[For just a second, he flips over into pure Constable Fraser mode:]
The short version, as I understand it, is that Bill Cipher and Ford Pines somehow hijacked the Barge and brought us to one particular iteration of the Pacific Northwest in order to find the man Cipher believes 'created' him. During the hatching of this plot, Cipher apparently promised one or more co-conspirators that no one would be harmed by their pursuits, and in his attempt to create what he felt would be a safe distraction, he cast a spell that both rendered everyone invulnerable and brought everything we imagined to life.
[And then he can't keep it up anymore. If she hasn't yet figured out why he sent that first message she's going to before long, and he just can't Constable Fraser himself through that particular humiliation. He sighs again and glances somewhere off-camera, rubbing his eyebrow.]
As you can imagine, the fallout was... was rather worse than I think he expected. And to be honest, I'm not sure what became of him or Pines, though I assume they're either back aboard or soon will be.
[Which means he's admitting that it fucked him up enough that he didn't do anything about it and hasn't been keeping track very well.]
[It makes Caitlin's head spin, trying to keep up, and she's already
a little groggy from the barge coma. She blinks a few times and lets the
explanation sink in, eventually nodding. Her expression softens when Fraser
switches gears.]
And how are you doing?
[On second thought:] Do you want some tea? If all the
hallways are back to normal, we could meet in my cabin.
Then I'll meet you there. Just come on in when you get there.
[ As it turns out, the hallways aren't a problem --
everything seems relatively normal, actually, but chances are she's missing
the worst of whatever this flood -- no, sabotage -- has wrought. It's not a
far trip from where she's been comatose in Bucky's cabin to her own, so she
should already be there by the time Fraser arrives, and starting to sift
through the assortment of tea bags and coffee pods that she still has on
hand. ]
[He still knocks, because he can't not -- but at least he opens the door right after that, so that it serves as more of a warning than a request. At least he smiles when he sees her, too.]
It's good to be up. I'm still not sure how long I was out.
But it's good to see you, too. Come on in, have a seat. [She
gestures to the row of stools along the kitchen island, and passes him the
box of tea bags. There's a pretty wide variety.] Tea?
[He hops up on a stool and rifles through for a moment. He's feeling uneasy enough to want something soothing, he decides, and passes back a packet of helpful-looking chamomile.]
It can't have been much more than two weeks, I don't think, but it shouldn't be too hard to narrow it down from there. What was the state of the Barge, the last you remember? Things like the gravity anomalies, the elevator, and so on.
It was awful. The anomalies were bad. The hallways just ... kept going.
[She picks out a similarly decaffeinated bag for herself and
prepares the mugs, filling them with heated water from the fancy coffee
machine.] The distances between places were always changing, and my
powers were acting weird. It felt like the whole ship was trying to turn
itself inside out, and I couldn't figure out how or why. [And that
had made things much, much worse; she'd been aware of less and less as the
days went on, more and more frightened of the way reality seemed to bend
and break around the barge.] I think the coma was kind of a
blessing in disguise; I probably would've lost my mind trying to figure it
all out and make it stop.
[She brings the mugs over to the other side of the island and sits
on the stool beside him. He's already told her some of what happened, and
she can guess how he feels about it.] How did you deal with
everything? Better than trying to encase yourself in a block of ice, I
hope?
[He takes his mug and holds it in both hands, looking down into the steaming, brewing liquid like it will hold a better answer than the truth. While he's waiting for that inspiration, he notes:]
You didn't really lose all that much time, then. That, ah-- well, let's call it that stage persisted for a few days, overall, and then the outcome you were dreading came true: the ship did, in fact, turn itself inside out, thanks to the portal. And that persisted for about a week, along with the spell, so you'll only have been out for about a week and a half.
There it is, and for a moment the desire to shut this down before it even starts is so strong that his whole body seems to tense up, even his hands going kind of white-knuckled on his tea. He doesn't want to do this, and she knows he doesn't want to do this, and it doesn't make sense to when she must already know what's happened.
Something in him wants to be fiercely angry that she's trying it anyway, but after the library, anger scares him more than anything else he could feel; so he tries to stamp it all back down, making his voice cool and terse. "Caitlin."
