Chapter Text
After they don't find the reaching out hand, and Fraser gets his new assignment...
("It would seem they're assigning me to...Mayo," Fraser had said, standing there in Frobisher's detachment, reading over his official transfer papers.
"Like you put on a sandwich?" Ray had said, because really? Just when Ray had gotten used to all the Forts and Bays and -uks and -iks, there went the Northwest Areas throwing him another weird place names curveball.
"No," Fraser had said, but he was smiling - maybe a little fondly - so Ray guessed that was okay. "Despite their congruent spellings, the man the town takes its name from, Alfred Mayo, had no particular connection to condiments. Quite the opposite, in fact - he was an acrobat who abandoned his career with the circus to explore western Canada and set himself up as a fur trader, and later the proprietor of a series of trading posts and the captain of the steamboat 'New Racket'..."
Ray had cut him off with, "Was there some biographical dictionary of the north you, like, swallowed as a kiid?"
"There was a children's 'Heroes of the Yukon' amongst the books in my grandparents' traveling library," Fraser had said, all primly.
"And you read it a bunch and imagined them writing you up like that someday."
"I would not have presumed -"
"You totally daydreamed about all the nice things they'd say about you and, and your team of sled dogs, and all the brave things you did and -"
"Ray," Fraser had said, really going pink in the cheeks -
- and Ray had laughed, maybe the last time he'd really laughed for a while.)
...Ray goes back to Chicago, where Welsh welcomes him back to the Two-Seven and partners him with Vecchio - and it's okay. It's fine. Vecchio grows on him the way most guys you get partnered with grow on you eventually.
He's not Fraser - they're not a duet - but Ray's not Fraser, either, and Vecchio at least gets how it might take some time to get used to partnering with *someone who isn't Fraser* again.
Really, the main upside is that Vecchio knows how to just...have an argument. He's sarcastic and he talks plenty of shit, but he says what he means - and Ray says shit right back and threatens to punch him in the head - so it works. They do work shit out. Eventually. None of this passive-aggressive, what do you mean we're arguing bullshit Fraser was a fan of.
Not that Vecchio really seems to *want* to argue the way Ray does, but at least he knows how, - he may start all their arguments by saying 'we're really doing this again? Why am I even surprised - of course we are...', but after that he's always good to go, and he gives as good as he gets.
Of course, Ray isn't the only one coming back to work after some time off. Vecchio's been 1) recovering from taking that bullet and b) spending some of that recovery time sitting on a beach in Florida, trying to drown his memories of the year-and-a-half he spent pretending to be a mob guy at the bottom of a bunch of ….whatever you drink on the beach in Miami. Probably something with a little umbrella in it. Also, he's started dating Stella
("It's just casual, so far" Vecchio had said, after they'd been on a third date, and were planning a fourth - which apparently made it enough of a thing to be worth the telling.
"Whatever," Ray had said, amused, because no it wasn't. Vecchio might not be a romantic the way Ray was a romantic, but you didn't say Stella's name like that if you weren't already kinda thinking things like next month, next Christmas, next year. "Have fun meeting my mom."
"We're not actually the same person, Kowalski," Vecchio had said, sounding annoyed - which at least proved that they weren't that serious, yet.
"No, but at least she'll never call out the wrong name in bed," Ray had said, and he didn't care if it was maybe an asshole thing to say. Vecchio would figure out about Stella's parents or he wouldn't. And also Ma Vecchio still seemed to like him best, for some reason, so Ray was clearly winning.)
Which is also fine. Actually fine. Ray has at least kinda made peace with the fact that somewhere between stalking Stella on her dates with Orsini and Vecchio returning from Vegas, his heart decided to switch allegiance entirely to the idiot in the red wool coat. Who went and took his half of the partnership and went home
And, okay, at first Ray had just accepted, face value, that Fraser staying in Canada was exactly what he said it was: a return to the place he'd spent the past five years missing, hail the conquering hero.
But you spend six, seven weeks out on the snowy ice-fields with a guy, seeing a whole lot of the Northwest Areas and sleeping in a barely two-person tent most nights, and, well, if you didn't know the other person before you did such a monumentally stupid thing, you're gonna know them better than you know yourself even by the end of it.
