*gives in*

[fahye]

Right. Right. I am now going to do something I never do, which is post the first part of a fic before the whole thing is finished. The completed fic will go up at the ficblog when it's done, obviously.

This was meant to be my ds_shakespeare project; also brynnmck's birthday present, but THAT fell through in a dramatic way, so now it's just something that I'm writing with her in mind. (I don't think I would have waded gamely into the murky swamp of F/K/V on my own account!) I have taken all sorts of bizarre liberties with this one. Everyone just smile and have fun and ignore my blatant disregard for canon(s).

ANYWAY - ENJOY, BRYNN. SORRY IT'S SO LATE. And I will be highly surprised if nobody has done this fic idea before me, but it was written with love, so I figure it doesn't need a brilliantly original premise as well :D



New In Amity


Ray Vecchio looked at the radio and made a noise that might have been laughter. "Hungarian folk music, Benny?"

"There's nothing wrong with exposing ourselves to a bit of culture, Ray."

Ray Kowalski rubbed his eyes, recognising a conversational opening when he saw it. "See, that's the problem with this whole trip, Fraser. I don't want to experience culture. Culture and me, we're fine, but we're not close, you know? We leave each other alone."

"I just feel that it would be polite to drop by and say hello before we head further north," Fraser said in the Picture Of Reasonable Argument voice, the one that Ray certainly had no chance of being able to defend himself against at six in the fucking morning. The only good defences against the Picture Of Reasonable Argument voice were throwing things across the office or truly phenomenal blowjobs, and Ray didn't like his chances of managing either of those effectively from his near-foetal position in the back seat of the car.

Early morning road trips and innocent visits to relatives: Ray had the sneaking feeling that his partners were trying to bully him into acquiring yet more extended family. He tried to think of an appropriately clever way to let them know that he'd seen through their ridiculous plan to compensate for his deprived upbringing, but all that managed to escape was, "Yeah, well. It's just like you to have a...cousin."

Fraser turned around and frowned. "I'm not sure I catch your meaning, Ray."

Ray groaned and tried very hard to bury his head under his own arms. "It's too early," he moaned. "Of course I don't make any sense. Vecchio, coffee. Stat."

"Sure, Kowalski," and he could just hear the fucking grin in the guy's voice, all chirpy and drawling. Vecchios were morning people. Ray remembered staying with the screaming hordes last Christmas: a hellish experiment in being awoken at some ungodly hour by Italian curses being hollered good-naturedly across the hallway and children shrieking with excitement, never mind the fact that the whole damn lot of them had gotten back from the midnight Mass in the tiny morning hours. "I'll just take my hands off the wheel and fiddle with this little cappuccino machine that's built into the dashboard –-"

"Wiseass," Ray muttered into the inside of his elbow, attempting to find a comfortable medium between his own shoulder bones trying to shish-kebab him and a reclining position that he suspected was actually illegal while the car was moving. Fraser would know. "Hey, Frase --"

"Espresso, Ray?"

Hallelujah, hallelujah, they were at a drivethrough something-or-other. Big signs. Green? Starbucks. "Yes," Ray said fervently, unwinding himself from his seatbelt. "Yes, yes, coffee, yes."

"So, Benny," said Vecchio, "what kind of wacky Canadian name is New Burbage, anyway?"

~

"Jesus Christ, Ellen, are you trying to insult me?"

"There's no need to be like that, Geoffrey." Ellen rolled her eyes and managed to look dignified doing it; Geoffrey recognised the expression from her Lady Anne. "I'm just saying --"

"You're just comparing me --"

"Oh, now you're being absurd."

"No! I'm not! That's the whole point!"

She gave a deep sigh. Ellen's deep sighs were minor works of art in themselves. "I have nothing against your production concept, Geoffrey. I think it's going to be a fabulous Othello."

"It is!" Geoffrey leapt upon this gratefully. "And I don't know what's wrong with all of the male highschoolers of the region, but there was one passable Iago in the lot of them, even while I was being presented with seven or so excellent Desdemonas."

