Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Ray thought about it, the whole Hand of Franklin adventure had been surprisingly peaceful. There were no criminals, for one thing, because there were almost no other people at all. There was no traffic to get stuck in. There were no other cops or Mounties. There was no one to harangue him about reports. Nobody had even tried to kill him, unless you counted avalanches, bears, et cetera. There was just snow and sky and Fraser. Once Ray’d figured out how to not die, all he really had to do was relax.

So it figured that as soon as they’d returned to the dubious civilization that was Inuvik, they were hot on the trail of some drug-runners. Fraser had gotten a hot tip based on a 15-second conversation about dogs with a man at a street crossing, or so he claimed. For reasons that could not possibly have been rationalized at this juncture, they were now all in a plane together.

Ray was flying it. It was nothing new to be at the mercy of crazy guys on planes, but this was more than he’d bargained for—especially with little more instruction than to “keep it level”. 

Their erstwhile quarry, the Delacey brothers—a couple of guys who were probably 75% bear—didn’t have enough eyes or hands to keep guns on Ray and Fraser and fly the plane and organize their cargo, so had decided their stowaways had better make themselves useful. Maybe it was a fitting end. It was how Ray’d gotten into Canada, and it was how he’d get out of it, permanently, into the great beyond.

“So—what,” said Ray, eyes fixed on the horizon, “do you have a plan, or a death wish?”

“I was going to land it,” said brother number one. “There’s an abandoned mine with a mostly-usable airstrip that we’d planned on, but it’s way out of our way. This way we can both jump and save lots of time! Seems providential, you two joining us. Even though we only really needed one of you.” He beamed.

So, they had parachutes. They even had parachutes for their goods. What they did not have were any extras, seeing as how they hadn’t planned on any passengers, and which they took pains to point out since they both found it hilarious. There was a quick switch of gun duty while each geared up. Fraser hadn’t said much since they’d been discovered, so Ray didn’t know if he had a plan or not.

“Here’s our spot!” he heard the second Delacey brother shout, and there was a sudden rush of cold air behind him as the side door opened. Ray risked a glance backwards and saw one of the brothers following his packages out the door. The other waved his gun pointedly at Ray. 

“Eyes on the prize!” he said, giving his harness a one-handed once-over. “Fellows, I believe this is where we part.” 

“The penalties for murder are somewhat stiffer than for anything you were doing previously,” said Fraser. 

“Now, now, we aren’t murderers,” said the remaining brother. “You’ve got a perfectly good plane. Hey, you could take a trip somewhere cool!” And he jumped.

“Ray! Eyes forward!” Fraser snapped, slamming the door back down behind him.

Ray turned back. The plane wasn’t crashing or anything, so he didn’t know what Fraser was so het up about. 

Fraser was rifling rapidly through the radio equipment in the cockpit. “If I can get a signal, we just need to get in range of a control tower that can help—”

“We don’t need the radio yet,” said Ray. “First we have to find the abandoned mine and land there.”

“Do you know how to land a plane?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Ray. He moved the yoke experimentally and the plane dropped suddenly, and it was tricky to get it leveled out again, but he managed it eventually. They weren’t that close to the mountain. 

“See, I can make it go down. Just gotta do that all the way to the ground.” He glanced over at Fraser, who had a look on his face Ray had rarely seen there. He knew what it was straight-off, though: it was the look people usually got around Fraser and his ideas.

“Make yourself useful,” said Ray. “I’m sure you know how to read those charts.”

“Well, I haven’t had much opportunity to make use of aeronautical—”

“Yeah, well, I’m busy, so maybe you should start learning now.”

“Maybe if you could try to hold the plane level…”

“What? This is level!”

“Well, if that’s the best you can do,” said Fraser, and Ray just grinned. It was an involuntary thing, because they were probably still gonna die, but as he felt it on his face he realized this whole chase had been the longest he’d gone without feeling it in approximately two months. Not counting sleeping, but only because he didn’t know for sure. 

Fraser did seem to know what the charts meant, or at least he told Ray where to go in between fiddling with the radio.

“It looks like a heading of 160 should take us there,” he said, and when Ray turned the wrong direction he added, “right, turn right! You have seen a compass before.”

“Any luck with the radio?” Ray asked, having now spotted on the instrument panel where it showed their current heading. 

“Unfortunately, I think a key component might be missing. Perhaps the Delacey brothers didn’t know it was illegal to depart without a functioning radio.”

“Doubt it,” said Ray. “Can you fix it, or are we landing it by ourselves?” He realized he was a little off on the heading, and turned back left.

“I’m working on it—” Fraser broke off. “Also, you’re supposed to bank more when you turn.” Unlike Ray, Fraser wasn’t buckled in, so he was now half-stuck between the seat and the side of the plane. 

“Sorry!” said Ray. Really he was sorry for Fraser, who sounded stressed, whereas Ray thought he’d found the solution to these tiny bush planes. It was nothing like driving a car except in one crucial aspect: if Ray was the one driving, it was great. 

Fraser couldn’t get the radio working, so quite possibly they were still going to crash and die, but there in the southwest was a blank white strip of snow, right where the runway should be. 

As soon as they dropped below the ridgeline they were buffeted by gusts, and the scenery tilted wildly from side to side. He’d never thought to consider the way this valley was a sort of wind funnel. The runway wasn’t quite parallel to the cliffs and they were knocked repeatedly sideways as Ray brought the plane down in drops that would probably have made him hurl if he wasn’t so busy.

They landed. More or less. There was a crunching sound, and the plane tipped in a way it shouldn’t and they skidded and slid. There wasn’t any controlling it after that, and for what felt like about 20 minutes Ray just sat there and waited to see if they were going to go careening into a tree. 

They came to a stop. He stared down at his hands on the yoke and felt like he ought to be shaking but he wasn’t, not at all. 

Okay, he thought. This was interesting. This was—new. 

“—Ray,” Fraser was saying. At some point he’d gotten out of the plane and was leaning back in through the door. “I think we should—”

“Shut up,” said Ray. “I'm having a moment, can’t you tell?”

“I’d rather you did it after you were out of the smoking aircraft that no longer has any landing gear,” said Fraser, and well, fair enough. Ray hopped out. He saw that Fraser was right about the landing gear and felt a little bad about it.

There was a little building next to the runway and they didn’t even have to break in. It hadn’t been used in years, judging by the dust on the maps Fraser was perusing.

“Radio now?” Ray suggested. “I mean, you might still be able to make it work.”

They went back out to the plane, but not to look at the radio. Fraser surveyed what supplies the Delacey brothers hadn’t taken with them.

“In this valley, chances are we wouldn’t get reception. We could lose precious time. But if you see here—” He unfurled one of the maps he’d taken from the office. “I think they miscalculated their landing spot, which would be approximately there, whereas we are here. It’ll be a day and a half’s hard going, but I do think we can reach Norman Wells before the Delacey brothers do. If you look, here…” Fraser talked, and Ray looked at the route he traced on the map and wished that they could use the plane some more. But he agreed readily enough—it was a sort of mini-quest. Last hurrah and all that. And they were all going to the same place, anyway.

The snow was melting, said Fraser, and in the lower altitudes they could camp without much difficulty. It would mean an ascent first thing in the morning but Ray wasn’t too worried about that anymore. Mostly he missed the skis, on the long and flat section out from the airstrip. That should’ve been new too, since he definitely didn’t remember consciously missing them before, but actually it wasn’t.

Somewhere in late afternoon, making his way around the icy snow that coated the direct path at sharp angles, Ray decided that he didn’t want to be a cop anymore. And that, it turned out, wasn’t new either. The sun came out abruptly from behind a cloud and the reflection off the snow felt like it was searing Ray’s unprotected eyes. It could, that was the worst thing—Fraser had told him all about the fun that was sunburning your corneas.

They hadn’t talked about what Ray would do afterward. They hadn’t really talked about what Fraser would do either, since he wasn’t all that thrilled about his new posting. Ray wasn’t sure if they were going to talk about it before the last possible minute, unless he gave Fraser some kind of opening. They hadn’t even kissed until that last night before they’d set out on the sled. He worried he wouldn’t have time to present his argument, if he even figured out what exactly it was. 

They took a long detour along a ridge, skirting the flash floods in the canyon below. Ray never saw it but at one point he heard the roar of the rushing water. Spring, said Fraser, was the most treacherous of seasons, and nothing Ray had experienced in Chicago proved otherwise. 

The sun dipped in and out behind the hills to the west, casting diffident, sidelong beams through the brush. Ray thought about skiing. About sunburn in winter. The stark, alien landscapes of the far north and how bright they were under a full moon. Here it felt a little more familiar, the severity of the tundra replaced by taller brush and more and more real trees. The icy downward slopes weren’t much fun, but it was something Ray could get a handle on. All appearances to the contrary, he felt like he had it halfway figured out. The other half was figuring out how to communicate that to Fraser. Fraser was always so set in his beliefs.

They made camp in the shelter of a low ridge, with tarps and emergency blankets taken from the plane. With Fraser curled up around him, Ray found it wasn’t even top five of the most uncomfortable camps.

“I can’t say this was what I had in mind, but I have missed my duties.” Fraser gave a pleased sigh against him. “I used to worry that too much vacation might dull one’s instincts, but after nearly two months of it I’m happy to say it does not.”

“So you think this all was good instincts,” said Ray. 

“Well, we’re going to catch them, aren’t we?”

“Sure,” said Ray. “Yeah, okay, nothing nobler than the pursuit of justice, yada yada.”

Fraser shifted against him. The moon was presently obscured by clouds and it was very dark in the makeshift tent. “You don’t feel the same?”

“I dunno,” said Ray. There were, as he’d discovered over nearly two months in the arctic, easier ways of getting your kicks (as long as you were already in the arctic, which helped a lot). And, sure, they could’ve focused more on the radio instead of on landing, but that had been his instincts. Good or bad, he didn’t know.

“I don’t know if I want to spend my life chasing the Delaceys of the world anymore,” said Ray. He’d spent so much time trying to be someone or do something, but two months of doing neither seemed to have jarred him right out of the habit. 

Fraser was silent.

Okay, come on, thought Ray. Here’s your opening. 

But Fraser always did weird things with his openings, and he said, “I wonder, sometimes, if I didn’t grant Chicago the credit it deserved. After all, there’s something to be said for a city you know, with people who know you there.”

Yeah, Fraser was still sore that he hadn’t gotten Inuvik. 

“There’s no reason it has to be just one place,” said Ray. “I think if I’d got more places to go back to and call home, a lotta things would’ve been a lot nicer. Everyone’ll know you pretty quick, anyway.”

“I suppose,” said Fraser dubiously.

“Come on, you haven’t even checked the place out yet. And it’s smaller than Inuvik, that oughta be a plus.”

“Some of my postings haven’t been very good fits.”

“Yeah? Well, mine neither. But that’s not really why.” It had felt good, a lot of the time, and exciting and interesting and challenging, but it hadn’t usually been fun. For Fraser it often was, because he liked disturbing blameless civilians and licking garbage and being right. After recent events Ray was starting to wonder why he couldn’t have everything, too.

“Ray?” Fraser prompted, after he’d been silent a long while.

Ray shrugged a little against him. “There’s more to life than being a Chicago cop, that’s all.”

“You’ve always been a police officer.”

“It hasn’t even been 20 years,” said Ray. “I’ve been other things for longer.”

He was glad, though, when Fraser didn’t ask what they were. He didn’t want to talk about Stella tonight.

▴ ▵

Afternoon saw them heading up the final ascent of the trek. Beyond the hills lay their destination, and Ray didn’t miss the skis at all today. He would’ve had to carry them most of the way. They’d made good time and Fraser predicted they’d beat the Delacey brothers to Norman Wells by at least an hour. Ray found it hard to get excited about that.

At last they crested the ridge and saw the town before them, the river weaving its way up north through the valley, glinting in the setting sun. There was patchy snow here, and he flopped backward onto it and shut his eyes for a second against the view of the journey’s end.

“Are you all right?” Fraser asked, from somewhere above and to the left.

“Just peachy, Frase.” Ray gave him a thumbs-up without opening his eyes. The snow was very crunchy and hard and didn’t make for a very nice pillow, but he needed a cool head just now. Almost there, he thought, now or never, and then thought about how all the last dozen times he’d thought now or never with Fraser it hadn’t really been anything like it. 

He clambered up, and they stared out at the view together.

“Looks nice,” he said. “Sure, it’s not Inuvik, but—nice.”

“Yes,” said Fraser, “I agree.”

They stood in silence for a long moment. They ought to have been hurrying down from the ridge, to alert the detachment and catch the brothers before they could unload their cargo, and Ray wondered that Fraser wasn’t hastening him onward. Maybe because he was too busy looking at the end of the road too.

“So, here we are I guess,” said Ray, and marvelled at how calm his voice sounded. “What do you think, half an hour?”

“45 minutes at least,” said Fraser, and his voice didn’t sound calm at all. Ray barely heard what he said next over the sudden pounding of his heart, because all at once he knew that though it wasn’t now or never, it was going to be now.

“Ray—have you given any more thought to Chicago?” was what Fraser said.

“I’ve thought about it,” said Ray cautiously, voice still strangely calm. “Chicago, sure is a...place, huh. The buildings are way shorter here, but the hills are way higher, so it balances out.” It was kinda funny how it was similar, how he felt best when something was always looming up behind him. He thought he was gonna like it here better than Inuvik, actually.

“Ray.” Fraser was staring at him with that unnerving intensity of his, a lot like on the eve of the quest, and all of Ray thought, yes, now.

“Fraser?” Ray said. “Spit it out already.”

“Lieutenant Welsh left a message for you in Inuvik yesterday morning,” said Fraser in a rush. “I didn’t—we were—I apologize for not passing it on to you sooner. The Delacey brothers made their appearance soon after and I was—distracted. He hopes to hear from you soon; he said that the 2-7 has been, and I quote, ‘a parade of Dachshunds trying to find their own assholes’. With the real Ray Vecchio having moved to Florida, it appears your job is still open.”