Or you'll think you do, at least.
What it tuns out is that Fraser is a letter-writing kind of guy. Which Ray is not in any way surprised by, given the whole thing where he spent a chunk of every day of their quest writing up the events of the day in a little leather-bound notebook. The first letter arrives a week and a half after Fraser leaves, and after that there's a letter a week, regular as clockwork. Ray isn't as good at writing back - mostly what he has to say is a) complaints about Vecchio and 2) complaints about the heat, and he's pretty sure Fraser doesn't want to hear much on either of those subjects. And anyway, his handwriting is shitty, and computers don't much like him, and any time he actually sits down planning to write, it's like everything he'd been thinking of telling Fraser goes flying right out of his head.
It's easier to split his free time between going to the gym and going a round with the heavy bag or getting a run in on the indoor track to burn off all this extra energy he seems to have in this world where he doesn't spend most days chasing after Fraser - and watching the Starsky & Hutch reruns that come on every day at seven PM.
And, okay, Ray hasn't really had a chance to rewatch much of it since he watched it religiously during its original run. But he'd be kidding himself if he tried to pretend that at least part of what he was hoping to get out of going to the police academy wasn't getting to be as cool as Starsky someday. Because nineteen year olds are D-U-M dumb. And Starsky is still just as cool as Ray thought he was back in the day, but it's funny looking at the way he acts from twenty, twenty-five years on.
He remembers thinking the guys were so *old* back when he was a kid just starting high school - hell, they'd been something like twice his age, real adults, but not the kind of boring old his parents were - and now he's got nearly a decade on them, well, they seem the kind of young Ray remembers feeling in the middle of the whole Botrelle mess.
And it's not like he's even that old - he's still got another couple years before he hits 40 - but it turns out there's nothing like re-watching a show you scheduled your week around back in high school to make you feel every single one of the years you do have on you. And not always in a bad way, either. There's nothing to do but laugh at some of the clothes, and remember the stuff his mom picked out for him, back before he was allowed to buy things for himself. And that leads to wondering what Fraser was like as a teenager, and whether any of this stuff made it all the way up to the Northwest Areas. When it dawns on him that he could just...ask, he goes scrambling for some paper and a ballpoint pen, and then he's scribbling out an apology for his handwriting and the beginning of the first letter he's actually wanted to write maybe ever:
I dunno - maybe this is a dumb question, but I got to wondering, so I guess I'm gonna ask: did your jeans have 'flares' on 'em, back when you were a kid in the 70s? 'Cos mine sure did - and some of the print shirts my mom bought me to wear with them -
...and somehow he ends up filling a whole sheet of notebook paper, front and back, talking about clothes of all the fucking things. Well, clothes and, like, the stuff they remind him of, and how he'd finally got a growth spurt at fourteen, and another one a couple years later, but he'd never really filled out much more (obviously, haha). And how, and maybe Fraser had guessed, but he'd started boxing when he was a kid because if he wasn't ever going to be big - and the answer sure seemed like a no on that one - then he figured he'd better get as strong as he could, and learn how to actually throw a punch. Dancing helped with the not getting tangled up in his own feet part, but ….
...by the time he's signing his name at the end, he's actually thinking he might want to do it again. See what makes him want to just...say things to Fraser. Dumb shit, but still. Stuff he's actually thinking that isn't about the weather or Vecchio. Though he guesses he could probably find a story to tell Fraser about Vecchio that isn't one long complaint if he tried, Or maybe Fraser actually would want to hear about how they fight over who gets to drive every single time they have to go somewhere.
Maybe Vecchio's already telling him that, if Fraser's writing him letters, too - not that Ray's gonna actually ask, or anything.
Fraser's next letter isn't a reply to Ray's - it was probably already on its way when Ray put his in the mail - so it's just more of the usual reports on Fraser's life in Mayo that Ray's been getting since the beginning. There's tourists getting themselves in trouble, Dief's adventures in northern junk food, something dumb one of his constables did (with no names named, because it's Fraser), the weather and other nature shit Fraser noticed, and even a detailed description of a repair Fraser had to make to one of their boats' motors. But, and Ray can't believe he didn't catch it before, there's even less of Fraser in the middle of all those stories than Ray'd been thinking.
