Title: RTFM
Fandom: due South
Rating: PG
Length: ~300 words
Content notes: Ray Kowalski & Benton Fraser.
Author notes: Created in under an hour.
Summary: Ray's finding Fraser hard to figure out.


Ray thinks they should have handed him a rulebook for how to make friends with Fraser, because he couldn't figure out the rules for this. If there were any, they were missing pages and had been badly translated.

Usually, it goes like this. You meet someone. You get talking. You find out if they like Italian or Chinese, rock music or opera, baseball or hockey, and normally there's some common ground. If there's enough of it, you can do stuff like catch the game after hours over beer and pizza and it'll be fine, even if you're not that into Italian yourself.

Except with Fraser, none of that applies, because he's about dried meat from a bag, and country music, and curling. Nothing even remotely "usual" about that. How do you make friends with someone who's from another planet?

Because thing is, if this undercover thing is gonna work, he's gonna have to make friends with the guy, not just pretend to, cause that's not gonna fly in the long run.

Thing is, if you don't know the rules, you try and figure them out.

So this is how it goes: you buy root beer, and beef jerky (which, yeah, okay, that is something you can actually get next to), and figure you can sit through a game of curling if it means having some company over, and it'll make Fraser happy because he's probably a little homesick for Canada. He's gonna sit there in his uniform, like some Canadian version of Captain America (do they actually have superheroes in Canada?) and if nothing else, that'll be easy on the eye, and so they'll both come out winning.

Except then Fraser shows up at Ray's in a checked flannel shirt and jeans, and Ray realizes that he's getting into another kind of game altogether.

The again, that means he can just throw the rules out the window and make it up as he goes from here on out.

It turns out to be a good approach.