Commentary ☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ

Strike Another Match

Last updated: 1st of January, 2026

I wrote this fic for the 2025 dS Seekrit Santa. My assigned gift recipient was flownwrong.

flownwrong offered quite a few prompts but the one that really caught my eye was number 2:

Sam Franklin/Ray Kowalski

Prompts:

• pre-canon tension or sexual encounter(s), with Ray starry-eyed over his mentor and Sam obliging and generous and interested
• anything set during and around The Ladies' Man with past Sam/Ray relationship of any kind suggested, discussed or privately reflected on, from Ray's POV or, if you'd like to do it, Fraser's I-Definitely-Noticed-Something-Here-And-Am-Possibly-A-Bit-Concerned POV. If you can do a non-totally-villainous Sam POV, I'd also be delighted.
• [...] As with everything, if you want to look at it through F/K goggles, more power to you

I'd seen The Ladies Man and yes, Ray did seem to be very close to his cop mentor. And there was very little fic about Ray and Sam - pretty much the only lengthy one I'd found was Verushka70's exemplary Just Act Normal.

This was my first year doing dSSS and I was a bit nervous. I decided to take this request on in the belief that even if my fic sucked, I would at least have added to the store of Sam/Ray fic in the world.

This fic took a long time to come together for me and I was running down the deadline...in fact I went over the deadline [hangs head in shame] and had to give it to my beta reader after I'd already submitted it. Btw thanks to SwitchbladeEyes for the very helpful and sharp-eyed beta read!

Now, onto commentary about the actual fic.......might as well start with the title.

Strike Another Match is a quote from a song by Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. I confess that the title was a last minute idea. I think it's okay, though.

Ray and Fraser solved the Botrelle case with hours to spare, but that alone hadn't saved Beth's life. Proving that Beth was innocent of the crime she was convicted of would do no good if she still got executed. So in the end, the only thing Ray really did to help that day was swallowing his pride and phoning Stella.

"My God!" Stella had said, and "That poor woman!" Within the hour, she had charges filed against Franklin, with Beth subpoenaed as a witness.

One of the unexplained things in The Ladies Man is exactly how Beth Botrelle gets her reprieve. Sure, the guys prove she's innocent and catch Franklin, but how does that translate into her getting a stay of execution from the governor?

The episode ends with a group effort to confront and arrest Franklin so I decided that saving Beth would have to be a group effort too. Welsh, Fraser, Stella and Frannie all do a little piece.

As soon as I thought of it, it seemed totally obvious that Ray would ask Stella to help. Originally I played it up more as Stella doing Ray a favour, but do you know what? Stella prosecutes domestic violence cases. She would absolutely move heaven and earth to save Beth.

Beth's cool defense lawyer also originally played a part, but she got lost between drafts. Sorry, Beth's lawyer.

"I completely understand, sir," Ray had heard Fraser saying on the phone, and "It would certainly be unfortunate," and "I can't imagine - if there was any appearance of misconduct, it could be very damaging, and just imagine how terrible it would be if the media got a hold of this story before everything was er, cleared up."

Like he didn't know Frannie was out there at her desk phoning the story in to Mackenzie King at the Chicago Guardian.

Mackenzie King gets a part to play too! It's not explained, because our POV character is Ray and he's out of his mind with anxiety while this is all going on, but the strategy is to scare the governor into thinking that executing Beth will be a scandal that will affect his chances at re-election. Mackenzie King is going to ring while Fraser is on the phone with the governor, and ask for comment about the Botrelle case. He'll smell danger and give Beth a stay of execution so she can be cross-examined during Sam's trial.

I kind of vaguely assume that Beth is given a pardon because of the evidence that she didn't do it, and in fact there was no murder for her to do. As you might be able to tell, I know very little about US criminal law, or any law really. In real life, the governor of Illinois gave a reprieve to a number of men on death row, but they continued to serve life sentences. It's usually quite tricky to get someone off death row and get them out of prison, even if they didn't do what they're accused of.

