Ray's Snowflakes
by Allie
Ray's hand are restless on stakeouts, kept busy with little puzzles, or tapping the steering wheel, or drawing or doodling on little edges of paper when he thinks no one will notice.
This December, he's found a little pair of scissors from somewhere. He folds white sheets of paper into delicate, tight patterns on this thigh and snips, snips and snips. Bits of paper litter the Capri's floor. Bodie makes jokes about how it never rains but it pours—paper snowflakes. Doyle makes his intricate designs, unfolds them in silence to see what he created.
Bodie always leans closer to watch, can't help himself. Doyle's artistic side still surprises him after all this time.
But once he's finished a paper snowflake creation, Ray rarely seems to care about it. They litter the car's floor, drift in soft white piles, appear unexpectedly in the rest room, under cushions, crumpled in corners or under someone's cup of tea to catch drips, getting brown ring stains. They're becoming ubiquitous as little dust balls, seeming to breed and shuffle about, rustle away and hide on their own.
Betty strings some of them up around her desk for Christmas. Most agents, Bodie included, begin scooping them into the bin on sight—or balling them up, flinging them at one another. One time Anson and Murphy gather them for several days and stuff them in the new man's locker so they cascade out at him when he opens it. That's a laugh.
Doyle ignores the teasing about snowstorms, both from other agents and from Bodie, living in his own little world the way he seems to so often lately.
But when Doyle disappears, each snowflake becomes a little stab to the heart, a reminder of what they've lost, what he's lost. Bodie smooths them out, even the dusty ones, even the crumpled and stained ones and saves them all in a drawer. He can't bear to throw away anything Doyle has touched now. Rapidly disappearing snowflakes become a grim symbol for the missing agent.
We'll find you, he promises. I'll find you, sunshine.
When the snow (Ray's and the real white stuff) has long since ceased turning up (Spring leaving soggy, wet rain instead), they do.
Ray is thinner. His gaze is far away, but sometimes touched by a gratitude so warm it takes your breath away, his smile bone bright and heartbreaking. He's held on to life these months, somehow, his spirit burning bright even while his body's ebb is low.
Bodie visits him in hospital. While he waits, his impatient fingers are desperate for some distraction. He makes snowflakes of his own with Ray's small scissors, tearing out pages of magazines and folding and snip, snip, snipping. Then he jumps up and leaves them forgotten in the waiting room as soon as he's allowed to go in and see Ray.
He doesn't save his own, but he's saved all the old ones he can find of Ray's.
It might be some time before Doyle can make them again.