AFTER THE FALL

by Cybel Harper

Ray sighed and shifted again in his narrow hospital bed, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. His shoulder hurt, his back ached, and his leg muscles felt twitchy from inactivity, though he had only been laid up for two days. If he felt this bad, he wondered how much worse Fraser, who had been hospitalized for weeks, must feel?

"Ray? Are you all right?" Fraser's voice, from the shadowy no-man's-land of the next bed.

"Yeah, Benny. I'm fine. Go back to sleep."

"You're restless, and you keep sighing. Is it your shoulder? Are you in pain? Do you want me to call the nurse?"

"No, I don't want you to call the nurse. Christ, Benny," Ray exploded, "you still have my bullet in your back, you can barely get out of bed without help, and you're worried about my pain? Why don't you think about yourself for a change? Jeez, you can be annoying!"

Fraser didn't answer, a sure sign his feelings were hurt. Ray sighed again. "I'm sorry, Benny. I didn't... I'm sorry."

A long moment of silence stretched between them, then the Mountie said, in an apparent non sequitur, "We haven't really talked since..." he hesitated, as though searching for the right words.

Ray provided his own. "Since I shot you."

"No," Fraser disagreed. "Since... Victoria."

Since Victoria. So much meaning in so few words. So much pain. Ray ruthlessly suppressed another sigh. "Look, Benny," he said instead, "I already told you. She blindsided you. You loved her. Okay, so she didn't deserve it. That's not your fault. None of it was your fault. Let it go. Let her go."

The shadowy figure in the other bed shifted in the near-total darkness, head shaking, hands raised to press against hidden eyes. Ray knew the look that would be in them now; he had seen it often enough in the last few weeks. He wondered if Adam's eyes had looked that haunted after the Fall. Ray could have killed Victoria for that alone--for the look he saw in Fraser's eyes all too often these days, since Victoria had reentered his life and almost destroyed it--for the death of innocence that look reflected.

"Yes," Fraser's voice, soft and strained, interrupted Ray's train of thought. "I loved her. I loved her so much I thought that my love would make everything right between us, for us. Why couldn't I make it right, Ray?"

Scarcely knowing he was speaking out loud, Ray murmured, "'There was a darkness in her'."

A startled intake of breath answered his words. "I thought you were asleep when I told you that," Fraser whispered.

"Yeah, well." Ray gave a one-shouldered shrug, though he knew that Fraser couldn't see the gesture. How could he tell his friend that he had pretended to be asleep all those months ago so he wouldn't have to hear more about the woman Fraser had obviously, even then, still been in love with?

"Ray?" There was an uncertain note in Fraser's voice that made Ray cringe. "Do you think that Victoria loved me?"

How could Ray answer that? What answer would hurt Fraser the least? Moot point; Ray could not betray his trust by answering with anything less than the truth. "I don't know, Benny. Maybe so. But not as much as she hated you, I think." His words were met with an accepting silence.

After a while, Fraser said, "Don't blame yourself for shooting me, Ray. I don't. I shouldn't have let you think that I did. It was an accident. And I'm glad you didn't kill Victoria. Even now I'm glad of that."

Anger boiled up in Ray at Fraser's quiet words. "How can you say that after all she did to you? All she tried to do? I'm sorry I didn't kill the bitch. You can bet your life I'm sorry about that. But I'm not sorry I shot you, Benny. Not any more, I'm not. Not now that I've had a chance to think things through. And you know why? Because if I hadn't shot you, you'd have left with her, and sure as shit you'd be dead by now. She'd have seen to that. She'd have taken your love and wrapped her darkness around it until there was no light left. She'd have won, Benny. You'd be dead, and she'd have won." He paused, his breathing labored with the depth of the emotions his words had set loose. "So I'm not sorry I shot you. But I sure as hell am sorry that queen bee bitch isn't dead and buried!"

Ray lay staring up at the shrouded ceiling, trying to control his anger, trying to control his grief. Fraser would hate him now, would be appalled at his bitter hatred toward the woman who, despite everything, the Mountie still loved.

