ds_flashfiction | Night is the Colour of a Self, for the compass challenge by Salieri

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Author: Salieri (

troyswann)
Length: ~1000 w + some photos
Spoilers/Episodes: Post-CotW
Characters: Ray K, Fraser, Dief
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Due South is not mine. No profit is made here except the social good, I suppose, of keeping me out of trouble for an hour.
Summary: Four wolves--or, 3 wolves and a half-wolf. Or... not.
Notes: This really is flashfic. Written in an hour. Inspired by “Norweg,” a song by Cirque du Soleil, and a dance choreographed by Sean Cheeseman. The photos are not really of the Northwest Areas, but of the prairie trail on Hudson's Bay Mountain in British Columbia, but we're pretending. The title is a line from "Prelude to Objects 1" by Wallace Stevens.

Night is the Colour of a Self

Ray turns full-circle on the alpine plain. All around them, the peaks are sketched thin blue on blue in unbroken chains just below eye-level. The weird scale of it makes him want to kneel. Beside his boot, a tree—maybe a hundred years old, Fraser says—is a pinwheel of leathery branches tight against the gray rock, pressed flat by the weight of the sky. Ray crouches to measure it. It’s not much bigger than his spread fingers, grows in a flaky bed of pale lichen and scruffy moss. When he lifts his head, he has to steady himself with a fist in the thick fur at Dief’s neck. Vertigo. The tiny and the vast are pressed together in the thin margin of space at the top of the world.

They camp above the tumbled debris of the moraine field. Fraser’s bedroll is aligned so he faces the rusty grey rockface of the peak and the remnants of the glacier that weeps a thin stream of water into the bowl of the lake.

Lachrimary, Fraser says, and explains about monks and nuns catching penitent tears while Ray looks the other way, across the muted green and buff grasses of the plain toward the distant outpost of pygmy trees and the ring of mountains like a safety rail to keep him from rolling off the plateau in his sleep.

When the light finally drains from the sky, Ray dreams of voices. He opens his eyes and watches a wolf approach from the lake, weaving its way through the jagged boulders and across the scree with his nose close to the ground. Dief rises, takes a few steps toward him. A low wail drifts up from the riverbed and there’s another wolf, white on the white awning of an ice shelf over the black water. Ray rolls inside his sleeping bag to look the other way and there’s a third, a black silhouette on the ridge. It pauses a moment to look down at them and then becomes a moon-shadow sliding down the steep slope toward them.

“Fraser,” Ray says in a low voice.

But Fraser is already standing next to the fire and he lifts a hand, palm out, at Ray. Ray goes still, but his heart is thudding behind his ribs. Wolves.

No. When he looks back at them he sees that he was wrong. They aren’t wolves at all, but people. Young. Thin. Naked. Their eyes glow a hollow green in the firelight, just like Dief’s when he turns to look at Fraser. Fraser says nothing at all when Dief settles down and begins to worry his paw, like he does when he’s caught a stone between his pads of his toes. He pulls and tugs until the fur on his paw comes away and he can freely move his hand to release the other and then to peel away his wolf coat all of a piece.

He stands a moment, a white-haired boy with eyes glowing a hollow green in the firelight, just like Dief’s, and then he takes off at a lope to follow the others over the ridge, chased by the moon.

Ray breathes slowly through his nose. In and out.

“Fraser,” he says, “I think Dief just got stolen by wolf-fairies. Or fairy-wolves.”

Turning to him, Fraser says, “I think ‘stolen’ isn’t quite the right word.” His eyes are dark in the firelight, just like Fraser’s.

“Are we gonna go after him?”

Fraser looks up at the ridge for a long time before he shakes his head, sharply, once. “It’s his choice,” he says.

Behind him, the glacier fills the bowl of the lake silently in the dark.

“Frase,” Ray says.

“Yes, Ray.”

“Now would be a good time to tell me I’m dreaming.”

“You’re dreaming, Ray.”

“Okay then.” Ray settles more deeply into his sleeping bag. A not-quite wolven howl paints a long, thinning stroke of silver behind his eyes.

When he opens his eyes again, the four wolves are there next to the ashes of the fire. He can smell the wet-fur wildness of them. Light is seeping up from below the mountains to the east, and the white wolf trots off toward it, following the river bed. Her feet crunch on the ancient snow. To the north, the black wolf is moving away, too, back across the moraine to skirt the edge of the lake, and then tracing a zig-zagging path up to a notch in the rockface. He doesn’t pause to look back. The third wolf, who is tawny now in the rising light, looks down from the ridge to the west, makes a yipping sound and heads over to the other side, out of sight.

“Weird.”

Crouching with his hand on Dief’s back, Fraser says, “It depends on your point of view.”

“From here it’s pretty weird.”

Fraser tilts his head, politely noncommittal acknowledgement.

So, Ray thinks as he tucks his head into his sleeping bag, it’s a good thing we're dreaming. He can hear Fraser lie down again, facing the lake, and Dief turning a circle before falling with an exhausted, slightly disgruntled sigh into the space between them.

Ray walks back from the lake with his hands held out to his sides and his eyes on his boots as he threads a path through the broken stones of the rubble field. He hopes he doesn’t fall, because his ten-second bath in the lake has flash-frozen his marrow and he’s pretty sure he’ll shatter.

Back at the camp, Fraser’s already stowed everything in their packs and Dief is waiting, shoulder-deep in a patch of wildflowers. The tiny blooms nod against the empty sky as he turns to head away across the plain toward the pygmy trees and the dark swath of forest far below them.

“Okay,” Ray says as he hitches his pack into a comfortable position. “Where to?”

Fraser sets off after Dief. “South,” he says.

--The End--