ds_flashfiction | TEAM ANGST: Day 18, "Wind from the South"

sage posting in

Title: Wind from the South
Author:

nos4a2no9
Team: Angst
Prompt: "I think we need to slow down."
Pairing(s): F/K
Length: 5500 words.
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to

secretlybronte and

isiscolo for their kind and thoughtful beta. SB convinced me that the story was worth finishing, and her insights helped me figure out what this fic should be. Isis stepped in with some fabulous suggestions that made the final version exponentially stronger. Additional thanks to

sprat and

bertybertle for hand-holding on a separate story that didn't make the cut. And, as always, my love to

jamethiel_bane for IM advice and support.
Summary: The snows came early that year.

Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Prompt and Team (Genre) information in the header above.

More details about the voting procedure can be found here.

**

This is my home, where whirlwinds blow,
Where snowdrifts round my path are swelling
’Tis many a year, ’tis long ago,
Since I beheld another dwelling.

—Emily Brontë

The snows came early that year.

He’d been expecting the winter to come too soon. The beavers, otters and muskrats had built thick dams and dens during the summer months, and there were fewer litters among them than he could remember in a lifetime of seasons. Great numbers of geese took to the sky a month early, blotting out the sun as they passed in a flurry of honking and flapping of wings.

Even the bears disappeared to begin their hibernation far sooner than was customary or safe. They would emerge too early in the spring and food would be scarce, and so they would be dangerous, wild, desperate. The first anxious days of warm weather would be spent on the lookout for starvation-crazed grizzlies and black bears. Later he would find their thin, ragged bodies in the deep woods torn apart by wolves.

He had only ever seen the bodies of bears when the snows came too early. They were creatures that preferred to drag themselves off and die in seclusion.

He stood at the window and watched the snow fall, a steaming mug of tea half-forgotten in his hands as he watched nature subvert herself. Leaves still clung to the branches; they curled there half-heartedly, frozen black by the sudden cold. Dry brown grass and moss disappeared under the thick, wet snow, and all the markers of late fall in the Northwest Territories were eclipsed by the early winter. As the world vanished under the blanket of white, he wondered if anyone was ignorant or foolhardy enough to brave the storm. He’d seen enough of human foolishness to suspect that someone would be lost out there. They would wade through the unnatural snows and huff breaths of white frustration out into the freezing air, rub their hands and stomp their feet to return feeling to their numb fingers and toes. And their heart rates would slow, slow, stop, just like the force of life in those fragile blackened leaves. Surprised by the chill of winter.

He turned away from the window and tried to shut out the wide, white world.

********

The dogs began their howling at three in the morning. He shut out the desperate wails of the dogs as long as he could, rolling himself up in layers of blankets to block the sound from his ears. That was the call of duty, and he wanted no more of that. Not any more.

But still the howling kept up and, eventually, he heeded the call of the dogs.

The weak flashlight did not cast light for much more than a hundred yards, but he wouldn’t have been able to see any further than that in the driving snow. Great gusts of wind buffeted him on the sled and make his eyes sting and water. He’d known this kind of cold for much of his life; still it left him breathless.

We need to slow down, he thought, but the dogs knew their path. They sensed something calling to them and he let them run where they wanted. After twenty minutes of flying through the wind-whipped night they slowed and finally stopped. The sled could have paused at the edge of a forest or a cliff; Fraser couldn’t see more than the vague, blurry outline of the lead dog in his harness. Steve McQueen, who had howled the loudest, run the hardest, was leading the team. As Diefenbaker might have done if Dief hadn’t left him half a year ago in favor of the wild.

Fraser got off the sled and moved down the line, navigating by keeping one hand on the gangline. One of the dogs yipped and nipped at his hand; he cuffed the dog’s head sharply and ignored her whimper as he squatted down near Steve McQueen.

"Now let’s see what all the fuss is about," he muttered, casting the beam of the flashlight in a wide arc. The light exposed a desolate field, the white streaks of fast-falling snow against black sky, and...nothing. Just the wind and dogs and endless white lit by cold stars. A fool’s errand.

"This will mean a demotion," he informed Steve, who sniffed and growled low in his throat. Steve McQueen had never quite managed Diefenbaker’s ability to dismiss the trivialities of human existence with a well-timed sniff or shrug; like all Malamutes he wore a perpetual grin that concealed a rather sardonic worldview. He did not seem to think Fraser’s threat was anything worth worrying about. And indeed, with Dief gone, there was no one else to lead the team.