He looks up at her face, finds her ready to listen, wanting to help... and just as suddenly, the fight goes out of him. He sighs, the tension in him going slack again, his expression going tired and hollow. He still doesn't want to go into the excruciating details, but he doesn't want to fight. There has to be some kind of middle ground. He has to be able to just... tell her what he needs.
Which he tries to, quietly, wearily. "I thought it was her. I really did. But it wasn't, and honestly... I'm ready to put it behind me. All of it, I mean. Victoria." He blinks a few times, rapidly, like he's getting misty -- but then he just looks back down at his tea, and no tears come. "I'm ready to put Victoria behind me," he says again, very softly, like he has to confirm it for himself.
She sees the cold come over him as surely as she's felt it on herself, and
she regards him steadily, unmoving even in the face of the clipped way he
says her name like a warning.
Caitlin doesn't say anything. She doesn't push any further than she already
has, and yes -- she knows she's toeing a line, here, but if she doesn't
take the risk to nudge Fraser right to the edge of that line, close enough
to see what's on the other side of it, then she's not really doing her job
as well as she could.
She's relieved when he does speak, in words that are quiet and a little
ragged, like something inside of him is starting to get a little scuffed
up, not quite as pressed and polished as the facade he wants to show the
world. And even if there's an exasperation with it, even if he's
tired, she knows this can only be good. Caitlin smiles, and makes a
sort of aborted attempt to reach for his hand, thinking better of it almost
as soon as she has the thought in the first place. The truth is enough, for
right now, without having to heap physical contact on top of it.
And she's skeptical, but he repeats the phrase with a little more
confidence, and she's sure that she can believe him. This, she'll take at
face value. "Good," she says, still gentle, with the quietest emphasis.
"I'm sorry you had to go through something awful like that when I wasn't
there to help. You know if I'd been awake I'd have been right there with
you, right?"
"I'm glad you weren't, honestly." That's not because of Caitlin herself, as stressful as things between them can be at times. It's that thinking about anyone else 'meeting' the fake Victoria makes him shudder with phantom humiliation. He sighs, rubbing his brow -- not his usual little tic of discomfort, but like he's been awake for 72 hours straight. Tired is hardly even the word for it at this point.
"I let it go for far too long," he admits. "Three, four days. I didn't even question it." He frowns, another spike of anger coursing through him, this time self-directed. Mostly self-directed, anyway. "My mind filled in all of the gaps. She had a door, she said she was an inmate..." He shakes his head, presses his lips tight together. He doesn't want to be this angry about it. He can't be this angry about it. Not at himself, and not at the people who set him up to stumble like that.
"And it makes sense," Caitlin says. "If you don't know that there's another
reason that something is happening, the simplest explanation is usually the
correct one. It's a lot more logical that someone from your life back home
would appear here as an inmate than her presence being the result of a
spell. It just isn't the first thing you come to - especially if it's
something you really want to be true." She shrugs, but there's still
sympathy in her eyes.
He smiles a tiny bit now, though without much humor or happiness. "I'm all right when I'm not thinking about it," he murmurs. "I spent the last couple of days off the ship, down in Portland with some of the others, and it helped. I felt pretty close to normal by the time I made it back."
"But when I learned the truth before that," he goes on, smile fading, "and when I think about it now, I feel..." He trails off, and after a moment, shakes his head, leaving it there.
He feels. He feels a lot of things; too many things. He's trying to remind himself very forcibly that the feeling isn't a problem in and of itself, because he's started to realize that there's something of a pattern forming: the harder he pushes down that piece of himself, the worse things get when it pushes back. And that's the lesson he'd forgotten about Caitlin Snow and Killer Frost, isn't it? It hadn't worked that way for them, either.
"Embarrassed?" she volunteers, without judgment. "Ashamed that you could
let yourself do something like that?" She really is just guessing, based on
what she knows of him and how she might have felt if the specter of one of
her exes had shown up on the barge shortly after her own arrival. And how
she did feel when she was dragged to Zero to melt back into Dr.
Snow. "Maybe even beating yourself up because you think that you should
know better?"
"I should have known better," he insists quietly. "It's humiliating."
Even if his subconscious had helpfully stepped in to flesh out the details, had given her a door and an inmate backstory... What does it say about him, or about him and Victoria, that he'd spent three full days happily in love with a figment of his imagination and hadn't questioned it once? Of course he's ready to be done; if it was that easy to fake, it was never as real as he thought it was from the start.
