A Searching and Fearless Inventory
by Nos4a2no9
Author's Notes: Many, many thanks to my fantastic betas, Aethel, Lamentables and Ignazwisdom. This was a tough story that started out as a piece of meta and, through their help and diligence, magically evolved into a narrative. What's good in this story is in place only because of them.
Story Notes: The title of this story is taken from the fourth step of the Alcoholics Anonymous pledge.
A Searching and Fearless Inventory
He buys a bottle of whisky once a year. It's always the finest brand that he can afford.
Sometimes that means it's Crown Royal, which is cheap, smoky-flavoured, and effective. If he's saved enough (and, since moving into the Consulate, he's had little to spend his money on), it's a bottle of something much better. Aged Glenfiddich, or a rare single-malt like Lagavulin, both of which are so expensive that it costs Benton Fraser more than a month's salary for a single bottle.
Whisky has always been his drink. Some prefer brandy, or rum, but he never truly cared for any of the other spirits. He'd always found the taste of a good whisky to be incomparable: rich, full-bodied, with hints of honey and heather, butterscotch and ground ginger. The finer whiskies always go down so smoothly that they hardly burn at all.
Of course, he doesn't drink anymore. He hasn't for years. When Fraser buys his expensive bottle of whatever he can best afford, he places it carefully on his desk, along with a clean tumbler used solely for this once-a-year event. He makes sure that both the glass and the whisky are within easy reach.
He waits.
It's partly a test of himself, and partly a celebration. Ray - either Ray - would probably say it suits him, this need to commemorate and evaluate simultaneously. It's his birthday, and this is how he chooses to mark the occasion.
He wasn't actually born in July. The sweltering heat of the Chicago night outside doesn't match the date on his birth certificate. But it does accurately mark the birth of Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP.
Ben Fraser was born in early November in a barn thirty miles from Inuvik. The man he is today - the RCMP officer who sits before an unopened whisky bottle and convinces himself that he doesn't really want to drink from it - was born on a warm summer night in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 1987.
He was a different person, before. Ben Fraser. He hardly recognizes the name. Ben Fraser had been little more than a stumbling drunk, a man so full of regret and self-pity that he'd been unfit to wear the uniform. A joke.
He isn't sure why, exactly, Ben Fraser began to drink. He suspects it had something to do with social anxiety, or peer pressure, or one of the other myriad reasons supplied by American after-school specials. He does know that it began that winter his grandparents had moved to Fort Providence, and he'd suddenly been required to attend high school with other teenagers for the first time. He'd been introduced to drink (cheap grain alcohol, tasteless and with an almost medicinal bite, but powerful) at a party, the first and last such event he'd been invited to during his adolescence. After he'd taken his first sip and suffered through the eye-watering, cough-inspiring burn of it, he'd been filled with a sense of confidence.
That was what alcohol really was, after all: confidence in a bottle. Surety in a shot glass. Suddenly he could talk to the strange people who made fun of his precise diction, archaic manners and encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Northwest Territories. He'd spent the rest of that winter and spring drunk as often as he could. He became adept at hiding the smell of beer from his grandmother, and soon switched to vodka because it was odorless and he could carry it in a water canteen without raising any suspicions.
He'd finally discovered whisky at Depot. Ironically, his father had been the one to introduce him to it. When Ben had been accepted into the academy, his father had made a special trip home - his first in nearly two years - and poured them both a full finger.
"Cheers, son. I'm sure you'll do your very best."
Ben had looked down at the honey-hued liquor in his glass, and wondered if Robert Fraser would ever think his best was even remotely good enough. When he looked up, his father was watching him.
"Drink up, son. Don't let the ice melt. It waters down the drink."
It was the single most useful piece of advice his father had ever given him.
Depot passed in a blur of alcohol-fueled nights and days spent in the agonizing grip of an endless hangover. He managed to graduate at the top of his class - he was Robert Fraser's son, after all - and the drink did help him cope with the hectic environment of Regina and the hostility of his fellow cadets. They resented him for being the son of a legend, for being the best shot and sharpest mind amongst them. Even half-drunk and nursing a severe headache, he was still able to best them all.
He'd tumbled into bars and into the beds of strangers for years after graduating from Depot. Alcohol helped him to feel less awkward, less out of place. Alcohol helped him forget how much he hated the grim northern cities he was posted to - Prince George, Fort McMurray, Red Deer. Alcohol helped him approach strange men on the street, and alcohol allowed him to ask if he might come home with them. And the inevitable hangover the next morning gave him something to focus on, instead of the bitter taste of regret.
Like alcohol, sex eased Ben Fraser's selfish pain, helped quiet the memories of his own failures. And that was what Ben Fraser had been. A failure. And a fool.
