ds_flashfiction | Sisterhood challenge, by Chris

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*shuffles in sheepishly and late*

Title: The Road Back Home Again.
Author:

the_antichris
Word count: 2200
Rating: G
Notes: Maggie, RayK and Fraser, very shortly post-CotW, with bonus vestigial plot. Title courtesy of Stan Rogers. Many thanks to

shihadchick for a quick, late-night look over this; all remaining mistakes are mine, mine, mine.

Ray tightened his arms, compressing the distance between us, one last time, and then another. But distance has its own solidity; like matter, it demands its own, to fill its rightful space, and finally his arms slid down, around, and the soft scrape of wool against leather sounded louder to my ears than my own breathing.

'Guess I'd better go,' he said, with a grimace that could, charitably, be called a smile. 'It's... it's been real, Fraser.'

Truer than he knew; I hadn't realised until now how much texture and depth the world gained by being shared with a companion. I'd grown accustomed to that, and the prospect of losing it appalled; still, there was no duty without sacrifice. My father had told me so often enough.

'Don't be a stranger, yeah? I got a couch if you want to visit, bet Frannie would love it. Or you should call. You got a phone up here?' He broke off, scrubbing a hand through already dishevelled hair.

I assured him that the detachment was indeed equipped with a telephone.

'Yeah, guess it's not exactly just you and the polar bears.' He huffed a laugh. 'OK, uh. Bye, Fraser.'

I didn't trust my voice any great distance, so I held out my hand, cursing myself a moment later for a fool; handshakes had never been a part of our physical language. Ray's grip on it turned into another bear hug, until the pilot yelled an indistinct, likely impolite, exhortation and Ray picked up his bags and turned with a jerk of his chin to the plane.

I supposed I'd come to know the pilot in the course of my duties, yet right now his face was as indistinct as his words.

Maggie stood silent as the plane climbed into the noon sunrise; after a moment she put a hand on my shoulder and said, oddly gentle, 'Ben. We should go.'

*   *   *

Ray had stayed several days after we returned from our adventure, helping Maggie with maintenance around her cabin and eating an improbable number of pancakes at Di's Diner. Nevertheless, the cough of an engine still rang oddly in my ears, and it was odder still to turn and see Maggie in the driver's seat. She really was very like Dad - not at first glance, perhaps, but there was something unmistakable in the set of her jaw, the hard humour of her eyes.

'Summer's coming,' she said, still in the light, careful voice she'd use for a restless dog. 'Feel it?'

I nodded, said something appropriate; the idea of summer felt strangely unwelcome. The northern summer is a gift, a brief, glorious recompense for the hard dark of winter that I'd never felt able - entitled - to enjoy after Chicago's mild Januaries. But even now, after chasing a dream of cold and freedom through the hardest winter of all, I resisted the lengthening days and the hint of softness in the air.

She looked over. 'You know, you don't have to look for your own place just yet. I'm happy to have you as long as you like.'

Loneliness is a low-grade fever, noticed only after a respite.

'I know.' Belatedly- 'Thank you, Maggie.'

*   *   *

Maggie was silent as we sat down to breakfast; although I found it pleasant to spend time with someone who neither chattered nor compelled me by her presence to fill the silence myself, as pleasant as the bone-deep familiarity between Ray and me that made silence or speech as natural and effortless as breathing, this smothering flatness unnerved me.

'Do you find it difficult?' I began. 'To work here?'

Maggie sighed and put a hand to her braid. 'There's times... I'll be going past the store and see something Casey would like, and I'll be inside before I remember. At the counter, once.'

I nodded. 'My father - Dad - once told me that he'd stayed away because everything around the cabin reminded him of my mother. It wasn't long after I met you, actually.' An unlooked-for gift, that she could accept that statement without visible mental arithmetic. 'Of course, that doesn't explain why he didn't come back when we left the area, and why he expected a child to- Well, that's Dad for you.'

She looked up briefly. 'And then I remember... But it doesn't make a difference, I still...' She dug, furiously, at her bannock and bacon.

'I don't think it ever does,' I said to mine.

