Plainclothes and Fancy Dress
by Zeborah
Undercover sucked.
He buried that thought as quickly as it surfaced, and bent to lift his pack. When he stood, he was Constable Benton Fraser again. "Come on, Diefenbaker," he said, and turned towards the door.
Diefenbaker didn't follow him.
He stopped in the doorway and turned around, holding onto his patience as tightly as he could. He was Benton Fraser. A Mountie. That was his life now, and that meant patience. "Diefenbaker," he repeated. "Come on."
The wolf simply looked up at him and blinked.
Patience be damned. Benton Fraser be damned, wherever he was. Here, in this godforsaken hole of a motel, no-one was around to see or care... But still some shred of his persona governed his tongue, refused to let him lash out -- he needed this wolf, no matter how badly they'd trained it.
"Your name is Diefenbaker," he ground out. "You are deaf, and your name is Diefenbaker. Are those two things so hard to remember? Because I can assure you, I have a lot more to remember than that, and I've been managing just fine."
Just fine. Oh, yes. Fine enough that most of the time he'd spent pursuing criminals recently was taken up with half-formed wishes that this time he'd be shot. That this time he'd fall off a cliff. That this time he'd take a wrong turn in the blizzard and slowly freeze to death.
Diefenbaker was still lying on the floor with some fucking pitiful expression in his eyes, and Fraser's patience snapped. Not his voice, though; he kept that perfectly even, perhaps calmer than it had been before. "Perhaps it would be easier for you to remember your name if your deafness was reality instead of just pretence? Because I can certainly arrange that if you think it'd be helpful." He drew the gun from his holster. "A loud explosion near the eardrums, do you think?"
Diefenbaker whined softly.
Fraser opened the door with his free hand, and gestured outside with the gun. One simple, short, sharp gesture, and Diefenbaker was up and plodding across the room and past him into the snow. One simple, short, sharp gesture, and Fraser holstered the gun again and followed him.
Out into the snow. Out to the car that would take him to the plane that would take him to Chicago. To pretend to be a dutiful son searching for his father's killer, when he already knew who the killers were because he was one of them himself.
Gerard nodded as he approached the car, and Fraser nodded back with the kind of grim courtesy that he imagined a grieving son would feel. The expressions came smoothly after all these months; and the words and actions came smoother still. He could let Fraser take over while he himself sat back and watched. Slept, perhaps, in a sense; but later, on the plane, he'd be able to remember it all.
* * *
Later, on the plane, he sat by the window and watched the world go by beneath him. Watched his life go by while this assignment dragged on.
Such irony, this determination to find a killer when, ultimately, the killer was himself. Not that he'd pulled the trigger, of course. No, all he'd done was to let them know that old Bob was getting wise to him, and they'd arranged for it themselves. There wasn't any other way, really, to protect his cover.
That wasn't true. There was one other way, the way he'd hoped they'd take. They could have faked his own death -- let the father grieve for the son -- and he could have returned to his own life. But obviously they'd decided that they need him for a while longer. Maybe even a long while longer....
He scowled at the clouds that blocked his view of the ground -- or scowled as much as he could while making sure no-one around him saw the expression. Sure Chicago would be a change. A good change, maybe even a great change. You could lose yourself in a city even more thoroughly than in the northern tundra. He'd be able to slip downtown for some fun that didn't involve cat-and-mouse games with petty criminals, or fantasies about Jack London characters that were pretty disturbing even for him.
But that was in the night, and with sleeping time figured in, the day was always longer. And in the day he had to be Constable Benton Fraser, the grieving son determined to find his father's killer when all he wanted to do was hand over his resignation and go home.
And he wasn't even supposed to find the killer; just to pretend to be looking for him. Well, fuck that, he thought suddenly, savagely. He was tired of playing by their rules. If they didn't want him to find the killer then they should have kept him in Canada. He wasn't going to playact; he wasn't going to put on a dumbshow for the local population. He was going to do this for real, stir up as much trouble for them as he could, and damn the consequences.
* * *
to be continued...
Zeborah
Return to the
Ride Forever Archive