"You know better now," Caitlin points out, and takes a sip of her tea.
"That's sort of why we're here, isn't it? We can keep on making the same
mistakes over and over until we actually learn what we're supposed to from
them." And if she's being honest with herself -- and she should be
-- she's starting to wonder if maybe there isn't a mistake of her own she's
caught in, even if it wasn't the one she was brought here to learn. But
that's not the point right now. "The fact that you're embarrassed by it
probably means you're moving in the right direction."
"Oh, God," he groans with unusual theatricality. Unusual for Constable Fraser, RCMP, anyway. Not nearly as strange for the man behind the mask -- it's almost exactly the petulant, biting tone he used to take with his father.
"What's next, in that case: I get to relive the Otter Incident of '71?" Which he instantly regrets mentioning, and quickly holds up a hand to forestall her. "Don't ask, please."
This is new, she thinks, and strangely refreshing; she hasn't had to poke
too hard or push too far to get an honest reaction, and it hadn't even been
preceded by the tension that usually splits fine fractures into his facade
before it cracks open. It's like the whole terrible event really did
do some good.
Her laugh is soft and genuine, with an arched eyebrow and lingering smirk.
"Oh, come on, you can't just bring something like that up and tell me not
to ask. I'm asking: what, pray tell, is the Otter Incident?"
"It's something not to be spoken of, which I regret bringing up," he snaps. She's not wrong, though: even now, trying to shut down this particular line of inquiry, there's a certain animation in him that's been missing for a while now.
"My point is, Caitlin, this is the afterlife, not... not grade ten." He swipes his thumb across his brow. "Now, I know I'm here for the purposes of redemption and self-improvement, and I'm not disputing that. But I'd like to believe that there's another way to get there, that doesn't involve me repeatedly humiliating myself in front of my... well, my friends." Which definitely does not make him feel less like a sulking teenager in this moment. He reaches for his tea with a quiet huff.
Of course she's still amused, despite knowing she probably shouldn't be
chuckling at his misfortune, minor though it may be in comparison to those
of others. It's still important to him, after all.
But god, there really is something about him that seems about sixteen years
old right now - something precocious and vulnerable, and she wonders if
that might be when the mask started forming, if what's inside maybe never
quite made it out of those awkward years, and needs to catch up with the
rest of him.
Her smile turns kinder, smaller. "With luck it won't have to," she says. "I
think things only get that bad when you ignore the first couple times the
message tries to get through to you. Once you know what to listen for, it's
easier to recognize. That's been my experience, anyway." She debates asking
again about the otter, but shelves it for now. That's not the button she
wants to push. "So tell me about these friends of yours," she requests
instead, ultra-casually, like she's not being as nosy as she really is.
"Who are you getting along with, besides Ray and me?"
He may be flirting with immaturity, but even at 16 young Benton knew how to listen, and he does listen to Caitlin now. He has to admit it makes sense, assuming the lesson here is that he oughtn't try to close himself off or compartmentalize so much. If he'd had more of an outlet without Victoria, maybe the floodgates wouldn't have opened the way they had. Or, hell, if he hadn't ended up hiding the two of them away, hadn't been so blinded, maybe he would have figured it all out sooner. And Caitlin is right that those weren't the only signs -- just the worst ones.
He's musing on this silently when he realizes she's asking a question, though when he registers what it is he looks like he wants to outright roll his eyes. He hasn't had a mother in a very long time, but that still sounds like a Mom Question. "Good grief," he mutters. "I don't know -- Harry, for one. And..."
Given the givens, it's a terrifically stupid idea not to mention the man he currently knows as Rex, but he keeps that to himself anyway. Surely he's allowed some privacy. "I don't know that I'd say 'friend,' exactly, but I've gotten to know Fiona Goode rather well. She's the one who... who helped me realize what was going on."
"I don't think I've met her," Caitlin muses, but she makes a mental note to
rectify that soon. It is a bit like a mom checking up on her son's
friends to make sure they're on the up and up, or at least not bad
influences, but she would do the same for any of her friends, mostly
because she wished that any of them might have done it for her. She might
have avoided a lot more trouble that way. And maybe Fraser would have, too,
considering what Caitlin knows of Victoria. (Not that anyone actually
in that kind of situation actually listens to anyone who
tells them their friends are no good.)