"So you decided to go with an all-female cast," Oliver said, appearing in one of the chairs shoved up against the wall. "Daring of you, Geoffrey."

"Exactly." Geoffrey glared at him.

"Exactly what?" Ellen's face started to work itself into a familiar worried expression; Geoffrey knew that she was two beats away from suggesting that he have a cup of tea and lie down in his office for a while.

"What? Nothing." Geoffrey ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Maybe it wasn't my original vision for the production, but I think it will work out fine."

Much as he loved her, Geoffrey thought, Ellen had a very unfortunate inability to drop an argument as soon as civility was reached; instead, she needed to circle back to the original disagreement and make sure that everyone understood how right she had been in the first place. "And I was just saying, you know just as well as I do that it sounds rather like something that Darren --"

"What, just because Darren Nichols can't breathe on a text without warping it in ten different ways, he has the monopoly on unconventional stagings?"

"That's not what I said, Geoffrey, and you know it," Ellen snapped. "I was just trying to be funny, and I'm sorry if you're not in the mood to take a joke," but Oliver was making patronising faces behind her back and Geoffrey was sick of having everyone question his judgement, goddamn it.

"I am not some kind of -- some kind of stuffy purist! Naked Macbeth, Ellen! Who was it that told you to go out on that stage and pull his fucking trousers down?"

The silence that followed was one that Geoffrey recognised, with a sinking heart, as the silence of an audience. It was broken by a snigger that became a yelp, suggestive of an elbow to the ribcage, and then a polite cough.

"Good Lord," Ellen said, sounding stunned out of her anger, and Geoffrey whirled around to face the door of the rehearsal room.

"Excuse us." It was as polite as the cough had been; this, Geoffrey rememered vaguely, being the truly baffling thing about his cousin. "Is this a poor moment?"

"Not at all --" Geoffrey started, but he was interrupted by a sharp exhalation of surprise from one of the two men standing with Benton Fraser.

"Shit," the man breathed reverently. "It's like Christmas. There are two of him."

"Try not to embarrass yourself, Kowalski," the other said. This one had dark hair and a dry edge to his voice that Geoffrey's mind immediately tucked away in its vast reserve of usable character quirks; the first speaker had spiked hair and a grin that bespoke the kind of sparkling impatience that was a director's worst nightmare. He did not look like the type to take direction.

"Introductions!" Geoffrey proclaimed rather desperately. "Benton, this is Ellen Fanshaw. Ellen, this is my cousin Benton and --?" He had known their names. At some stage. They were in the letter.

"Of course." Benton practically clicked his heels together and took over the introductions with perfect courtesy. Blond and Jittery turned out to be Ray Kowalski, and Dark and Casual was Ray Vecchio. Geoffrey didn't know how he was expected to keep names straight in his head when they were the same name, but the Rays seemed perfectly happy to just throw surnames around.

"Or you could just call him Stanley," Vecchio put in.

"Or they could not." Kowalski threw him a glare.

"Ray," Benton said, all firmness and calm articulation, and both of them subsided. Geoffrey immediately revised his opinion of the usefulness of this shared nomenclature, and wondered for a wistful moment if he could rename every member of his Othello cast 'Ray' for purposes of barking it out during rehearsal.

Then he realised that everyone was looking at him, and he'd just missed part of the conversation.

"Good to meet you both," he tried, and for once it seemed to be the right thing to say.

"Aren't you going to introduce me, Geoffrey?" Oliver was prowling around Benton, looking both fascinated and sulky.

"Oh, fuck off."

"Geoffrey!" Ellen slapped his arm, but neither of the Rays looked insulted.

"It swears." Vecchio looked impressed. "What about it, Kowalski, d'you think it drinks, too?"

"It certainly does."

"Thank you, Ellen."

But she'd moved out of the range that would allow him to slap her in turn, and she was sweeping forward to inspect Benton. Geoffrey had always admired Ellen's ability to sweep even when wearing, as she was now, nothing more elegant than a pair of jeans.

