Unforgettable

A/N: Clip shows always used to be pretty interminable, but Due South's pulled it off, especially in the subtle differences between Fraser's diction, vocabulary and manner during his fugue state. It was still calling out for some Ben/Meg wish fulfilment, though!

They were heading for the consulate stairs when the man who did not know himself as Benton Fraser paused.

"So this Inspector Thatcher and me," he said. "We definitely never had a thing going on before I lost my memory?"

"Benny, I'm telling you, the woman hates you. She's tried to fire you like, a million times. When she first got here she sent you out to get her dry cleaning. You! That's like sending a guard from Buckingham Palace to pick up hamburgers. And she took away your favourite uniform, just because she could. There definitely isn't any love lost there. Come on, let's go try something else."

"I'll be right there," the man who could not remember being called Ben, Benny, Benton or any variation thereof said. "I'm just going to…" he waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the Inspector's office. "No harm in being thorough, is there? I feel like she was trying to tell me something with her eyes, Ray, her very big, very dark and very attractive eyes, and I just wasn't getting it. Know what I mean?"

Vecchio sighed with an impatience that Fraser was beginning to find familiar, though not from memory. "You are very definitely barking up the wrong tree in that direction, my friend. But hey, if you want to wind up with sentry duty for a month, be my guest. I'll be in the car. I'd say don't be long, but I already know you won't be."

"Great. Cheers, Ray."

Vecchio was already jogging down the stairs. "Whatever." The man who currently could not remember being called Fraser heard him mutter to himself as he went. "Give me the old Benny back any day…"

Meg Thatcher was standing at her filing cabinet. The cabinet wasn't actually open: instead she has found herself staring out of the window beside it. Looking into Fraser's eyes had been like trying to connect to a complete stranger, which to all intents and purposes, at this moment he was. She hadn't wanted to bring up the incident on the train, especially not in front of Detective Vecchio, but out of all their interactions surely that one would have been memorable?

Apparently not.

She didn't really want to contemplate why him being unable to remember their kiss was so upsetting. After all, she'd told him to forget it, and had done her best to follow her own recommendation, albeit with varying degrees of success. But now he actually had, perhaps irrevocably. His loss had unexpectedly stolen something from her, too, something she hadn't realised she'd been harbouring until she'd stared up at him, willing him to remember, while realising that he absolutely did not.

There was a knock at her door. Turnbull, no doubt: she had asked for tea. "Come!"

It wasn't Turnbull. The stranger formerly known as Constable Benton Fraser stepped into her office and shut the door behind him.

"Hi." He was smiling at her, a bright, disarming expression.

The relaxed colloquialism blindsided her as much as the smile. Fraser coming into her office without an Excuse me, ma'am, or If I may, sir was enough to throw the entire Earth off its axis. Unexpectedly, her heart rate shot through the roof and she had to take a breath to steady herself. She backed herself up against the filing cabinet, feeling in need of something solid at her periphery.

"Fraser? Was there… something else?"

"Well," said the man wearing Fraser's undeniably handsome face, as he stepped further into the room. "Here's the thing. I get the feeling that back there, just then, you were trying to tell me something. Something about us that I don't remember and that Ray Vecchio doesn't know. Vecchio seems to be my best friend here in Chicago, and so it seems to me that if there's something about me that he doesn't know and you do, that's probably significant."

Meg opened her mouth, but found it hard to form sound. The man advancing toward her was wearing Fraser's face and speaking in his voice, but not with his words. Here's the thing? I get the feeling? Not to mention the unfaltering directness. She shut her mouth and cleared her throat even as her heart rate continued to accelerate.

"I'm… not sure what you mean, Constable. I'm your superior officer. We know each other through work. That's all."

He tipped his head to one side and regarded her. "Is it? Because honestly, I know this guy – me, I mean – is by all accounts a bit of a backwater schmuck, but even he can't have missed that you are an extremely beautiful woman to whom it is very easy to be physically attracted. And since you're not wearing a wedding ring and he's – I'm – single, and we're both living in the same city and both, you know, Canadian… I can't believe he'd be so much of a loser that he wouldn't ask you out at least once."

Meg felt the floor shifting slightly under her feet. She didn't think she'd ever heard so many consecutive words come from Fraser's mouth and especially not words such as extremely beautiful and physically attracted. "We had coffee," she heard herself say. "You took me out for coffee, once."

"That's it? Just coffee? What about this train thing? You were asking me if I remembered it and looking at me as if I should."

