Author: Minervacat
Fandom: due South
Pairing: Ray Kowalski gen, Ray K/Stella
Rating: PG-13
Summary: well the south side of Chicago is the baddest part of town/and if you go down there you better just beware of a man named Leroy Brown

Ray's 37th birthday was in July, just like all of Ray's other birthdays had been. It was hot as hell, hotter even than usual for Chicago in July, and Stella was about six months from kicking him out for good, except he didn't know that at the time. They were walking back from Mia Francesco because Stella liked to see and be seen, especially along that stretch of Clark Street, with its outdoor tables and upscale yuppie restaurants. If Ray had a choice, he'd have rather gone to Gibson's for steak or Shaw's for overpriced lobster, but Stella said downtown wasn't fashionable anymore, everybody who was anybody was eating in Wrigleyville.

37 years Ray's lived in Chicago, and some days he still feels like he don't know a damn thing about the city.

The air was so sticky that Ray felt like he was swimming through it, and he could hear the roar of the crowd at Wrigley in the background. Night games at Wrigley - he'd never get used to that, no matter how many years they played them and how many times Ray forgot to put the permit for night game parking on his dashboard and got fucking ticketed for it.

Down on the corner of Clark and Wellington, there was a fire hydrant somebody'd wrenched the cover off of, and it was spraying all over the sidewalk. Stella said, "God, I don't know why they don't come and fix those things when that happens; it's such an inconvenience." She pulled her hand out of Ray's just as he heard the crowd roar from the ballpark, and when he'd flip on the TV later, he'd find out that Sammy had launched a three-run homer out onto Sheffield. Stella skirted the water carefully, and Ray stood where he was for a minute, feeling the breeze pick up the spray and fling it into his face.

He thought about the pool on the rooftop of the Lincoln Park condo Stella's father bought them before it was cool to own property in Lincoln Park; he thought about the pool on the rooftop of the Gold Coast building next to the house where Stella grew up. He thought about the fact that until he met Stella, he spent summers cooling off in the spray of fire hydrants opened by enterprising mechanics and South Side firefighters who remembered what it was like to be a kid and not be able to even scrape up the 25 cents to get into the pool at the park a couple of blocks over.

"Sure, Stell," he said. "I'll call Mikey over at the fire department when we get home."

When Ray was 5, the book binding plant in Pilsen where his dad worked closed down, moved the whole operation up to Milwaukee where it was cheaper to pay the binders, except that it still just amounted to something only a little more than slave labor. His dad was out of work for three months, and every day during those three months, he picked Ray up from kindergarten at lunchtime. Ray's mom, when she was home, never let him watch anything on their tiny little black and white TV after school, and the neighbor who looked after him sometimes didn't either, but Ray's dad didn't seem to mind, so Ray watched a lot of grainy news shows and kids' show on the public television station, and sometimes his dad let him help change the oil or work on the engine in their car.

His dad was probably drinking more than he should have been those three months, but Ray didn't know it then and by the time he figured it out, in a bar in Lincoln Park with divorce papers sitting beside him, it didn't really seem like the moment to bring it up. His dad got another job at the meat packing plant where Ray's uncle worked, and all Ray really remembers about it after that is that he stopped being allowed to watch TV during the day.

The one thing that Stella never bugged him about was his folks, which was a nice break from the rest of everything she nagged about. Maybe Ray sent enough signals that he didn't want to talk about it, or about them, or to them, at least not until his dad forgave him for joining the department which at this point was looking like never. Or maybe Stella was just happy to not have to deal with them, because when they got married, she was pretty clear that Ray's friends from Pilsen weren't quite the type she'd like at their wedding except Ray was goddamned determined that they'd be there, Stella be damned; so at least, thank God, she didn't have to deal with a meat packer and his wife on top of all that.

Stella didn't really get it, either. Maybe Ray looked like she wanted him to now, but his folks were still his folks, speaking to him or not, and he was still a meat packer's youngest son, and a cop, and a South Sider, no matter how she wanted him to be from Ravenswood or Lincoln Square or Lakeview, and something other than what he was.

You can take the punk out of the South Side, but you can't take the South Side out of the punk.

When Ray was 8, he got glasses. Thick glasses, because he still couldn't read real well, even though his mother and his teachers told him that he was smart, smart enough to be able to read better from on the chalkboard even if he wasn't a genius or nothing, but it turned out that if you can't see that far, you can't read any of it. So he was an 8-year-old geek with thick glasses, and that would have gotten him beat up anywhere, no matter how nice the neighborhood; but that still didn't change the fact that when the 12 year old kid who lived in the two-flat across the street punched him in the face, they couldn't afford to buy new ones and he had to go to school in glasses fixed with tape.