"But I do know Harry -- not too well, but he lives across the hall, and
I've been bringing him up to speed on modern medicine. He's good. Not that
you need my approval or anything." Because she knows full well that he
doesn't, and no matter how nosy she might get, even if she didn't like
someone, she wouldn't actually order Fraser to stop spending time with
them. That would defeat the whole purpose of this thing where he learns to
make good choices, wouldn't it?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-03-28 03:35 am (UTC)Another flood? [It's the most logical explanation, after all.] I wouldn't mind hearing about it, if you want to share.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-28 04:03 am (UTC)[For just a second, he flips over into pure Constable Fraser mode:]
The short version, as I understand it, is that Bill Cipher and Ford Pines somehow hijacked the Barge and brought us to one particular iteration of the Pacific Northwest in order to find the man Cipher believes 'created' him. During the hatching of this plot, Cipher apparently promised one or more co-conspirators that no one would be harmed by their pursuits, and in his attempt to create what he felt would be a safe distraction, he cast a spell that both rendered everyone invulnerable and brought everything we imagined to life.
[And then he can't keep it up anymore. If she hasn't yet figured out why he sent that first message she's going to before long, and he just can't Constable Fraser himself through that particular humiliation. He sighs again and glances somewhere off-camera, rubbing his eyebrow.]
As you can imagine, the fallout was... was rather worse than I think he expected. And to be honest, I'm not sure what became of him or Pines, though I assume they're either back aboard or soon will be.
[Which means he's admitting that it fucked him up enough that he didn't do anything about it and hasn't been keeping track very well.]
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 01:32 am (UTC)[It makes Caitlin's head spin, trying to keep up, and she's already a little groggy from the barge coma. She blinks a few times and lets the explanation sink in, eventually nodding. Her expression softens when Fraser switches gears.]
And how are you doing?
[On second thought:] Do you want some tea? If all the hallways are back to normal, we could meet in my cabin.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 03:03 am (UTC)All right. I don't think the hallways will be a problem.
[Caitlin tenderly asking him how he's doing might be -- but then, she seems to have thought better of that.]
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 03:10 am (UTC)Then I'll meet you there. Just come on in when you get there.
[ As it turns out, the hallways aren't a problem -- everything seems relatively normal, actually, but chances are she's missing the worst of whatever this flood -- no, sabotage -- has wrought. It's not a far trip from where she's been comatose in Bucky's cabin to her own, so she should already be there by the time Fraser arrives, and starting to sift through the assortment of tea bags and coffee pods that she still has on hand. ]
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 03:55 am (UTC)Hi, Caitlin. It's good to see you up.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 04:00 am (UTC)It's good to be up. I'm still not sure how long I was out.
But it's good to see you, too. Come on in, have a seat. [She gestures to the row of stools along the kitchen island, and passes him the box of tea bags. There's a pretty wide variety.] Tea?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-30 01:23 am (UTC)[He hops up on a stool and rifles through for a moment. He's feeling uneasy enough to want something soothing, he decides, and passes back a packet of helpful-looking chamomile.]
It can't have been much more than two weeks, I don't think, but it shouldn't be too hard to narrow it down from there. What was the state of the Barge, the last you remember? Things like the gravity anomalies, the elevator, and so on.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-30 03:07 am (UTC)It was awful. The anomalies were bad. The hallways just ... kept going. [She picks out a similarly decaffeinated bag for herself and prepares the mugs, filling them with heated water from the fancy coffee machine.] The distances between places were always changing, and my powers were acting weird. It felt like the whole ship was trying to turn itself inside out, and I couldn't figure out how or why. [And that had made things much, much worse; she'd been aware of less and less as the days went on, more and more frightened of the way reality seemed to bend and break around the barge.] I think the coma was kind of a blessing in disguise; I probably would've lost my mind trying to figure it all out and make it stop.
[She brings the mugs over to the other side of the island and sits on the stool beside him. He's already told her some of what happened, and she can guess how he feels about it.] How did you deal with everything? Better than trying to encase yourself in a block of ice, I hope?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-30 04:08 am (UTC)You didn't really lose all that much time, then. That, ah-- well, let's call it that stage persisted for a few days, overall, and then the outcome you were dreading came true: the ship did, in fact, turn itself inside out, thanks to the portal. And that persisted for about a week, along with the spell, so you'll only have been out for about a week and a half.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-30 04:19 am (UTC)Well, that's better than I thought. I know some people have been out for up to a month, if not longer.
