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      	  Wink 
 by spuffyduds	

 Disclaimer: I only dream of these guys, I didn't dream them UP.

 Author's Notes: Originally done for the LiveJournal ds_shakespeare
challenge, for the prompt of "I have not slept one wink."

 

 He was glad to give up a little sleep, to help Ray out and to be near
him. Ray was on a low-level Mafioso stakeout, and Fraser sat in the car
with him for hours at a time, playing twenty questions, handing him
sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Ray always lifted up the bread to look
at the sandwich filling before he took a bite, and Fraser amused himself
by wondering if he had gotten unpleasant surprises in his lunch bag as a
child, or if that was a more recent Fraser-induced paranoia, if he was
checking for window putty.

 He never asked, because it seemed odd and-sentimental.

 The one or two days Welsh had been sure it would take turned into five
days, six, seven. And Ray kept asking him if he was okay, because Ray was
able to sleep well into the morning after knocking off the stakeouts at
two a.m., but Fraser was up and about early on consulate duty.

 "I'm fine, Ray," he said, over and over. "I don't really have a normal
need for sleep." What he needed, what he couldn't tell Ray, was to keep
doing this, to keep sitting beside him in the dark, watching him fidget.

 But he was prevaricating a bit, because as the week wore on with three or
four hours of sleep a night, he was not entirely fine. He was, on
occasion, catching himself staring off into nothing and forgetting to
blink. He was beginning to feel...glazed. Like donuts, he thought. Fried
and glazed and sprinkled, beware of Dief, and he laughed out loud at how
jagged and jangled his thoughts were getting.

 And then realized that he'd just laughed really loudly. And that, for
quite some time now, while he was assuming he was staring off into a
distant nothing, he'd really been staring at a quite near Ray. Who was
looking worried.

 "Fraser, buddy, we gotta get you home," Ray said, but then there was a
noise up ahead of them and they were both out of the car and sprinting,
Ray with his gun out yelling "Hands up in the air!" and Fraser realizing
that this time if Ray derailed midway through the Miranda warning, he
couldn't remember it either.

 The mobster they'd been waiting for proved anticlimactic, however; he
threw his hands up, looked wistfully at the front door of his girlfriend's
apartment building, and said, "Well, fuck." Ray Miranda-ed like a
champion, and within the hour they'd dropped their man off with the night
lieutenant, promised full paperwork the next day, and were back in the
car, taking Fraser home.

 At some point in the short ride, he fell hard asleep. He woke up,
partially, when the car stopped, to find himself in that odd state of
being awake and aware but unable to move; this brief sleep-paralysis had
on previous occasions panicked him slightly, hitting when he was
alone-even though he knew what was happening, he had uncomfortable
thoughts of his time after the plane crash, when he was unsure if his legs
would ever work again. But this time it was fine, Ray was right there,
everything was fine.

 He could feel Ray leaning toward him, reaching across him to unlock his
door. Ray was going to come around and help him out of the car because he
was so sleepy.

 Kind Ray, Fraser thought muzzily, and then Ray was leaning back toward
his own side, and Fraser could feel the heat of Ray's arm passing in front
of his face again, going away, and he couldn't bear it, so much could not
bear it that he snapped all the way awake; his eyes flew open and he
grabbed Ray's hand with both his, pulled it to his mouth and kissed the
inside of the wrist right where it was most pale and tender and soft,
before he could stop himself, before he could get another thought through
his muddled brain.

 As soon as he knew what he was doing he stopped doing it. Pulled his lips
away from the soft hot skin. Ray was sitting quite still, really
remarkably still for Ray, just looking at him, and Fraser realized that he
hadn't released his hard grip on Ray's hand. "I'm sorry," he whispered,
and let it go. 

 Ray pulled his hand back; moved it toward Fraser again, stopped; dropped
it to the seat between them. 

 "Fraser," he said. "Are you thinking straight?" Then Ray closed his eyes
and laughed, and Fraser stared at his lashes all he wanted to, because he
was already discovered, he was undone, he might as well look all he could
before Ray very gently and kindly turned him down. He wasn't even sure
what he'd been offering. "Sorry," Ray said. "Bad choice of words there. I
mean, are you--impaired?"

 "I don't know," he said honestly.