“Huh,” said Ray. It wasn’t quite what he’d been looking for, but he thought about Fraser sitting on that all through yesterday’s breakfast and all through the frenetic chase sequence and all through the plane-flying and the wilderness-traversing. This was Fraser, and what was it he’d said on the eve of the adventure, when he’d stared at Ray so intently? Oh yeah, something like, “we can only take ten pounds of coffee, due to various mathematical calculations I will proceed to bore you with.”

“Once we’ve dealt with the Delaceys, you can—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ray interrupted. Because on the eve of the adventure he’d kissed Fraser and stopped him there, but since then the shock of it had worn off and Fraser kept talking whenever he wanted to.  

“I—” Fraser swallowed, and looked at Ray with what was almost a glare. “I wanted this last day. This last run. I didn’t want to waste it on thoughts of the future. I didn’t want to think about you leaving.”

“Yeah, okay, me neither.” Ray was actually kind of grateful Fraser hadn’t put all that in his head just before the plane-flying, or they might have crashed and died. “I’m not going back to the 2-7, Fraser. I don’t think I’m going back to Chicago at all.”

“You’re not?” Fraser stared at him.

Ray shook his head. 

“But it’s...your whole life, Ray,” said Fraser. “Are you sure?”

Chicago felt very inconsequential, here on the edge of the precipice with Fraser, the lights of the town in the valley below them. He had stuff to do. Places to go, people to see. New things to find out about. 

Ray stepped closer to Fraser. “Look,” he said, “are you gonna ask me to stay or aren’t you?”

“I want you to stay,” said Fraser, so low he was almost whispering. 

“But are you asking?” said Ray. “‘Cause I’m not inviting myself. I’m just not. This is your world up here, and I can’t guarantee you that I’m gonna learn to become one with nature, or stop complaining about the weather, or develop a real fondness for pemmican. I cannot guarantee you anything except—me.” He gestured towards himself, feeling a little silly, with all the magnificence of the rolling hills and the golden sky surrounding him.

“I’d be a partner,” Ray added. “I can guarantee you that. I can learn to pull my own weight up here, and no—” because Fraser had opened his mouth to say something— “that’s non-negotiable. That’s for me. But—but you have to ask.”

“Ray,” said Fraser, taking Ray’s face between his gloved hands, “please stay.”

“Okay,” said Ray, and kissed him. It still shut him up when he wanted to be silenced.

They hurried down into the valley not long after that, to the detachment and then north along the river. They caught the Delacey brothers not far from town. They’d lost a fair bit of their cargo trying to navigate the ice-choked waters, but not so much that there wasn’t ample evidence left over.

They were somewhere in the chasing-fugitives-over-the-shifting-ice bit when the RCMP officers figured out that the guy out there tossing his prey clear to shore was the new corporal. And Ray was—?

“Oh, I was his partner in Chicago,” said Ray, as he and Constable Smith clung desperately to their own ice floe. “Kicked a lot of guys in the head over there, so you all better watch yourselves. On the count of three—”

They jumped, and back at the detachment with the brothers locked up and awaiting transit out tomorrow, Ray was given a rundown of the past few years in detachment history, as passed down by Constable Smith’s predecessor.

“I think this takes the cake!” said Constable Smith, and Ray grinned back at him.

▴ ▵

They got a room at one of the two inns in town. A more permanent residence would have to wait until the rest of the ice broke up and the barges started coming. Ray wasn’t sure if a more permanent residence was even what Fraser wanted, but he thought Fraser was still figuring that out himself and so he didn’t ask.

There were two constables at the detachment: Smith and Levesque. They were short an officer, theoretically, but they hardly ever had more than three. Smith was an Albertan fresh out of training and hung on Fraser’s every word, and even Ray’s sometimes. Ray wasn’t sure where Levesque was from because despite Fraser’s claims that both of them spoke mutually intelligible dialects of English, Levesque and Ray had not yet managed to have a mutually intelligible conversation.

Ray called Welsh and told him he was resigning. Welsh told Ray that he didn’t accept resignations by phone and as far as he was concerned, Ray was still on leave. 

A few weeks after that Fraser brought Ray out on a surveying mission of several parcels of land that were for sale. Fraser had decided he wanted a cabin, and he might as well build one here while he had the money for it, and because it was easier to build something all new than to rebuild something. Ray got that. 

The spot Fraser found wasn’t too far out of town, on the edge of some water that was somewhere between a pond and a lake, with a view of the ranges climbing up beyond. 

“We can cut a trail through here,” said Fraser, surveying the spot they’d staked out for the cabin from atop the neighboring hill. “It would give us easy access to the road. A truck ought to make it during the dry months.”

“Is that good?” asked Ray. Fraser didn’t always seem to be that fond of civilization. 

“I like this town,” said Fraser, with a faint air of surprise about him.

“Me too,” Ray agreed readily. He’d been hanging around the local airstrip getting in the good graces of the manager, Dave, whose dad operated a small fleet of bush planes out of Yellowknife. Ray had broached the subject of how to get into this whole flying business, et cetera.

“Have you done much flying?” Dave had asked. 

“I crash-landed a plane recently,” said Ray. “It was great.”

Dave had accepted this at face value and even offered to help. It was something Ray had been enjoying lately, being taken at face value. In Chicago that had mostly been just Fraser, and Ray wasn’t sure what all had changed but he suspected it wasn’t Chicago’s fault.

It was warm(ish) and the days were long, and Fraser still had vacation time left. He started with the detachment gradually, taking long weekends almost every week, and the cabin went up steadily. Ray burned some of his dwindling cash supply on a couple flying lessons with Dave and decided he actually liked it better when he didn’t think he was gonna die. Until then he hadn’t been quite sure.

Ray had gone into town early on a Friday, and it was still pink and yellow dawn across most of the sky when they took off. So, here was an idea, he thought. He’d said he was going to pull his own weight whether Fraser cared or not. It wouldn’t be easy. But he’d fixed a couple cars already and knew that wasn’t gonna cut it. 

“So, in a year or so,” said Ray, eyes fixed on the horizon, “if I get a commercial license, you think you might have openings?”

“Well…” Dave trailed off, and when Ray glanced over he was giving him kind of a funny look. “Turnover is pretty high.”

“So you’re saying you probably will have openings?”

“Do you actually want to live here?” asked Dave.

“Uh, yeah? I’ve hardly done anything these past weeks except build a cabin.” 

“You’re staying, then,” said Dave. “I wasn’t sure if you were just up here to help Corporal Fraser.”

“No, I live here now,” said Ray. It still felt very strange to say so, but not in a bad way.

“So you and him…” Dave made a vague gesture with one hand.

“Yeah?” said Ray, and didn’t even sound all too aggressive. 

“Well, if you’re gonna be staying wherever he is,” said Dave. “Most of the Mounties stay a decent amount of time, disregarding recent events. Promise me five years and I swear I’ll make it happen. The last four pilots we hired lasted a combined total of eight months. They never actually wanted to live here. They all have this idea that when you’re just starting out you have to go north to get jobs. That would be fine if there weren’t plenty of places that would hire them further south.”

“I’m not going south,” said Ray. “Maybe north, someday.”

“I see.” Dave nodded. “It’s hooked you, the north, hasn’t it?”

“I dunno. I still complain about the weather all the time.”

“People who live in Aruba complain about the weather,” said Dave. “I know because I was there in March. That means nothing.”

▴ ▵

Ray enjoyed the cabin-building more after that, because now that Dave knew he and Fraser were together he had someone he could properly moan to about the fact that Fraser was fucking nuts and who would take it in the right frame of mind. Fraser thought power tools were too loud and unnecessary and got annoyed when Ray wanted to save about five hours using one.

“There’s much to be said for good, honest work,” Fraser had claimed, as if there was something deceitful about chainsaws. 

Ray suspected that Fraser had done his own complaining to Paul, the inn’s owner, because one evening when Ray and Dave stopped by for a beer Paul made several offhand comments about everything he’d done around the place with nothing more than the contents of his grandfather’s old toolbox. Ray was sure the guy was giving him significant looks the whole time.

So the cabin went up, the days shortened to something more reasonable, and at some point Ray noticed he was down to his last $40 Canadian and getting anything out of his US bank account was easier said than done. Plus he had kind of a lot of stuff still in Chicago that he was paying to store and that seemed really wasteful. Some of it might even be useful here.

He waited until they were nearly done with the cabin to broach the subject, because he didn’t want Fraser to think he was welshing after promising to pull his own weight, et cetera. 

They were up on top of the pointed roof, finishing the last of the major exterior work. After today it’d be more like interior decorating (at least the parts that Fraser trusted Ray to do) and he was looking forward to it. It was starting to get a lot colder, for one thing.

“I’ve gotta get back to Chicago,” Ray said, over the sound of his hammer. “I talked to Dave and he says he can take me as far as Yellowknife, and I guess it’ll only cost me an arm and half a leg out of there. You’ve got the first Saturday of October off, right?”

There was a pause for hammering, and for a minute or two Ray didn’t really think anything of it, because Fraser was obviously doing the tricky bits that took more concentration.

But after another row and still nothing, Ray looked over at him. He was hammering away but it wasn’t tricky.

“Fraser,” he said, “you hear me? Earth to Fraser…” and Fraser looked up. Ray had started with a sweatshirt and had only just graduated to t-shirt, but Fraser was shirtless and had been for a while, and his shoulders stood out sharply against the backdrop of spruces. The thermometer had said it was 15 degrees Canadian and Ray was still working on his translations but he knew it wasn’t that warm.

And Fraser, he was still working on whatever his face was doing.

Ray thought back over what he’d just said, and then he thought, shit. 

“Fraser, no,” he said sharply, like when Dief had gotten hold of something he shouldn’t. 

“Eh?” said Fraser blankly, with the same damn look Dief had with a contraband doughnut hanging out of his mouth. It was off-putting.

“Stop looking at me like that!” Ray squawked, and put down the rest of his nails, and in a domino effect several dozen rolled down over the eaves and into the grass, and he was going to have to go find them later. 

“Look, I don’t mean back back,” he said. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff in storage I’ve gotta get. And Welsh won’t let me resign over the phone, I tried.”

“I see,” said Fraser, as if he hadn’t been seeing something else entirely ten seconds ago. 

“Do you?” said Ray, and stopped there and looked at him across the roof’s peak. Do you think I’m that kind of an asshole? was what he’d have said to Stella. And Stella would’ve told him the half-dozen kinds of asshole he was, and meant all of it and none of it at the same time, and would never have thought she was getting broken up with, off-hand, on the top of a roof. 

“Yeah, I do,” said Fraser. “Something about unfinished business, unless I miss my guess. You did leave rather suddenly.”

“Unfinished business with my bank, mostly,” said Ray, although he supposed there were some other things he could attend to while he was at it. He’d never really told his parents he was moving to Canada, for instance. 

“And when would you be returning?”

“Well—I dunno.” He saw instantly this was the wrong thing to say, but it was true, dammit. He didn’t know how long it took to sell furniture and that stuff was too expensive to just leave on the curb. “A few weeks after, I guess. Not later than November.”

“Okay,” said Fraser.

Ray tipped his head. “Okay? That’s it?”

“Okay as in: understood,” said Fraser. “Of course I can take you into town on the first Saturday in October. I take it you’ll want to go in tomorrow to purchase your ticket? It’ll only get more expensive if you wait.”

“I don’t mean that.” They were up on a roof; it was not necessarily a great locale for any conversation other than pass-me-the-nails but Ray did not want Fraser worrying at him once they got back down. “You know I’m staying here, right?” Ray asked.

“Yes,” said Fraser.

“Well, don’t go forgetting that, then.”

Fraser flushed, and Ray watched interestedly to see how far down it went. It was interesting enough that he leaned in over the roof’s peak, and since all the nails were long gone it was easy to get his mouth up against whatever Fraser had been going to say. Ray knew that look by now; it wouldn’t have been germane.

“We should—” said Fraser, with a hitch in his breath that Ray liked, “we should finish this first. Sunset can come as a surprise this time of year.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

“Where are you going?” Fraser asked, as Ray shimmied down the roof.

“I dropped all my fucking nails! And it’s your fault, okay!”

Since Fraser now labored under the delusion that it was his kissing that made Ray lose the nails, there was no more of it until the sun dipped below the horizon and they’d made suitable progress for the day. They were both in hats and jackets by now, and the little lake reflected the gold of the clear sky in the south as the wind drove waves across it.

“We can cut a trail all along the shore before winter sets in,” said Fraser. “It’ll be good for skiing and snowshoeing, and Dief will like it too.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” Ray hadn’t known he had it in him to ever miss snow, but there was something nostalgic in the sharp chill of the wind. 

They slept in the cabin that night. They’d done so at least a dozen times before, but always in sleeping bags. This morning they’d brought the bedframe and mattress and it felt a lot realer than before. It wasn’t just a project; it was a house.

Ray had missed having a house. While Fraser fussed with the stove he made the bed and then immediately disturbed its immaculate folds by flopping down on it. When Fraser poked his head into the bedroom to see what he was doing he stretched his arms out to either side and sighed luxuriously.

“Welcome home,” said Ray, and he mostly meant it towards himself, but as he shifted more comfortably against the pillows he encountered a look on Fraser’s face like nothing he’d seen yet.

“Where thou art, that is home,” Fraser murmured. It must have been a quote from somewhere. 

He sat down beside Ray and did that thing he sometimes did, where he stared so intently at Ray’s face that it was like he was searching for something. It had terrified Ray a little at first, because what if he didn’t find it? 

“You are,” said Fraser, “the most incredible surprise I’ve ever encountered.”

“The first time we met was pretty surprising for you, yeah,” Ray agreed.

“I guess that must’ve set the tone,” said Fraser. With nothing but the backlight of the doorway Ray could barely make out his expression, but despite the light tone of voice he got the sense that Fraser wasn’t smiling. “But even disregarding that,” Fraser continued, tracing Ray’s jawline with his thumb, “you never cease to make me wonder. In all senses of the word.”