"I hope you’re able to come up with a more convincing argument for yourself. It’s not as though I’m completely without options."

Not quite true, but smart as he was Steve McQueen wasn’t particularly adept at logical analysis. He was, however, gifted with far better hearing than his predecessor. He jerked his head to the side, then threw his head back and howled.

The other dogs added to the chorus and Fraser sighed, collecting a flashlight and a first aid kit from the sled. "I hope for your sake it’s not a bear."

********

It wasn’t a bear. Before he had gone ten feet, the beam of his flashlight revealed a frozen creek framed by shallow, rolling hills that sloped down to the shore. And there, huddled in the shelter of the creek bank, a bundled figure.

Fraser moved as quickly as the wet, clinging snow would allow. The land gripped him tightly, clinging to his boots and slowing his passage through the deep snow. He knelt and dug frantically for a pulse, for a patch of skin, anything that would tell him if this was just another frozen body in a long chain of people he’d been too late to save but...there. A pulse, faint but present. He squinted in the darkness and tried to illuminate his survivor’s face with the flashlight.

An Inuit woman. He tried to clear the snow away from her face. She was dressed warmly in a parka and thick fur mukluks, but her face was slack, her eyes closed. Hypothermia made her look as if she were sleeping. He fought off a shiver and hefted her, stumbling towards the sled.

And the storm closed in around them.

********

He watched her in the low, dim light of the fire. She sat on a pallet of furs in front of the fire wrapped in his Hudson blanket, a white outline in the shadows.

"I’m Benton Fraser," he told her, and the woman looked up at him and blinked. Her smooth, unlined face and long black hair did not offer any clues as to her age; she might have been sixteen or sixty. She was short and stocky, and if she stood she would barely come to his shoulder. He wished she would smile—he wondered if she had sharp teeth.

"What’s your name?"

She ignored him and stared at the flames instead.

"Are you warm enough?" Fraser finally asked, rising to collect her empty stew bowl.

She simply stared at him, her black eyes flat and glassy in the firelight. After a moment she dismissed him from her mind again—he watched as she did it—and once again turned her attention back to the fire.

He left her sitting there and went out to see to the dogs.

When he came back in, hands aching a little from the cold, he saw with a sinking heart that she had curled up in the wide bed that dominated the small cabin’s single room.

She was a guest, of course, and therefore entitled to whatever comfort he could offer. It was not the use of the bed that pained him, nor her easy assumption of his hospitality. But she was using Ray’s pillow.

It had managed to retain some of his former scent and in Fraser’s darkest moments he had clung to that pillow and inhaled those last, lingering traces of Ray. Sometimes he’d held it as he sought his solitary release, trying to recapture the sensations Ray had once evoked with hands and lips and his beautiful mouth.

And now he would not have even the faint, elusive scent of Ray on his pillow. It would smell like the woman now.

His silent houseguest was fast asleep and so Fraser unrolled his musty bedroll in front of the fire and lay down. Sleeping with Ray for those brief, wonderful months—first on the trail as they searched for Franklin and then later, when his whole world comprised this cabin, their sled team and this bed—had cured him forever of his tendency to drift to sleep on his back. He slept on his left side now, arms empty and seemingly waiting to be filled by that slim, twitching body that had lain so close for so many nights. He hugged a pillow tightly, this one bereft of the Ray-smell. Its loss felt like a raw wound.

He slept.

********

The touch of sunlight on Fraser’s face finally woke him. It was late, nearly nine, and the woman was gone. He wondered if the storm and the terrifying race back to his cabin had been a dream until he felt a sudden draft of cold air as the door opened, letting in the freezing wind and bright glare of the sun.

He watched as the woman entered the cabin, her white mukluks leaving watery footprints on the floor. He did not know where she had found the energy after the exertions of last night, but then her people had lived in this place for thousands of generations and his for only three. She was stronger, that was all. And perhaps he had forgotten how to live in the North after Chicago.

He could admit to being slightly ashamed she could do what he could not. Embarrassed, too, at the squalor of the tiny cabin. Dust and dirt coated every surface and mixed with melted snow to become thick streaks of filth on the floor. There was a heap of empty tin cans by the stove and his footlocker was overflowing with unwashed laundry. The state of the cabin pained him, and so he roused himself, tidied away his bedroll, and began the chore of heating and hauling water for breakfast.