 Ray nodded, scratched at the back of his head, kept looking at Fraser.
His hand resting on the seat was twitching a bit. "I'm trying to care
about whether your brain is working right or not," he said. "I think it
would be, you know, honorable to care. You'd probably care, if you were
me." He cocked his head, considered Fraser some more. "I think I don't
care," he said.

 He slid across the seat, put both his hands on Fraser's cheeks, and
kissed him. 

 *****************************************************

 The next week was gloriously sleep-deprived. They worked their regular
shifts and ate their regular dinner together, and then (most new, most
irregular) they kissed for hours. In the car in the dark, on Ray's sprung
and lumpy couch, on Fraser's creaking cot. Some nights slow and lingering
and langorous, some nights fierce kissing, with tongues and teeth and
gasping.

 Parts of Fraser were beginning to suggest that they should move on to
additional activities. He would pull back from Ray's mouth to breathe, to
look at Ray in the half-light, look at Ray looking back at him, and think,
yes, more, anything, everything.  And then think, I don't know how to do
everything, I don't know how to do any of this particular everything, I
don't know if he knows how to do any of it because we haven't been
talking, we've just been kissing, and kissing is good. We should kiss some
more.

 Ray seemed to be trying to make sure Fraser got enough sleep. If they
were at his apartment he'd nudge Fraser (groaning, complaining) up off the
couch, into his car, take him home. If they were at the consulate he'd
pull himself (groaning, complaining) off the cot, walk backwards to the
door grinning, and go home in plenty of time for Fraser to rest up.

 The problem was that after he left he was still there. Fraser could smell
him on the pillow, and the sheets, and most distractingly on his own skin.
And everything that he'd tamped down with more kissing would become
rampantly untamped.

 Every night, mere minutes after Ray left, he'd find himself scrambling
frantically out of his pants. It never took long, not after the kissing;
all he had to do was squeeze and pull and think, would Ray like this?
Would my hand work for Ray, just like this? And he didn't know, but it
worked for him. 

 He'd come hard, and start to relax and drift, and then, every time, just
on the edge of sleep, snap back awake. Because his hand and stomach were
drying sticky, and he couldn't possibly go to sleep quite this-debauched,
what if Turnbull or Thatcher came in early and smelled him? And it was
just-unfinished, wrong, like leaving dishes in the sink.

 So he would stumble to the shower, and by the time he got done he'd be
fully awake again and thinking about Ray. He was lucky if he managed an
hour or two before his alarm went off.

 He was in a constant daze. His lips were sore and his face was
chapped-Francesca kept offering him lip balm and moisturizer. He was
clumsy and forgetful, and sometimes the punctuation on the consulate forms
would float up off the page and do a little midair dance for him. Dief was
quite sarcastically dismissive of his current mental capacity, and he was
starting to feel like the orbits of his eyes were lined with ground glass,
and he was very happy.

 ****************************************************************

 On Friday Fraser left the consulate precisely at 5 p.m., even though he
was still in the midst of a seemingly endless series of questions from a
female American tourist. (Who had kept touching his arm, and who, he
suspected, did not actually need the answers to any of the questions she'd
been asking him for an hour.) He handed her off to Turnbull with a clear
conscience, because for once, Turnbull was likely to be more helpful than
he was. He was so groggy, and his head was so full of Ray, that he was
fairly certain he had told the woman that Canada's main export was giant
carnivorous radishes. 

 Friday was the first night of-whatever this was-that they were both free
the next morning. Fraser resolutely refused to let himself speculate about
what that might mean, but to his own surprise, he stepped outside the
consulate and hailed a cab.

 Once in the station, he waved at Ray, who looked at his watch, mimed
astonishment, and started to get up from his desk. But a moment later
there was a hubbub near the door, and Fraser turned because one of the
female voices was oddly familiar. 

 The hubbub was a dozen or so people in dark suits, federal agents of some
sort, and now he remembered the mention of an upcoming "interagency
intergovernment play-well-with-others blah blah blah workshop" which Ray
was extremely grateful not to have been assigned to, but that voice, who
was...

 He spotted her face. "Agent Cortez!" Fraser said delightedly, but as soon
as he stopped trying to recognize her voice he heard what she was actually
saying to her companions, which was something about homemade land mines
and Vecchio and oh. Oh no.