Meg was suddenly assaulted by the memory of how it felt to be locked against him, chest to chest, hip to hip, how it felt to have her nose pressed against his neck as he tried to pull a pin from her hair with his teeth and then his lips brushing over her clavicle and then lower, lower. What is that perfume you're wearing? She bit her lip, willing the heat not to find its way to her face.

"It was a very stressful experience," she said. "A very… extreme… experience. I thought if you were going to remember anything, you'd remember that."

"You were there?"

"Yes."

"With me?"

She risked a look at him, and wished she hadn't. He had moved closer, and her next word came out more like a gasp than she would have liked. "Yes."

He was watching her carefully. "There's something you're not telling me. If you know anything that could help me, why wouldn't you say?"

She swallowed, guilt flooding her gut. "It… it was nothing. We… we kissed. That's all. There was… there was a kiss. On the train. Actually, on the roof of the train."

He was staring at her mouth. Meg wasn't sure she'd ever breathe again.

"We kissed?"

"Yes."

"Just once?"

She heard herself laugh at that, a single breathless huff. "It was quite a long kiss."

"But we're not… it was just a kiss? Nothing else?"

Meg thought of that narrow bed in his apartment, how many times she'd found herself imagining- "Nothing else."

"Why not?"

"I told you to forget it."

"Why?"

"Because-" she couldn't remember why. God help her, he was now right inside her personal space, and right then, she couldn't remember why. She shook her head. "I'm your superior officer," she ground out. "And…"

"And you hate me."

She blinked in surprise. "I don't hate you."

"You just didn't want to kiss me again."

Now it was her turn to stare at his mouth. "It wasn't-" she stopped herself. It wasn't that I didn't. It was that I did.

"How about now?"

"W-what?"

He shrugged, slightly. "I don't get the impression I spend a lot of time kissing women, and you're right, I absolutely believe that kissing you would be memorable. So maybe-"

"All right. Yes."

And in the next second his mouth was on hers, sucking her bottom lip between his, making her lose the last of her breath on a helpless exhale that parted her lips enough to deepen a kiss that was already, instantly, out of control. He feathered the backs of his fingers against her neck and then ran them into her hair, thumbs brushing along her jaw as he pressed her up against the cabinet. Her heart thundered and she couldn't breathe and didn't want to because whatever else he'd forgotten, Benton Fraser still knew how to kiss her senseless in less than a second.

The kiss ended but he kept his hands cupped around her face, looking down at her as she caught her breath. His eyes searched hers, and she let him look, still weak.

"You don't remember."

He shook his head, slowly, and for the first time she saw a flicker of distress.

"It's all right," she said. "Ben, it's going to be all right."

He was looking at her as if, at that moment, she was the only thing in the world that was solid.

"Do you think, if my memory comes back, I'll remember… any of this? What happened while I'd forgotten everything else?"

"I don't know."

He nodded. He looked at her mouth. "Perhaps… some further jogging of my memory might be in order," he suggested. "Just in case once wasn't enough."

She blinked. "Well, it always pays to be thorough."

"My sentiments exactly."

He leaned in and caught her lips with his again. It was a softer kiss this time, deeper in a way that made her heart flutter. There was more than one of them. In fact, there were several.

She didn't object.

Something occurred to her.

"Fraser," she whispered, between kisses. "Fraser…"

"Hmm?"

"You're not a schmuck. Well. Not all the time, anyway."

"Finally," said Vecchio, as Fraser opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. "I was beginning to think she'd clapped you in irons and hauled you off to her dungeon."

"Sorry, Ray. We simply had things to discuss."

Vecchio raised his eyebrows. "Oh, you did? Like what?"

Fraser shifted in his seat. "Things of a personal nature."

"Personal? Between you and the Dragon Lady? You've got to be kidding me. Come on, spill."

"It would not be an appropriate for me to discuss a superior officer, Ray. You know that."

"I-" the detective stared at him. "Hey, have you got your memory back?"

Fraser considered. "No."

"Really? Because you're sounding a lot more like yourself than you have for a while."

"I am?"

"Oh yeah. Come on, what gives? What happened up there?"

"Apparently not enough to jog my memory, so as you said, we should try something else."

Ray continued to stare at him with narrowed eyes for a moment. "All right. Well, if women are the key, have I got a real doozy for you. If you don't remember this chick, you're probably done for."

Vecchio started the car and pulled out into the Chicago traffic. Fraser looked out of the window, seeing dark eyes, feeling full lips, willing himself not to forget, unsure how he ever had, or ever could.

[END]