After a few minutes he heard the telltale rattle of Fraser starting to get up, using the side rail that the night nurse had insisted on raising to pull himself into a sitting position. Alarmed, so used by now to wanting to help Fraser, to protect him, that the need cut through everything else he was feeling, Ray sat up, asking, "What are you doing? It's dark; you'll fall and hurt yourself. Let me get the light." He started to reach for it, biting his lip against the sudden throbbing of his shoulder, but Fraser's next words stopped him cold.

"Don't. Don't turn it on, Ray. I have to tell you something, and I won't be able to if you turn on the light."

There was a fragile, fierce quality to Fraser's voice that frightened Ray more than anything that had come before. He wanted to get out of that bed, get out of that room before it was too late, and he knew, certain sure knew that if he stayed and listened to what Fraser was about to say, it would be too late.

The rattle of the side rail came again, and Ray said hurriedly, "All right! All right! But don't get up. I'll come over there."

Ray carefully got up and walked the short distance to the other bed, putting a hand against Fraser's chest to urge him back down onto his pillows. The Mountiecomplied without comment, but when Ray tried to move away, Fraser took hold of his hand and held it in place with one of his own. Despite the long weeks of convalescence, his grip was sure and strong, and something inside Ray gave way at the touch, as if a tightly coiled spring had been released. He stood still, closing his eyes against the darkness, delighting in the rise and fall of Fraser's chest under his hand.

"Everything I've told you is true, Ray. I love Victoria. Maybe I always will. She's the only woman I've ever loved, but not the only person. As much as I love her, I love you more. I swear it, Ray. When I saw her leaving on that train, and I saw you running to stop her, I made a choice. I knew you wouldn't shoot if I was with her, so I chose to go. I let her hurt you, almost destroy you, and still you stood by me. I felt I didn't deserve you, didn't deserve your trust, your loyalty. I thought that you'd be better off without me, and that if I left with her you would finally understand that you had misjudged me, that I wasn't who you thought I was. So you see, Ray, if there is a darkness in Victoria, there is one in me as well. Like calls to like."

"Ah, Benny." Ray could hear the tears in his own voice and knew Fraser could hear them, too. He didn't care. All he cared about was lying open under his hand, waiting bravely for a condemnation that he did not deserve and that Ray, of all people, could not impose.

"Ah, Benny," he said again. He had to clear his throat before he could continue. "I've neverlied to you, either," he finally managed to say. "So you listen to me, 'cause this is gospel. You are the best man I've ever known, Benny. The very best. There's no darkness in you. If there was, I'd have seen it by now, believe me, 'cause I've been watching you like a hawk since we first met. At first I figured you were too good to be true, that no one could be as good as you seemed to be. But you proved me wrong, Benny. Over and over you proved me wrong until I started to think that maybe, just maybe this world isn't as bad as I'd started to think it was. So I started caring again, because of you. I startedthinking that maybe I wasn't so bad, either, if you liked me like you said you did. So don't give me any crock about you not deserving me, buddy, 'cause it just ain't true. So you're not perfect, so what? No one is. That just means you're human, too, like the rest of us, and that only makes me love you more than ever."

It was Fraser's turn to clear his throat. "More than ever? Then, you do love me?"

"Benny, in case you haven't noticed by now, just about everyone either loves you or hates you, and I sure don't hate you."

"Well." Fraser sounded a little breathless.

Belatedly, a thought occurred to Ray. "Uh, Benny?"

"Yes, Ray?"

"When you say 'love'... I mean, I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing, here, you know?... so when you say 'love', do you mean 'love', or do you mean... 'love'?"

"I mean 'love', Ray."

Ray could hear the smile in Fraser's voice, and he let out the breath he had been holding. "Oh, good," he said. "I was afraid..."

"That I wasn't interested in having sex with you?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, I'm not drop-dead gorgeous like you are, and I don't imagine you've ever actually had sex with a man, and--"

"Shut up, Ray, and kiss me, although I don't think either one of us is up to much more than that right now, and..."

"Shut up, Benny," Ray whispered just before he took possession of Fraser's mouth.

For once, the Mountie had nothing more to say.