"Second Thoughts"
By Viridian5
9/30/00

RATING: R; Fraser/Kowalski. If m/m interaction bothers you, walk away now.
SPOILERS: "Odds," "Easy Money"
SUMMARY: Ray's the one who was injured, but Fraser's dealing with a related pain all his own.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Hexwood and Serge. If some kind person feels that this story is appropriate for DSX and wouldn't mind posting it, that would be great as well. Anywhere else too, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com
DISCLAIMERS: All things due South belong to Alliance no matter how much I want Ray K to belong to me. No infringement intended. Suing me would be a waste of time. Besides, I'd just kick you in the head.
NOTES: This is a companion story to "Enabling." Read-through by Te.
#2 in the Thinking Twice series

===================
"Second Thoughts"
By Viridian5
===================

Ray had his hand on my shoulder to comfort me and stop my late-breaking shivers. To comfort me, after everything he'd suffered tonight. I turned my head so I could feel the living warmth of his skin against mine. His other hand stayed wrapped around my hand, making him stand so close to me that he could embrace me if he moved further forward. If his head and neck injuries hadn't made him stiff and too sensitive to touch. I squeezed his hand again and opened my eyes to look directly at his battered face. "I swear to you, Ray, that I will endeavor to deserve your trust." God knew I didn't deserve him.

His mouth twitched upward in a little smile. It looked painful. "That's all I need to hear."

If my own conscience hadn't succeeded in rightly tormenting me for my actions tonight, the sight of his face would take up the slack. Ray's ordeal had swollen his face on one side, making it look as if he wore a misshapen mask. That the other side retained its usual, angular shape only made the total package worse to see somehow. The broken blood vessels under his skin and in his left eye gave him the look of something that had been repainted, badly, as well as warped. He'd been defaced. He couldn't even move with his usual, perpetual, jittery energy, instead holding himself motionless in place to avoid jarring his head.

He could have been paralyzed.

He could have died.

And it was all my doing, my fault. I hadn't dropped the crate on his head, but my careless disregard for his safety and my lust for the hunt had led to it. That I had only the best intentions amounted to little when compared to the damage done.

I'm aware that people consider me to be logical, methodical. Yet it was my partner, thought impetuous and reckless by so many, who'd suggested we wait for backup. Ray often functioned as the voice of sense in such situations. I'd refused to heed his caution. These men had stolen the museum's art treasures and intended to sell them into unscrupulous private hands, robbing the public. They had to be stopped immediately.

I didn't give it a second thought. I barely even waited for Ray to follow me. Like a hound with the scent of his prey in the wind, in my exhilaration at the nearing conclusion of the chase I charged forward almost mindlessly.

Into disaster and nearly tragedy.

We split up to cover the vast expanse of space inside the warehouse. I thought nothing of it until ten minutes later when I heard Ray's cry of surprise and then pain from across the room and ran toward it. I didn't let myself think about what it might mean. I couldn't. Seeing Ray lying motionless under the large crate and the corpse of one of the two criminals left me chilled and frightened. Thank God he'd started to move and moan after that moment. I noticed the perpetrator escaping but had no time for him--though Dief left in pursuit--as a rush of adrenaline gave me the strength to yank the crate off my partner. The broken corpse, which had probably saved him, lying atop his I threw aside as quickly.

My fault.

I crouched next to him and resisted the urge to turn him over so I could see all of his face. I couldn't tell how much of the blood on and spattered around him belonged to him. The corpse atop him had been a mess, and I knew head injuries bled completely out of proportion to how large the wound was. I told myself these things to remain calm and avoid envisioning Ray's face laid open in an area I couldn't currently see.

Ray groaned and said, "I can't believe it hurts worse with the crate off."

Ray actually handed me his cell phone and said that he thought he might need an ambulance. I knew him to be badly injured when he wouldn't move anything other than that arm since usually you couldn't keep him still.

Diefenbaker returned after I finished that call and one to Lieutenant Welsh. The criminal had slammed the door in front of Dief and escaped.