[A little more softly:] The spell that made things real, right?
orite prose is a thing
Date: 2019-03-30 05:01 am (UTC)Something in him wants to be fiercely angry that she's trying it anyway, but after the library, anger scares him more than anything else he could feel; so he tries to stamp it all back down, making his voice cool and terse. "Caitlin."
He looks up at her face, finds her ready to listen, wanting to help... and just as suddenly, the fight goes out of him. He sighs, the tension in him going slack again, his expression going tired and hollow. He still doesn't want to go into the excruciating details, but he doesn't want to fight. There has to be some kind of middle ground. He has to be able to just... tell her what he needs.
Which he tries to, quietly, wearily. "I thought it was her. I really did. But it wasn't, and honestly... I'm ready to put it behind me. All of it, I mean. Victoria." He blinks a few times, rapidly, like he's getting misty -- but then he just looks back down at his tea, and no tears come. "I'm ready to put Victoria behind me," he says again, very softly, like he has to confirm it for himself.
Re: orite prose is a thing
Date: 2019-03-30 11:03 pm (UTC)She sees the cold come over him as surely as she's felt it on herself, and she regards him steadily, unmoving even in the face of the clipped way he says her name like a warning.
Caitlin doesn't say anything. She doesn't push any further than she already has, and yes -- she knows she's toeing a line, here, but if she doesn't take the risk to nudge Fraser right to the edge of that line, close enough to see what's on the other side of it, then she's not really doing her job as well as she could.
She's relieved when he does speak, in words that are quiet and a little ragged, like something inside of him is starting to get a little scuffed up, not quite as pressed and polished as the facade he wants to show the world. And even if there's an exasperation with it, even if he's tired, she knows this can only be good. Caitlin smiles, and makes a sort of aborted attempt to reach for his hand, thinking better of it almost as soon as she has the thought in the first place. The truth is enough, for right now, without having to heap physical contact on top of it.
And she's skeptical, but he repeats the phrase with a little more confidence, and she's sure that she can believe him. This, she'll take at face value. "Good," she says, still gentle, with the quietest emphasis. "I'm sorry you had to go through something awful like that when I wasn't there to help. You know if I'd been awake I'd have been right there with you, right?"
no subject
Date: 2019-03-31 04:01 am (UTC)"I let it go for far too long," he admits. "Three, four days. I didn't even question it." He frowns, another spike of anger coursing through him, this time self-directed. Mostly self-directed, anyway. "My mind filled in all of the gaps. She had a door, she said she was an inmate..." He shakes his head, presses his lips tight together. He doesn't want to be this angry about it. He can't be this angry about it. Not at himself, and not at the people who set him up to stumble like that.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-31 08:35 pm (UTC)"And it makes sense," Caitlin says. "If you don't know that there's another reason that something is happening, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It's a lot more logical that someone from your life back home would appear here as an inmate than her presence being the result of a spell. It just isn't the first thing you come to - especially if it's something you really want to be true." She shrugs, but there's still sympathy in her eyes.
"You look exhausted."
no subject
Date: 2019-03-31 08:51 pm (UTC)"But when I learned the truth before that," he goes on, smile fading, "and when I think about it now, I feel..." He trails off, and after a moment, shakes his head, leaving it there.
He feels. He feels a lot of things; too many things. He's trying to remind himself very forcibly that the feeling isn't a problem in and of itself, because he's started to realize that there's something of a pattern forming: the harder he pushes down that piece of himself, the worse things get when it pushes back. And that's the lesson he'd forgotten about Caitlin Snow and Killer Frost, isn't it? It hadn't worked that way for them, either.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 02:24 am (UTC)"Embarrassed?" she volunteers, without judgment. "Ashamed that you could let yourself do something like that?" She really is just guessing, based on what she knows of him and how she might have felt if the specter of one of her exes had shown up on the barge shortly after her own arrival. And how she did feel when she was dragged to Zero to melt back into Dr. Snow. "Maybe even beating yourself up because you think that you should know better?"
