Story Notes: Written in August 2007. Originally done as a comment!fic, very slightly cleaned up. Nothing deep here.

Ray is not a good person.

Because, if you're a good person, anything that makes someone who's--important to you, someone who--okay, someone you love. Anything that makes that person happy is supposed to make you happy for them, right? Even if it means they're being happy without you, that they'll never--

Well, Ray just isn't. Because he hates the fucking snow. They dropped into it from god knows what height and Ray thought he was gonna die fighting his way up and out of the stuff, and when he finally got up into the air and looked at Fraser, Fraser was smiling, and it was a new smile. One Ray hadn't seen before, and wasn't that a gut-kick of a surprise because he thought he knew the guy.

But no, it was a new one, blissed-out, lit-up; on anybody else it would have looked just-fucked. Looking around, at what?--at nothing, and looking like that, looking happy, looking like Ray was an idiot for ever thinking he'd maybe looked happy before.

And Ray hates the smile and hates the snow and the ice and the color white and any temperature below thirty-two degrees fahrenheit, and he hates any fucking temperature of celsius, at all.

And when the whole weird thing is over, when the killer of Fraser's mother is captured and all the other bizarreness is wrapped up, Fraser starts asking Ray if he meant that, about the adventure.

There's no way. There's no way Ray can do that, can tag along behind Fraser in the wilderness watching Fraser beam a stupid beautiful lovestruck smile at a bunch of frozen fluffy water.

So he says "No, sorry, I was out of my head a little there, Frase," and, because he is a rotten person, he enjoys that Fraser looks disappointed.

And he starts thinking about tomorrow, packing up and leaving. About tonight, lying next to Fraser in a tiny tent and trying not to do anything or say anything, because at least they can stay friends, at least he hasn't fucked that up.

But then realizes that he has. Because even though Fraser doesn't know how Ray feels, Ray knows exactly how Ray feels, and knows that he won't be able to go back to Chicago and leave Fraser here where he needs to be, and do any kind of friends thing that isn't completely half-assed and insulting to Fraser. Because Ray won't be able to stand it, calls and letters and visits every couple of years, so he'll sound weird on the phone and hang up too soon and cut letters back to postcards and then to seldom and then to never, and he'll let the visits not happen, and he's pretty much ruined this already just by being Ray.

So, because it's ruined anyway. Because he's blown this in a year, blown it before it ever even was an it--hey, since Stella he's gotten way more efficient--he might as well have something, something to remember and think about and jack off to, and he leans. Leans over toward Fraser, and closes his eyes so he can maybe keep going a few seconds after Fraser starts looking horrified. Puts his hands hard on Fraser's cheeks and kisses him.

He can hardly even feel it because he's trying so hard to remember all of it while it's happening, to store up the stubble and the soft, the salt of the lips and the sweet of the inside.

He pulls back, opens his eyes, opens his mouth to say, "Don't worry about it, I'm going, I'll send you a Christmas card," and looks at Fraser.

And wow. He really, really didn't know Fraser, because here's another one, another smile Ray's never met before, and if the snowsmile looked blissed out this looks--more and different, bigger and goofier but not so peaceful.

Not even a little peaceful, really, because Ray is pretty sure that along with the big happy and the big surprised in that smile, there's a pretty huge fuck-me, too. A definite order of a fuck-me, and Ray follows orders, because it turns out that he's a fairly decent guy after all.