They ate a silent meal of oatmeal and raisins. Fraser, still unable to shed the manners of his grandmother, ate at the rough-hewn table with a spoon. The woman squatted near the fire and ate neatly with her fingers. If she thought his use of utensils odd or unnecessary she did not indicate it; she was steadfast in her ability to ignore him. That, too, Fraser had forgotten about Inuit women. Living so long in Chicago and the small white townships of the north had led him to expect, and dread, the attention of women. But among the People he was—always—an outsider.

He knew he must look like a lunatic, thin and wasted with a full bushy beard. All the discipline he had possessed in his former life had been washed away like it had never been important at all. And perhaps it hadn’t—perhaps it had just been something to hide behind. Ray had always thought so. Ray had—

But to think of Ray meant madness, a terrifying maw. Better to think of the woman and wonder who she was. Or perhaps it was better not to think of anything at all.

By mid-day the sky had darkened again. Another blizzard would soon hit and by the look of the heavy snow clouds gathering in the sky this storm would last much longer than the last one. Fraser had been so negligent in his housekeeping duties that he worried they might run out of wood. It had been suicidal to let supplies get so low, and if the woman had not appeared when she had, he might not have noticed at all.

And he was no longer alone, at least for the moment. Duty and responsibility, dormant in him these long, empty months, stirred for a moment to whisper, "Take care of her. And then..."

He closed his eyes and sighed.

"Right, then."

********

They passed a night, and a day, and another night as the storm raged around them. Looking out the window at the thick swirls of snow, Fraser could not help but think of the blizzard he'd weathered at Fortitude Pass—no. Deliberately he put Victoria out of his mind. Much better to focus on the here and now. Only his companion was so quiet, so self-contained that she might as well not even exist.

She was staring at the fire again. The flickering light cast her odd, flat features in a brassy red, flickering unevenly over her high, wide forehead and strange black eyes. Her hair, glossy in the light, fell around her like a protective cloak. She was beyond everything and nothing could reach her. He could not touch her, and that was what made him speak.

"I’m lost," he told her. He expected no response; he received none. "And I don’t know...I don’t know how to go on."

A year ago, ten years ago, he would never have been able to say those words aloud. He would not even have been able to conceive of them. This admission, he supposed, was the legacy of his time in Chicago. At least now he could admit when he was beaten.

She seemed to stir at his tone, glancing at him for a long moment, and then her eyes darted towards the bed. She understood.

"I loved him," Fraser found himself saying. "I would have given anything to be with him. Anything. But it wasn’t enough."

********

When he’d finally worked up the nerve to call Chicago and hear Ray’s voice again, he’d dialed Information and rasped, "Stanley Raymond Kowalski," wondering if Ray was still Ray, if he’d taken another undercover assignment, if something had gone wrong on a case and Ray was hurt, Ray was gone, Ray was dead...

That had been the longest minute of his life, apart from an eternity spent on a train platform in Chicago as he watched the only other love of his life slip away. Then the operator returned and recited a ten-digit number, which he redialed with shaking fingers. And when he had called a woman had answered. Or rather, the recording of a cheerful woman’s voice.

"Hello, you’ve reached the Kowalskis. Lisa and Ray can’t take your call right now, but leave a message and we’ll get back to you ASAP. Stay frosty!"

The machine had beeped once, a shrill tone, and then there had been the fuzzy silence of a magnetic tape unspooling patiently, waiting for the imprint of his voice. He did not speak.

He’d wanted to sound level, controlled. To leave some vague, polite message and ask that Ray call him back at the outpost in Fort Nelson. But by this point he was shaking so badly he could barely hold the telephone. He hung up, and never called Chicago again.

Fall and summer had passed in a blur of long patrols. He sought and was granted a route that would carry him far from civilization, and ironically it was hated new technology—satellite phones, internet connections—that allowed him to check-in electronically with his supervisors. Once again he was alone in the wild. He spent every night sleeping beneath the stars and the days pushing himself beyond exhaustion. In those aimless months he covered half the Northwest Territories, most of that by foot. But as far and as fast as he walked, Fraser could not forget the high-pitched sound of that shrill metallic beep. It echoed across the empty miles and through the strange corners of his heart.

Fraser walked and walked but he was never able to find a satisfactory answer.