Fraser in this mood was hard to answer. Maybe he wanted pretty quotations in return, but surely he knew better by now. Maybe he wanted explanations, but Ray couldn’t think what there was to explain. He’d never been a particularly opaque person.

“Why do you wonder?” he asked, as Fraser slid his thumb under Ray’s chin and tipped it up towards his shadowed face. “Why don’t you just—know?”

“I don’t know,” said Fraser. “Maybe it’s a matter of practice.”

“Well, as long as you admit it,” said Ray, and he could feel in Fraser’s touch that he wasn’t entirely satisfied, but under the warmth of his lips, trailing kisses down Ray’s neck, it was easy to leave it there.

▴ ▵

The way Ray saw it, Fraser had asked him to stay and he’d said yes, and it was going to be that way unless Fraser changed his mind. Ray had left his fears about that somewhere out on the ice, along with the ones about retirement savings and going bald and droning on through the small-scale irritations of life till he died of it. Ray had told Fraser all that too, more or less. It wasn’t Ray’s fault if Fraser didn’t quite believe him. 

So he bought the ticket. He made appointments in Chicago with his bank and with a lawyer. He talked on the phone to flight instructors in Yellowknife. He tramped into town and drank coffee and played cards with people at Paul’s inn and went fishing on the river. Sometimes he climbed up onto the cliffs behind the town and enjoyed the view without all the stress of the first time. It was a good view.

Fraser was actually working full-time now, so Ray didn’t see so much of him. It turned out that in the middle of nowhere you weren’t just a Mountie (or an innkeeper or a pilot), and if you weren’t catching criminals 24/7 you were expected to do something else to earn your keep, which in Fraser’s case was dominated by some greenhouse project he’d inherited from his predecessor. And there were lots of other things, like school sports and trail maintenance and some sort of book exchange deal happening between them and Deline and coordinating all the last-minute barge deliveries before things began to freeze over. 

Ray packed up what he needed for Chicago. It wasn’t quite enough, since his clothing hadn’t had any easy time of it, what with the adventuring and the cabin-building, and it drove home how very little he had here. It wasn’t a bad thing really—and Fraser could’ve packed all his own stuff in an even smaller bag, because he was better at packing. But it made Ray feel like he was checking out of a hotel. 

Fraser came back that night and told Ray he’d forgotten to pack the wool sweater he’d bought in Inuvik. And here Ray had left it in the closet because he wanted to leave something there other than snow gear. 

It was no good promising Fraser. He would just have to come back, over and over again, until Fraser got used to it. 

▴ ▵

October, when it started freezing and the sunsets raced in on each other, was prime stargazing time. Fraser was determined to give him the whole tour of the sky the night before he went south. It was something below freezing but not at frostbite-in-five-minutes range, and they dragged out their sleeping bags and blankets and Dief (dubious but amenable), and got comfortable on the grass back behind the cabin that was almost like a lawn, if you squinted. 

Ray didn’t know so much about stars—they were hard to see in Chicago—but he could find Orion’s Belt, and Fraser immediately piped up with an Inuit story about four hunters who’d climbed into the sky in pursuit of a bear.

“Where’s the fourth star, then?” Ray asked.

“He’d dropped his mitten and went back for it.”

Ray liked when the people in Fraser’s stories did normal, reasonable things. He burrowed further under the covers and kind of wished he’d worn his own mittens. He wasn’t exactly cold but the air had a certain sharpness to it.

“Tell me about something you can’t see in downtown Chicago,” said Ray.

“The Andromeda Galaxy,” said Fraser readily. “2.5 million light years away. It’s the farthest thing the unaided eye can see.” And he walked Ray through a many-step process to find something that looked like a faint smudge.

“That’s a whole galaxy, though,” said Ray, who knew what that meant by now and had gotten unrealistic expectations from the word. “What about the farthest single star?”

“Many would say it’s a particular star called V762 Cas in the constellation Cassiopeia; it’s over 16,000 light years away. But I couldn’t show you how to find it. It’s never held any particular interest for me.”

“Why not?” Fraser was interested in so many random things that sometimes it was intriguing when he wasn’t. 

“It’s one dim star in the sky,” said Fraser. “It doesn’t point the way home, or explain how the heavens came to be, or tell us anything new about our world. It’s just the focus of a lot of squinting. There are two thousand others visible, give or take.”

Which didn’t seem very fair. That light had waited 16,000 years to be seen by Ray’s own two eyes (a great honor) and maybe some other light had waited longer but it was easier to feel a personal connection with a single star than with a whole galaxy. Gradually it occurred to him that Fraser was still talking. 

“—ay. Ray. Ray. Are you listening?”

“I’m cold,” Ray complained. Instead of the sharing-body-heat this was supposed to lead to, Fraser just pulled one of the blankets from his side on top of Ray’s.

“You found these temperatures quite comfortable in the spring. It’s a matter of acclimatization. But Chicago is on average about 5 degrees warmer this time of year, so you should have no difficulties there.”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Ray, burrowing closer anyway. Fraser didn’t move, and okay, this was getting annoying. “Chicago’s just gonna fuck up my—temperature senses or whatever anyway, and by the time I get back I’ll have to start all over again. You don’t gotta be so hard on a guy just ‘cause he’s gotta go to Chicago.”

“That was not my intention, Ray.”

“‘Cause I’m just saying, I’m not getting that vibe from you right now. I’m getting a we-both-know-long-distance-won’t-work vibe, and let me tell you, I am not liking that vibe, not one bit.”

“I’m not trying to give you any vibes, Ray.”

“You sure about that?”

“Quite sure, yes.”

They were silent for a bit while Ray tried to find the Pegasus square or whatever it was called himself, and failed. It probably would’ve been easier with his glasses on.

“You know I’m coming back, right,” said Ray.

“I know,” said Fraser, sounding so miserable that Ray propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at him.

“Look,” he said, “would it make you feel better if I bought a return ticket now?”

“Not if it would go to waste if you couldn’t come back then. And refundable tickets can be very expensive.”

“No, I mean, just pick a date and come back on it, no matter whether I’m done with everything or not.” Come to think of it, it wasn’t a half-bad idea. He’d known plenty of people who took longer moving out than anyone reasonably should. He was pretty sure his old partner from the 1-9 still had a storage locker full of furniture from 1985.

“I…” Fraser trailed off, staring up at the sky and seeming a couple million light-years away, so he was probably looking at the Andromeda Galaxy. “...Yes?” he said finally. “Yes, I would feel better, no matter how many times I tell myself that’s ridiculous and won’t do anything other than inconvenience you.”

“Okay, deal,” said Ray. “I’ll buy the ticket.”

“Ray, I wasn’t—”

“Yeah, you weren’t asking me to, I know. But you could’ve.”

“I don’t want you to feel trapped,” said Fraser, turning at long last from the starry beyond to look Ray in the eye. “It’s nearly 700 kilometers to the nearest city. This is far more remote than anything you’re used to, the town notwithstanding.” 

“Yeah, I know,” said Ray. He was working on that, but he didn’t want to talk about it now. It cost about as much to buy a ticket from here to Yellowknife as it did from Yellowknife to Chicago. It was a very small world really, up here in the wide-open spaces. “Me being here is not the issue, my stuff being in Chicago is the issue. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Fraser, back to the thousand-light-year stare at the sky, and Ray figured that this was the closest Fraser was gonna get to admitting he was freaking out over nothing. It wasn’t any better if you knew it was nothing, and didn’t Ray know that too, from all those years with Stella?

“Hey,” said Ray, “hey,” leaning over and blocking the view. He kissed Fraser, gentle at first, but Fraser’s mouth was warm and insistent and he pulled Ray down atop him, undoing the waistband of Ray’s jeans one-handed.

It wasn’t really all that cold, under the covers.

▴ ▵

O’Hare was too big and overcrowded and irritating. It wasn’t just that he’d spent the past seven months with room to breathe. It had always been like that.

He got a decent hotel off the blue line because the cheap ones were full and calculated the costs listed on the bedside phone. He called the satellite phone, which Fraser had promised he’d have that night, and the connection wasn’t even that bad.

“Ray,” said Fraser, and “Fraser,” said Ray, and they both listened to each other breathe for a minute, really expensively.

“I already want to just toss my ticket back and buy one for sooner,” Ray admitted.

“That would be wasteful,” said Fraser.

What was wasteful was this phone call, which wasn’t going to help anything. Ray told Fraser he missed him and tried to get comfortable on the hotel mattress, which was way nicer than anything he’d slept on in a year. But it had been such a long time since he’d slept alone.

▴ ▵

First on the to-do list was the 2-7. 

“Okay, pay up!” someone yelled the second he walked through the door. It was Dewey. “Told you he wasn’t dead!”

“I did not bet that you were dead,” said Huey, when Ray turned to glare at him. “Only that you weren’t coming back to the 2-7.”

“Better check the wording on that bet,” said Ray. “Dewey might still owe you money.” He left them sputtering behind him and invited himself into Welsh’s office.

“Detective Kowalski!” said Welsh. “Are you going to tell me something I want to hear?”

“Probably not.” Ray dropped into the seat opposite him. “You told me to resign in person, so here I am: resigning personally. All the way from the Northwest Territories.”

Welsh blinked. “So you really were still up there?”

“Yeah. Why, were you in the betting pool? I just came back to tie up some loose ends.” They looked at each other for a moment.

“Did you move to Canada?” asked Welsh.

“Yeah,” Ray muttered. 

“Ah.” Welsh toyed with a file on his desk. “Well, in that case, there doesn’t seem to be much else to discuss. It’s not like you’re gonna be commuting from there.”

“No, sir,” said Ray. 

This time, Welsh didn’t try to convince him to stay. He was businesslike about it, and Ray put his signature down in several places, and Welsh shook Ray’s hand when he was done.

“I take it you’ve got some other plans going up there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Ray, and didn’t elaborate. Welsh looked suspicious, but he let him go.

Frannie was there when Ray came back out. Someone had called her.

“I can’t believe you!” she said. “You never said you were coming here at all! What kind of a brother are you?”

“You remember the undercover gig is over, right?” said Ray, following her down the hall. They stopped in front of the coffee machine.

“Cappuccino?” she snapped.

“Sure,” he said. “Look—Frannie.”

She didn’t look up from the machine. “Duck boys put in their notice, too,” she muttered. “At least neither of them went and stayed in hotels without talking to their sisters. ”

“I only got here yesterday!”

“Yeah, and where were you then?” She waved the cup at him, and Ray tried to grab it before any more coffee spilled out, but she didn’t let him. “Sitting alone in your hotel room, I bet, like a sad person with no family.”

“Eh…” said Ray, and shrugged. It wasn’t totally inaccurate.

“So you’re coming back with me, okay? I’ll even give you a ride and everything.” She thrust the mostly-empty coffee cup at him. “Good plan, right?”

“Uh, I don’t know if…”

“You know what they say! Don’t look an old pony in the face!”

“A what?” said Ray.

“Keep up, Ray!” she said. “Get your stuff!”

▴ ▵

He didn’t get as poor a sleep at the Vecchios’ as he’d expected. They kept him talking so late, about the Franklin quest and the Northwest Territories and all he and Fraser had been up to all summer, that he was dead tired by the end of it and slept soundly. Even if the mattress wasn’t quite as nice as the hotel one.

In the morning he went to the bank, and then to his lawyer—he’d never had a lawyer before the divorce, and he was almost uncomfortably grateful for the convenience of not having to call around. 

Here amid all that was familiar it felt a lot stranger. He was probably being unfair to Fraser, who must be getting constantly bombarded by unfamiliar situations in the once-mundane north. Annie, for instance, who owned the grocery store and who’d known them for a couple straight off, and tried to be casually friendly by giving them free bread, but it hadn’t really come off as casual. Paul, whom Fraser had definitely confided in by now. And Ray didn’t want to know what kind of shit Dave had said in his absence. 

But he got a lot of immigration-related information from his lawyer, updated his will, sold the big-ticket items from the storage unit, and made sure Elaine’s friend Sarah was okay with living with the turtle permanently. 

Then he visited his parents. They were staying at a place up north along the lake, and he wondered if they’d been awaiting his return. Neither of them would ever, ever say so, and Ray wasn’t about to betray their trust by asking. Besides, it was a nice enough place for summer and fall. He was here before anyone had to make any awkward decisions.

His mom greeted him delightedly and his dad somewhat morosely, but that was to be expected. They made a campfire and Ray showed off a little, with how fast he could build one now. His dad looked slightly less morose at that.

They sat around it talking, mostly about the adventure, about the tundra and the ice and the days upon days spent pointed at the northern horizon. And a little about Norman Wells too, about Fraser and the cabin, even though it felt weirdly private somehow. It got dark, and the rest of the park put their lights out, but Ray put another log on the fire. His mom went to bed, and he and his dad sat there watching the sparks flicker out in the blackness overhead.

Over in the other parking space sat the Goat. His dad had brought her along on all their short-haul travels, looking after her and cleaning off the salt. 

Ray’s bank account balance was doing a lot better than it normally was, but this was all going to be expensive as fuck, and try as he might he couldn’t cook up any worthy use for her up north.

“I’m gonna have to sell her,” Ray blurted out. “I’m selling all the stuff I have in storage too.” He’d spent a lot of time talking on the phone to people who promised to come to the storage locker with cash in hand and a vehicle in which to transport their purchases and only about 5% of them did. He’d gotten decent money for the TV and the nice walnut dresser that Stella had never liked very much, but he was about ready to write off the remaining lower-ticket items. 

His dad hadn’t responded, was just staring intently at the top of the picnic table, so Ray said, “Uh, I know the Goat was—it means a lot to me, but I can’t bring her up there, she’ll just get destroyed and it isn’t fair to just let her sit and rust.”

“Hasn’t got a speck of rust!” his dad protested. “I think I know how to take care of a car! Are you in debt?” This, suddenly, in a completely different tone of voice. 

“No!” said Ray. “I don’t even have rent anymore, how would I be in debt? Look—I’m moving to Canada.”

His dad frowned. “Didn’t you already?”

Trust him to have been the one to catch on. “Mom doesn’t think so.”