We never actually see Jake Botrelle's suicide note, and the last person known to have seen it is Sam Franklin. Therefore there's an intriguing possibility, which I wasn't able to work in: what if Sam Franklin agrees to testify that Jake Botrelle killed himself, and that's what frees Beth Botrelle in the end?

Sam had been a lot of different things to Ray: his coworker, his mentor, his lover, his friend. And now it turned out he just hadn't been who Ray thought he was the whole time. It was, Ray thought, like looking through an old family photo album and suddenly realizing that there was an uninvited stranger in all the pictures of birthdays and Christmases and high school graduations.

A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN:

Originally I had a line about looking at the photos from your camping trip and spotting Bigfoot in the background, instead of one about spotting an uninvited stranger. Eventually I decided that a bigfoot metaphor was a little bit too silly for this fic and I changed it. I suppose the uninvited stranger could still be Bigfoot.

It all caught up to Ray later that week, when they were interviewing some hoodlum about a burglary. Ray was working on the punk. He took off his jacket and handed it to Fraser, he rolled up his sleeves, and the next thing he should have done was point at the guy and say You were there on the night of the 29th, weren't you?

But he stopped. 

Sam had taught him how to do that. How to slowly turn the pressure up, toy with the suspect, use your body and your voice to intimidate them until you could get them to tell you anything you wanted. Some cops were better at interviews than others, and Sam had been one of the best. He wondered if the technique had worked on Beth Botrelle. 

Ray pulled it together and kept going, but his heart hadn't been in it any more. Every interrogation was a performance, and Ray's would have gotten two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert. The punk clammed up and they ended the day with no leads, no proof and no idea of how to solve the case.

In the episode, Ray clearly admires and looks up to Sam Franklin, and it's implied that they had a close working relationship, presumably both during and after the Botrelle case. Hence the idea of Sam teaching Ray how to interrogate people.

Originally this was going to go to a darker place, given that in the first episode of series 3 we see Ray threaten to hit a suspect during an interrogation. In real life, part of the reason those people on death row were pardoned was because people suspected of major crimes were repeatedly kidnapped and tortured by Chicago police officers. I thought that maybe Ray respected Sam so much because he seemed like a "clean" cop in comparison to more violent and more cynical cops he had also worked with. However, I ultimately decided that I didn't have the skills to sensitively write about police brutality in a fanfiction story, and that if I was going to attempt to do that, I should probably do so on my own time, not in a fic for someone else. A Christmas gift fic, too, for god's sake! That would have been about as Christmassy as the last episode of Blake's 7!

All that said, I do think that a large part of why Ray is having such a bad time in this fic is because of a sense of moral injury.

I mentioned Verushka70's fic about Ray and Sam above. While I was editing, I noticed/felt that I'd unintentionally pulled a lot from it just because it is one of the few fics that's been written about them. In Verushka70's fic, Sam treated Ray terribly during their relationship but is able to justify it to himself and Ray by pointing to how terribly he'd been treated by other closeted cops, and saying that he'd treated Ray much better than that. In a way, my rewrite of that is Ray admiring Sam for being better than some of the nastier people in the CPD, only to later realize how big a gap there is between "better" and "good".

Sam was from Frascati Park, not Cabrini Street, but he came from the same place as Ray - working-class inner city Chicago. His polish was hard won, a defence against being overlooked. You never saw Sam come to work in a t-shirt with mustard from yesterday's hot dog on it because all his other shirts were in the wash. Sam wore a suit to work, a different one every day. With a long tan raincoat like he thought he was a PI in an old movie.

I don't think there's a Frascati Park in due South or in real life. My brother was in the same class at school with a girl whose surname was Frascati. I liked the name. Googling it now, I see that there is a Frascati Park....in the not-particularly-tough-at-all South Dublin neighbourhood of Blackrock. Oops. I must have heard the name somewhere.