"We get the guy?" Ray asked.

"No, Ray."

"Don't worry. We'll clean his clock later on."

That wouldn't be the last time that he tried to comfort me.

With the both of us unwilling to risk damaging him further by moving him, I spoke to his back and the visible right side of his face during the agonizing wait for the ambulance. Ray joked with me, but I could hear the pain in his voice. I tried to keep the terror out of mine, but the guilt leaked through. I could hear it.

Huey, Dewey, and Lieutenant Welsh arrived just before the ambulance did and agreed to take Diefenbaker home while I went to the hospital with Ray. Welsh commended us on retrieving the stolen paintings, but I had too much of my attention on Ray as the emergency medical technicians put a cervical collar around his neck and strapped him to a backboard for transport to do more than murmur positive sounds back to Ray's commanding officer. At least I could see Ray's face now and noticed no serious open wounds, though the swelling had already started. Most of the blood on him seemed to be the criminal's.

Still, he was in a collar and strapped to a backboard, barely able to move.

"We'll find the bastard who did this, Constable," Welsh said.

"I'm sure it will please Ray to know that, sir."

When we reached the hospital and finally had a doctor attend to Ray, my guilt increased. We had seen this doctor a few times before, and she greeted him by saying, "I thought I told you I didn't want to see either of you back here."

"Yer too charming, doc," Ray answered. "I needed an excuse to see you again."

Doctor Takeshi gave me a look that seemed to see down into my soul and know that if not for me, Ray wouldn't be injured now.

At least he didn't look quite so bad once she'd cleaned the blood from his face to see his injuries better. Most of it had been from the other man.

As we waited for Ray to be admitted for X-rays, I talked to distract him. I didn't want him to worry about what the X-rays might find or to go crazy from boredom. He told me that he'd be counting the holes in the ceiling tiles if I hadn't been there. While they'd unstrapped him from the backboard, he still wore a movement-restricting cervical collar. He fidgeted as best he could regardless, but looking around the room remained out of his reach. To my shame, I stared at the white expanse of collar the whole time so I wouldn't see his damaged and misshapen face.

That our talk also distracted me from brooding was an undeserved side effect. Not that I didn't manage to slip some brooding in now and then. How many times had I seen Ray Vecchio in a hospital gown after one of our cases or my crusades had taken its toll on him? Now my new Ray suffered the same. Again.

At one point Ray told me an Inuit story of his own, sharing the tale of Eskimo Joe. When I told him that "Eskimo" is a pejorative term, he told me that it wasn't his fault that Joe had named himself that. When I asked why Eskimo Joe had a habit of throwing walruses over his head, he answered, "The people in yer stories do bizarre things all the time, but I have to explain mine? Unfair. Okay, okay. See, his father and his father's father and so on all threw walruses over their heads, so it's tradition, but the origin of the practice was lost in, uhm, antiquity."

Ray refused to let me call his parents, saying he'd tell them after he found out what the X-rays had to say. No reason to worry them yet. I had a sudden mental image of myself calling Mrs. Kowalski to tell her that her son had died because I was a reckless idiot.

The X-rays showed no broken bones, and Doctor Takeshi didn't think he had a concussion, so she released him from the collar and the hospital, though she told him he should have someone wake him every hour in case he had a concussion after all. I volunteered, then called a cab for us while Ray received the prescription he'd have to fill tomorrow for a painkiller.

Ray said nothing during the ride home, simply lying back against the front seat's headrest looking tired and beaten. He put his happy face back on when we reached his apartment, saying that he had to find a way to buy some pudding since his head hurt so much that chewing would be out of the question. "You can't argue with an excuse to eat pudding all the time, Fraser," he said. "And don't you tell me that baby food would be healthier, because there's no way in hell I'm eating that. I found a plus to all this, and I'm going with it."

"I wouldn't dream of it, Ray."