“Oh…” He waved away her cares offhandedly. “So you need the cash for...what?”

“A pilot’s license,” Ray admitted. “Look, it’s one of the few things that might actually be useful up there and if I’m gonna do it I need to get it done now.”

“Do you like it?” his dad asked. “Flying.”

“Yeah.” Ray remembered a similar conversation now, back when he’d decided to become a cop. And he’d never said he was going to enjoy it because he was pretty much a kid and he wasn’t sure and he didn’t know if it was something you were even supposed to enjoy. His dad hadn’t been too impressed.

“Good,” his dad said this time. “You know, I could make you a competitive offer. You might get more from some out-of-state kid but if you’ve been selling off your stuff you know you’ll have to consider the convenience.”

“What?” said Ray. “No, I couldn’t—she’s yours, if you want her, I couldn’t take money from you for that.” 

“You could take money for all kinds of things back in the day,” said his dad. “Not sure what the difference is now, except you seem to have more of a plan this time. You’re not going it alone, for one thing. Besides, I’ve spent too much time with that car over the past six months. I don’t want it sold to some punk kid.”

Ray swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “If—well, hypothetically, how much are you offering?”

Ray’s dad bought the Goat. 

▴ ▵

“Is there a payphone around here?” he asked Frannie two mornings later, who predictably scowled at him.

“Your phone is just fine,” Ray said, over whatever she’d started to say. “Your idea of privacy, on the other hand, not so much. I gotta call Fraser about something.”

Grudgingly she pointed him down the street, and he realized when they got there that there was nothing to stop her hovering over his shoulder here either, but somewhat to his surprise, she left.

Constable Smith answered, but Fraser was on the line moments later.

“Ray?” said Fraser, and Ray smiled into the phone at the eagerness in his voice. So first he summarized what he’d been up to, and Fraser told him all about some miscreant who’d tried to steal a snowmobile and gotten stuck because he ran out of snow.

“Hey, I gotta tell you about something,” Ray said. “Didn’t want you to be the last to know.”

“The last to know what?”

It was weirdly hard to say. Harder than with his dad, who must’ve by now reached some kind of Zen level of bemusement with Ray’s doings and had been surprisingly chill about the whole thing.

“Because I told my parents, but that’s it,” he said. “And everyone keeps asking if I have a plan, and I keep going, oh yeah, I have a plan, but not saying anything about it, so they don’t believe me. At all.”

“A plan for what,” said Fraser sharply.

“A plan for not getting kicked out of Canada! And you can say what you want, but nuclear subs only take you so far, and eventually everyone who knows about it is gonna retire or die of old age, and it takes a real long time to become a pilot. Because that’s what I’m gonna be doing. Pilot stuff.”

“You’re going to become a pilot?” said Fraser.

“Dave’s gonna help. It’s just, I have to get it done before they forget about the sub thing, or else I’m gonna be stuck flying over to you from Alaska or something and Dave says international flights are a huge pain, they took these government charters once where—”

“...ay. Ray. Ray.”

“What??” said Ray. 

“What I’m hearing is that crash-landing a plane led you to discover a sudden fondness for flying.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” said Ray.

“Ah,” said Fraser. “Well, if you’re serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Am I not a serious sort of person, Fraser?” If Fraser didn’t buy it, he wondered what the hell anybody else was going to think. 

“Forget it,” said Ray, over whatever placating thing Fraser had been starting to say. “I’ll explain it again when I’m not paying a million dollars a minute. But I’m serious. Sold the Goat for funds.”

“But Ray, you shouldn’t—”

“To my dad,” Ray added quickly. “It was kind of embarrassing really, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so...”

“Ah,” said Fraser. “Then you’ll be able to buy it back if you’re in a position to,” and no, that wasn’t what Ray had meant by it at all, but he didn’t know where to start trying to explain it.

“I mean,” he said after a slightly-too-long pause, “my dad is—well, I wouldn’t say he loves the whole thing exactly, but it’s not…”

“I see,” said Fraser, after another pause. He sounded like he was still turning the whole thing over in his head.

“Anyways, how’s life?” said Ray, and they talked about the safe subjects of criminals and the wilderness for a bit before Ray hung up. And though he didn’t say anything above a PG-rating he was still glad Frannie wasn’t hovering over him.

▴ ▵

Stella came over the Vecchios’ for dinner one night. It turned out she was in town for the same reason as he was, and she hadn’t even unloaded her place yet. They commiserated amicably over the difficulty of selling furniture while all the Vecchios watched suspiciously. 

“Hey, Frannie, you know me and Stella are basically siblings now, right?” said Ray.

Maybe that was why Stella agreed to go out with him to this place off the red line, to drink until she forgot that thought. It was dark and loud and hazy with cigarette smoke, and they found a high-top in the corner and drank half their drinks before they started really talking about anything.

“What are you going to do in the Northwest Territories?” Stella asked him presently.

“Fly planes,” said Ray, who didn’t much mind admitting it now that he’d told Fraser. In for a penny, in for kilogram, or however it went in Canadian. “It costs a lot of money to get a commercial license, so—gotta sell all my furniture, clean out my American bank account, all that.” 

“Huh,” she said.

“What are you gonna do in Florida?” Ray asked curiously. “Bowling stuff?”

“Lawyer stuff, I suspect,” said Stella dryly. “How much work do you think it is to run a bowling alley?”

Ray didn’t answer that, because his impression was that it was kind of a lot—but he’d mostly gone into bowling alleys in hot pursuit of criminals, so his ideas on the average chaos of a bowling alley were probably skewed. He guessed she’d learn soon enough if she was wrong.

They were each on their second drink (Stella had gotten something weird with maple syrup in it, because Canada) when Ray broached the subject of Fraser. He thought Stella knew, but it wasn’t like he’d ever really said. 

“Hey, so, me and Fraser, you know…?” It wasn’t the smoothest start.

She closed her eyes briefly. “Yes, Ray?”

You do know, don’t you, right, was what he wanted to say, but if he couldn’t say it to Stella he wasn’t sure who he could say it to.

“I love him,” said Ray, and it came out kind of flat and aggressive.

“I’d hope so,” said Stella, so she did know, and didn’t sound all too thrilled about it. “But—the Northwest Territories, Ray? And you’re going to—you said a commercial license, so—you’re going to do that as a job? Up in the middle of nowhere in Canada, in those tiny planes?”

“Yeah, and you don’t gotta hope I crash and die,” said Ray, without really thinking about what he was saying, “because you’re not my...benefactor or whatever, anymore.”

“Beneficiary.”

“I knew being a lawyer was good for something!” said Ray. 

“Ray, do you think—do you think it would give me any pleasure whatsoever to find out you’d died in a plane crash?”

“No,” said Ray. “It was just a joke.”

“Not a funny one!”

“Yeah, that was always a problem, wasn’t it,” Ray observed. 

Stella’s eyes were huge and dark in the low light. Her fingers twisted her straw back and forth absently.

“I’m just worried,” she said.

Ray wondered what it said about him that anyone took this for worrying. Not the previous however many years, when he’d spent countless nights drinking with the turtle and taking whatever he could get. If they’d worried then they’d been a lot quieter about it. 

“Look, it’s not a—midlife crisis, or something,” said Ray, trying to see it from her perspective. “And I didn’t hear a peep from you about the adventure, not one word, and that was a lot more insane—”

“Yeah, because that was like a midlife crisis,” Stella cut in. “That’s exactly the kind of thing people do! You should tell Constable Fraser to start marketing it—he’d get all kinds of middle-aged divorced guys signing up for his Hand of Franklin quests!”

“Corporal Fraser,” Ray corrected. 

“Constable is much better for marketing to Americans, kind of exotic,” said Stella, and she wasn’t wrong, but all of the sudden he was seized by a desire to make her see—not about Fraser, really, because Ray was always going to have his reservations about Vecchio and as far as he saw it, that was fine. 

“You, of all people, should get it,” he said. “You’re selling all your furniture too. You know how it is, when everything feels new again, and it turns out you care about all kinds of things? Not about some one , I don’t mean. That’s the easy part. But about bowling alleys and stuff like that. I like cross-country skiing now, you know that? And looking at stars and following animal tracks in the woods and putting roofs on cabins.”

“I—yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do know.”

They looked at each other across the table, and she smiled a little lopsidedly.

“Good, then,” said Ray, and offered to buy another round.

They sat without talking for a while, but it was a companionable silence this time. Over by the bar a fight was forming over whether someone was too drunk for another whiskey and soda, and he purposefully ignored it. Not a cop anymore, officially now.

Stella dipped her head and picked up her straw with her lower lip. Ray watched her close her mouth around it and suck. Yeah, he thought. He could still sit here and watch her all night, the shadows of her eyelashes against her cheeks and the movement of her throat as she swallowed in the yellowish bar-counter half-light. 

“You know, Stell,” he said, “you’ll still always be the only woman for me.”

She looked up, a crease between her eyebrows, but whatever she saw in his face smoothed it out. 

“Oh, Ray,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s sweet or just weird.” Then she giggled, and it had always been catching when she made that kind of sound, and they were both a little buzzed and so it kept up through the taxi ride, and the driver was probably really surprised when they left Stella at her place. She’d given Ray the bowling alley phone number and the house number and her email address, and Ray had recited her the airstrip number while she copied it down. 

“In case you ever don’t feel like dealing with the Mounties,” said Ray. 

She didn’t invite Ray up with her and he didn’t ask, but before she shut the car door she bent down and gave him a quick, closed-lipped kiss on the mouth.

“Good luck,” she said. 

▴ ▵

The night before his flight out of Chicago, Ray sat on the floor of the Vecchios’ living room, trying to cram his remaining worldly possessions into seven cardboard boxes. Frannie had come over to help but mostly she just sat on the couch and judged him.

“Do you really need that many t-shirts?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Ray. She had no idea how many t-shirts he’d destroyed during the cabin-building. Fraser had said it was a wonder how much damage he’d managed to do to his clothing without doing any to himself.

“Okay, but what about the moldy old quilt with the cat faces on it?”

“Dief loves that quilt!”

“Well, there’s no way he loves these gross old Christmas ornaments. They’re not even cute.”

“Hey, just one box of them would probably cost like thirty-seven dollars in the Northwest Territories,” Ray protested. “And Fraser doesn’t have any Christmas stuff.”

Frannie gasped. “Nothing? Maybe we should get him some more. I have some—”

“Frannie! Not helpful!”

By 10pm he had everything packed away—into eight boxes, Frannie had found an extra in the basement—aside from a small pile of records he didn’t want that badly and just wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Frannie promised to keep them for him till next time.

“I could get good money for these if I had more time,” Ray sighed. “It seems like a waste to just leave them here. I always could try and change the ticket.”

“Ray, you’re not really considering disappointing Fraser for the sake of some old records, are you?” said Frannie in horror.

“Don’t be dumb,” muttered Ray, from where he was flopped on his back on the floor. “Course I wouldn’t. I’d dump me, if I did that.”

“Fraser wouldn’t,” said Frannie softly. “He’d say something about how he was sure you’d had a very good reason for it, and think of all the—dogsleds or whatever you could buy with that money, and never say how he felt about it.”

“Yeah,” said Ray, turning his head towards her. “But he’d make you feel like shit all the same.”

“Ray.” Frannie clasped her hands and leaned forward, and for a second he was scared this was going to go into some kind of sentimental speech that he wouldn’t know how to escape from, especially when he was lying on the carpet in a very vulnerable position, but she just said, “don’t be a stranger, okay? And tell Frase to call sometime. If it isn’t too expensive, I mean, and I guess I don’t really know if he’d want to, but…”

“He would,” said Ray.

▴ ▵

It took way too many Vecchios to get Ray’s boxes into the airport, and way too much of Ray’s money to get them checked to Yellowknife. He tried to get the ticket counter guy to check them all the way, but he said they couldn’t tag bags onto random cargo flights which Ray didn’t know the flight numbers of or anything.

It turned out to be a moot point because in Yellowknife none of the boxes were there.

Ray was very polite about it, if he did say so himself, even when the lady at the baggage office got a very fixed look to her smile when Ray told her his forwarding address. He kept telling himself he was in Canada, not Chicago, and he didn’t want to get deported.

Ray found a payphone—and okay, it was maybe sort of nice not to be dragging eight boxes everywhere, but nobody even knew where they were and what if they were all strewn over the tarmac in Calgary and that was basically all his worldly possessions in those boxes and—Ray abandoned this line of thinking and called the detachment.

“Ray?” Fraser’s voice, thankfully.

“You’re not gonna believe this!” 

“Is something wrong?”

“Everything is wrong!” said Ray balefully. “Air Canada lost my boxes! All of them! And the lady didn’t even know where they were or when they were coming or how they were going to deliver them to me, and you know how much money I paid for them in Chicago, it ought to be illegal—it probably is illegal, I should call the consulate about it, because Fraser, they had one job, and they couldn’t even—”

“Ray. Where are you?”

“Yellowknife.”

“Ah,” said Fraser. “So they did deliver you to the destination, at least.”

“Okay, sure, but there’s only one of me and eight of them, and one out of nine is not a great success rate.” 

“I’m sure they’re just in Calgary, Ray.”

“Do you wanna bet on that?”

“Well—no.” Fraser cleared his throat. “But, ah—I presume this won’t delay your arrival tonight?”

“Fuck no,” said Ray. The baggage lady had asked him if he planned to wait in Yellowknife until the boxes arrived and his reply then had only been marginally more polite. 

“Would you like to ski back?” asked Fraser suddenly. “We’ve had enough snowfall these past few days that the trail is navigable on skis. Now that you don’t have all those boxes to worry about...and I could go on ahead, get the cabin warmed up and dinner ready. Last night I was forced to make camp out on patrol and it won’t be very inviting just now.”

Ray’s first thought was to say no immediately, because it delayed when he would see Fraser next—but the guy had a point, and now he remembered the other night at the payphone by the Vecchios when he’d ranted something about missing skiing, and realized Fraser must’ve been paying attention to his late-night ramblings after all. 