I hadn't meant to tell her about Victoria so soon - sister or no, a few months were scant time in which to lay a foundation - but the familiar cadences flowed out of me, numbing me, and when I reached the sequel, though I'd never put words to it before, it followed. More easily than I'd expected: tugging, barely tearing, and then it was gone. For a moment, my head swam.

'I suppose one has to trust,' I heard myself saying. 'Sometimes the surprises are pleasant.'

'Mm. I wish I'd got to know Bob better.'

'I think he did, too. You're very like him in some ways.' Single-minded, feeling deeply but reluctantly: it frankly surprised me to find so many similarities between Maggie and my father. Between Maggie and myself. Perhaps it shouldn't have; I'd always ascribed much of my development to my relationship with him - or, rather, with the space where a father ought to be. 'Is he the reason you joined the Force?'

'What? Oh, no. No, if anything, it was a friend of my mother's. Ellen Murray - first woman in Inuvik to go to Depot. I remember she once...'

The tension - in the air, in Maggie - lessened, and Ellen Murray and the snow-blind poacher carried us through the rest of breakfast without incident.

*   *   *

'Ah, Corporal Fraser. I do hope we'll be able to provide sufficient trackless wilderness to keep both you and Constable MacKenzie entertained, though I'm sure you understand that our natural resources are limited.'

I've often reflected that cross-border cooperation seems most advanced in the area of sarcasm training for senior officers.

'Perhaps you might begin with the snowmobile case.'

'Sir?'

'Bob Morrison's snowmobile has been stolen, which makes... how many in the last week, Constable?'

'Six, sir.'

'And since Grand Theft Snowmobile is not the sort of thing we like to see on our crime statistics, it seems appropriate to make it a priority. Constable MacKenzie will bring you up to speed.' He waved a hand and began ostentatiously shuffling papers. 'Dismissed, men.'

'Six?' I couldn't help asking.

Maggie sighed. 'Well, the detachment's understaffed at the best of times, and March is a busy month - the Tsiigehtchic jamboree, the Fort McPherson jamboree... Jam-packed, you might say.' She twinkled. Chicago obviously exerted a corrupting influence on the sense of humour; I snorted. 'Inspector Peel felt at first that there were more pressing calls on our attention.'

'I see.'

'Well, we'd better be about it.' Maggie picked up her coat.

I followed suit. 'You know, Ray and I saw an unusual concentration of tracks on the way into town. Near the lake.'

'Say no more.'

We took the dogs, as they'd been short of exercise, and the sudden, always shocking silence as they fell to their work after the baying chaos of harnessing them tugged at my memories of my journey with Ray, even as the softening monochrome of the landscape spoke of endings and beginnings. There'd been fresh snow since our return, naturally enough, but Diefenbaker rather pointedly drew my attention to an oddly shaped spruce that he'd remarked upon at the time, and, sure enough, over a small rise we found a low shed, six snowmobiles and...

'Maggie.'

She swore, as did Diefenbaker; I was tempted to myself.

'Well, that explains the snowmobiles. He needs something to carry the pelts, and they're stolen. Untraceable.'

I was thinking aloud, but Maggie answered me: 'And he had to expect we'd come looking. He'll be planning to move them soon. With accomplices.'

'As you say.'

We moved slowly around the shed; it was clean of suggestions of identity, except-

'Hmm.' Maggie stooped to pick up a shred of something green.

'Hmm?'

She tasted it; her mouth twisted thoughtfully. 'Beets.' She must have misinterpreted my look, because she raised a defensive eyebrow. 'It's-'

'Part of the story; I know,' I finished, and we grinned foolishly at one another a moment. 'Beets?'

'Beets.' She dropped the leaf into a plastic bag, and the bag into the pouch of her Sam Browne. 'Old Isaac Fitzpatrick's the only one growing them this year, so far as I know, and he's in the greenhouse most days - says he likes to have a bit of greenery around. Might have seen someone.'

A trip to the community greenhouse found Mr Fitzpatrick reading a newspaper on a camp stool next to the aforementioned beets; he seemed nonplussed at the sudden appearance of red serge, but directed us readily enough to one Winston Peters. 'Took some old boxes off my hands. Haven't seen anyone else, not in the last day or so.'