He guesses he knows Fraser so well he'd just been filling in the Fraser bits where they shoulda been.
And he can do the same thing with this one, which is actually kinda fun, and means when he writes back this time, he's replying to all the stuff Fraser didn't say, and filling in around that with stuff the other stuff makes him think of. And who knows if anybody else would think it was a *good* letter, but he thinks - hopes - Fraser will. And he's definitely looking forward to hearing what Fraser will have to say about Ray suddenly managing to write him two letters in one week.
'Course, just about then they get the kind of case at the Two-Seven that means the whole work-life balance thing tips heavy over to the work side of things, and there's a week where he has to fight his VCR every couple days over recording the Starsky & Hutch episodes he's missing. Because he's not spending nearly every minute of the day he's awake in Vecchio's charming company just to miss the rest of Season 1.
And definitely not over some weird swimming pool vandalism thing that's apparently top priority because the pools belong to some guy the mayor's buds with - and also maybe it's Satanists?
"Of course it wasn't fucking Satanists," he says to Vecchio as they slump over their paperwork after it's all over except for the filing. "It's never fucking Satanists."
"Were you that stupid as a teenager?" Vecchio says, sounding just...completely done. "Because I'm pretty sure I wasn't. Don't get me wrong - I did plenty of dumb shit - who didn't? But…"
"But you never thought to yourself 'yep, what Chicago needs is some more Satanic Panic'? Yeah, me either." Ray shakes his head, stares down into his empty coffee cup, and sadly considers the idea that that's what getting old feels like. Like, even more than watching Starsky & Hutch reruns made him feel. Start thinking 'kids these days' and it's all downhill from there.
"Yeah," Vecchio says. "You almost done explaining in small words how we tracked down their spray paint supply and why red spray paint definitely doesn't look anything like any kind of blood, fake or real."
"To be fair, they hadn't invented Satanic Panic yet when we were kids," Ray says, as he writes another sentence on the subject of idiot teenagers dumb enough to do this flashy shit fucking designed to get attention and barely even try to cover their tracks. "But, yeah, as soon as I write the conclusion, I'm outta here."
"Hot date?" Vecchio says, because that's what he always asks whenever it seems like Ray might have plans. Which, okay, Ray's got a hunch is him feeling guilty over the whole Stella thing. Given the thing where they're still dating and the only relationship Ray has is with his own right hand.
"Just with a beer and the TV - and I might fall asleep on the TV." And he really might - it's been that long a week.
Vecchio makes a face at that, like he's maybe thinking that whatever he had planned, he's gonna have to scale back on it, too. "You ever think Fraser had the right idea, getting out of here?"
"What - getting away from all the weird city shit? Nah, I'm pretty sure that stuff just follows him around wherever he goes." And whatever else Vecchio might be asking, Ray's not answering.
'You're not wrong," Vecchio says, like there's a story there. But Ray's too tired to ask about it, and Vecchio clearly isn't in the mood to share with the class just 'cos.
"And on that note," Ray says, scribbling his name on the last line marked 'Investigating Officer - Signature', "Dot it, sign it, stick it in a box marked done." And then he's stacking it up with all the rest of their paperwork, sliding his chair back and grabbing his windbreaker.
Vecchio yells, "Frannie"
Frannie yells back, "What?"
And Ray gets the hell out of there. He'll see them when he sees them and not a minute sooner. Welsh definitely said he didn't want to see either of them around the Two-Seven before Monday, and Ray has no problem with taking full advantage of that, not after what they've spent the week dealing with..
'Course, he has no idea how much he's gonna end up taking advantage when he walks in the door to his apartment with a pizza and cracks open a beer - just that he's definitely gonna catch up on Fraser's letters and maybe follow that up with some Starsky & Hutch.
