Disclaimer: Not mine, any of them. But can you blame the boys and Dief for needing to be walked and watered once in a while? I'm just taking them around the block – promise.

Tin Man

Ray sat down wearily at an empty table at the very back of the canteen, hoping to catch a bit of a breather from the madhouse that the station had been for the last three days. Still was, in fact. Sure, it always was a bit of a circus, Ray had to admit, but the last 72 hours had been especially hellish. Despite their respective case loads, virtually everyone at the 27th had pitched in on that missing person case that had been driving Huey and Gardino up the walls.

Ray leaned forward in his chair and rested his cheek on the heel of his hands while pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. There was no love lost between him and the other two detectives, but they still respected each other, albeit grudgingly. So when the case the two were working on had started unraveling before their very eyes – through no fault of their own, Ray had to admit – everyone dove in, racing against the clock to get to the kidnapped victim before it was too late.

With a gusting sigh, Ray sat back slowly and leaned his head back against the wall, pressing his thumbs against his eyelids in an effort to hold back the headache he felt coming on. He ran his hands over his short-cropped hair as he waited for his vision to clear, then let his arms drop to his chest, where he crossed them. Things had ended badly; the girl had been found near the harbor, beaten to death, apparently for no other reason than the fact that her abductor could. It sure looked that way: he hadn't even bothered stealing her jewelry or her money, which made the whole situation all the more maddening and disheartening.

Ray pressed a hand into his forehead as he recalled the pictures taken on the scene. They had reminded him of his sister Maria. The impression had been so vivid that he had had to call home just to reassure himself that he was hallucinating due to stress, lack of sleep and lack of food. Now everyone was even more determined to catch the perp, and while they all did a good job of hiding the effect the sight of those images had had on them, they all still looked a little green around the gills, Fraser included.

Ray let himself slouch a little further in his seat, trying not to frown at the ceiling as he thought of his friend. On the one hand, he was worried about what such horrendous images would do to Fraser, while on the other, he well new the Mountie was no stranger to horrors perpetrated by human beings. Innocent he might look, but Fraser was no Johnny-come-lately, at least when it came to police work. Still, Ray knew this one had shaken him; the quiet escape he had made a little while ago, supposedly on Dief's behalf, was a dead giveaway as far as Ray was concerned. He would never in a million years call Fraser a coward, to his face or otherwise, but damn he was tempted this time. He knew it was only out of spite because he couldn't do the same at the moment, but it did nothing to smother his anger.

Ray did frown this time, both in anger and discomfort as he realized that part of his anger was directed at his friend, of all people. He ran his fingers thoughtfully over his upper lip as he tried to pinpoint the reason for this. Not one for self-analysis normally, Ray pushed down the reluctance he felt at the thought of attempting the exercise, feeling he owed it to Fraser to find out the source of that feeling before acting on it and risking hurting his friend needlessly. Again…

What was it that was driving him up the walls about Fraser this time? Heaven knew, there was plenty of stuff Benny did that got Ray going easily enough. Yet, the more he thought about it, the more Ray realized his reactions were more for show that anything else – almost as if he knew Benny would be disappointed if the expected retort or the familiar look didn't come. Hell, he half-suspected Fraser to pull any one of his usual stunts just to get a rise out of him. And, if he were entirely honest with himself, he'd have to admit that he liked it that way.

Ray closed his eyes, thinking, the frown still firmly in place. It sure as hell had nothing to do with Benny's reaction to this particular situation. Where he had fully expected the Mountie to react to the whole thing with his usual cool, analytical approach to things, he had instead seen a very human man reacting in a very human, if tightly controlled, way. The fact that Benny had felt the need to go out to clear his head said a lot to someone like Ray, who hadn't failed to see the tightness around the mouth and eyes, and the paler-than-normal skin. Yep, Benny was human, all right, just like the rest of them.

Human…

Ray opened his eyes slowly as it finally dawned on him what it was that bothered him so. He shook his head to himself. Damn you, Benny.

There was a time, Ray reflected half in anger, half in shame, when a case like this wouldn't have drained him quite so much. Oh, he would have found the situation unfortunate, no question, but would he have been affected by it as he was today, feeling like a boulder was sitting on his shoulder while he stood in quicksand? Hell, no. The victim was no one he knew, so why should he care personally what happened to her? He'd never wish this on anyone, but it did happen, unfortunately, and his job was to try and prevent it and, barring that, to catch the creep who had done it before he tried it again. End of story.

Then Benny had shown up, literally out of the backend of nowhere, with his sparkling clean morals, ethics and sense of justice, his soul and his heart as pure as the pristine snow he had just left back home. But worse than all that, he brought hope with him – hope that the world hadn't all gone to hell in a handbasket, that there was actually good left in people if you knew where to look, that maybe, just maybe, you could make this world a better place just by reaching out a helping hand to your fellow man. And damn him, he had made Ray believe it, too.

Oh, he hadn't gone peaceably at first. He had clung with all his might to that shield he hid behind, formed out of years of disillusion and bitterness, waiting with an almost perverse pleasure for the moment when Benny would lose his wings and come crashing down on the hard concrete of reality. Ray had long since stopped waiting.

Damn you, Benny.

Instead, he had found himself following his friend's lead more and more, quite against his will, to find that it was okay to care for your fellow man. Sure, it hurt like hell sometimes. Sure, it made doing your job harder. But while you also needed to keep your distance sometimes so as not to get engulfed in all the darkness surrounding you, it didn't mean you had to get rid of your heart altogether.

Ray started smiling softly as he felt the frown melting away, taking the nascent headache along with it. Somehow, Benny had known that, beneath the thick crust of cynicism Ray had burrowed under, beat a good heart, a warm heart – a little scarred, a little patched, perhaps, but big for all that. So, with his usual patience – or sheer doggedness, in Ray's opinion – he had started chipping away at that crust, until he got to the prize. And Ray hadn't been the same man since. Oh, to most people, he was still the same brash, loudmouthed cop who didn't mind bending things a little to get his way. But gone was the man who would as soon have hit you as talk to you, gone was the man who was afraid to care because he thought it would weaken him at best, destroy him at worst. And if he still didn't mind bending the law a little – to Benny's eternal chagrin – at least now, he did it for the right reasons. "Thanks, Benny," Ray said softly, his smile growing wider, fonder.

"For what?"

Ray looked up, not even surprised that Benny had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at the precise moment he had voiced his thoughts aloud. "For putting this Tin Man back on the Yellow Brick Road."

Benny cocked his head, puzzled. "I don't follow you."

Ray almost laughed when he saw how similar the head gesture was to one of Diefenbaker's patented expressions. I don't know if I should tell him, Ray thought a little mischievously. He'd never live it down. Getting up with a snort, Ray put his arm around Benny's shoulders and guided him back toward the door. "Well, follow me now and I'll tell you all about it."

The world on the other side of the door would still be ugly, but somehow Ray knew that it wouldn't be quite as ugly as it had been the last time he'd looked. It was all in the way you looked at it.

The End