Stella wanted him to get contact lenses, but no matter how much blood and guts and gore Ray could stomach while he watched the horror flicks on the Late Late Late Show, he couldn't stomach sticking his fingers and a little piece of plastic in his eye every morning, plus why'd he want to see that good all the time anyway? He put his glasses on when he needed to read small print or shoot at somebody, and the rest of the time he lived in a nice blurry world, where he didn't have to look at shitty cars or ugly shirts or the Cubs losing on the bar TV, or any other stupid shit like that.

Plus, even when Stella harped at him about the convenience of contact lenses, she still really liked his glasses enough to jump on him whenever he wore them at home. Ray was willing to trade a crystal-clear view of the Sears Tower for every time Stella tossed his glasses halfway across the room before she kissed him.

Ray's been here all his life; it's not like he needs to know what State Street looks like anymore.

When Ray was 12, he met Stella. Stella's aunt had a friend from high school who lived on Ray's block in Pilsen. So Stella came down from the shining fairy-tale kingdom that was the Gold Coast with her cousin, and Ray met her for the first time standing in a stranger's front yard, grass brown and crunchy underneath his feet. When he rode up on his bike, wanting to know who the pretty girls he'd never seen before were, Stella looked him up and down and before he could say anything, she said, "Who are you?"

It was the hottest summer in a long time, the first summer Ray really cared about girls, and it hadn't rained in weeks and weeks. Ray remembers the way Stella asked him who he was, half scorn and half curiosity. He remembers the way he fell, thump, right in love with her in the kind of way he's never ever fallen in love since, because Chicago, the only other thing he loves like he loved Stella - by the time he was old enough to figure out that it was the kind of city that you could love, he'd already been loving it, he just didn't know he was.

He knew he loved Stella from the first moment he saw her, though, and that was how Stella was different from Chicago: they were both cool edges and slick composure, but Stella changed his life, because she changed how Ray looked at Chicago.

If Ray counted things like that, he might say that Stella won.

When Ray was 15, he took a bus, a train, another train and then another bus, just to get to school. Because his mom sat him down when he was 14 and told him that he wasn't going to the same high school everybody else in the neighborhood was going to, all his buddies from the time he was born, and Ray'd been looking forward to it. Maybe go out for baseball, watch the girls with his friends, you know - he wanted to go and be normal, maybe not be a geek with thick glasses for the first time in ever. But his mom said, "You're going to a good school," which meant "you're going to get out of here, Stanley" which meant Benet Academy, way the hell out in Lisle. Ray wasn't particularly wild about the idea except that Stella went there, and that counted for a lot more than other stuff did anyway.

He still doesn't know how they scraped tuition together, because he was clever enough to not flunk out but never smart enough to get a scholarship, and even when he was out of the house and out on his own, his mom still wouldn't tell him where the money came from. They managed, though, and Ray worked weekends at Tom's garage down on the corner by his house, to cover his train fare, and he got to go to school with Stella. It wasn't that much of a drag, except when he missed a bus and was late to chapel and got detention, which meant he missed the last train home. Sometimes, though, when he didn't have detention, Stella's driver would let him get a ride back to Stell's parents' place on Lake Shore, where he'd sit in the spotless kitchen, across the table from Stella, and do his homework, because she wouldn't let him kiss her until he finished it. Worth the train ride, every day.

Somebody at the his second station found out he went to Benet, a couple of months after he first transferred in, off probation and with his own beat, and the guys gave him no end of shit about it; what's a kid like Ray doing going all the way up to a place like Benet Academy? So it wasn't a fact he broadcast, because who cares where he went to high school, plus mostly when people found out, they tended to give him hell or ask him things like, "Why didn't you go to college, then?" Which, if you asked Ray, was a really fucking rude thing to ask, but nobody asked him that, they just asked why the Academy, instead of Northwestern. The thing is, the first time he said "Because I really wanted to be a cop, help some people out" instead of just shrugging and walking away, the judge he was talking to at this party of a friend of Stella's from law school looked him straight in the eye and patted his arm and said, "That's the best reason for doing anything, son. Because you wanted to."

He was proud of being a cop the same way Stella was proud of being a lawyer - the same way he thought Stella was proud of him being a cop.