Her voice had been warmer than whisky, her presence more potent and intoxicating than anything he'd ever known. They spent three days and three nights together, and at the end of it...he'd turned her in. He'd done what his father would have done: he'd abandoned someone he'd cared about. He'd thrown her to the wolves.
Ben Fraser spent years afterward trying to drown out the sound of Victoria's voice, wondering why both the crack of ice in a fresh glass and the howl of the northern wind reminded him of her.
In 1987 he was transferred to Moose Jaw. It was the largest city he'd ever worked in, and the size and pace of it nearly overwhelmed him, just as Depot had done seven years earlier. His drinking habit, barely held in check by his daily routine - he drank only after his shift was over - began to take over the rest of his life. He heard her voice every night, that beautiful voice that had always made him think of something wild. Something free. He'd caged that voice, and it was driving him mad. Moreso, anyway.
Much as he'd like to take credit for the change that had wrought Constable Benton Fraser - sober, responsible, and always steady in act and deed - he'd actually had very little to do with it.
Sergeant Stephen McCreedy, his CO at the time, had been the first and only person to recognize Ben Fraser's addiction. He'd watched Ben carefully for several weeks, noting his red eyes and shaking hands, how slow he was to respond to a middle-of-the-night emergency call. The Sergeant - or Steve, as he'd insisted Ben call him - was the one who dragged him out of Capone's Hideaway, the Moose Jaw bar where Ben had downed shot after shot of straight American rye (peppery, with just a hint of citrus) and had taken him home.
They'd gone back to Steve's quiet, cluttered apartment on the east side of town, and Steve had set a large cup of coffee down in front of Ben. He'd said, "Let's have it, then. Why are you doing this to yourself?"
Ben had blinked at the question. His alcohol-fogged mind hadn't known how to respond. No one had ever asked him why - people suspected, perhaps, but he'd never let it affect his work, and that seemed to be good enough for most. He had no friends on the force, and no family within a thousand-mile radius. His actions mattered very little, in the grand scheme of things, because they affected only himself.
"You're, what, twenty-six? Why are you trying so damn hard to pickle yourself alive?"
Steve had reminded Ben, suddenly, of his grandfather: a big, gently cajoling man, with a bushy red mustache and the slightest trace of an Orkney accent. Perhaps it was that faint stirring of memory that had made Ben answer his question.
"I turned her in," he'd said, softly, and found himself unable to control the tears that burned on the edges of his vision. "I could have let her go."
Steve had shaken his head. Perhaps he knew about Victoria; perhaps he didn't. Looking back from the safe distance of ten years, Fraser wasn't sure how much his commanding officer had known.
"You did your duty, son," Steve had told him, and he managed to make it sound like something more than a simple platitude. "And I think we both know that this...problem, goes well beyond one single decision you've made in your life."
"I'm sorry," Ben had said, crying openly by that point. Much as the liquor had always helped him to feel more confident and less inhibited, he hated the way it forced his emotions so close to the surface. If only he didn't feel quite so much. "I don't know how to stop."
"Well, you can't keep on like you have been. It'll start to affect your work soon, son. And once you're booted off the force, what then? What will you do with yourself?"
Ben had shuddered at the prospect of a long stretch of days with nothing to fill them, with no purpose and no meaning. "What do I do?"
"You bury it," Steve had said simply. "You bury it with work. You do not try to drown it."
"I don't know if I'm strong enough."
"Well, you'll find out, won't you?" Steve had said, and went to make Ben another cup of coffee.
Fraser stares at the bottle of whisky. The soft glow of the lamp on his desk shines through the bottle: the light turns the alcohol inside a rich, orange-tinged amber.
Steve McCreedy had saved him. Together they'd created Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, a man who became as much a legend in the north as his father. He'd dried out, sobered up, and Steve had shown him how to live for duty. How to bury any other need deep inside.
Need, however, continued to surface every now and again. Need for companionship, for a loss of control. For feeling. For a single moment once a year, Fraser allows himself to be consumed by the desire to take a drink. Just one drink, and perhaps the voices in his head would quiet. He could forget about Victoria, about the friend he'd lost to the bright neon glitter of Las Vegas. About his hopeless desire for the man who'd taken in his place.
"There will always be reasons to drink," Steve had told him. "But there will always be better reasons not to. Duty. Responsibility. Pride in your uniform, pride for yourself. Focus on those things, and you'll manage."
Fraser tries to remember his old CO's words as he rises, goes to the sink, and breaks the seal on the whisky bottle. With a thudding heart and immobile face he pours the drink out, the amber liquid swirling down the drain, thousands of dollars and a promise of oblivion gone.
He keeps the wooden cork from the bottle, and puts it in a cloth bag where it knocks softly against the others he's collected over the years. He shuts the trunk, and locks it firmly behind him.
He's safe, at least for one more year.
THE END
End A Searching and Fearless Inventory by Nos4a2no9
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