Thanks so much! I just dove into Wilby Wonderful fic (which I actually just watched because someone recced it to me to get a sense for homophobia in Canada in the early 00s for a Due South fic I'm writing), and I saw so many fics where Duck has this sort of backstory, which--absolutely, I can see where people would see his character and think abusive childhood. I hadn't really intended to write such a heavy fic or focus just on backstory, but I looked at Buddy, who has this quality where, even though he's the 'competent cop' character of the movie, he spends a lot of it being pretty non-confrontational, and even in his scene with Brent at the end, where he's justifiably angry, he never even raises his voice. I really wanted to dig into that, and I couldn't help poking just a bit at his backstory with Carol.

And thanks so much for commenting--it's so good to hear that the Wilby/nature bits worked. I'm actually a lifelong city dweller nearly 3,000 miles from the Canadian maritimes with basically zilch woodland or wildlife experience; that was all just tons of googling about Cape Breton and a couple of texts to friends who go hiking. :) So I'm so glad I didn't make any really glaring mistakes there.