He's on his second slice of ham and pineapple and halfway through the beer when he gets around to fishing around in the pile of mail slowly taking over his coffee table. Turns out he's got two letters from Fraser waiting on a reply - and when he slits open the one with the earlier postmark, he gets a couple pages of Fraser getting into the spirit of the thing on the subject of the ridiculous fashions of their youth:
Most of my clothing, as a child, was purchased from the Hudson Bay Company catalog - and it, like your Sears Roebuck catalog, aspired to keep abreast of the latest trends. Which is all, I suppose, a long way of working my way around to saying that, yes, if there were any extant pictures of me as a youth, I might appear in them wearing flared jeans. Flared jeans and a turtleneck sweater and a ski jacket while I played pond hockey with my friend, Mark. Flared jeans and a plaid shirt while I sat reading a book from my grandparents' library. Flared corduroy trousers and a thick wool sweater on Christmas Day. And so on. That my grandmother - who purchased all our clothing - bought all these items for me says more about her eye for a good bargain than her eye for fashion. If the price had been right, and the construction sound, she would have sent me to school dressed head to toe in paisley. Fortunately for me, the stars never aligned on that possibility -
...and once he gets started, he doesn't have any trouble going on in that vein. There's a bit about the matching plaid wool shirt and flared trousers which Fraser categorically refused to wear as a set. And the tale of a pair of particularly eye-searing burnt orange corduroy pants he 'accidentally' turned into rags. He confesses that his own growth spurt was late in coming, perhaps because of the limited range of food available to the residents of the Territories - and that the possibility that it wouldn't troubled him more than he would've liked to admit. He admits to envying Ray his boxing club, as he had had no formal instruction in fighting prior to beginning his training at Depot. And for all that every sentence is a shade more formal than Fraser ever gets normally, he still manages to tell Ray more about him, the guy inside the Mountie uniform, in those brief pages than Ray's ever got out of him in a single conversation before…
Ray just sits there holding the second page, smiling, staring off into space, for a bit when he's done. Because, really, who knew? And, okay, Ray had had some idea, at least about the Fraser stuff - but the part where letters could be like that...nope. Not a clue. So he's definitely excited about the second letter even before he gets the envelope open and the page unfolded - and when he gets a look at the beginning of it and sees that it opens with an emphatic:
If you're going to insinuate things I never said -
...well, not to put too fine a point on it, he stops reading right there. Because of course Fraser's mad. He hates it when you notice he's having less than polite thoughts or any feeling that he hasn't decided he wants you to know about. And here Ray's gone and written him an entire letter noticing every single last piece of that shit there was to notice. It woulda been way more of a surprise if he hadn't been mad. And pissy may be one of Ray's favorite looks on Fraser, if he's being that kind of honest - pissy Fraser lets go a little, lets a little more of the messy stuff Fraser doesn't like to admit to show. And boy, howdy, does he have a tongue on him. But he hadn't been trying to piss Fraser off, not this time. So, no, he's not surprised by the short second letter…
...but he sure hopes Fraser gave his letter a second chance, read it again and saw that Ray hadn't actually been trying to make him mad. If he's real lucky, there's maybe another letter on its way, sent a day or so after the first one, covering all the stuff Fraser'd meant to tell Ray before Ray went and got a whole lotta messy instinct in his logic. It won't contain an actual apology, but that's okay. Ray doesn't want one.
If he's missing Fraser even more than usual, it's his own damn fault - but he got what he wanted, so he figures he'd make that bargain over again, given the chance.
And if he's gone and (temporarily) pissed off his partner, well, no reason to not spend the rest of evening watching a couple episodes of the show with the best fictional cop partnership Ray's ever seen. He didn't want to jinx things with Fraser when he was trying to sell him on them as a duet, but Starsky & Hutch were the guys who showed him what a duet could look like, made him want one of his own, made him want to give the thing with Fraser a real chance once he realized there was something there that ain't ever been there with any of his previous partners.
So, yeah, watching Starsky & Hutch do their thing sounds ike just what the doctor ordered.
And that means grabbing another slice of pizza and his beer - and cueing up the tape with Monday and Tuesday's episodes on it. When the opening credits start to roll, it turns out he's starting with Lady Blue - which begins with Hutch's car on fire and Hutch ranting abou how people can't just be reduced to numbers. And that gets him caught up in thinking about the day he met Fraser, when the Riv caught on fire and in the midst of having his life rearranged, Fraser up and said, for no damn reason, that people weren't interchangeable like snowmobile parts (duh!). He tunes back in when Starsky starts going off about how Dobey has to keep him on the case - and that's when he remembers that, oh, yeah, this is the one where Starsky's ex gets murdered on an undercover job, but because it's Starsky & Hutch, the murderer is a serial killer who doesn't know she's undercover.
