hackthis_archive | dS - Love is Disappointment

1. According to IMDB, today Tom Felton turns 17. Millions of ~~jailbait-lusters~~ people everywhere rejoice.

2. There are two reasons to see Closer: Jude Law and Clive Owen. There are also two reasons not to see Closer: Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman. Perhaps I will just stick my fingers in my ears a lot.

My beta said she loved this. I was v pleased.

due South
Fraser/var.
Love is Disappointment

1.

His mother's love is the purest emotion that Fraser has ever known. In his memories she is forever young and beautiful; she always smiles as she laces up her mukluks. She is there when he comes home with numb fingers and toes, and she rubs ointment on the scrapes he gets from climbing pine trees. His mother is never cross, nor does she raise her voice, and on the occasions when he thinks of his father with bitterness, his mother's voice tells him to be patient instead.

In his head, she still calls him Benton.

No one else does.

2.

His grandparents were no-nonsense sort of folks, devoid of unnecessary emotions or material baggage. If they loved him, they never said, but if Fraser thinks about it very hard, he consoles himself with the idea that they loved him in their own way. They took him in when he had nothing; they raised him long after their child-rearing days were gone, and they did the best they could. He couldn't have asked for more. He wouldn't have dared. There are all sorts of love, not all of them come with hugs and kisses for tears on numb faces.

3.

Fraser's childhood was an amalgamation of names and places and books to keep him company when the children he encountered refused to play with him because he talked the way he did. His grandfather said there was no excuse for a lax vocabulary, and on the few occasions that he saw his father, his father was far too busy talking of his next jaunt to wherever to pay much attention to his son. Of course after his father died he paid so much attention to Fraser that Fraser got nostalgic for his childhood.

4.

Innusiq introduced himself by throwing a snowball at the back of Fraser's head, but instead of laughing and running away when Fraser turned around, he laughed and came over and wiped away the snow that was seeping down Fraser’ neck. It was just his way, and for a very long time Fraser mistook love for gratitude. But then Innusiq began spending time with Kate Martindale, and Fraser understood that friendship and love really weren’t the same.

5.

There’s a small part of Fraser that’s not sure he would have ever known love again if he didn’t have Diefenbaker in his life. As far as unconditional love goes, it doesn’t get much better than that of a half-deaf, half-wolf.

6.

Fraser has read the Oxford English Dictionary cover-to-cover twice. He has read the works of Shakespeare and Lord Byron and countless others, and to this day he is at a loss to put his feelings for Victoria Metcalfe into proper words. The night they huddled together for warmth from the storm, he truly understood what all the poets had talked about for hundreds of years before he had walked the earth. The day he let her go, he felt as though he had cut off a limb and would die from blood loss.

And then she returned, and Fraser was whole. Except he wasn’t.

And it was only lying on the platform of the train station with a bullet in his back and Ray Vecchio hovering around him that Fraser understood what Plato had meant all along.

Love was the grave mental disease.

It drove people out of their minds.

It made him insane.

7.

It’s no small regret that Fraser didn’t get to know his father until after he died, but there’s a part of him that resents his father for waiting until the afterlife to find Fraser worthy of his time and attention.

8.

Fraser loves Ray Vecchio. Not in the sexual and intimate way that he loved Victoria, but in the way that he loved Innsuiq before he realized he wanted something more. Fraser loves that Ray calls him Benny when he’s only Fraser to everyone else. He loves that Ray makes him laugh and appreciates his sarcasm; he doesn’t see Fraser as an oversized Santa Claus who’s only good for rescuing cats and helping little old ladies. But there’s a part of Fraser that will never forgive Ray Vecchio for leaving him without saying good-bye first. Fraser understands that duty comes first, he understands that Ray had a job that needed to be done, but that never stops him from being disappointed that Ray Vecchio didn’t stay behind for him.

As much as Fraser laments losing Ray Vecchio to Armando Langoustini, there’s another piece of him that embraces the loss, because without Armando there would be no Ray Kowalski for Fraser to come home to at night.

9.

Fraser has suffered enough loss and abandonment in his life to be wary of anyone who tries to get close to him, and yet, from the moment Ray, his Ray, took that bullet from Greta Garbo, Fraser’s been a lost cause.

Time and again, he’s been disappointed by love. He’s been abused and left behind for wreckage, but when Fraser looks at Ray he sees the same scars that litter his own psyche. Ray’s not perfect: he’s loud and brash. He rushes in when a little tact is in order, but if Ray were like Fraser then Fraser wouldn’t want him half as much as he does.

When Fraser looks at Ray Kowalski he doesn’t see an angel, he sees a man; and when Ray touches him, Fraser knows he could never disappoint Ray, because Ray sees him and only him.

Love isn’t disappointing as long as you’re not blind to the reality of what’s there.

-end-

Beta by