I don't think that Ray is meant to be from Cabrini Street in due South either, just because he teaches boxing to kids from Cabrini Street. But I decided to make him from there anyway.

All the stuff about clothes came out of a conversation in the due Southbound discord server about clothes and class, and whether the relatively casual way Ray dressed at work came from his working-class background. I am much, much too middle-class to offer any insight into this, but I've always read and heard that working-class style and subculture comes from a desire to look as well put together as possible - "clean living under difficult circumstances" is the famous description of mod subculture. For the short period of time we see him on screen, Sam Franklin is very sharply dressed. Even when we see him relaxing at home, he's wearing a cardigan and a shirt with a collar. Ray on the other hand dresses much more casually, and they make an interesting visual contrast (like Ray and Fraser). So I ended up writing about the differences between Ray and Sam and kind of taking the different ways they dress as two different personalities reacting differently to similar circumstances. Assuming that Sam is from a similar background to Ray, which I think I got from Verushka's fic. Verushka, I can pay you royalties if you want!

If Ray wanted to be totally pretentious about it, Sam was Old Hollywood and Ray was New Hollywood. Or maybe Direct To Video.

I was kind of thinking about Cary Grant, who came from an impoverished background and created a new identity and persona through relentless effort (and was allegedly in the closet). Of course, Ray is identified with New Hollywood in the show, with references to Paul Newman.

He never looked right in those clothes, anyway. Ray could have won the Powerball and he'd still be the guy who buttoned his shirts wrong, and never wore cufflinks, and wouldn't throw his jeans out when they got holes in the thighs. Sam used a steamer on his jeans, and wasn't embarrassed about it.

I had another take on this which I quite liked, but it got lost in the edit. Check it out below - consider this a DVD bonus scene....

"Sam used a clothes steamer on his jeans. Ray had seen him do it a couple times, when he stayed the night at Sam's. They didn't do it often, because Sam's sister liked to drop by and she had a spare key. Still, sometimes. When they'd been celebrating about a case together the night before, or if they were doing something together the next day.

Ray used to sit up in bed and watch Sam's whole morning routine in disbelief: the mirror checks, the clothes brush, the protective bags for suits and shirts."

Anyway....

After a while, Ray had realized that it wasn't envy he felt for Sam, or fraternal admiration. It was more like what he'd felt for Dave Brubeck, who'd been the pitcher to his catcher on his high school baseball team.

Dave had been a year older than him, a senior. He'd had beautiful dark hair, and when he smiled it lit up his whole face. Ray had seriously considered transferring to a different school district.

I only realised after I submitted this fic that Ray should probably have considered transferring to a different school, not a different school district. To move districts you'd probably have to move house. Oops. Anyway. I invented a baseball crush for Ray, gave him the name of a famous person (as is the right of anyone who writes a minor background character in a due south fic) and tried to make him seem like a litttle bit of a future echo of Fraser. Ray has a type!

Right now, nobody knew exactly what Bedford did and didn't know. Maybe he conspired with Franklin: maybe he just turned a blind eye to any irregularities. Maybe he'd honestly believed that Beth was guilty, and the only thing he himself was guilty of was the same thing Ray was guilty of: trusting Sam.

Maybe so. Ray didn't buy it. Back then, Ray had just thought that Bedford was an interfering jackass: he kept coming around to Major Crimes and demanding to know why they hadn't finished investigating the Botrelle case yet. 

When I rewatched the episode again I realized my memory of the actual plot was blurry and unreliable. I am still not entirely sure what Bedford's role was. This is possibly my problem not the episode's problem. Of course the thing about Bedford murdering Botrelle was a red herring, but was he also aware of Beth's guilt being in doubt? Was that why he was trying to pressure Ray not to re-investigate? Maybe or maybe not! I made him collude with Sam to stitch Beth up, whether or not he was aware of her being innocent. It's not uncommon for cops to frame people they genuinely think are guilty.