When Ray was 16, he got his driver's license and his dad bought the Goat from Tom at the garage, all in one week. It took them three months to rebuild the whole thing, from the engine all the way to the brand new sleek black paint job, and the first day Ray drove it out to Benet, all the stuck up Lincoln Park jerks who ignored him and tried to date Stella behind his back turned and stared. Ray let the motor rumble in the parking lot behind the gym for a minute, and when he got out, people moved out of the way for him and his practiced Steve McQueen walk. It felt like power, the GTO rumbling underneath him, people stepping aside like he was someone who mattered.

Stella let him drive her home that day, sent the driver and his Caddy back to her parents' house without her. He still got ignored at school, but they gave off trying to date Stella, which counted for a lot in Ray's book. He drove her home, over Foster and then down Lake Shore, with windows down and Stella's hair whipping around her face in the wind, and Chicago felt like a place that had a future for him, for the first time.

It was work, trying to get Stella to fall in love with him, but falling in love with her was easy, and so it never seemed like work to make her love him, even when it was. She had a dozen guys after her all the time, and Ray had less money than all of them, but when she finally picked him, the first day she let him kiss her behind the tree in her parents' backyard, it was worth every minute of it.

Keeping Stella turned out to be work, too, once he had her, because she was used to a different kind of life, a different kind of Chicago, than he was used to, but it was worth it, having Stella on his arm.

For Ray, it came down to two things: Chicago before Stella, and Chicago after.

When Ray was 18, he graduated from Benet, just barely, and with more than a little help from Stella. He wasn't stupid, he knew that, but school just didn't seem worth it - better things to do in the world than study a bunch of dead people. He applied to college, though, just one, UIC, because Stella was going to U Chicago and he didn't want to be all the way up north at Loyola or something, not when Stella was meeting guys with money and more brains than Ray down in Hyde Park. Except that he didn't hardly go to class, because he was spending all his time over in Stella's tiny studio apartment on Ellis Avenue, and when he woke up in the morning because Stella was leaving for class, he had two choices: roll over and go back to sleep, or get up and drive back to UIC for his classes.

And when he couldn't sleep anymore and Stella was busy with her International Relations and her Intro to Psychology, Ray used his fake ID to drink before dinner time in bars that the snooty students at U Chicago would never set foot in; he learned how to roll his own cigarettes from the regulars in those bars. The guy at the service station at Ellis and 53rd helped Ray tune the Goat up so the engine rumbled lower and growlier.

It shouldn't have surprised anybody that Ray always chose Hyde Park over Pilsen, but when he dropped out of UIC after his third semester, his parents acted like they didn't see it coming. His mom said, "We wanted better for you, Stanley," and his dad said, "No son of mine's going to be a cop, God damn it." Ray thought, I'm just what this place made me, and surprised himself with the thought that followed: Yeah, but I could be better than meat-packing, it just ain't going to be in college.

Stella was the only one who wasn't totally pissed that he wanted to go to the Academy, which was kind of a surprise but a nice one. "It's good you're going to do something with yourself," she said, and she went back to her Poli Sci book and Ray went back to making dinner and that was pretty much the only time they ever talked about him being a cop.

When Ray was 24, he saw someone get shot for the first time. He was walking his beat over by Comiskey, and there was a domestic, and he and his partner got there just in time to see the husband shoot the wife in the chest. She survived and he went to jail, but Ray didn't find that out until a couple of weeks later when his Lieu got on him about the paperwork, and the whole thing sort of shook him up. He told Stella about it over dinner, and when he was finished, she looked up from the law book she'd been staring at the whole time he talked. She said, "You never saw someone get shot when you were a kid? I mean, I thought the South Side ..."

She trailed off, and he said, "Fuck you, Stella." She didn't say anything back, and he slammed out the door and into the car and sped off to a bar where he knew he wouldn't see anybody he knew. He got too drunk to drive home, and Ray was maybe an alcoholic but he wasn't stupid, and so he took a cab home. When he went back the next day to get the car, somebody'd stolen the fucking hubcaps. Up in Lincoln Park somebody took his hubcaps, not even in a shitty neighborhood like where he'd hung out in high school, a place where he'd expect the hubcaps to get stolen. He couldn't catch a break, and Stella yelled at him for that, too, because she was still in school and beat cops didn't really make that much money to begin with and new hubcaps were a luxury they couldn't afford.

And Stella never apologized for assuming that he'd seen tons of people get shot at close range, plus Ray always thought she was kind of missing the point of what he'd meant - he was trying really hard to protect people from bad shit, and sometimes the bad shit slipped between his fingers and got to good people anyway.