Ray refused my offers of help, preferring to navigate his apartment without my guiding hand on his arm and saying that he could undress and dress himself for bed. He did let me choose a T-shirt with a badly stretched neck for him, though I couldn't help believing that he did that to make me feel better.

"What's with the nightlight, Fraser?"

"It's for me, so I can check in on you without hurting the both of us."

"That's cool then." He smiled and started to shake his head, but quickly stopped when the motion pained him. He gritted his teeth and said, "Started to feel like a baby."

Watching him try to find a comfortable position for his head on the pillow proved to be another kind of torture. "If I could take some of your injuries on myself, I would."

"Only some? That's not buddies."

For the first four hours he really didn't need me to wake him since he slept not at all. The cadence of his breathing told me that even though I stayed in the living room when I wasn't checking on him. It impressed me that he didn't strike out in his growing irritation with his pain, his inability to sleep despite his fatigue, and my unnecessary hourly visits. Similar situations had made me quite unpleasant to be around in the past.

A little while after my third visit I heard his breathing settle into the pace of sleep and sighed in relief. And continued to use my time in the living room to castigate myself. I'd been here before. Every time I swore I wouldn't needlessly endanger my partner again. Every time I ceased to think and just threw myself in, giving no thought to the threat my partner faced.

I think Ray would walk through Hell for me. He'd already flung himself through glass a number of times. Why did I keep forcing him into situations where he had to do it?

About 40 minutes later I heard moaning from his bedroom and rushed in, not knowing if the pain had finally overwhelmed him or if he suffered through a nightmare. As I watched him twist and writhe, I came closer, prepared to wake him up. I stopped when I saw how he was moving, the way his head fell back and his back arched, the flex of his long fingers, the curve of his lips.... I stopped when I smelled the rich scent of his musk.

Knowing that I had no right to be watching this, I backed away until I stood in the doorway. I should have left the room entirely, but I was obsessed by the thought that this was how he would move, this was how he would sound. I wanted to be the person inspiring this, wanted to be the one arousing him as the sight and scent and sound of him aroused me. I couldn't look away.

"No, it's great. I'm good," he moaned suddenly in a voice thick with sex, and I was lost. Arousal hardly caused a loss of all motor function, but what I faced at that moment certainly felt like it.

He cried out as he achieved orgasm, and I felt an answering pull within myself. I needed to leave and stroke myself to my own release. I had to be clear-headed when I returned to wake him instead of stupid with lust.

Lust left me so stupid that it took me some time to realize that he was awake and staring at me. I started to apologize, but he forestalled me by standing up and nearly falling over. It looked like he did it on purpose to distract me.

Ray should have been angry with me--I almost wanted him to be--but he still tried to make me feel better. He tried to deflect me further by joking about what had happened to him, then told me he wanted to use the bathroom. When I still didn't move to let him pass, he told me that he didn't need me to carry him in or clean him up, then looked horrified and fled to the bathroom as quickly as he could while still keeping his head level.

The conversation that ensued once he felt ready to face me again.... This time he accepted my apology and, to my relief, held me responsible for my actions. I resolved once again to take better care, to refuse to recklessly endanger him in bizarre ways. He told me that he knew that running in as my backup helped me to continue behaving as I did, but he couldn't risk me being hurt by refusing to back me up. I could swear that I heard love in his voice, maybe even a love like what I felt for him....

Now was not the time for confessions of love. Not that kind of love.

I wanted to touch him but didn't dare, and not for the usual reasons. I simply didn't want to add to his pain. All right, maybe it was close to my usual reason.

What he told me confirmed that I would have to change my behavior by myself, which was as it should be. Then he forgave me.

How could he possibly?

I would endeavor to deserve his trust. He'd walk through Hell for me, and I loved him. How could I do any less?

More Viridian5 stories can be found in The Green Room at http://members.tripod.com/~drovar/viridian/
Fandoms represented: due South, Hard Core Logo, Twitch City, X-Files, Once a Thief, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, Angel, Two Guys and a Girl (was Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place), X-Men (comics), Doctor Who