been run over by a tourist bus on the Loop.

"What?" She asked, seeing him staring blindly at the picture of meerkats over the fireplace. He looked liked he'd gone somewhere and wasn't sure he liked it.

"I'm trying to determine if this is real or if perhaps I'm actually imagining all of this as I lay unconscious somewhere, and how I could ascertain reality." He admitted. She could understand his uncertainty.

"I know what you mean. But, I can assure you that you will have no doubt about reality once we go through that door. I suspect that even in your nightmares would you never imagine the climate that we are going to have to deal with here. I am concerned, Ben, that if the heat starts getting to you that you will let me know. I was raised in Vancouver and temperatures there tend to be fairly mild. I can't imagine what kind of shock this is going to be to someone raised in the Territories. So, please let me know if you start to feel the effects." She was truly concerned that he would refrain from telling her, and that she'd turn around and find him passed out on the sidewalk. He assured her that he would keep her informed. She had one last issue to address.

"So, are you ready for the sunblock?" We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Short, sweet, covers that awkward morning transition. The rapids are just ahead. . . .