"Delighted to make your acquaintance, Ms Fanshaw." Benton smiled, but he looked just a little unnerved.

"So polite." Ellen sounded delighted. "And so neat, look, Geoffrey." She turned and tossed an impish smile over her shoulder. "If only you ironed your shirts this nicely."

Before Geoffrey could point out that Ellen herself had never ironed a garment within living memory, she had turned back to the Rays and her body language had swerved into dangerously flirtatious areas. "Want to swap?" she enquired. "Just for a little?"

"He's ours," Vecchio said firmly, just as Kowalski growled: "He's gay."

"Very gay?" Ellen pressed.

Benton touched his head, looking mildly surprised when he didn't encounter a hat, and smiled apologetically. "I believe the expression is as a maypole, ma'am."

She looked a little put out. "Well. If you're sure."

"Ellen." Geoffrey strode to her side and wrapped his arm around her in a gesture that was, he realised belatedly, far more irritated than it was affectionate.

"Oh, come on, Geoffrey." She looked up at him, not at all repentant. "You know that persusading someone to switch teams is a great boost to a girl's ego."

"Your ego, darling," and Geoffrey tapped her on the nose, eliciting a frown, "is already so vastly inflated that it could swallow Manhattan. If not the entire state of New York."

There was a meaningful cough. "Well, if he's gay, do you think I could...?"

Geoffrey attempted to flip Oliver the bird as discreetly as possible.

~

"Hey, are you Anna?"

The woman looked up, a smile appearing on her tired face almost before Ray could blink. "Yes, can I help you?"

"Yeah, uh." Ray jerked his thumb vaguely towards the door he'd stepped through. "Geoffrey said I should talk to you about reservations. In a hotel."

"Oh. Oh!" She scrambled into life, picking up a notepad with one hand and digging under piles of paper with the other. "Pen, pen, pen. You're with his cousin? Pen."

"Here." Ray held out a chewed biro. "Should still have some ink left. And yeah, I am, but there's three of us -- Fraser and Ray are getting things from the car."

Anna took the pen with a nod, and her smile grew a little firmer. "I'll call the Royal for you; it's still pre-season, so they'll have plenty of rooms. Do any of you smoke?"

"Nah."

Scribble. "Is a single room all right? They have suites."

"Yeah."

Scribble. "Three beds?"

"One."

"Oh." She looked back down at her notepad and scribbled something else, and Ray felt his pugnaciousness rising.

"You know, just one bed for all of us."

"Okay."

"Because we're all...together. All three of us." Ray threw in a glare, which didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever; Anna just looked nonplussed.

"That's...nice?"

"Didn't you hear me?"

"I think so?" Anna now looked bewildered, and suspiciously like she was trying to calm him down. "One room, one bed. King-size if possible."

Ray paused. "Yes, but --"

"Oh, I see." She put her fingertips to her mouth and smiled. "This is the theatre, Mr -- sorry, Mr what?"

"Just Ray."

"Ray. Trust me, I stopped finding shock value in things like relationships a very long time ago." Pause. "I thought the other one was Ray?"

"We're both Ray."

"Well, that's got to be confusing," she said thoughtfully.

"We get by." This was one of the more surreal conversations Ray had ever taken part in, and this was from a man who lived with a Mountie and an Italian.

"Did you need anything else? Coffee?"

"Sure, coffee...the machine's just there, yeah? I can do it." The woman looked harrassed enough as it was, helpful desperation dancing behind her eyes like maybe if he pushed the wrong spot she would snap and start trying to pull his arms out of their sockets with her teeth.

…or maybe Ray was just kinda sleep deprived and she was, you know, perfectly fucking normal.

"Okay. I'll let you know about the booking." She gave him another smile and then turned back to her computer, and Ray made a beeline for the coffee machine. It didn't look any better than Chicago PD coffee, but on the bright side it didn't look any worse either – hell, cops, actors, they were all society's dregs when it came down to it, right?

~

"This was a good idea, son."

Fraser, searching the back seat of the car for various items which Ray Kowalski had managed to lose from both his person and luggage over the duration of the journey, looked up to see his father leaning against the driver's door.

