author: bghost
fandom: due South
character: Benton Fraser
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 1108

AN: For future reference (badge wise) this was written in less than an hour (thirty eight minutes)




“The trilling wire in the blood
sings below inveterate scars
appeasing long forgotten wars.”


For some reason those lines resonate. Fraser is lying on his cot, reading poetry in the fading light. His Grandmother's remembered voice echoes in his head, telling him he'll go blind... He smiles. That hasn't happened yet. Well, only the once. Of course, she had warned him of other activities that might lead to blindness... Not eating his greens. Indulging in the sin of onanism. Good Lord, he thinks, affectionately. She was so very Victorian.


He misses her stern, protective ways.


Wire in the blood... What does that mean? Adrenaline, perhaps. And yes, it does sing... What do they call it? A spike of adrenaline, like a shot of a drug, he supposes. He has never taken drugs, but sometimes he wonders if he's addicted to his own adrenaline. There are times when it jolts through him, like lightning, and he finds himself, mindlessly almost, taking foolish risks. Things that, in retrospect, he is ashamed of. Things that are, in the cool light of reason, utterly insane.


He feels that wire trilling through him, singing in his veins, when he jumps a desperate distance from roof top to roof top, when he plunges down a waterfall, when he flings himself at cars.


He shuts his eyes, and places the book, still open, face down, on his chest. No wonder Ray is so infuriated by him. No wonder both his Rays in fact... He thinks of Ray Vecchio, deep undercover with the mob. He tries to imagine the level of anxiety he must be enduring. Constant adrenaline spiking through his veins. Is he addicted to it yet? And Ray Kowalski... flying through a window on the back of a motorbike. Good Lord, his example is bad for people, he thinks. Both Rays are courageous decent men... but would either be taking such suicidal risks if they had never met him?


He's like a contagion.


He lifts the book from his chest, folds it shut, and places it on the floor. He should tidy it up, he thinks, but he's tired, and it will still be there in the morning. He's annoyed with himself. How on earth, he wonders, did he start off on this train of thought?


Ah, yes. Scars. He thinks back to the poem. Inveterate scars... All things considered, he supposes that he does have his scars. Physical ones, of course, but that was not what Eliot was talking about. The poet was thinking more along the lines of emotional scars... Inveterate... things he compulsively picks at. And yes, he does have his fair share of those. On the other hand, doesn't everybody? The usual childhood nonsenses. In his case, the absence of his father, the uncomprehending valiant love his grandparents showed him, despite the fact that... well, he was a brat. And yes... what he now recognises as profound loneliness. More than all that, of course, the loss of his mother. Scars, certainly, and he cannot help but pick at them. (And some he has hidden, and will never pick at again, he thinks, not thinking of Victoria.) Inveterate.


Yet of all the stanzas the one that troubles him most is the last. Eliot spoke of wars.


Fraser cannot remember any wars that shaped him, no particular violence as a child. There was the usual bullying, on those rare occasions when he attended a local school. The otter incident... perhaps the odd adventure. But his home life was remarkably peaceful... if suffocating. No... there wasn't much warfare in the Yukon. He laughs at himself for the peculiar fancy. Perhaps he went out looking for trouble because of the stultifying atmosphere in his Grandparents' little cabins, as they travelled around. Perhaps if they'd had a television, or even a radio, there would have been no incident involving a boomerang and a gold mine and...


Who knows? His childhood was what it was. Different in its details from other childhoods, but not really all that bad.


And yet, those lines still sing to him, an irritating refrain. He wishes he hadn't picked up the book now, because the verses are driving him mad. He should have remembered that from the last dozen times he read them, over the years. He doesn't know what possessed him to pick them up again.


Wire in the blood, inveterate scars, long forgotten wars...


The first time he remembers a spike of fear in his blood was so long ago, he can't even remember what triggered it. Perhaps nothing more significant than being lost for a few moments in the dark. He does remember the dark, in an enclosed space, trying not to breathe too loud, and standing still. And the wire in the blood was coiling in him, twisting through his veins, making his feet and fingers tingle, making him dizzy with it. Was that when it first became... important for him to feel that way? And why? The memory is out of joint, and seems to make no sense.


As for wounds, inveterate or otherwise, the first wound he remembers must be a muddled construct from a book he read... someone lying in the snow, with a red hole blossoming on their chest. An unhealed wound. He's seen the same scar on Ma Vecchio's wall... the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps he saw the picture in one of the library books he grew up amongst as a child. An open wound that will not heal.


And as for war... he remembers (and it must have been a dream) gunfire. He almost remembers a fallen soldier.


He read a lot as a child, he knows that. He read books that were beyond his age, that he couldn't understand. He must, at some point, have read a story about a child hiding in the dark, while outside a war was waged.


It makes no sense for these false memories of his to be anything else. He simply is the way he is. Someone addicted to fear, who no longer even feels it as fear, feels it as a lust instead. It connects him to something, somehow... something that he cannot name.


And again, there is no reason for him to have grown up into someone who covers his scars in red, so nobody will see if he's bleeding. Someone who has to be a soldier, whether he ever wanted to or not. These things aren't caused by anything, they just are. He just is.


He won't read Four Quartets again, he thinks, reaching out with one hand, and turning off his lamp. Those words stir up strange thoughts.