Fall came and then winter hard upon it. The snows were thick and heavy, the temperatures dangerously low. When a group of hikers went missing Fraser was recalled to Fort Resolution to aid in the recovery effort. Nineteen days of searching revealed only two frozen corpses half-buried in the snow. One man was broad and dark, the other slim and blonde-haired. The ice-covered eyes of the men had reminded him of a caribou he’d pulled from the ground years ago. A caribou that had drowned on dry land.

Something had broken inside him then. Whatever it was that had kept him going for the last half-year fled at the sight of those two bodies in the snow. The enormity of what he had lost since finding that caribou had brought Fraser to his knees. Ray Ray Ray, gone gone gone. His second chance.

The RCMP granted him leave. He was a national hero, after all, and a bit of a minor celebrity following the arrest of Holloway Muldoon. He’d gone back to the cabin he and Ray had rebuilt together after the end of their quest for Franklin. By spring he’d expanded and improved upon the structure he and Ray had framed out, and before the leaves turned, the cabin was as he remembered, clean and spare and a testament to a life lived indoors only by concession. Fraser spent most of the time working on the cabin or walking in the still, silent woods beyond. He grew a beard and lost fifteen pounds.

And when he went out to feed the dogs Fraser tried not to look at the two axes gone to rust in the cold, dark corner of the barn.

Then came another fall, and then the first snows. Too early. Nature turned in upon itself, cannibalizing the order of things.

"I’m lost without him," he said.

The woman began to sing.

She competed with the wind outside and, faintly, he imagined he could hear the beat of drums keeping time with her high-pitched cries. There was no way to know who or what she was singing for: the sudden winter, the premature spring, the strangeness of the world in the way it stranded strangers together and ripped lovers apart.

The fire popped and hissed. Her voice dropped, grew low and quiet, and finally she fell silent. The drums faded. When Fraser opened his eyes she was watching the flames again.

"You’re Dakelh?"

She did not look at him, but she nodded imperceptibly. He knew the cadence of her song, its rhythms and bits of phrases included here and there to punctuate the melody. Although he did not speak her Carrier dialect, he knew a few common phrases. At least now he could discover her name.

"Snachailya," he told her. "For the song. Thank you."

Another imperceptible nod, and she began humming to herself again. He should occupy himself somehow: repairing harnesses to get the sled in working order, or chopping more firewood. But the night was cold and the snows were thick, and perhaps if he stayed she would sing to him again.

"What’s your name?" he asked her. "De’n?"

No answer. She even ceased her humming. Fraser stood and dressed in boots and his parka, and went out into the snowy night.

********

The storms broke on the fifth day, and they went outside to stand in the sun and examine all the ways in which the world around them had changed. She looked to the sky first, scanning for clouds, and then pointed to the sun. He nodded. The storm had passed, for now.

They set to work gathering more firewood. Fortune had smiled on them; their supplies were low but they could have lasted another week. When the woman took stock of the depleted woodshed and shook her head, he felt his face heat.

"I’m well aware of my foolishness, thank you," he said, surprising himself. His tone was positively snippy.

She offered him a crooked smile and seemed to delight in his unaccustomed sarcasm. Rather like Diefenbaker had, once.

Fraser frowned and grabbed the axes from the barn, brushing off the dust and grime that had collected on the once-smooth heads. It would take a few hours at the grindstone but he could return one axe, at least, to working condition. Its mate was beyond salvaging and he snapped the handle off, adding it to the pile of wood meant for the fire.

The woman watched him for a moment, and then turned and made for the trees.

When she returned she was dragging a travois loaded with branches and small bits of timber. She set to work separating what she had collected, organizing the wood into that which could be used for true firewood and that which was good only for kindling to start a blaze. Fraser finished sharpening the axe and followed her footsteps across the field and into the woods. Hours passed as he hacked and chopped, trying to bring down enough trees to keep them warm for a few weeks. Another storm might bear down upon them and he refused to let anything happen to her.

Darkness fell, and he trudged back to the cabin in the snow, the lights of the fire dancing and shifting among the trees. Strange to come home to warmth and life after the years of blank solitude. For a brief period he had thought he might always have this, this brief sensation of pausing at a door and hearing the murmur of another voice inside and know that that he was welcome. Wanted. Loved. For a few months it had been his, and then it had vanished along with all of his other foolish hopes and half-recognized dreams. How could something so briefly known leave such a profound mark?

The woman was heating beans on the stove, and he could smell bannock in the oven.