Sam's bail had been set so high that even the Fraternal Order of Police didn't want to pay it, so he was being held in lockup at the 2-4. Something about him being in danger for being a cop if he was in a regular jail. Ray didn't phone ahead to make an appointment: he wasn't sure he'd get in if he asked. 

BORING FACT: The references to the Fraternal Order of Police come from spotting a half fallen off FRATERNAL ORDER OF sticker on the side of a bookcase in the 2-7 during my rewatch of The Ladies Man. Actually, I think it happened to be one of the scenes where Huey and Dewey are hassling Ray for re-investigating Beth's case. In real life, cop unions often try to protect cops from criticism and scrutiny - hence the idea of the Chicago FOP bailing out Sam, although I'm not aware of any real branches of the FOP doing anything similar in real life.

It sounded bad when Ray tried to put it into words, like a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, but it hadn't been. Sam had known he was married, but he'd also known that Ray and Stella were on the outs, the first big blow-up between them in the series of blow-ups that got worse and worse and eventually led to the end of their marriage.

Franklin was a little older than Ray, but not by much; and he had been the superior officer, sure, but that was just because Sam had joined the CPD earlier and risen through the ranks faster. Where it mattered, they were equals. Weren't they? They'd just been two guys in the same department, nervously looking at each other from over a stack of case files. 

And Sam was vulnerable too.

Ray had been married then. Sam wasn't married, and he never had been. Probably, most people at work had no idea that he was gay. Even if some of them had guessed, they couldn't prove anything. Sam never did anything that confirmed it for them. He operated in the realm of plausible deniability, and Ray was one of the few people who could blow that up for him.

My gift recipient requested "sympathetic Sam POV if possible". I ended up writing from Ray's POV, so I thought that maybe a sympathetic perspective on Sam might still be appreciated...

I did think that Sam and Ray's relationship could be something like a relationship of equals. I also thought that they probably maintained a good working relationship after the Botrelle case and were fairly friendly even after they broke up. Of course, their relationship is still very fucked up because Sam has been withholding the truth about the Botrelle case from Ray, lies to him, and is ultimately prepared to kill Ray for his own benefit.

It's repeatedly mentioned that the Botrelle case happened eight years ago, which means that Ray was about 30 when it happened and he met Sam. I wasn't able to work out how old the actor playing Sam Franklin was, and I'm terrible at judging age by faces, but I'm not sure that he's that much older than Ray. They seem to have a mutual respect, and Ray talks about how he worked "with" Sam, not for him. There's also that idea that there can sometimes be greater equality in a queer relationship between two people from different classes or backgrounds, because you both share the vulnerability of being queer....but is that something that's actually true, or just something that people say? I don't even know myself.

You can decide for yourself if Ray is right about their relationship being equal, or if he's in denial about the seriousness of the power imbalance.

Speaking of queer relationships. My recipient's DNW included "hard gender/sexual identity headcanons". It wasn't until after I'd submitted the fic that I thought to myself, "oh no, does the way I depicted Sam Franklin in this fic count?!" Hopefully it doesn't!

In fairness, the fic is from Ray's point of view and we don't hear how Sam sees his own identity. Also what Ray is really talking about here is their perceived vulnerability to homophobic scrutiny, and homophobic scrutiny can apply to anyone regardless of their particular sexual identity. Sam could be gay, bi or queer; he might use another label or none at all. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking with it...

What I kind of wanted to do was depict Sam as operating in the closet out of necessity, not out of denial or self-hatred, regardless of how he specifically identified. Here's another bit that didn't make it out of the edit:

"Sam was okay with being gay. He just liked being a cop, too, and he was keenly aware of the limits to the CPD's tolerance. He got through the scrutiny because of his brass necked fucking confidence in his own worth and his own right to be there. Ray knew that confidence was a front, though, something Sam had to put on again every morning just like that tan raincoat. When Ray slept in the same bed as him, Sam used to cling to Ray all night like he thought that otherwise he'd disappear."