'Well, thank you kindly for your time,' Maggie forestalled me in saying, and shook his hand.

Peters was in his trailer on the outskirts of town. Maggie ascertained his responsibility with 99.4% accuracy, after which I placed him under arrest and he pulled a gun on me.

I held out my hand. 'Mr Peters, if you'll just hand me your weapon, I believe you'll find that matters will proceed much more smoothly.'

Maggie, at least, would be unlikely to storm at me for putting myself in danger; as slight and arbitrary a border as the 49th parallel sometimes seemed, certain cultural differences were insurmountable.

Peters' hand wavered; Maggie's arm flashed out to knock the weapon away at the same time as she hefted her own.

I worked a knot out of my neck. Well, difference seen from another angle was complementarity, after all, and for a moment it was blond spikes rather than a sleek blond braid that spun across my field of vision.

'Sorry, Ben, but I saw his finger twitch.' Dief barked, irritably, in obvious agreement.

'I'll take your word for it.'

'I'm telling you, it twitched, and apart from anything else, it takes weeks to get replacement uniforms up here.'

I lifted my hands in surrender. 'I said I believed you, didn't I?'

*   *   *

A few hours later, Peters, his associates and a number of grateful snowmobile owners were expressing themselves in the detachment foyer; Maggie's low voice threaded itself through the din. 'Would you like something to eat?'

Inspector Peel shouted something that sounded remarkably like 'paperwork'; I hesitated, but Maggie waved her hand. 'Later.'

At the diner - blueberry pancakes; Ray's taste was impeccable - Maggie lifted a quizzical eyebrow across the table at me.

'One of Peters' men is American.'

'True enough.'

'From Chicago.'

I nodded around a bite of pancake.

'They'll probably want to try him themselves. You think they might send Ray to pick him up?'

A chuckle grew into laughter and spilled out, surprising me. It really was improbable, how like me Maggie was; she could scarcely be more so if she'd been deliberately created as a foil for me - or, less solipsistically, I for her. Even in this, in her... attraction, I supposed one would call it, to Ray Kowalski-

Wait. I froze, a mouthful of milk half-swallowed.

'Ben?'

A sudden image held me motionless - Ray's skin pressed against mine as we huddled in a hammock and I tried to will my heat into him, to use the banked ember of hatred that had brought us on this quest. If I lost one thing more to Muldoon, I'd thought distantly, as my mouth charted his face, the warmth of my breath proof - I hoped - against frostbite... Later, acclimated to the cold, it had still seemed natural in the chill confines of the tent to sleep curled together like the dogs, a companionable sharing of heat and comfort, and I'd given no further thought to it but a muted pleasure in having a friend willing to this with me.

The curse of a life lived in the wilderness, this: the beauty of the landscape was a thief, stealing me from myself, and as my senses reached outward into the electric bite of the air, blindness turned inward. How else to explain it but that the width and freedom of my home shrank my sense of self so that my desires became abstract, directed towards an ideal of companionship in place of the presence and physicality of a single person. It was a tide, I was drowning in it, and how could I have ignored it so long?

Benton Fraser, you're a damned fool. My grandmother's voice, a rare betrayal, as I told her I'd accepted Cape Dorset as my first posting.

A fool, yes, and surely damned, for what was damnation but the knowledge of loss?

'Ben, are you all right?' I may have met her eyes; I don't remember.

It's not too late to go back, you know. Quinn this time, and I could have sworn I felt his hand on my shoulder, silent and waiting.

I raised my head, and the waves receded.

'Maggie.' My voice scratched in my throat. 'Maggie, may I use your telephone?'

~END~

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilac-one.livejournal.com

I really love this. You write just beautifully, and your characterizations feel dead-on to me. Brilliant.

This so needs a sequel for the Fraser-and-Ray-figure-it-out challenge. (What? You never heard of it? I can't imagine why...)

*whistles and looks around innocently*

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Sisterhood challenge, by Chris

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