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 02:37 am (UTC)Even if his subconscious had helpfully stepped in to flesh out the details, had given her a door and an inmate backstory... What does it say about him, or about him and Victoria, that he'd spent three full days happily in love with a figment of his imagination and hadn't questioned it once? Of course he's ready to be done; if it was that easy to fake, it was never as real as he thought it was from the start.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 02:49 am (UTC)"You know better now," Caitlin points out, and takes a sip of her tea. "That's sort of why we're here, isn't it? We can keep on making the same mistakes over and over until we actually learn what we're supposed to from them." And if she's being honest with herself -- and she should be -- she's starting to wonder if maybe there isn't a mistake of her own she's caught in, even if it wasn't the one she was brought here to learn. But that's not the point right now. "The fact that you're embarrassed by it probably means you're moving in the right direction."
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 03:20 am (UTC)"What's next, in that case: I get to relive the Otter Incident of '71?" Which he instantly regrets mentioning, and quickly holds up a hand to forestall her. "Don't ask, please."
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 03:27 am (UTC)This is new, she thinks, and strangely refreshing; she hasn't had to poke too hard or push too far to get an honest reaction, and it hadn't even been preceded by the tension that usually splits fine fractures into his facade before it cracks open. It's like the whole terrible event really did do some good.
Her laugh is soft and genuine, with an arched eyebrow and lingering smirk. "Oh, come on, you can't just bring something like that up and tell me not to ask. I'm asking: what, pray tell, is the Otter Incident?"
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 04:09 am (UTC)"My point is, Caitlin, this is the afterlife, not... not grade ten." He swipes his thumb across his brow. "Now, I know I'm here for the purposes of redemption and self-improvement, and I'm not disputing that. But I'd like to believe that there's another way to get there, that doesn't involve me repeatedly humiliating myself in front of my... well, my friends." Which definitely does not make him feel less like a sulking teenager in this moment. He reaches for his tea with a quiet huff.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 08:52 am (UTC)Of course she's still amused, despite knowing she probably shouldn't be chuckling at his misfortune, minor though it may be in comparison to those of others. It's still important to him, after all.
But god, there really is something about him that seems about sixteen years old right now - something precocious and vulnerable, and she wonders if that might be when the mask started forming, if what's inside maybe never quite made it out of those awkward years, and needs to catch up with the rest of him.
Her smile turns kinder, smaller. "With luck it won't have to," she says. "I think things only get that bad when you ignore the first couple times the message tries to get through to you. Once you know what to listen for, it's easier to recognize. That's been my experience, anyway." She debates asking again about the otter, but shelves it for now. That's not the button she wants to push. "So tell me about these friends of yours," she requests instead, ultra-casually, like she's not being as nosy as she really is. "Who are you getting along with, besides Ray and me?"
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 04:29 pm (UTC)He's musing on this silently when he realizes she's asking a question, though when he registers what it is he looks like he wants to outright roll his eyes. He hasn't had a mother in a very long time, but that still sounds like a Mom Question. "Good grief," he mutters. "I don't know -- Harry, for one. And..."
Given the givens, it's a terrifically stupid idea not to mention the man he currently knows as Rex, but he keeps that to himself anyway. Surely he's allowed some privacy. "I don't know that I'd say 'friend,' exactly, but I've gotten to know Fiona Goode rather well. She's the one who... who helped me realize what was going on."
no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 04:35 am (UTC)"I don't think I've met her," Caitlin muses, but she makes a mental note to rectify that soon. It is a bit like a mom checking up on her son's friends to make sure they're on the up and up, or at least not bad influences, but she would do the same for any of her friends, mostly because she wished that any of them might have done it for her. She might have avoided a lot more trouble that way. And maybe Fraser would have, too, considering what Caitlin knows of Victoria. (Not that anyone actually in that kind of situation actually listens to anyone who tells them their friends are no good.)
"But I do know Harry -- not too well, but he lives across the hall, and I've been bringing him up to speed on modern medicine. He's good. Not that you need my approval or anything." Because she knows full well that he doesn't, and no matter how nosy she might get, even if she didn't like someone, she wouldn't actually order Fraser to stop spending time with them. That would defeat the whole purpose of this thing where he learns to make good choices, wouldn't it?
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