When Ray was 25, he got married. Stella finished law school, Ray got a promotion and his own patrol car, and Stella's mom, having reluctantly decided that apparently Ray wasn't just some kind of teenage rebellion on Stella's part, started hinting that she'd like grandkids, and soon. So they got married at Holy Name down on State, and his parents still weren't speaking to him even though a.) he was getting married, b.) to a nice successful lawyer who was also, did he mention it, Catholic, c.) in a church; but his brother came, with his wife, and so did some guys from the precinct and a couple of guys from Ray's old neighborhood, with their wives. Ray's side of the church was still way emptier than Stella's, which was full of her posh blond church-on-Easter-and-Christmas-Catholic relatives, but he didn't care, because that wasn't the point.

The point was Stella, beautiful and shining in her dress, and the point had been Stella from the first time he laid eyes on her when she was 12 years old, because all Ray really wanted to do in his life was take care of Stella, make the world a place that somebody like Stella, somebody he loved like he loved Stella, would be safe. It was all about making sure that the bad guys couldn't get to the things that Ray loved. Security and justice and all that stuff, and getting married just meant that he was it for Stella, and she was it for him. Getting married was the last line of defense between them and the rest of the world.

Ray wasn't a romantic or anything, but he'd wanted to marry Stella for as long as he'd known her; this wasn't just a wedding, it was inevitability, it was fate. Marrying Stella, standing up with her in front of a whole room full of people who loved one or the other of them - it felt like the only thing Ray had ever been sure of in his whole life.

Or at least that's what Ray thought, anyway.

When Ray was 37, he got a divorce. Stella said, "Things change, Ray. People change." Like she needed to tell him that, like he couldn't see it for himself - they tore his parents' old place in Pilsen down last year, and the last time Ray drove by, a night when Stella threw him out after a fight and he went on a tour of all the places that existed for him in the city before Stella, there was a big sign up that said they were building condos there. The city was changing, and Ray could see it just as well as Stella, but that didn't mean he had to like it, just like he didn't have to like Stella throwing him out of their house and ending their marriage, like she was the only one with any kind of say in it.

When Ray is 39, Stella starts seeing someone new, some slimy alderman from the West Loop, and stops answering Ray's phone calls. Even after the divorce, they were still ... they were still something, though Ray's never been able to put a finger on what. Fuckbuddies, maybe, and what a way to reduce a lifelong romance to jack shit.

Ray turns 39 in July, an unseasonably cool day - he shivers in the shadows at Wrigley that afternoon, and the Cubs lose in the 10th. There's a message from Welsh over at the 27th on his machine when he gets home, and because he liked Welsh, and Welsh liked him, back when Ray was a rookie at the 1-7 and Welsh had a lot more patience than he does now, Ray calls him back.

He listens to the details and says, "Can I call you back?"

Welsh says of course, of course, but please, Detective, don't take too long. Ray hangs up with Welsh and calls Stella. He gets her answering machine, and he says, "Stella, it's me. Look, Welsh at the 2-7 can give you the details, but if you need me for anything for the next couple of months, I won't be around."

Ray hangs up and pours himself a drink and waits for Stella to call him back, and say she still needs him, she'll always need him, he can't disappear into somebody else's life for six months.

Stella doesn't call.

He takes the Vecchio gig because it stayed the same; somebody's else life to make a mess of, sure, but keeping people safe, justice, all that shit that he's believed in since Stella happened, none of that changes - it's just that some days, he thinks, I'm taking care of Chicago instead of I'm taking care of Stella.

It works, even while the world shifts under him at every turn.

And sometimes he only does things for himself.

He picks up the phone. "Yeah," he says when Welsh answers. "Yeah, I can be somebody else for a while."

author's notes: i'm not prone to lengthy author's notes, but this story was, oh my god, the most massive community effort ever. it started last july with a train ride home from midway, and has been pushed and pulled and prodded at ever since. h., sid, lale, tracey, and r. all read various drafts of this - several of them read multiple drafts, even - and tried to help me fix it. all the good bits are theirs and all the remaining weaknesses are mine alone.

honest truth: this story isn't finished. but this story is almost a year old, now, as well, and i still don't know what's wrong with it, and sometimes you just have to let a story lie the way it falls, you know? my gratitude to everyone who tried to help me fix this - my apologies for not being able to.

and because i said this way back then and it's still true now: like all the ray i write, this is for h., who loves the ray kowalski/chicago otp like i do.