Levers and pulleys

Rating: PG

Summary: Fraser lives inside his own head, and it's an odd spot.

Could be considered a prequel to "Life, Liberty, and. . ." if you are of gen persuasion, or as a prequel to "Midnight Hour" if you're a slasher.

Set after Burning Down the House, just before Eclipse. I am making the assumption that Fraser discovered RayK's real name before Ray tells him.

Beta-read with skill and subtlety by Sandy Steiner, Meghan Black, Kellie Matthews, Melissa, and Maxine. Encouragement by Maxine.

I write this stuff for love. You couldn't pay me enough to do this for money. They belong to Alliance.

My grandfather once told me, "Give me a lever, and a place to stand, and I can move the world." He was talking about how we'd used mechanical advantage to remove the tilt from a neighbor's old barn. I was delighted with his wit. Only long after his death did I discover that the idea had originated with Archimedes.

Nevertheless, it has remained a touchstone of my life. A lever and a place to stand. I stand on my convictions and I have a lever, which is all my strength of muscle, heart, and brain. I have yet to move the world, but for a good cause I will always try.

Everything else that I do, that I am, branches off of this. I've learned to focus my will, to become an officer of the law in the first place, and then to maintain the right. And for more personal goals, to play guitar, to learn to navigate the Chicago public transit system. To discover the true name of the man who is posing as Ray Vecchio. I know that I give the impression of confidence, even when trying new and risky things. I am not confident that I will succeed, merely sure that I am correct to try.

Gerard, damn his black heart, told me that Chicago would eat me alive. It did not, merely because I knew where to place my feet. Well. Also because I found a guide. Or, to be more accurate, Ray Vecchio found me, sought me out time and again, became invaluable to me, and offered me his friendship.

Ray is a good man, and a good detective. And a very good friend. We fit together easily, not always frictionlessly, but comfortably, as though we were brothers. I still wonder why he took me under his wing in the first place -- I have noticed that most of his friends are very unlike me. I am an aberration in his world.

I am an aberration in this world. Not just Chicago. I know this. I try not to brood about it. I can still hear my grandmother: "Brooding is for hens. Get to work." Very often, she would follow the strict words with an unspoken kindness. After dinner she might open a tin of cookies, or the next morning I'd find my knife and axe newly sharpened.

I lie on my cot, in my office and new home, and miss her, miss both my grandparents, with a deep ache. I fit into their world, not always gracefully and not always gratefully, but I had a place there. I was always a bit odd, but then, everyone had their oddities, and we adjusted accordingly. I was not a freak.

To Stanley Raymond Kowalski, I am a freak. An aberration. A sport of nature.

I cannot seem to settle comfortably this evening. I've tossed off the covers, now I pull them back up, feeling the chill.

I miss Ray Vecchio. My friend. I wish I could build the same easy friendship with Kowalski, and I will certainly try, with all my strength. My circumstances in the city are difficult enough; I'd rather not try to live here without a friend. But even in the handful of days since we met, there is already a strange energy between us, a tension, that I haven't encountered in my other relationships. Perhaps it is merely part of his character, the same energy that keeps him moving, restlessly fidgeting, focusing outwards.

If I am like a lever, Kowalski is more like a top: as long as he is spinning he is stable. I wonder if he would wobble if he slowed down, or whether he merely thinks that he would. He appears to operate by intuition, but while I'm used to Ray's hunches, Kowalski's a-logical thinking seems much more focused and completely unpredictable to me. His leaps of faith catch me off balance. Perhaps a better metaphor for him would be a pulley inside a black box. I have no idea how he is rigged. Pull the rope in one direction, and the responding force might be in any direction at all, even directly counter to the original tug.

I'm already fond of him. I am also uncomfortable about that, because I need him, and I must know that my own needs aren't coloring my perceptions unduly. I don't have other people to support me. My family is dead, and although I am pathetically grateful for my father's presence in my life -- whether as a real spirit or a delusion -- I still feel a need to be known, to be accepted, perhaps even befriended. Ray Vecchio, likewise, is beyond my grasp.

Meg, although she is a great many things I would wish for in a partner, in a lover or wife, is also my superior officer. Given my current state of disfavor, I am unlikely to ascend in rank to equal her in the next decade. The power inequity is too great, and is unresolvable in the foreseeable future.

Turnbull? As freakish as I am, I am far better adjusted to the world than Turnbull. Exiled to Chicago, he needs a hero, and has settled on me, as my father's son. He depends on me far more than does Diefenbaker. I am fond of him, I would miss him were he to leave, but he has put me on too high a pedestal to be my friend.

I know better than to accept the proposals I have received from women, and a few men, here. Some are quite blatant about what they want. But if they wish me to bed them, without more than a passing acquaintance with me, then I have no doubt they would leave me even more lonely after we'd achieved physical satisfaction together. I am lonely, every day I crave contact. Yet I will not torture myself with liaisons that are only a shadow of what I seek: a true communion of souls and bodies. Pretended naivete seems to be my best defense, and the most polite way to fend off these advances.

No, I desire intimacy of spirit far more than sexual gratification. If possible, of course, I'd like both. By the time he was my age, my father was married, with a son in school, and had already lost and regained his partnership with Buck Frobisher. I envy him his friendships and loves. His life.

I turn yet again, the cot creaking in the antiseptic silence of the Consulate.

I am starved for a human touch.

Kowalski hugged me. He grabbed my arm. He seems to touch me as often as Ray did, without reservation. Perhaps even more often? I appreciate that. I remember the hug. As bewildered as I was at the time, I didn't have a chance to enjoy it. I wonder if he will hug me again.

Ah well. I am brooding, and it's well past time I was asleep. Dief lays nearly under my cot, staying closer than usual to me since our home was destroyed. I roll over yet again, rest a hand on his flank, just to be touching a friend, and go to sleep.

END