mercury7650

Title: Alone
Fandom: Due South
Rating: G
Length: 300
Author notes: Written for Challenge 518 – Real

Summary: Things are different now.

Alone

Fraser jerks awake, heart pounding, his mother’s screams echoing in his head. He struggles to breathe in the dark. Alone. He is always alone. His chest aches. He feels hollowed out and empty. It is no use telling himself it was a dream, a construct of his mind; that it wasn’t a real memory.  The recurring dream is unbearably vivid. He watches, a frozen, frightened child, as his mother collapses on the kitchen floor.

A shift of the mattress beside him, a warm weight along his side. A sleep-roughened murmur.  “Frase?”

Ray. Not alone, then. Not anymore. His muscles relax, the tension draining out of him. A kiss is pressed to his heaving chest. An arm snakes across his waist and Ray’s body presses closer, offering silent comfort. Fraser closes his eyes and feels Ray’s weight against him, his touch, his scent. Slowly, his heartbeat calms, his breathing evens out. Ray’s hand strokes up, up across his chest, slides under his neck and into his hair, gently urging him to turn into Ray’s embrace.

He lets himself, his own arms coming up to enfold Ray. He doesn’t know he’s crying until Ray wipes the tears away, and then the sobs break loose in a storm of grief and loss. Ray holds him as he cries, while great ugly sobs wrack his body. He quietens eventually, spent, drained of a grief trapped since childhood, a grief he’s never been allowed to express.

Ray holds him closer still, murmuring half-heard words of love, nuzzling soft kisses along his hairline. Ray’s hands caress him, petting his hair, his neck, his shoulders. Bliss, Fraser thinks. This is bliss, to wake in the night to love, to tenderness. To find solace in his lover’s warmth. Fraser has this now. He is not alone. Not anymore.