We don't get to see much of Sam at work or interacting with his colleagues. But in the flashback to the crime scene at Jake and Beth Botrelle's apartment, we briefly see Sam Franklin bagging evidence. He's got a pen stuck in his mouth until he pulls it out to write on the evidence bag, and I thought it was very insouciant, you know? Very nonchalant for what's supposedly a murder scene. From that I got the idea of both Sam and Ray being "different", but in different ways. Ray isn't able to live up to the kind of ideal expected of Chicago detectives: Sam lives up to it almost too well. Call it butch and femme. Feel free to send me hate mail for misusing the concept of butch and femme.

Anyway....I thought that both Sam and Ray might have bonded over both feeling like outsiders in the CPD. Whether that's because of class or sexuality or personality. In The Ladies Man, Welsh comments that Ray has a talent for pissing people off. Ray seems to only just tolerate most of his coworkers and even his superiors. He respects Welsh, and Fraser is his partner, but other than that?

So in this fic and the backstory for Sam and Ray, I set up this sense of it being "us against the world". Their boss wasn't doing his job, Attorney Bedford was on their back, but Sam and Ray would do the job properly. It's one way to make a home for yourself in a hostile workplace.

Of course, two things can happen if you set yourself at odds to the corporate culture of your workplace. One is that your workplace can try to crush you, because the job you're doing is not the job they want you to do. Another is that because you see yourself as being an outsider, you become comfortable with the idea of doing things that are contradictory to your workplace's stated values.

They hadn't been together for that long: the guts of a year.

My beta tells me that this is actually not a phrase that people use in countries other than Ireland. I left it in because I couldn't think of another good way to say it. For the record, "the guts of" means "most of" something - the guts of an hour, the guts of a hundred euro.

The desk sergeant at the 2-4 wasn't happy about them turning up, but she agreed to let Ray and Fraser see Sam. They pretended it was official business. "Thirty minutes," she said. "That's all you get. If you're not gone by then, you'll be in the cell next to him." 

Sam was being held alone in a block of cells that was usually used for prisoners who were being transferred to jail. Ray stared at the door to the block and wished he could come up with some excuse, any excuse, not to go in. He had been foolish: he had been blind: he hadn't realized how nervous he was about seeing Sam again.

I think this bit was inspired by the fact that I'm currently watching Oz, a very different 90s crime show with a big slash fandom. I dunno, there's something about a guard having to unlock a door before you can see someone you care about, and being given a time limit on how much time you can spend with them. It's dramatic. Maybe even melodramatic, and I think I have an unfortunate tendency towards melodrama.

He'd never known anybody who went to prison, 'till now. Put plenty of people there, sure, but nobody he'd thought was his friend.

Is this actually true? I'm not sure! Maybe there's an episode I haven't seen or have forgotten in which Ray arrests a friend. I don't think there is.

Ray seems to have a slightly ruthless streak and isn't above manipulating or threatening suspects to try and get answers. At the same time, he has a very strong sense of justice and will go to great lengths to protect people. I felt like having someone he trusts and respects turn out to be one of "those people", the Bad People, would really mess with his head.

"Don't say you're sorry if you don't mean it," Ray said. His voice sounded weird. He touched Sam's hand: Sam held his face. Ray felt strange. He felt like he might throw up.

In The Ladies Man, Sam Franklin pats Ray on the cheek twice. Once at the end of their conversation, near the start of the episode, and once when Sam was handing his gun over to Ray before he got arrested.

"Why'd you do it, Sam?" Ray asked. "For money? Just for money?"

Sam shook his head. "Those bastards thought they owned me," he said, "But I knew they didn't. I was gonna cheat them all and get away with it." 

"And let an innocent woman die?" 

Ray still couldn't believe it. 

 "I gave my life to the CPD," Sam snapped, suddenly looking fearsome. "I gave them everything. Now I'm pushing fifty, and what have I got? My hearing is shot, I've got two bullets in me, I gave up on having any kind of a relationship - and what did I get in return? Nothing." He kept going. "Yeah, I took a kickback - so? They were going to ruin my life for that?"