“Yeah, I’d like that,” said Ray. “Still got any bear sausage?”

“I think that can be arranged,” said Fraser, and Ray gave up on his irritation at life and everything in it in favor of anticipation.

They flew up from Yellowknife by the light of the full moon. Dave was full of questions about Chicago to start with, but after a while he seemed to realize that Ray was a little bit in another world and left him to himself.

The streets were blanketed in snow and bright in the reflected light. As he tramped down the road to the detachment he passed a cluster of people exiting the inn and a couple of them called out greetings and welcome-backs. He waved and kept walking.

Constable Levesque was still at the detachment, bent over what looked like a textbook. He greeted Ray absently and waved him towards the skis Fraser had left standing in the corner.

“How’ve you been?” asked Ray, just to be polite, and got something vague and mostly incomprehensible and so he took his leave without any other attempts at small talk.

It was quiet outside now. He struck out from the main street, getting his legs and arms back into the rhythm of it, an easy, measured glide up Fraser’s snowmobile tracks. There wasn’t much wind and as he got farther away from the town it was eerily still. As he found his groove he picked up his speed. It felt good to stretch his legs.

He’d taken the last stretch at a breathless pace but when he came around the final corner and saw the lights of the cabin, he slowed. The rectangles of the windows shone crookedly through the trees and the clearing smelled like woodsmoke. If he squinted he could see a figure moving around inside.

For a moment he felt like an outsider, stumbling across this place on a long trek through the wilderness. He was tired and hungry and his nose was running and he wanted nothing more than to go into the warmth and the light. It was weird, to stand here outside it and think that it was his. It had been a long, long time.

Fraser opened the door. He was wearing a plaid shirt—top two buttons undone—and his hair was still damp from the shower. The warmth hit Ray first, then the scents of woodsmoke and dinner. 

“Ray,” Fraser said, and Ray shed the fatigue and discomfort of two thousand miles in an instant and grinned.

They were kissing almost before he was able to get out of his outdoor gear, tripping a little over the threshold and into the main room. Fraser shoved him up against the wall, very impolite, and Ray laughed into his neck, hands fumbling for purchase at Fraser’s clothes.

“It’s felt so much longer than it was,” Fraser murmured, and Ray let Fraser manhandle him into the bedroom. Somewhere along the way he left his jeans on the floor and Fraser cupped his dick through his boxers, briefly but full of promise.

“Hey, Fraser,” said Ray suddenly, while Fraser rid him of his shirt, “you turn the stove off?”  

“Are you—” Fraser murmured, lips grazing the back of Ray’s neck, “accusing me of—inadequate fire safety practices?”

“It’d be a,” said Ray, and and gasped for breath, “pretty big turn-on if you just—forgot.”

He dropped backwards onto the bed, gazing up at Fraser, who was shedding some dark grey hiking pants that had barely hidden his hard-on. Underneath he was wearing briefs that hid it even less, and he pushed Ray back against the bed—and stopped.

“I actually don’t remember if I turned the stove off,” said Fraser. Then he left Ray there, panting, while he ran off into the other room. Ray half turned and buried his face in the pillow, wheezing with laughter, until Fraser returned, saying he totally had remembered after all and looking at Ray a little uncertainly.

“Hey, I said it’d be a turn on if you didn’t remember, didn’t I,” said Ray, and Fraser, seeing no evidence to the contrary, started laughing too, and it was some time before they next thought about dinner. 

At long last they did, with Dief hovering at Ray’s side all through it, and it was delicious. There was something about eating bears that made Ray feel extremely powerful. For dessert they had weird chocolate that Ray had bought in Calgary and which Dief whined for and was not given. 

“Tomorrow I’m gonna have to go back to town and check on my boxes,” said Ray, once they’d retired to the couch in front of the lively fire. He wasn’t all that into the idea of leaving the cabin for at least a couple days, even if Fraser had to.

“Did you claim them for customs in Calgary?”

“Yes, I fucking claimed all fucking eight of them for fucking customs, thanks, you sound just like the baggage lady in Yellowknife—”

Fraser held up his hands. “Mea culpa. I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the vagaries of international travel by now. It was merely an idea.”

“You watch those ideas of yours,” said Ray, leaning against him. Between the fire and his wool socks and sweater and Fraser’s intense body heat, he was almost too warm. He wondered if he fell asleep here, if Fraser would carry him to bed. Because he could, but realistically, he probably wouldn’t. Ray blinked hard and tried to stay just this side of awake.

He felt Fraser relax, gradually, all along his left side. It was nice to be home.

▴ ▵

Three days later, the boxes showed up on one of the passenger flights up from Yellowknife. Ray waited until Fraser was at work to unpack them. He’d gotten enough judgment from Frannie already.

Dief found the boxes very unsettling at first, and creeped on them from behind the couch, but eventually he got into the spirit of things and nearly tripped Ray a dozen times on his travels to and from the closet. Fraser had so little that Ray’s stuff fit fine at first, so long as he stacked it up in the corners.

Out came the dozens of spare t-shirts, the French press, the inconvenient but attractive shoes. The record player (the battery-powered one that he hadn’t used in years, but mostly seemed to work). The creepy cat quilt, which Dief greeted as an old friend.

“I think we might need to build another room,” said Ray, when Fraser got home that night.

“You can’t possibly have that much in eight boxes,” said Fraser, but he’d underestimated what Ray could do with Frannie egging him on. There were still two mostly-full boxes shoved against the wall in the bedroom that he didn’t know what to do with. Fraser came over to look, and somehow everything ended up packed away somewhere that Ray would probably never find again, and the boxes joined the stack of cardboard next to the door.

“Can I have you do all my packing and unpacking?” Ray asked. “‘Cause I don’t want to take more than one bag to Yellowknife.”

“You’re already going?” asked Fraser.

“Just gotta finalize it. I should be able to start in Yellowknife next week.”

“You just got back,” said Fraser unhappily. 

“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes,” said Ray. “Give it some time and I’ll be gone less. You think I’m happy about it?”

Fraser narrowed his eyes. “You don’t seem particularly depressed to me.”

“Okay, I’m not, you got me.” Ray laughed, because he was honestly kind of excited in a way he hadn’t been since that aborted freshman year of college and hadn’t ever thought he was going to feel again. “I wish it wasn’t so far, though.”

“As do I,” Fraser muttered.

“Want me to have Dave pick you up some nudie mags to pass the time with?”

“Ray!”

“I’m serious! I don’t want you going crazy over here.”

“In that case, no thank you, I’ll be fine.”

Ray wasn’t all that convinced. And maybe he shouldn’t have pressed it, but it was nice and cozy on the couch, with Dief stretched out in front of the fire and something by Joni Mitchell that he didn’t remember ever owning, let alone packing on the record player. Maybe these things spontaneously generated in Canada. All was good except for the vibes he was getting from Fraser, which weren’t you’re-going-back-to-Chicago-forever vibes anymore, but they were Yellowknife-is-still-long-distance, and Ray thought that was really unfair and said so.

“I’m not sure why you think I’m worried I won’t ‘survive for three weeks,’” said Fraser.

“Because that’s how you’re acting! You’re gone all the time with your job too. I’m not somebody who wants to stay home and sew quilts.” Ray had never imagined himself doing so before but now he did, and it was definitely all wrong.

“I’m not sure you’ve considered all your options—”

“Oh, and there you go again, thinking you know more about everything.”

“Not everything,” said Fraser. “But I know a lot more about living up here than you do.”

“Do you?” said Ray. “You know how to survive an avalanche, but do you know how to live in a society? ‘Cause everybody knows everybody here, and everybody has a job to do, and—I like that, okay? It’s alright. I want to be part of it.”

Fraser looked away. “That’s...admirable, Ray. I just want to know that you’ve thought things through.”

“Well, I have. Happy now?”

Of course he wasn’t. He didn’t even have to say so.

“If that’s how you feel about it, just stay on the couch,” said Ray, and stomped off into the bedroom. 

Presently Ray was awakened from a dream where a grizzly bear stood on its hind feet at the foot of the bed and tried to feed him cinnabons. No wonder he’d dreamed it—Fraser was standing there, looming over him in the moonlight. No cinnabons though. Shame. 

“Ray, I—”

“Oh my god, just go to bed,” said Ray, patting the mattress beside him.

Fraser crawled in next to him and curled up quietly on his side of the bed. But Ray turned toward him and presently he felt Fraser’s rather cold hand slide across his back. Ray wriggled a little closer and slept.

Fraser didn’t make any coffee in the morning.

“Are we fighting?” asked Ray, sleepily measuring out coffee grounds. If they were, he wanted to make sure he won. 

“Seeing as how you were the one who told me to sleep on the couch, I think that’s for you to decide,” said Fraser. He was already in his uniform, which gave Ray the advantage if it came to that, because he knew how to mess those things up in all kinds of ways by now.

“Seeing as how you didn’t listen to me, I think you should answer the question!” said Ray.

Fraser was standing by the door, and Dief was pacing back and forth in front of him, clearly annoyed that Fraser wasn’t letting him out.

“I wouldn’t call this fighting,” said Fraser finally. “Merely a difference of opinion. Or perhaps a misunderstanding. I may not have shared all the information available to me on the topic of immigration.”

“You shared kind of a lot,” said Ray, thinking back to nights in the tent when he didn’t have anywhere to run.

“There are a number of options open to you,” Fraser continued.

“Yeah, and I’m picking this one.”

“I’m not sure if you’ve considered the—”

“Yeah, I have,” Ray interrupted. It was a lie; there were all kinds of options he hadn’t considered at all, but what was the point, when he’d already found the ones he wanted? 

“There are simpler—”

“I don’t want to be a Mountie, Fraser,” Ray interrupted again.

Fraser blinked at him. “Ah…?”

“Oh, that wasn’t where you were going? I thought maybe it was: be a good Canadian for approximately a million years and maybe someday they’ll let me wear those pants. And: no. Absolutely not.”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” said Fraser, rubbing his forehead.

“Good,” said Ray. “I’ve already done the cop thing.”

“I was thinking, something like...you’re a skilled mechanic, for instance. And there are a number of seasonal jobs which welcome applicants of all backgrounds.”

“Fraser, I’ve fixed like a dozen cars since I got here. I have fixed all of the cars that needed fixing. That’s not a job.”

“Well, no, but along with—”

“Benton,” said Ray very slowly, “I am going to Yellowknife for three weeks whether you like it or not. And I am coming back in three weeks, whether you like that or not, either.”

Fraser nodded. “Understood,” he said, and Ray wasn’t sure what the hell he thought he was understanding. He didn’t trust Fraser to tell the truth if he asked, either. So he just told him to let Dief outside already, and once Fraser was gone he packed his duffel bag to the accompaniment of Mamma Mia. He had to restart it four times. He was going to have to get faster at packing.

▴ ▵

Ray went to Yellowknife. He doled out money to a flight school called FSS. He asked around and rented a bunk bed in a shared room from a hair stylist named Mary Rose, who for some reason was the go-to for this kind of thing. It was cheap enough that he didn’t really care that his three 20-year-old roommates seemed to either get up or go to bed at 3am. 

He knew more or less what to expect by now. It was a weird mixture of stuff that felt like common sense and stuff that felt like a whole other language. He had not expected to enjoy those charts and didn’t, but he could cope. On a long downwind over the lake at sunrise it was hard to feel anything other than sorry for everyone who wasn’t him.

There was a bar and grill type place right near the airport that got a lot of traffic from people on overnight layovers who knew the area, and Ray took to hanging out there in the evenings, nursing a weak rum and coke. Dave had said to network and by god he was going to try. Besides, he didn’t have any particular desire to go lie awake in bed, or maybe leave a sad voicemail with the detachment along the way. 

There were lots of pilots from the little northern airways, most of them about half Ray’s age who dreamed of Air Canada and were very curious what Ray was up to. He was cagey on the pronouns most of the time, but sometimes (when it wasn’t the bartender he knew and they were actual rum and cokes) he was honest, and no one really seemed to care. He met a few Air Canada flight attendants who insisted on showing him around town. There was one named Anthony who commuted from Yellowknife to Calgary and who after forcing Ray to drink some god-awful mixture of chartreuse and tabasco sauce gave him his number—not because he was attracted to Ray’s gagging over a trash can but in case he ever needed a standby pass to/from Chicago. Ray had a feeling he’d talked about Chicago in a way that didn’t make much sense.

He called the detachment once from a payphone, at random, fresh off a frustrating flight where nothing had made sense like before and he was asking himself if he’d done everything all wrong and maybe none of this would ever work.

“Ray!” said Fraser’s voice, and trust him to know that a Yellowknife payphone would be him.

“Hi,” said Ray, and felt instantly better, and proceeded to tell Fraser all about yesterday’s flying, which hadn’t been nearly so annoying, and the people he’d met and the places he’d seen. 

Fraser told him about the town-wide volleyball tournament that had been held in the school gym on Saturday and how Paul from the inn had sprained his thumb.

“I might go over and see him after this,” said Fraser. “He’s had a difficult few days, dealing with all the ribbing from the townspeople.”

“I really doubt you’ll make him feel any better,” said Ray, who’d heard the suppressed laughter in Fraser’s voice clear enough. 

But Fraser meant it in a friendly way, and so did Yellowknife toward Ray. He even met a guy from Chicago, whose wife’s family lived in Deline. His name was Chris and he’d gotten stuck in Yellowknife alone because he’d let her and their twin daughters have the last seats on today’s flights. Ray bought him a beer and learned that he was a 747 captain for United with about a million years’ seniority and this was approximately the 87th time he’d gotten stuck in Yellowknife and he was getting to like it pretty well. Ray concurred.

In the third week, Ray called Fraser on the satellite phone, because yesterday on the detachment line he’d said he’d have it with him tonight. 

“Ray, I can’t—” said Fraser.

“Just keep saying you can’t, in that voice,” said Ray, wrapping his left hand around his dick.

Fraser said a lot of other things, and so did Ray, and he didn’t mention he was supposed to be studying right now.

He came back from Yellowknife two days later with his private license anyway. 