 Ray arrived beside him at the same second that Agent Cortez spotted him.
"Fraser!" she said, smiling hugely. "Where's-"

 "AgentCortezofcourseyouremembermypartnerRayVecchio!" Fraser interrupted
frantically, gesturing at Ray.

 She blinked at him and turned to look at Ray.

 Ray gave her a blazing smile. "Hey, been a long time," he said. And
winked. It was, Fraser thought, an unnecessarily slow wink.

 Agent Cortez shook herself and said, "Well. You...haven't changed a bit.
Ah, Fraser, I had something I wanted to ask you about..."

 She dragged Fraser around the corner and into the supply closet (he found
himself vaguely wondering how she knew where it was, but this was hardly
the time to ask.) "Okay," she said. "WHAT?!?"

 He gave her a quick precis, details and geography omitted, of the first
Ray's current assignment. "And thank you for being-fast on your feet," he
added. "And, please, continue not to mention that the current Ray is, uh,
ersatz, in front of people whose level of trustworthiness has not been
established."

 "Right," she said. "Well. I've been talking you guys up for an hour,
here, it's going to look weird if I don't invite you out to dinner with us
like I said I would."

 Fraser hesitated. Of course the original Ray's cover must be maintained
at any cost, but whether or not he and the new Ray could maintain the
fiction over the course of a dinner was... Was not remotely in question,
he told himself sternly; he would have plenty of time to brief Ray on
their previous "acquaintance" on the ride to the restaurant. The only
reason he was hesitating was eagerness to get Ray alone, and that was an
unacceptable, self-centered reason.

 ******************************************************

 That would have been a perfectly fine reason, he thought an hour later.
Anything would have been a perfectly fine reason not to be suffering
through this dinner. Not to be watching Anita and Ray.

 Ray was having no trouble maintaining his cover-any time one of the feds
asked about the earlier case, he would just shrug and smile and duck his
head and Anita would say, "Oh, see, he wants to look modest but he wants
me to tell about it!" and start talking again about how smart and brave
and funny Ray had been.

 Well, not this Ray, but it was this Ray she was leaning closer to when
she talked, tipping her head toward his and laughing low. Ray was doing it
back, and Fraser found himself replaying that wink over and over in his
head, that wink that was considerably more lascivious than it had to be.
It was becoming obvious to him that Anita had had, as they say, a thing
for Ray, and was even now developing a thing for Ray, and Ray seemed to be
falling back into the thing even though it hadn't been his thing in the
first place, and Fraser was quite sure he wasn't thinking straight, and
should probably go home.

 He stood up, abruptly, and everyone stopped talking, and looked at him.
"I'm-I'm very tired," he said, "and I need to go home."

 He kept fairly upright until he made it out of the restaurant and then he
could feel his gait descend into a disheveled shamble.

 He was going at about half his usual speed; he wanted this day to be
over, but his legs weren't cooperating. Not that it mattered all that
much, he thought; not that the day would really be over once he got back
to the consulate. He was fairly certain that he'd be awake the rest of the
night again, but not with the pleasant pictures of Ray in his head that
he'd had lately. He wouldn't get forty winks, he wouldn't get one wink,
because he'd be seeing that wink, again and again, that laughing and
leaning into Anita; a more realistic picture of Ray, no doubt. A picture
of Ray when he wasn't-having a dry spell with women, or temporarily
insane.

 He'd only made it a couple of blocks when Ray pulled the car up next to
him. "Hey," Ray said. "Couldn't wait, huh? How were you gonna get into my
place without keys?"

 "I was going to the Consulate," Fraser said stiffly.

 "Uh-wrong direction, Frase," Ray said, and gave him a worried look.

 "Oh," Fraser said. His legs stopped walking but his torso seemed to think
there should still be forward momentum, and made him sway in place
slightly.

 "Get in the car, I'll take you to my place. You can crash better in my
bed than in the Consulate, right?" Ray said, and added, more softly, "We
don't have to-you can just sleep, okay?"

 "No thank you," Fraser said, but he was suddenly, for once, very tired of
walking. "But could you take me to the Consulate, please?"

 "Sure, hop in."

 Fraser climbed in, and Ray started driving, and noticeably failed to turn
around. Fraser waited through four intersections, and then said, "Ray?
Consulate?"

 "Lied," Ray said cheerfully, and kept driving.