When I rewatched The Ladies Man, I noticed that they never quite explain why Sam Franklin took a kickback, or why he was willing to kill one to four people in order to keep the fact that he took a kickback a secret. Okay, maybe it's wrong for me to expect everything to be said instead of shown. Sometimes people are just greedy. Still, I wondered about his motivation. Hence he gets this little villain monologue.

Is this really why Sam did what he did? I don't actually know. It's what I made him say, but what Sam says and what is actually true are usually different things.

There are a lot of possible reasons for why Sam did what he did, but nothing that really explains him trying to kill not one but three people at the end of The Ladies Man, in addition to Beth Botrelle. That's outside the sphere of rational behaviour.

I decided that his motivations had to be emotional, rather than just pure financial greed. He says in the episode that the kickback scheme was going to be his payout (or words to that effect). But Sam is single (at least, it seems like he's single - Ray goes to his apartment in the middle of the day and there's no one else there) and he probably makes good money. How much money does he need? You could definitely write a fic in which he was just motivated by greed - those nice suits don't pay for themselves. But would Ray respect someone that unprincipled? Would Sam be able to hide how money-obsessed he was from Ray?

I thought it was interesting if instead the kickback was a way to get one up on the CPD - a way of getting revenge for feeling unappreciated.

Why be a cop? Ray protects people - he got a commendation for saving someone during a hostage situation. Sam Franklin doesn't. He's a murder detective - by the time he turns up, the bodies are already cold. He could tell himself that he's maintaining law and order and protecting society, but he doesn't feel like society has given him anything that he didn't work for - in fact, he deserves more than he's got.

I guess my idea was that Franklin obeyed the rules, obeyed the unwritten rules of working in the CPD by staying in the closet, worked hard and didn't complain. Ultimately, he grew to resent the CPD and his resentment bubbled up in a way that was very ugly. He wasn't going to get the same respect and privileges as other detectives. So why not steal some?

Fraser was standing there, hat in hand. He looked nervous, Ray realized. Maybe he'd overheard - maybe Ray had raised his voice without meaning to - although of course Fraser, with his freakishly good hearing, had probably been able to hear every word that was said.

Ray felt a surge of affection for him.

Fraser probably didn't like Sam too much, but he'd come here with Ray anyway. He hated breaking the rules, but he'd let Ray bend them so he could get to see Sam, and he'd broke every rule there was to save Beth. Fraser, like Sam, looked good on the outside, but his good reached all the way inside.

My assignment said: "if you want to look at it through F/K goggles, more power to you". I was wearing my F/K goggles, which is why I ended up setting up parallels between Sam and Fraser (but making it clear that Fraser is actually a good guy). Thinking about it now, maybe I didn't have to draw parallels between them. Maybe that's in weird, fated-soulmates-through-seven-reincarnations territory, which - can I just shock you? Is not actually how love works. But that's what I did.

On a sudden impulse, Ray reached out and hugged him. "Oh!" Fraser said, and he seemed - surprised, but in a good way. 

"Thank you," Ray said. "I - just - thank you."

He felt a tentative hand on his shoulder, and then on the back of his neck.

I guess this is kind of similar to the end of Ray and Beth's tour around the crime scene at the end of The Ladies Man! Which, I assume, in this fic, is still in the future, because it probably took a while to get Beth out of prison. A couple weeks at least.

While I'm here let me say that I'm sorry Beth isn't in this fic very much, with all the sadness of someone who has fruitlessly searched the "Beth Botrelle" tag on ao3. This fic isn't about her, and it wasn't meant to be, but there should be more fics about her. After this episode, like many other due South guest stars, she just kind of disappears! Maybe she's hanging out with Mark Smithbauer.

Anyway, this is all I've got. Leave a comment on dreamwidth or lash me an email.