Due South Ladies day three, women who appear in single episodes: a little Maggie AU.
When Maggie Stern is six, her mother doesn't come home. By the time Maggie realises something is wrong, it's already getting dark, and she knows she's not allowed to leave the cabin by herself after dark. The next morning she walks into town - it's summer, so it's not hard at all - which is what Mum has always told her to do, if she doesn't come home.
Five days later, a solemn-faced old man in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform (as an adult, Maggie would realise Bob Fraser couldn't have been more than forty, but he'd seemed so old then) tells her that he's her father and she's coming with him to Inuvik, to his parents and her older brother. She's met him before, at the cabin, but he wasn't wearing a uniform then, and Mum had just said he was called Bob, and he was a friend. She would have said if he was her father. She would have.
"But my father's dead," she says. "And I don't have a brother."
"Well - now you do," says Sergeant Fraser. It takes her years after to think of him as her father. He's never quite her dad. "And your mother is dead, and I am...here."
Twenty-odd years later she and Ben find her mother's will and the note to Bob Fraser, after she loses yet another parent. All it says is Sorry Bob - she's yours, and if this gets to you, I'm not around anymore to look after her. Do your best.
Maggie supposes it's to Bob Fraser's credit that he takes on the responsibility, on that slender a reed. But for all his failings as a parent, responsibility is the something he's good at.
She gets an hour to pack up her things from the cabin, which there aren't many of, and then she's getting on a plane to Inuvik. She's never been on a plane before. She's never been to Inuvik before. She's never had grandparents before, even more solemn and disapproving than her maybe-father. When he said she had a brother, a small hopeful part of her thought she might find a friend, but Benton is a gangly almost-adult who is more interested in being upset with his father than her. It's not like having a real brother at all.
Maggie, faced with all this, does the only sensible thing and runs away. It's not like she has very much to take with her, and the plane didn't fly for that long, and it's summer, and Mum has already taught her how to snare rabbits. If she walks for long enough, she can get back to town, their own town, where people know her.
She doesn't even get out of Inuvik. Benton catches up with her right away. She realises later he must have seen her leaving.
"Leave me alone!" she tells him. "I'm going home."
"Margaret," he says, awkwardly. "This is your home now. Dad said so."
"Ah. Well. I don't - he says he is," Benton says, face all screwed up, like he doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to think about Maggie.
"And you're not my brother!"
"And I want to go home, and I want my mum," Maggie says, and she starts crying, like a little baby, on the side of the road in Inuvik. She sits down and buries her face in her knees so Benton won't see her crying.
"Me too," says Benton, sitting down next to her.
"Well where is she?" Maggie says. "Your mum." She hasn't wondered about it before. Sergeant Fraser just said, your older brother. Nothing about a mum.
"My mum fell and broke her neck," Maggie says. "She was clearing her trap lines. Sergeant Fraser said it was - he said she didn't get hurt. She just died." She's not sure how that works. You must have to be hurt really badly to die. It makes her mum sound like one of the animals she traps. She doesn't like it.
"My mum -" Benton stops. "I don't know what happened to my mum."
"I just - I don't know," Benton says, annoyed at her, but - Maggie doesn't know what else. "Listen, Margaret -"
"My name is Maggie," she says. She'd said it to Benton's grandparents too but Benton's grandmother just said "Names should be respected," and they called her Margaret, and she felt like she wasn't there at all. "Nobody ever called me Margaret at home. I don't know who that is." Margaret Fraser, Benton's grandmother said to people. That's a stranger. She's Maggie Stern.
"Well, what's your name then?" Benton asks.
"Maggie." She wipes her nose on her sleeve. "My name's Maggie."
"Hello Maggie," he says, very properly. "I'm Ben. It's nice to meet you."
He holds out his hand like she's a grown-up. Shaking hands is a thing she's seen grown-ups do a few times, but she's still not really sure how it works. She puts her palm against his and moves it up and down a bit.
"I think you should come back home with me, Maggie," he says. "I know it's not your home. But it's where you are now. It's a long way to anywhere else."
Maggie looks down the long, flat, dusty road, at the gentle green mounds and ponds to either side. Nothing like the woods she knows. He's probably right. It's a long, long way. Maybe she should run away next summer, when she's bigger and she knows where she's going. That seems like a good plan. She just won't tell Ben that.
"Okay," she says, and Ben offers her his hand, and they stand up together.
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