Relax
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Relax |
| Author(s): | Dira Sudis |
| Date(s): | |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | slash |
| Fandom(s): | Due South |
| Relationship(s): | Fraser/Kowalski |
| External Links: | online at AO3 |
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Relax is a Fraser/Kowalski story by Dira Sudis.
Reactions and Reviews
After accidentally hypnotizing Ray (and learning something that Ray wouldn't want to be public knowledge), Fraser finds himself putting Ray under again and again, torn between the desire to learn more about his partner and the fear of ruining the partnersip. What I like about this story is the fact that Ray and Fraser (and Dira) all acknowledge that what Fraser did was wrong (because, no way around it, it was), but that Ray still finds a believable way to forgive Fraser anyway. Even better is the fact that Ray communicates better than Fraser, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that no one can be married for over a decade without learning how to sit down and talk. Best of all is the second to last paragraph, in which Ray explains his motivations for his forgiveness. It's one of the most insightful statements I've ever seen, and it explains so much about Ray. Really, a beautiful Ray story all around (despite the fact that it is told from Fraser's POV, heh). [1]
A really well-done episode-based fic is a unique kind of pleasure for me, because it serves to "realize" or actualize the homoerotic subtext of canon so that the slash makes sense, seems inevitable. Relax is just such a fic, beginning and playing off of the scene in the episode Seeing is Believing in which Fraser hypnotizes RayK, Welsh, and Thatcher in an attempt to determine the actual facts regarding a crime that all three witnessed but each remembers differently. The story is written from Fraser's point of view, which permits the author to show us what the episode doesn't: what actually happened during the hypnosis, and thus the reason for Ray's unaccountably nervous and edgy reaction when Fraser releases him.Dira Sudis (a remarkably talented author whose work gets better and better; this is one of her earlier pieces, and my favorite - so far) posits that Fraser gave in to temptation during the hypnosis and elicited from Ray a disclosure of what appears to be his deepest secret: his true sexual orientation. This was something Fraser had dared not even hope for, and in the ensuing few days, once he discovers he has the capacity to hypnotize Ray easily, he finds himself unable to resist the temptation to do so, to return Ray to the dreamy, relaxed state he achieved in hypnosis - and not incidentally, to pursue the implications of what he learned, including Ray's feelings for him, while leaving Ray remembering nothing. He knows that what he is doing is absolutely, utterly wrong, a violation of Ray's trust of the most severe and unforgivable sort, and he struggles with almost debilitating guilt - yet he doesn't stop, can't seem to stop.
And the implications are tragic. Fraser knows he'd never have discovered Ray's attraction to him without violating Ray's trust - but he also knows that by doing so he's ruined any chance there might have been for that attraction ever to come to anything. [...] [2]