 When they reached his apartment Fraser sat down on the couch and took his
boots off, which afforded him several minutes of not looking at Ray, and
then stretched out . He threw his forearm over his face and silently
begged Ray: just go in your room, just go to bed, don't make me talk.

 "Hey, what's that about?" Ray said. Of course.

 "Tired," Fraser said.

 "I get that. But you can't possibly be comfortable. C'mon, get in bed,
stretch out," and Ray was sliding an arm under him and lifting and shoving
and nudging until he had Fraser up and walking.

 "What," he said in Fraser's ear, in a flirting teasing tone that was most
unfair considering he'd been using the same tone on Anita an hour ago,
"you think you're so hot I can't leave you alone to let you sleep for a
few hours?" and then the bed was behind Fraser's knees and Ray gave him a
shove and he dropped gracelessly. The surprise of the mattress impact
knocked out his last bit of self-control and he snapped, "I'm sure you
have no trouble leaving me alone." 

 "What?" Ray said, and sat down next to Fraser on the bed. The mattress
dipped and tilted Fraser toward him, and even a few inches away, Ray was
very warm. "What are you talking about?"

 Fraser slid away from Ray's heat. "That doesn't need exploring at-"

 "I am exploring it, Fraser," Ray said. "I am exploring the hell out of
it. I am drawing maps and I am planting a fucking flag.
What...are...you...talking...about?"

 "You." Fraser said. "She..." He seemed to have lost his verbs.

 "Cortez?!?" Ray said. "Christ, are you jealous?" And started laughing.
Which was too much. Really too much for Fraser, and he would have stood up
and left if Ray's hand hadn't started moving through his hair. 

 "Fraser. C'mon. I was maintaining cover. You told me to maintain cover."

 "I didn't tell you to enjoy it so much! And to wink like that!"

 "Like what?"

 "That was lewd."

 "That was the exact same wink I gave you the first time I saw you! Did
you think that one meant, 'Come on, baby, let's fuck on Welsh's desk!'? It
did not! It meant, 'Undercover, here, work with me!' Just like this one
did!"

 "It didn't look the same at all."

 "Yes, it did, you were just TRANSLATING IT WRONG!"

 "WELL I'M SORRY I DON'T SPEAK EYELID!"

 "WHAT ARE WE ARGUING ABOUT?!?"

 "I DON'T KNOW!"

 Fraser started to sit up and leave, but Ray was all over him suddenly.
Ray seemed to have gotten stronger recently, or grown more arms; in any
case he was somehow simultaneously pinning Fraser and pulling down his
pants. And boxers. And then his hand was wrapped around Fraser's cock,
moving, and Fraser stopped trying to leave at all.

 "Listen," Ray said, and stroked, and cupped. "Pay attention," he said,
squeezed, pulled. "Was I doing this to Cortez?"

 "Well, technically," Fraser gasped, "you--oh!--you couldn't do-"

 Ray suddenly squeezed just a little too hard, and Fraser shut up.

 "Are you done being an idiot?" Ray said.

 "I think so, yes," Fraser said.

 "Good," and Ray went back to the lovely things he'd been doing. It was
inexplicable, really, how much better it was than Fraser touching himself;
he'd been doing that for years, he ought to be the expert on it by now,
but when he closed his eyes and thought, my god, this is Ray, this is
RAY'S hand on me, it was so much better that he couldn't make it last,
couldn't wait, he was bucking up into Ray's hand and moaning and coming
all over his stomach and Ray's wonderful hand and, no doubt, his uniform
tunic.

 He felt all his muscles going lax, the familiar pull of sleep, and fought
back hard, because he certainly had to do something about his uniform,
sponge it off at least, make it decent enough to even show to a dry
cleaner, and besides he couldn't fall asleep in Ray's bed like this with
his pants and boxers down around his knees and a sticky mess everywhere,
he looked ridiculous. He tried to sit up but Ray was all around him now,
an arm under his neck and one across his chest, a leg flung across
Fraser's thighs, and Ray was whispering in his ear, "Let go, let go..."
Which was ludicrous, what was he talking about, Fraser just had, how could
he possibly let go more than coming all over himself, and he needed to get
up and fix things but Ray was warm and heavy and pressing everywhere,
whispering let go, and something somewhere unclenched or uncoiled or
unsprung and Fraser went limp, dropped into a dream, and Ray was wrapped
around him there too.  
  

End Wink by spuffyduds 

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