"The wood’s cut," he told her, not expecting a reply. She glanced over her shoulder at him, and then returned her attention to the stove. "We’ll be fine for another few weeks, and by then the snow will be hard-packed enough to harness the dogs. You won’t need to stay here very long."

She added salt to the beans, and he wondered if she would stay, given the choice.

********

Time, Fraser had decided, was only a relative concept. Without a profession or duty beyond his responsibility to keep the dogs fed and the stove warm, and to hunt and trap enough to meet their basic needs, he lost the sense of the progression of days. The woman was there each morning when he woke. Sometimes she was sitting at the table but more often then not he would start from sleep just as she came in from outside, bright-eyed from romping with the dogs.

She bathed in the evenings, and he walked or took a book into the forest to allow her privacy. After dinner she would watch the flames and sing, or sleep, and he often wondered at the compact nature of her world. She seemed to require nothing from him.

One night, when she was fixated on the fire and James Joyce failed to hold his attention, Fraser stood and stirred the embers, then put another log on to burn. The room filled with the scent of fresh-burning pine. He watched her in the firelight. Her face was serene and lit like a Madonna, the warm glow smoothing out her distant, fixed expression.

"I wish you would speak to me," he said, talking because the silence weighed down upon him like a thousand tons of crushing snow. "I’ve been lonely. Haven’t you?"

She flicked a glance at him, whip-like, and then her eyes were drawn away to the fire. She opened her mouth but no sound came out, not even her strange, strangled wail of a song.

"I want to know what happened to you. Why did you come to this place? How did you find me? What’s your story? What’s your name?"

She would not look at him. Strangers, strangers all around him, filling his life, occupying the small corners of every room. More distance, more gulfs he could not navigate. He was framed on all sides by hostile seas and rocky shores. He wanted to explain it all to her, to make her understand. She could play priest-confessor and he could be the penitent on bended knee. This woman’s silence was only more proof that he would always speak to an empty room, his words coming too few and far too late.

"I never told him I loved him. I don’t think he knew."

She rose, touched his shoulder, and held out her hand.

He clasped it, and she led him to the bed.

He sat on the mattress, its soft give unfamiliar after so many weeks on the hard floor, and watched as she stretched next to him, tucking a pillow between her legs.

"Cksh'to-gg," she advised him. Sleep. Fraser did not let go of her hand.

********

The winter deepened and the nights grew longer. He would start awake sometimes, and find that in sleep he curled around the woman, her small hand gripped tightly in his. In sleep she lost that permanently distracted look; something eased within her and he would often light a lamp to mark the changes.

Her round, full face reminded him of the moon in the black night sky. She was beautiful but stained by some kind of deep grief; it was there, hiding in her smile, and he wanted badly to take part of her burden onto himself. But Fraser no longer wondered who or what she was hiding from. They were like two planets locked in orbit around each other, the outer world and its cruelties and disappointments drawing them together with the inevitable force of gravity.

If she had ever turned aside or pushed him away, the pull they held for one another would have been broken. If she had asked he would have shattered their orbit, taken her to town, returned her to the world. But she never spoke, and so they continued, down and down through the long dark nights, turning among the stars.

They never made love, but it felt as if they had.

*******

The weather broke on March the 11th. Fraser had long ago abandoned calendars and clocks, but he did note this date. March the 11th sent them both tumbling from the stars toward the earth.

He had been out hunting. The bears were starting to wake and prey was scarce, but he managed to bring in two snowshoe hares for a stew. The woman liked rabbit meat. He was almost boyishly eager to present it to her.

There was a snowmobile parked just outside the cabin. He smelled the machine’s diesel long before he saw it. The fuel had left oily black patches in the snow.

An RCMP officer in a standard cold-weather uniform was sitting before the fire. He rose when Fraser opened the door; the woman was nowhere in sight.

"Ah, Constable," the man said. He was young, dark-haired, First Nations. Not new to the area by the look of him; younger recruits in the north tended to be a little snow-dazed but this man seemed to have already adjusted. "I’m Corporal Jim Crowfoot. I hope you don’t mind the use of your fire."

"No, not at all," Fraser said automatically.

The corporal stared at him and there was an awkward pause of a few seconds. A few years ago Fraser might have filled the pause with a polite remark about the weather. Now he stood and dripped water on the floor and refused to feel self-conscience about his beard and rumpled clothing, his lack of a uniform, his apparent insanity. Corporal Crowfoot looked as though he’d expected to greet a hero or a legend; Fraser was sorry to disappoint him.