▴ ▵

The detachment was empty when Ray got in. There was a note on the door saying they’d been called out for an emergency and to please call the number of the next detachment downriver if needed. For a second Ray was so pissed off that he fully sympathized with Fraser’s unspoken desire that he never leave the cabin. Maybe they should try it the other way around and see how he liked it. 

Then he shook himself. The roads were covered in snow and night was falling. He let himself in and grabbed the skis he’d left in the back room, leaving a note behind at the desk. He’d hightail it back to the cabin and have dinner on by the time Fraser returned. If there wasn’t any meat thawed he could always do pasta. It would keep.

He came across Annie on the way, huffing and puffing up the track from the river.

“Did you hear about the bank robbery?” she said.

Apparently that was the emergency manhunt Fraser and the constables were on. The robbers had gotten away with almost 20 grand and it was quite the most excitement they’d seen in these parts since their river chase in May. 

“I didn’t know the bank even had that much cash in it,” said Ray.

“Oh, they’ve got more than that—that’s what was in the day’s deposits, before they transferred it to the vault. Whoever it was must’ve known that Keith had just paid in cash for that snowmobile.”

“An inside job?” asked Ray curiously. 

She shrugged. “They couldn’t have come from too far out, could they? If you ask me it was Roger’s cousins in that spat over their grandfather’s will.” 

Roger managed the bank and Fraser said there’d been threats levied in both directions all summer and fall. He only hoped the robbers didn’t compound their stupidity by taking their pursuers out over the still-thin ice of the river. 

He took his leave of Annie and poled northeast under the darkening sky. The sunset was obscured by the high layer of cloud he’d flown in under. Dief must’ve been out with Fraser and the cabin was quiet and cold. It felt nice to change that, to put on the lights and the heat and set a pot of water to boil.

Ray felt the little jump in his heart rate when he heard the snowmobile. He started to strain the water out carefully. Dief came bolting in first, bouncing around and giving the countertops a once-over for any snacks. 

“Hey!” Ray called over his shoulder. “You get your man?”

“Men,” Fraser corrected. “There were two of them, they—”

“Robbed the bank, I saw Annie on the way in.” Ray put down his cooking implements and made sure the burner was off. Even out of the corner of his eye he didn’t trust the way Fraser was looking at him. 

“Why didn’t she give you the bread then?” said Fraser, and Ray saw he was holding one of Annie’s packages. 

“Don’t think she trusts me with it,” said Ray, turning fully around and leaning back against the cabinets. Fraser’s hair was still slightly mussed from his hat, and there was a redness in his cheeks that couldn’t be entirely attributed to the wind. “Fraser—”

Ray gave him plenty of time to put the bread down somewhere safe, and it was Fraser’s own fault that he didn’t.

“Ray,” said Fraser in bed later, when Ray was on the edge of sleep and a little reluctant to be pulled back from it.

“Yeah?” 

“When I came around the corner and saw our lights—” He stopped.

“Yeah, Fraser,” Ray murmured sleepily. “Me neither. I know.”

▴ ▵

It didn’t snow much, but it never got warm enough again that any melted. Dave let Ray jumpseat down to Hay River and gave him some impromptu lessons on the way, and from what Ray had learned in ground school this was not actually legal. It was fun.

This morning they’d watched the sun rise on a 10:45am departure, but now, heading home through town, he had to squint against the brightness of the snow. Here along the river the terrain was flat and the buildings weren’t as colorful as the ones you got further north, and it was a wide and almost monochromatic prospect to walk into. He ran into one of Annie’s kids, who was learning to hunt and wanted him to relate some convoluted story to Fraser. A block further on was George, looking for updates on the road status. He passed on what he’d heard from some workers in Hay River, that it’d be another couple weeks. And George surely knew that already but he liked getting outside confirmation and Ray liked giving it. It was fun, looking down at the ice crossings and making up his own predictions.

“I saw Corporal Fraser this morning,” said George. “Just before sunrise. He’d stopped to watch your plane take off.”

“Did he,” said Ray, and it was reassuring somehow to know it.

▴ ▵

He was just back from three more weeks’ frenetic flying in Yellowknife when Fraser asked him what he was doing for Christmas. 

“I dunno, what do you usually do up here?” Ray asked. 

“I meant,” said Fraser, looking determinedly into the middle distance, “I wondered—perhaps you’d like to see your family for the holiday.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Ray decidedly. “My family’s great and all, the real and the fake one, but I just saw them in October and Christmases with them weren’t all that hot anyway. But hey, how about seeing your family?”

Fraser frowned. “I don’t think my father will be making an appearance.”

“Not him!” Definitely not him. Ray didn’t hold with ghosts. “I meant Maggie.”

“Oh,” said Fraser. Ray knew they’d been writing letters, and they phoned sometimes too, because one day in November when he’d inexplicably found himself manning the detachment line, she’d called and they’d talked for a while. Maybe she was having her own family Christmas in Inuvik but he hadn’t really gotten that sense. 

“I could ask her,” said Fraser slowly. “If she’s interested, could you, ah…”

“Yeah, I can work something out, go up and bring her down here one day.”

“You could?” said Fraser. And he wasn’t gonna tease Fraser about it (right here and now, at least), but he suspected that was the first time it’d clicked in his head that anything Ray was doing had any practical application. 

So Fraser called Maggie and Ray talked to Dave and the weather was clear, clear, and clear, so they decided Ray would go get her on the morning of the 24th and bring her back the night of the 25th. 

Two days beforehand Fraser went into full-on cleaning freakout mode, because it was the first guest they’d ever had at the cabin. Which Ray said wasn’t even true, but this was a guest- guest, not somebody from town who’d stayed so late it was pointless to go home till tomorrow. 

“No one mops ceilings, Fraser,” said Ray, from where he’d been sent to clean out the fireplace, like fireplaces weren’t supposed to have ashes in them. “It’s not a thing, not anywhere, not even in Canada.”

“It’s the only way to be sure all the dust has been removed,” said Fraser, mopping assiduously. 

The next day Fraser had to work, so Ray assigned himself to decorating duty and had a good time with Dief unpacking all the ornaments and garlands and weird candles in the shape of elves that he’d hauled up from Chicago. They’d found a little spruce behind the lake and had potted it in a big metal bin, roots and all, because Fraser being Fraser he wanted to replant it afterward. Ray draped it with tinsel and a plastic garland that looked like popcorn but sort of deformed, and hung every single ornament on it except for the ones he’d broken playing with Dief. It was maybe going to offend Fraser’s aesthetic sensibilities, but Fraser was unpredictable on that front so maybe not. 

It was nearly dark already so he lit the candles and put the tree lights on, and then something occurred to him so he checked the calendar. The shortest day of the year had happened yesterday and he’d totally missed it. Fraser had probably said something, but Ray had been studiously ignoring him during the cleaning. 

“Take that, arctic,” Ray murmured to himself, sprawled on the couch with Dief half on top of him. So what if they were a degree or so south of the arctic circle? 

He was very used to the decorations by the time Fraser got home and almost forgot to watch his face when he walked through the door. It would’ve been a real shame to have missed it.

“Very nice, Ray,” said Fraser, staring bemusedly at the angel on the top of the tree, who was a little sexier than angels were supposed to be. It had been a gag gift four years ago at the 1-9. “Where did you...get this.”

“It was one of the boxes Air Canada lost. Good thing they found it or I would’ve had to itemize all this.”

“Air Canada can never know what a narrow escape it had,” Fraser agreed. 

▴ ▵

Ray took Dave’s Cessna up to Inuvik and wondered how he’d lived prior to knowing him. Ray had (very casually) checked prices for himself and was a tiny bit regretful that his pursuit of a commercial license was going to rule out any aircraft purchases for now.

But Maggie was full of admiration, and complimented him on the plane, even after he said it wasn’t his, as though it were a horse he’d brushed until it shone. “Never realized you could just follow the river from up here,” she said, looking down out her window.

“Who says that’s not what I’m doing?” asked Ray. “If a cloud forms suddenly out of nowhere, I might crash.”

“Clouds don’t form suddenly, out of nowhere,” said Maggie, confidently but a little uneasily all the same. She’d probably have been a good test case for taking Fraser for a ride, but Ray was still too freaked out by his first real passenger to really test anything.

They took the snowmobile back to the cabin and Fraser insisted on the full tour, trail included. Ray begged off. It was too much effort to dress for it, and now Maggie could use the second pair of skis around the lake. He turned the tree lights on and stretched out on the couch and felt very Christmassy, and for some reason he thought about Chicago. Not things he missed or didn’t, specifically, just...things. Like how after a wet snow there were calf-deep puddles at every street crossing. Being stuck in traffic on the Kennedy eastbound with the skyline looming up ahead. The smell of the sewers in the summer. The banging and rattling of the el overhead, interrupting conversations with Stella on Jewelers Row. 

He was glad Fraser wasn’t around to interrogate him about whether he missed it, because he did, but not in a way that hurt any. Chicago was still there, and it’d still be there long, long after he’d gone. This cabin, built of trees born before he was, next to a lake with a far longer lifespan than any of them, nestled at the foot of mountains so old that only those far-away stars remembered a time before—it would never have been here at all if not for them. 

Fraser and Maggie were hungry when they got back, so they went into town to eat an early dinner at the inn restaurant. There were a fair number of people with the same idea, so they introduced Maggie around and she got free drinks all afternoon. She got enough that she shared them with Ray, so it was great.

“Why is she sharing with you?” Fraser asked.

“He flies planes,” said Maggie. “That’s cool, right?”

Fraser was dubious right through till they headed home. It turned out it was because he had his own alcoholic mix, a kind of spiced punch that needed to be heated very slowly so the alcohol didn’t burn off.

“I’m not sure either of you would notice, at this point,” said Fraser, but Ray wasn’t paying close enough attention to make note of whether he actually put the heat up. He sat on the couch with Maggie while they waited, and ate incredibly overpriced peanuts.

“Is the recipe a family tradition?” Maggie asked, as Fraser came over from the stove.

“It didn’t happen quite enough to become a tradition,” said Fraser, passing them cups. “It was dad’s recipe.”

Ray sipped it cautiously, but it wasn’t bad, pleasantly spicy and warm down his throat. He stoked the fire and they sat around it and sang carols, the classics like Joy to the World that Ray could belt out with the best of them, and ones about roses he’d never heard before. They sounded nice together, Fraser and Maggie, and sometimes Ray just listened while they tried out harmonies or argued over the correct lyrics to an old French tune. 

He was leaning back against the cushions, well on his way to sleep when Fraser roused him.

“Let’s leave Maggie to her bed, shall we?” said Fraser. Maggie yawned and fumbled with her backpack. They went in turns through their nightly routines until Ray joined Fraser in their bedroom and closed the door behind him. 

It was coming up on midnight. The bedroom was full of moonlight and the scent of woodsmoke, and Ray shuffled down in the bed and said, “How about I give you my first gift now?” Which was one of those porno-style lines, but Fraser hardly ever rolled his eyes at them, which made Ray wonder if it was worth having a line at all. 

This time he just gave the door a glance. Fraser had hardly seen the need for a door at all, because surely no one would disturb them in their mountain fastness, and it was only due to Ray that they even had one. 

“It’s a good door,” said Ray. “Hard. Thick.”

That time, Fraser did roll his eyes. “What about soundproof?” 

“Haven’t you ever had to be quiet before?” Ray asked.

Fraser paused, and something passed across his face that Ray wasn’t sure he liked seeing there, but in the dark it was hard to tell.

“I’ll be quiet,” said Ray. “Can you?”

“I think I’m up for the challenge,” said Fraser.

Daylight on Christmas was something that didn’t technically happen till about noon. Ray woke up around 8, to darkness and Fraser breathing steadily beside him. He crept out of bed, even though they’d placed the presents under the tree yesterday without any subterfuge, and tiptoed into the main room.

Maggie was already there. She’d turned the tree lights on and was sitting cross-legged in front of it, Dief curled up beside her. 

“Coffee?” Ray asked quietly. She said yes, and they sat there on the rug, staring up at the tree.

“Where’d you get that angel?” Maggie asked.

“How do you know I got it anywhere? How do you know it’s not Fraser’s angel?”

“Oh, please,” she said.

By the time Fraser turned up they’d had plenty of coffee and eaten some donuts Ray had bought several days ago. Ray had thought and rethought his gift for Fraser and wasn’t even too worried anymore when he opened it. A better clothes iron, and a handwritten gift card for 10 books from Yellowknife. They were cheaper if Ray brought them in his backpack instead of paying for shipping.

Maggie got ice skates and some Oilers gear, because Fraser swore that was what she wanted (she glared at him at first, but then they were laughing and Ray didn’t ask what the joke was because he wasn’t gonna get it, anyway). Ray got a backpack full of survival gear.

“A lot of people think the world is going to end at the end of the year,” explained Fraser. “It’s made some things cheaper, just because of the volume they’re now being produced at—the blankets, for instance. Of course, I replaced the short-term rations with my own. I think they’ll be a little more edible than what comes with any kit.”

“Okay,” said Ray, “so this for...the apocalypse?”

“I thought you could use it during weather delays,” said Fraser. “You might have to overnight somewhere unexpectedly, and airport shops often close well before the last flight is off the ground. It’ll be better quality than any emergency supplies they give you, and it wasn’t like you’d asked for anything else.”

“You know what, that’s a good idea,” said Ray. “And I wouldn’t have thought of it, so thanks.” He’d heard some stories about people who’d gotten stranded overnight at places like the disused mine airstrip from back in May. It wasn’t quite tacit approval of whatever Ray was doing, but it was the closest Fraser had come yet. 

After breakfast they went snowshoeing. Ray wanted to ski but there weren’t enough to go around and Fraser didn’t think it was polite to abandon a guest in one’s dust (or snow). Conditions were frankly questionable for either but they made it around the lake without getting stuck. 

“Are there any fish in there?” Maggie asked.

“Of course!” said Fraser. “Stream-fed. A beautiful spot for fishing in the summer.”

“Put it on your calendar,” said Ray. 

