Disclaimer: Standard Disclaimer. What 3rd season? If Ray was mine I´d only take him out on special occasions, like weekdays and weekends. Please send comments, questions, compliments, and otters to sdelcul@yahoo.com.

Author's Notes: I apologize for the list overload, but please bear with me (feel free to send angry emails and fling inanimate objects) until I catch up. Keep in mind that internet is a two hour bus ride away at the moment and I have to boil my water before it's safe to drink. Gotta love rural Ecuador!

Story Notes:

He almost hadn't realized the significance of the date at first. Then Rosa Vecchio mentioned last year's trip to visit her sister, and he was back in time. It wasn't the first time he'd lied to his mother, but that didn't mean he enjoyed doing it. He'd never told her the whole story, partly to protect Benny, but because he was still ashamed of his own actions. A year ago he'd shot his best friend in the back, and nothing had been the same since.

At the time, they'd been friends. Good friends. Best friends. But, just friends. Now, things were different. They could be more then just friends, maybe.

He just wasn't sure that Benny could return his feelings the way he wanted. It wasn't like in elementary school where you pulled the pigtails of the girl you liked; he'd shot the man. Or junior high where you passed her a note: Do you like me? Check yes or no. Or even high school where you got your friends to ask her friends what she'd say if you asked her out. He'd say yes, it was the next part that Ray questioned, the Happily Ever After. However much he wanted to believe, he'd been through the fairy tale before, and it had never ended well, just ended.

Benny just hadn't learned to hid his feelings, not from someone who knew him and was looking. He had feelings, but sometimes, and it was exactly these sometimes that were driving Ray insane, sometimes it seemed like they were both stuck in the past. Ray didn't want to be runner up. He'd fought to save his partner when Victoria showed up, not because he wanted to, but because no one else could. Even he had only managed not to hill him in the process. He'd been perfectly willing to let his best friend make a life with this woman, if she was good enough. Victoria wasn't good. Something inside of her was broken, leaving her not only incapable of truly loving Benny, but also leaving her just as obsessed with breaking him as he was with loving her.

It was that obsession he was still fighting now that Victoria was gone. If he thought for a second that she might come back, he'd hunt her down and put her in jail. Assuming that she didn't resist arrest. He wanted her to resist. But of course, he wasn't even sure that death would break this obsession. And that was the other problem. He didn't want to be last place in a relationship of three people. Nor did he want to win Fraser by default just because Victoria was physically out of the picture.

And he'd almost made peace with that, had almost resigned himself to being a friend if that was all he could have. There was still satisfaction to be had in life. But every now and then there'd be that big-eyed Mountie look. You're my best friend in the entire world and I believe in you and you can do anything, it said. It made him feel like Superman.

That look had sustained many wet dreams, caused more than a few unwieldy erections and just a few embarrassing moments. He couldn't give in to attraction, nor could he escape it every day.

He could take the overt approach and force Benny to decide what he wanted. He'd get all the right answers.

If Victoria Metcalfe came within range of him, Constable Fraser would arrest her. It was his duty. And then a part of him would curl up and die, just like it had when he arrested her the first time, and tried to the second. The list of other injuries was long, too long for Ray to intentionally add to it.

He knew that Benny had convinced himself that Victoria was an aberration, an anomaly. But he had been about to go with her, and while Ray had forgiven Benny everything, he hadn't forgotten and never would forget that he'd been second best. Fraser could promise the world, and sincerely he would mean every word, but it wasn't a promise he could keep, even if he knew how. For a man who was otherwise fairly self-aware, Benny had a lot invested in ignoring or denying his feelings.

Ray, perhaps more than most men, knew that you couldn't control or ignore feelings and desires. They'd always come back to get you in the end.

It was why he couldn't just ignore that Victoria was still coming between them. Ten years was a lot of history to compete with, leaving Ray in an uncomfortable position of being unable to change the past, unable to see the future, and unable to stand the present. It was now or never, and looking more and more like never.

He needed a break.

End Break Me by silvina: sdelcul@yahoo.com

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