And, jeez, that coulda been Ray a bunch of times the whole time he was partnered with Fraser - except it never was because he had a partner who was never gonna let him get killed, no matter how many times he risked Ray's life in wildly unusual ways.
Mostly it's them following leads and working on cracking the case after that, but there are a couple other moments that catch Ray up. There's Hutch saying that Starsky 'isn't the kind of guy women lose their jobs and fall into despair over', because shit, Starsky may not be, and Ray definitely isn't, but Fraser? Yeah, the jury's still out on that one when it comes to Ray. He's pretty sure there's only so much missing a person you can take before you just gotta do something to make the missing them stop. And couple that with the bit where they're walking in the park and Starsky mentions how he used to talk about getting married and having kids with the ex, and he asks if Hutch is surprised by that - and Hutch says 'no' - because of course that's the kind of thing Starsky wants and of course Hutch knows it...
….well, by the time the whole thing wraps up with Hutch putting on a candlelit dinner just for Starsky, making him pot roast from Starsky's own mom's recipe, really pulling out all the stops, Ray's definitely thinking things he never thought when he was a kid watching it all for the first time. Like, how if it had been Hutch doin' that for a girl, one of the love interest of the week characters, it'd be a date, for sure. Hell, the way Ray's looking at things, now, in this upside-down world where he's stuck on the dumb lug in red wool...it's still a date, no two ways about it. And if Hutch's technique is as good as it usually is, he's gonna get some, after.
Starsky sure doesn't look like he'd mind - and Ray definitely wouldn't if Fraser ever decided to pull the same trick.
And he rides that thought right into the beginning of the second episode on the tape, Captain Dobey, You're Dead. Which opens with a scene Ray can 100% imagine playing out with Fraser. Starsky and Hutch sit opposite each other at their desks in the bullpen, Hutch is clearly in a mood, and Starsky's needling him about it, trying to get him to admit that whatever's eating at him has something to do with the night before. And then Hutch busts out this whole speech about how Starsky being 'left-handed' is a problem and Starsky needs to get with the program and fix it. Except - and Ray definitely didn't catch this back when he was fourteen - there's no way 'left-handed' actually means left-handed. Particularly coming from Hutch. Who could really give Fraser a run for his money when it comes to hiding what you actually mean behind an extended conversation on a seemingly unrelated subject.
The rest of the plot's ridiculous - a whole convoluted scheme cooked up by a racist old rich guy to try and off Dobey, but make it look like a revenge killing. Obviously he's gonna fail in the attempt. Ray's just here to watch Hutch deal badly with this morning after - and it's clearly a morning after - where Starsky refuses to get on the same page as Hutch. And tops it all off by fucking fondling his gun at Hutch. Which, Stella had enough to say about phallic symbols by the end of their marriage that he's clear on the meaning of that, thanks. Ray's definitely with Starsky on that one.
But the way Hutch keeps coming back to the 'left-handed' thing all episode, and shutting Starsky down even aside from that, that's a big 'ol flashing neon DO NOT ENTER sign of a message he's sending - and Starsky's just sitting back and letting him, like he doesn't think there's any point to ever trying to change the way their story goes.
And sitting there, watching the episode wrap over the guys having a moment with Dobey's young daughter, it hits him smack dead between the eyes: Ray's done bein' Dave Starsky on this one. He's done letting Fraser pretend there's nothing to see here. Because when it comes right down to it, to use Hutch's metawhatsit, they're each 'left-handed' in their own way. Fraser's a freak and Ray's a con job, and Ray can't see any good reason why they shouldn't take a chance on being a freak and a con job, y'know, together. So he guesses it's a good thing Welsh doesn't expect to see him any time before Monday, because he's about to book a whole bunch of expensive one-way plane tickets and take off to do something dumb on a hunch..