“There’s a spot near where I live that you’ll have to see too,” said Maggie, and they continued down the path, mostly exchanging fishing tips and Ray had never imagined his life ending up this way. He still wasn’t sure if he truly liked fishing. 

In the winter the trail had meandered a bit from what they’d cleared in the fall, going up and over a slight rise to the north that was nice to coast down from on skis. They tramped up the last low hillside before the descent to the cabin, with the little snow-caked trees that jutted up against the flat blue sky before them. 

“One of us should get a nice camera,” said Ray. “You could make a Christmas card out of this, bam! Right here.” He framed it with his hands for a better look.

“Maybe you should have asked for a camera,” Fraser said, and Ray shot him a look but couldn’t make out what his expression was.

“Hell no,” said Ray. “I trust you to buy backpacks and blankets and emergency rations, but you think I trust you on electronics?”

“Imagine he was buying you a hunting knife,” said Maggie to Fraser, and Fraser laughed while Ray decided not to be offended. But he could totally pick out a good hunting knife. Not on sight, but he probably knew the right questions to ask by now.

Ray was in charge of the turkey, which had been so eye-wateringly expensive that he was terrified of ruining it. But it came out edible and they made a good meal of it around the kitchen table while the sun went down. Maggie and Fraser chatted back and forth about the prime suspects for who’d replaced the Delaceys’ operation, and the deficiencies of the police force as pertained to the wilderness. 

“Hey, you might be able to have a look around in Yellowknife,” said Maggie, turning to Ray. “We know there are shipments moving out of there from time to time—you could keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

“I don’t know, it’s a big airport.” Ray had seen a thousand things that would’ve looked incredibly suspicious to him before he’d learned how haphazard some cargo ops could seem to the uninitiated. 

“Don’t try to recruit him,” said Fraser. “He doesn’t want to be a cop anymore.”

“Really?” asked Maggie. “For good, I mean? Because you could get citizenship eventually, I bet, and…” She looked between them. “Okay, for good.”

“He says he couldn’t handle the uniform,” said Fraser. 

“I think you have to grow up around it,” said Ray. “But hey, I can still keep an eye out in Yellowknife.”

“Thanks, I’d really appreciate it.” Maggie flashed the full wattage of her smile at him, and it was almost as overwhelming as Fraser’s. 

Talk grew desultory as they moved on to dessert. Ray kind of wanted to go to bed and sleep off his full stomach rather than fly a plane to Inuvik and back.

“It’s too bad you have to be at work tomorrow,” he said to Maggie, still yawning a little as he shrugged into his coat. 

“We’ve had a wonderful time having you over,” added Fraser. “I do hope you can come again before too long. It’s a great benefit of having a house, being able to host guests.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking between them a little wonderingly. “You’ve done a good job with this place. It’s homey, you know.”

“That’s all due to Ray,” said Fraser. “Especially the decorations.”

Ray took Maggie into town on the snowmobile, leaving Fraser behind with the clean-up. The stars were coming out by the time they took off. It was a bright, windless night, one that went well with carols about heavenly peace. Fraser, Ray thought, would probably do a lot of singing up here.

“You ever take Benton up?” Maggie asked.

“No,” said Ray, “you’re my first real passenger, actually—usually it’s just my instructor, or one of the other flight school guys, or Dave, he runs the airstrip here.”

“You should,” said Maggie. “He might like it.”

“I dunno.” He still wasn’t sure what Fraser made of the whole thing except for A) it was something Ray liked, and B) it took Ray away from Fraser, and it was a good thing A trumped B in Fraser’s world or they might’ve been sunk. “I don’t think he’s that into it. More of a ground person, Fraser. Anyways, he’s probably been on a plane up here way more times than I ever have.”

“Search and rescue, maybe,” she said. “That’s different. You don’t get a chance to look at the stars. Good stargazing up here.”

She was sitting low in her seat, head tipped a little to the side, the better to stare out into the glittering dark. She wasn’t wrong. Even Ray could find all the brightest stars by now. 

“Wow,” she said presently. “This is something else. You know, I wanted to be a pilot for a year or two, when I was a kid.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Ray.

“Oh—because after that I wanted to be a Mountie, I guess. And it’s even harder to become a pilot, cost-wise. And back then girls didn’t really become pilots. Maybe it’s different now.”

“I don’t know,” said Ray. There were a couple girls and a lot of guys, and it was still really expensive. “I’m lucky, I guess. That I got here when I did, and I had the extra cash from the undercover gig, and Fraser doesn’t charge me rent.” He shot her a quick grin. “You know, if me and Fraser hadn’t ended up in that plane back in May, maybe we wouldn’t even be here right now.”

Back in Chicago, Ray had never felt like one of the lucky ones. Maybe it was a statistical thing—Chicago was littered with guys who flew private jets everywhere, and here it was mostly people who waited for the ice roads to open to get to the next town over. It wasn’t only that, but it probably helped.

“He’s lucky too,” Maggie said. “I think he’s always been torn between these remote communities and the rest of the world. He’s too curious to be satisfied with one town. But you could give him both.”

“Yeah,” said Ray thoughtfully. 

They banked, and the stars tilted on their axis. On the northwest horizon the lights of Inuvik came into view. When they landed it was quiet, and Maggie slung on her backpack in preparation to make the trek into town on foot. There was probably someone at the airport who’d give her a ride, she said, but she didn’t want one. Ray got that.

Before they said their goodbyes she asked if he was sure he didn’t want to stay the night—it was late and Dave didn’t need the plane back in any hurry. But the night was still crystal clear and Ray wanted to end it back home.

“Sometime I will,” he said. “I’ll bring Fraser, too. And hey, you know—in spring, maybe I could show you some flying stuff. If you wanted.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, maybe.”

They smiled at each other, a little uncertain how to end things, and then Maggie reached forward and pulled him into a quick hug.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Nothin’ to it,” said Ray. 

“Benton said it was your idea.”

So she didn’t mean just for the ride. Ray shrugged a little embarrassedly. “He was the one who brought up family at Christmas.” 

“Like I said,” she replied, “he’s lucky.”

▴ ▵

Frannie had sent them a New Year’s card, which he hadn’t ever known was a thing but it appeared to have been bought in a store. On the 31st he made use of Dave’s office line to call her, his parents, the turtle’s new parent, a couple guys in Yellowknife, the 2-7, and the bowling alley in Florida, among others. He’d mostly gotten answering machines but Stella was one of the ones who picked up.

“You know Ray’s on the other line with Fraser?” she asked.

“No,” said Ray, laughing at the thought that Fraser was doing the same thing from the detachment. “I wonder if he’s called the 2-7 yet. Have you?”

He swore he could hear her rolling her eyes over the phone.

“I had a lot of good reasons for moving to Florida,” she said. 

Ray left a post-it note on Dave’s desk with a list of the calls he’d made and to bill him for it later. Ray had turned down a couple invites in Yellowknife—Dave was going and had offered him and Fraser both a ride, but Ray had been to countless city new years.

That evening he met up with the detachment bunch to go to the Inn. Constable Smith was a little worried that things would get out of hand. Constable Levesque had brought along a lot of questionably-legal fireworks. One of these days Ray was going to figure out how to communicate with Levesque and make friends.

Fraser didn’t share Smith’s concerns. “Typically, New Year’s Eve is more about the celebration, not the specific moment of the year changing over. This year, if anyone tries to cause problems, we can simply threaten to make them miss it.” Ray was pretty sure that meant he didn’t care what happened after, but that was enough to fob off Constable Smith. 

It was the biggest crowd Ray had been in up here, and it was nice somehow to realize that the north could still do crowds, even if it was only a couple hundred people. They milled around the ground floor of the inn, and out back where Paul had set up a tent with a few heaters. Ray ate a lot of chips and nursed a beer and fielded a surprising number of questions about greenhouses, even though Fraser never talked to him about that.

“Listen, I think you need to take that up with...the government, or someone,” Ray told some random guy he’d barely met. He wondered how the guy even knew he knew Fraser. “That all happened before we were even here.”

He wasn’t sure if the guy believed him, but then Ray was accosted by someone else and gladly let himself be led away. He’d lost track of the time entirely well before everybody started hissing to each other about midnight.

Someone handed Ray another beer. “One minute!” the guy said, and shit, where was Fraser? Ray went fumbling through the room for him, trying not to spill beer on anybody, till someone pointed him in the right direction. He was by the outside wall near the door, talking to an elderly woman.

“Fraser!” Ray shouted, but it was so loud that no one heard. “Fraser, it’s almost time!”

“10!” someone yelled, and Fraser finally looked his way.

“9!” yelled everyone else, and they were off.

“Outside?” Fraser mouthed, and Ray knew why he’d asked 

Ray shook his head and grabbed Fraser by the wrist.

“Five—four—three—” they were shouting.

He pulled Fraser along, into the dead center of the crowd. 

“Two!” he yelled in Fraser’s face, and Fraser jolted a little and then grinned.

“One!” they yelled at each other, and in the middle of the room, in the jostling and screaming and the happy-new-years they kissed, quick, in what felt like the exact moment, and then joined the hollering.

There was a sudden boom from outside, followed by a near stampede to the doors and windows to watch the fireworks show. Fraser yanked Ray out for a closer view, even though it was much too cold for outdoor activities. They huddled under the eaves and Ray drank the rest of his beer quickly, in case it froze or something, and watched Constable Levesque and his cronies set up the remainder of their arsenal.

“Really, I should arrest him,” said Fraser, watching Levesque mess with the fuses on his next set. 

“Oh yeah?”

“If he leaves it like that only the first two will go,” said Fraser, and went over to help.

▴ ▵

If he’d ever thought about it, Ray had imagined winter in the north as something you hunkered down against and waited out. Sometime back in November Ray had realized that everyone in town had a countdown going until the days got even shorter and darker and colder and the ice roads opened up. There were grandmas to visit in Fort Good Hope, cars to sell in Hay River, deliveries in all unwieldy sizes, and better yet, freedom for a manageable price. The detachment was awaiting a new truck. Dave was getting in materials for a new hangar. Fraser and Maggie were arguing back and forth on how best to get building supplies to their father’s cabin. The first week of January, Ray saw literally dozens of strangers in town. 

Some of them were Dave’s cronies, to whom he was introduced as “Ray, who flies planes,” so nobody really questioned what he was doing there. They hung around at the airport and at Paul’s inn and bought Ray beers when he came by. Some of them were Paul’s huge extended family, and Stan, who did summer sightseeing flights in a tiny floatplane and went fishing with Ray sometimes, turned out to have a girlfriend in Yellowknife that he’d never mentioned. 

One night, they had almost two dozen people—a party, Ray said, but Fraser objected to the term—up to the cabin. They served sausages and Fraser made his spiced rum punch and the northern lights were bright and green overhead. Ray sat by the house with Dave, Stan, and Stan’s girlfriend Jenna and watched people slide around on the ice of the lake. Ray was pretty sure he’d identified Fraser correctly but still, he’d thought Fraser would be more graceful. 

“Aren’t you going to join them?” asked Jenna, and while Dave said hell no, Ray figured he had another 15 minutes before he had to unfreeze his face, and so he went. He heard Stan following him down.

The ice wouldn’t have been much for skating on, but it was just slippery enough to slide around in boots without worrying about your impending death. They were doing something reminiscent of the Red Rover games of Ray’s youth, and he found himself unceremoniously yanked into line by one of Annie’s kids. 

On the second round it was Fraser coming towards them, and Ray held tight and hoped Fraser knew better than to break an 11-year-old’s arm, because Ray didn’t. They all ended up in the snow at the edge of the lake, uninjured and disentangling themselves. Fraser planted one arm on either side of him and Ray stretched up to kiss him. There were people everywhere and it wasn’t very dark under the aurora borealis, but it wasn’t all that private of a thing anymore. It was a nice time to kiss somebody and so Ray did. He could feel Fraser’s smile—and then he yanked Ray up by the arm and said, “Next round!”

Before long they were headed in, because it was cold and Fraser considered it his duty to make sure nobody made stupid decisions. He rejoined Jenna, who was sitting in front of one of the lake-facing windows. He got her another drink (Fraser’s family recipe, surprisingly popular) and slumped into the other armchair, wondering vaguely if they ought to make the house bigger in the summer. The sky had calmed down somewhat but it was still bright enough to clearly see the lake—quiet now that all the kids were headed in for a snack break. 

“How’d you decide to move here?” asked Jenna suddenly, as Annie’s and Paul’s families milled around behind them getting food. 

Ray thought back. “I think I knew as soon as I saw it,” he said. 

“Oh,” she said.

“That isn’t everything,” said Ray, as the last guests staggered in from the pond. “It helps, though. I mean, look at these guys.”

“You’re not into that?” she asked, gesturing at Stan shoving one of Dave’s friends into the snow. Ray couldn’t decide if Stan knew they were watching. 

“Well, sometimes,” he said, imagining if it was Fraser he was watching. 

“Hmm,” she said, and sipped her drink. He wondered what she would decide. He couldn’t help her there—it hadn’t ever felt like much of a decision to him.

Once the party wound down there were still a lot of people left over. Dave, who’d more or less planned to do so beforehand, but also Stan and Jenna, and Delmar, who’d made it down from whatever arctic regions to partake of their hospitality, and Levesque, who was still way too busy talking to Delmar. But there were plenty of blankets and Ray didn’t think Delmar would mind Dief’s cat quilt.

Still, it was a while before they’d gotten everyone settled and could retreat behind the thick wooden door of the bedroom. The last time they’d shut it was when Maggie was there. 

“If I’d known they would all still be here I wouldn’t have invited them,” Fraser muttered.

“Now you know why I put a lock on this door,” said Ray, leaning over him. “I wasn’t slacking off, or whatever it was you said I was doing. Peace of mind is a wonderful thing.”

“Is it Delmar-proof?” asked Fraser

“Oh yeah. He’d take the whole cabin down before he got in here.”

“Somehow that doesn’t entirely reassure me,” said Fraser, but he pulled Ray down to him anyhow.