"Was there something you…?"

"Ah," Crowfoot said, sinking back down into the chair by the fire. "I’m looking for a missing Carrier woman, name of Wendy Nilak. Paul Palootuk said he thought he saw some strange tracks in your woods. Said you never have any visitors, so I thought I’d ask."

Fraser met the other man’s gaze steadily. "Why are you looking for her?"

Crowfoot shrugged, and his eyes flicked to the shotgun Fraser carried over his shoulder.

"Just want to make sure she’s okay. Her husband and son died in a house fire down in Fort Nelson last fall and she took off afterwards. Her family’s worried about her."

Fraser closed his eyes and put the rabbit carcasses in the sink. He set the shotgun down beside the door.

Crowfoot eyed the weapon, and then forced himself to relax. "You all right there, Constable Fraser?"

"I’m fine. Would you like some tea?"

"Sure."

Fraser put water on to boil, leaving Crowfoot to look around the cabin. The wide double bed was still unmade from the morning. Harnesses he’d been oiling last night sat out on the rug in front of the fire, and there was a deck of playing cards spread out on the kitchen table. Fraser had been teaching the woman how to play poker. Perhaps Crowfoot would think it was a game of solitaire.

"You know anything about Carrier mourning rituals, Constable Fraser?"

His eyes felt strange and hot. They burned and itched, and he rubbed at them with the heel of his palms. "No, I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with Carrier culture. My experience has largely been confined to the Inuit and the Tlingit."

Crowfoot nodded. He sipped his tea and stared into the fire. "Yeah, well, not many Carrier left. Their band name is a white man’s word, came from the settlers. In the old days, when a Carrier woman’s husband died, she burned the body and made a sack for the bones and ashes. She’d carry them with her until the mourning period was over. Some of the old women got all twisted up from those sacks, from the weight of those bones. The white government outlawed the whole thing. Eventually."

The fire hissed and popped, and Crowfoot frowned at it. "I always thought that was a strange custom, myself. I’m Cree; we just bury our dead. You can’t carry grief with you like that. Makes you a little crazy inside, y’know?"

He looked up, and finally met Fraser’s eyes. Fraser kept his face carefully relaxed, his expression neutral. Finally Crowfoot looked away.

"Okay." Crowfoot drained the rest of his cup and set it on the kitchen table. "Tell her to get in touch."

He pulled on his parka and mitts; Fraser watched him silently, heart thudding slowly in his chest. Just as Crowfoot opened the door he paused, his hand on the knob. "I’ve been hearing stories about you for a long time. They have lots of white-men names for you, Constable Fraser. Sometimes those words fit, sometimes they don’t. Guess you know better than me what you are."

Fraser didn’t hear him leave. He sat at the table and put his head in his hands.

********

Fraser cleaned the cabin. The playing cards went back in their box. He returned the harnesses to their hooks in the barn. He changed the sheets and made the bed. He stoked the fire. Night fell and he did not hear the crunch of her feet on the icy sheen of snow just outside their—his—doorway. Finally he went to bed.

Two days passed without a sign of her. He let the fire go cold and no longer went out to chop wood or haul snow for water. The cabin grew still and silent, layers of quiet piling up like the snow that fell softly outside. Jim Crowfoot was wrong: after a certain point grief was the only thing you could carry with you. The only thing that made sense.

He’d shown Ray the northern lights when they were out on the trail together. He hadn’t allowed himself to watch the aurora dance across the sky since Ray had returned to Chicago. When the blue-green-gold lit the night sky he turned away, went inside, closed his eyes. But tonight…tonight he would watch. The delicate fabric of reality seemed to be tearing; he could easily have shared this cabin with a dead woman or a ghost these past few months. But hibernation was ending and the lights…the lights called. And he answered, slipping outside wrapped only in a blanket. He wore no shoes.

The night was calm and clear and cold, and the aurora was brilliant as it waved and shimmered in the sky. He tilted his head back and thought of Ray Kowalski, of Ray Vecchio, of Diefenbaker and Chicago and all the places and people he had known and lost.

And then there was a warm hand on his neck, and a warm body pressed against his own. He felt the slide of her hair along his bare arm, and her soft whisper in his ear.

"Onartok," she whispered. Keep warm.

And so she saved him from the cold, and the snow.

**

THIS POLL IS NOW CLOSED. ANY FURTHER VOTES WILL NOT BE COUNTED.

[Poll #1086364]