"You think so, Dad?" He was already having doubts on this subject himself.

"It's nice to see you making an effort with your mother's side of the family."

"Well, I --"

"My goodness," his father said, now looking past him. "What an impractical scarf."

"Geoffrey! Your hair!" A dark, compact man with a scarf so long that Fraser was worried he might trip on it at any moment was bearing down upon him, blinking epileptically from behind his glasses.

Fraser sighed and closed the car door. "I'm afraid I'm not Geoffrey --" he began, but was cut off by some wild hand-waving.

"Oh, by all means, don't let me interrupt your character headspace or whatever the hell it is. Good lord, please tell me it's a wig. It's a wig? Yes?" The man chewed at his lip, darting around Fraser in quick half-circles and inspecting his head from every angle. "It's a dreadfully good one. Or is this penance for something?" He played with his syllables as though they tasted bad, lingering on the emphases with the air of one practiced in public masochism.

"Really, sir, you must believe me." Fraser put out a firm hand to halt the man. "I am not Geoffrey Tennant. My name is Constable Benton Fraser."

A quick, incredulous snort of laughter. "That's a new one. Something modern, is it?" He gestured impatiently with a couple of fingers. "All right, tell me more."

"Well, I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father, and for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I have remained there, attached to --"

"Exploring at this juncture?" the man cut in. "Geoffrey, who wrote this rubbish?"

"Er," said Fraser.

"You don't need a hand or anything, do you?" Geoffrey's head appeared in the frame of the building's entrance with the kind of perfect timing that Fraser supposed one acquired with years of theatrical appearance. "Oh. Hello, Darren." His voice became actively unenthusiastic. "I see you've met my cousin Benton."

Fraser smiled and extended his hand, which the dark man eyed as though it might be contaminated before shaking it. "Darren Nichols," he said, with a self-deprecating smile, "excuse me," and the next moment he was charging across the carpark with the same irritated energy. Fraser followed him.

"Geoffrey," Darren said in a tone that was somewhere between strangled and ecstatic, "do you mean to tell me that all this time you've been keeping an identical cousin hidden away? And you didn't tell me?"

Geoffrey sighed. "Well, Darren, I can't imagine why, but keeping you informed as to the existence of relatives whom I hardly ever see is not exactly high on my list of priorities."

Darren stopped short about a foot away from Geoffrey and immediately assumed something that looked an awful lot like a pose. Fraser almost expected him to draw a sword. "The possibilities, Geoffrey! Just think -- oh, oh, if only we were doing Twelfth Night, how sublime."

"But as we're not --"

"But that's the wonder of the Dream, isn't it?" Darren went on, ignoring him. "It doesn't have to be about twins, it can be about magic, it's the ideal embodiment of Oberon's omnipotence; 'course, it would be a better trick to use with Puck, but beggars can't be choosers, eh, Monsieur Theatre Sans Argent?"

"You do talk the most godawful rubbish, Darren," Geoffrey said, but to Fraser's alarm he too had turned to regard Fraser with a thoughtful expression.

"Oh, stop thinking like a lunatic and start thinking like an actor, Geoffrey." Darren nudged his scarf back over his shoulder. "You do remember how to do that, don't you? Just think, it wouldn't have to involve any lines, just an appearance at the balcony we're using for Puck in Act Three, a clap of thunder -- Maria can add a local blackout to the rest of the lighting cues, I'm sure -- and then Oberon's gone --"

"And then he appears stage right," Geoffrey broke in.

"Ill met by moonlight, et cetera, et cetera." Darren made a noise that was bordering on sexual. "Yes."

They both paused for breath and continued to stare at Fraser, who had caught on. He hazarded a smile, rather pleased. "I'm flattered, gentlemen. Not to blow my own trumpet, of course, but I believe I do possess a modest gift for amateur theatrics."

Darren's hysteria had mellowed into an ecstatic expression. "A modest gift...Geoffrey, he's perfect. Can we keep him?"

~

TO BE CONTINUED.