▴ ▵

Winter carried on, and Ray wasn’t mad at it. The days, slowly but surely, were getting brighter even if they weren’t getting warmer. The worst thing about winter was not the dark or cold, but that Fraser was too damn busy all the time.

“It’s going to be even worse in the summer, when all the tourists need rescuing,” said Paul, to whom Ray had been complaining. 

Ray cringed at the idea. There was so much more lawbreaking with all the roads open. It was bad enough now—one day Buck Frobisher had shown up, on his way down from god-knows-where. He’d shouted something at Ray about the 11th of March and sped off in his car. He hadn’t broken any laws that anyone knew of, but Ray still had his doubts about the guy.

“But then, that’s what you get when you stick around one place, all seasons,” said Paul morosely. His grandparents had used to tell stories of the first time their families had lived in log houses. That was when everything had changed. “I just don’t know if everywhere and everyone is designed for that, you know?”

“Probably not,” said Ray. He didn’t feel trapped himself, and for good reason, but in another universe adjacent to this one he might’ve. As annoying as the increased traffic could be it lessened the overall snowbound feeling.

One day Fraser floated the idea of inviting Ray Vecchio up for a visit, and Ray said sure, fine, and Stella too if she wanted—he was too busy to be sore about it. But he heard nothing more of it and had almost forgotten the idea, until he walked out from the airport one day and saw Ray Vecchio standing in front of Paul’s inn.

“How’d you get here?” Ray asked. He hadn’t seen him on the flight.

“Drove up from Yellowknife,” said Vecchio. 

“Oh, right,” said Ray. “You can do that now. Stella come?”

“She has a case,” said Vecchio, and sighed, and Ray knew that sigh. Had sighed that sigh, a couple thousand times at least, and he didn’t know whether to sympathize with the guy or tell him off for getting all up in his own personal sigh catalogue.

“Besides, I don’t know if this is really for her,” Vecchio continued. “She wanted me to promise to drive up from Yellowknife. Something about tiny planes. And hey, it was cheaper anyway.”

“Oh,” said Ray. “Well, uh. Welcome, and all that. Does Fraser know you’re here yet?”

“I tried calling the detachment yesterday,” said Vecchio, “but I wasn’t sure if the guy who took my message really understood what I was saying.”

“That’s gotta be Levesque,” said Ray, and clapped Vecchio on the back. “You know, I think the two of us might have a lot in common.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Vecchio, which made Ray think again of Stella. Was she—but that was better suited to a phone call, and they’d talked less than two weeks ago. He’d call her again sometime. 

Fraser was still out, so Ray gave Vecchio a ride up to the cabin. “You like cross-country skiing?”

“Maybe,” said Vecchio.

“Okay, then I’ll let Fraser do the tour,” said Ray. “That’s what he’ll want to do with you. We’ve got a trail around the lake.”

“Looks like more of a pond to me.”

“Pond, lake, what’s the difference? There isn’t a law about it.” Ray had found that out, arguing with Fraser one time. 

Dief was home, asleep on his bed in the corner, but he got up to greet Vecchio enthusiastically. Ray got Vecchio sheets and blankets for the futon and towels for the shower. He popped into the bathroom to double-check the water tank and when he came back out Vecchio was still standing there with Dief turning circles around his legs, contemplating his towels with the look of a man wondering what the fuck he was doing with his life. Ray found he didn’t have it in his heart to judge him. He’d surely thought Fraser would be here to welcome him, and besides, he was going through the experience that was just having married Stella. 

“You eat dinner yet?” said Ray. “‘Cause I haven’t, and who knows when Fraser’ll be back, so I figure I’ll make something.”

So that was something to do, at least, and Vecchio seemed genuinely interested in the cabin so Ray told him about all the trials and tribulations involved in its construction, and after a while they ended up in front of the fire Ray’d built, Vecchio on the couch with Dief where Ray usually sat and Ray in Fraser’s armchair. It figured that today would be one of those days that Fraser didn’t get home till late. Ray wondered a little what was wrong, but there were so many things to go wrong and they were rarely emergencies (except to Fraser). 

“So, Florida,” said Ray. “How are things there? Long way to come without warning anybody, you know.”

“You trying to imply something?” asked Vecchio.

“I’m just trying to be a good host,” said Ray in an aggrieved voice. “Find out what you want to get out of the Northwest Territories, all that.”

“Sure,” said Vecchio dubiously, and Ray didn’t blame him for that either.

“Everything is okay, though?” he asked, and wasn’t sure why exactly he cared, only that he did.

“Uh, I was under the impression that I was invited,” said Vecchio. “Fraser said, when you get here you get here, and here I am. He’s not an easy guy to get hold of. Unless you know something I don’t.”

“No, no, not at all,” said Ray. “You just seemed kinda…”

“Go on, Kowalski.” Vecchio sounded almost threatening. “How did I seem?”

“Er, not so happy, I’d say.”

“Well, it is a long way,” said Vecchio. “I had to sleep in the Calgary airport. Plus I had to leave my wife behind, because she has to be in court on Thursday.”

“Makes sense,” said Ray cautiously.

“I miss her,” said Vecchio. “I was thinking, maybe that wasn’t what you’d want to hear, maybe I’d be nice, but if you’re asking for it—yeah! I don’t sleep alone much these days.”

What Ray said was the first thing he thought of, which was, “Me neither.”

“What?” said Vecchio, and then, “Oh,” immediately, because it wasn’t as though Fraser hadn’t already told him a while ago. He looked over at Ray. Ray wished he’d thought to offer him a beer or something before this because it was only going to make it more awkward to do it now. 

“You want a beer?” Ray asked him anyway. 

“Sure,” said Vecchio, and sat staring at the label for a long while. Molson Canadian, because it had been on sale. “So, you like it up here?”

“Yeah,” said Ray. “It’s too cold, but I don’t really mind snow anymore. It’s not even as dark as I thought it would be.”

“See, cold I can get used to—I was used to it. But snow? No. That’s what I learned in Vegas: snow is just not necessary.”

“You like it in Florida?”

“Yeah, I do,” said Vecchio. “And I’m not saying it’ll be Florida forever, you’ve probably heard what my family thinks of that—but a decade or two, let everything thaw out completely? Yeah.”

Ray stared into the flames for a moment. “I think it’s Canada forever for me,” he said. 

“For Fraser?” said Vecchio.

“I’d do Alaska if I had to,” said Ray. “Don’t think I will, though.”

“Alright,” said Vecchio, and Ray appreciated how he seemed to have gotten the point without a lot of talking (which was more than could be said for Fraser). “If you guys are happy, good for you. And we are too, since you’re worrying about it.”

“I’m not, really,” Ray protested.

“Sure,” said Vecchio. “But this is the one time I’m telling you, so listen.”

“Okay,” said Ray.

“What, no threats? Something about how if I hurt Stella you’ll feed me to a crocodile?”

“Stella can do that herself,” said Ray. “By the time I got down to Florida there wouldn’t be anything left.”

Vecchio nodded. “Good point.”

They were on their second beers and drowsing by the time Fraser got home.

“Ah, you made it!” said Fraser, stomping snow off his boots. Dief bounced off the couch to greet him, and Fraser gave him something surreptitiously from his pocket. Ray didn’t know who he thought he was fooling. “Did you get the full tour yet?”

“Just the cabin so far,” said Ray.

“It’s a bright night!” said Fraser. “It’ll be a full moon tomorrow, so you’d still get a good view if we went out now. What do you think, Ray?”

“I’m sure it’ll be a bright morning too,” said Vecchio.

“Well, actually, once the moon sets it’ll—”

“What I meant to say was no,” said Vecchio, and Ray snickered. 

“Tomorrow it is, then,” said Fraser, giving them both irritated looks.

▴ ▵

Ray was home the next couple days, but he had to go to town first thing to fix Dave’s friend’s uncle’s carburetor. Maybe it wasn’t so critical that he get up before dawn, but he wasn’t sure he could face Fraser’s tour guide persona first thing in the morning.

When he got back he worried that he hadn’t stayed clear long enough for it to wear off, because Fraser was feeding Vecchio pemmican.

“Ah, just in time for the taste test!” said Fraser, giving Ray a generous helping.

“Okay, I thought I remembered what this was like, but I was wrong,” said Vecchio, though he chewed valiantly.

“You get used to it.” Ray took a hearty bite and almost choked. “Fraser! What the fuck is this?”

“Pemmican,” said Fraser, smiling beatifically. “It’s Maggie’s; I think it’s nice to change things up once in a while, don’t you?”

Ray couldn’t for the life of him work out whether Fraser was fucking with them or not. The fact that Fraser could eat it happily meant nothing, but the involvement of Maggie wasn’t really playing by Fraser’s rules. And it didn’t taste poisonous. Just made by someone with messed up taste buds.

▴ ▵

“I almost get the impression you’re used to this,” said Vecchio the next day, as they hiked up from the road. He narrowed his eyes at Ray.

Ray had taken him out ice-fishing with Stan, the last day before he had to go back to Yellowknife. Fraser was full of plans for the two of them and Ray hated it a little bit. Sometimes he wondered if Fraser was trying to rub it in—ineffectually, because he was too nice to do it properly. 

“You learn,” he said. “It’s like moving to Florida. No alligators or crocodiles here.”

“I’m not spending much of my time running from alligators or crocodiles.”

“Yeah, and I’m not usually running from...bears, or whatever. It’s not even the real wilderness.”

“Well, I guess it’s good you think so,” said Vecchio.

Ray went back down to Yellowknife and had an irritating week. He was busy working on his instrument rating and flying under the hood made him kind of nauseous. At least it had stopped making him feel like he was going to crash the plane. His instructors were delighted with his progress and he was on track for that one-year goal he’d told Dave about last year, but there were some things he was fucking sick of even when they didn’t involve nausea or even flying. Waiting for planes was sometimes the worst of it, when whatever plane he’d been supposed to fly had some random mechanical problem or got stuck elsewhere due to weather and he sat around the airport thinking of how he could’ve left Norman Wells a whole day later if he’d known. Watching his bank account balance steadily decrease was another. This week, the other inmates of Mary Rose’s were more annoying than unusual. 

“I can’t sleep,” Ray complained on the phone to Frannie, who’d called here because she hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone in Norman Wells and wanted to know if her brother had been eaten by a polar bear yet.

“Polar bears don’t come down this far south,” Ray told her.

“Well, now, that’s a shame,” said Frannie. “I can think of few better fates for brothers with no family values. It’s like he goes to Las Vegas for just a little while and forgets about everyone else. Even you do better than him!”

“Maybe you should go see him in Florida,” Ray suggested. 

“Really? I don’t think Stella likes me.”

“I thought it was the other way around,” said Ray, who couldn’t recall Stella ever mentioning Frannie at all, except in a really general way.

“Oh, maybe you can talk to her!” said Frannie. “Because I don’t want to invite myself, but I went to Miami once for spring break, and I’ve always felt that in that kind of environment I could really grow, you know, expand my horizontals.”

“I’m not asking her to let you move in with them,” said Ray suspiciously. 

“Hmm, yeah, I should probably do that myself,” said Frannie. “Tell Ray when you see him that I’m gonna come down for spring break and check it out. Thanks so much, you’ve been so helpful!”

Ray was gonna tell Vecchio he’d better call her, and nothing more.

▴ ▵

It was up to 2C and blindingly sunny when Ray got back. Vecchio was due to head down to Yellowknife this afternoon, and Ray met him and Fraser for lunch at Paul’s inn. 

“Oh, how I’ve missed normal food,” said Vecchio, intent on the menu.

They’d spent Fraser’s days off camping up north. “Ice fishing on Great Bear Lake!” said Fraser. “And Stan was able to take us on a wonderful sightseeing flight—we are very grateful to you for arranging it!”

“Maggie’s pemmican aside, it was great,” Vecchio confirmed.

Fraser shook his head confusedly at the mention of the pemmican.

It fell upon Ray to take Vecchio back to where he’d left the rental car, and to help him clear off the snow that had fallen in the meantime.

“I gotta do the drive sometime,” said Ray. “Just for the sake of doing it, right?”

“It’s honestly not that exciting. If anybody’s gonna fall through the ice it’ll be the semi you’re stuck behind.”

Vecchio freed the windshield wipers while Ray wiped off the rear window. Behind him the hills were nearly obscured by the low clouds moving in. Good thing he wasn’t flying out, or he might’ve been stuck for a bit.

“So, how was it?” asked Ray.

“Wonderful,” said Vecchio. “Met some old guys, nearly froze my balls off, expanded all my horizons.”

“But you liked it, didn’t you.”

“Did I say otherwise?”

“Hey,” said Ray, “what about Florida? Not for me, I think I’ll be too busy, but Fraser might like the crocodiles.”

“He can come see crocodiles whenever he wants, I told him that.” Vecchio narrowed his eyes at Ray. “He might not do it until you make him, though. We’ve got a king bed in our spare room, you can come if you want. Get him here before the end of the year and then I’ll really be impressed.”

“You know what, you hold me to that,” said Ray. It had been a long winter, even if it had been a lot less unpleasant than he’d expected, and the idea of a beach in the distant future was motivational. “By the way, Frannie might show up this spring.”

Vecchio closed his eyes briefly. “At least I have warning,” he said. “I figure it’s too much to hope that she wants to help out at the bowling alley?”

“Do you need her to?” asked Ray. “Are bowling alleys a lot of work?”

“No, not at all,” said Vecchio, in what Ray could only interpret as a really sinister way. “Still, I’ve got better things to do than babysit.”

“What makes you think me and Fraser don’t need babysitting?”

“No, you probably do,” said Vecchio, “but I don’t care what kind of trouble you get into.”

▴ ▵

It had become a routine, tacitly agreed upon, that they never waited for each other in town. Ray was back unexpectedly early; the forecast for the next week was so poor that he’d cut the latest trip short. The clouds were rolling in dark from the northwest when they landed and Fraser was out somewhere with Levesque—searching for someone, Smith said.

Ray decided on stew, because Fraser wasn’t likely to be back for ages, but no sooner did he have the meat on than he heard the rattle at the door.

“You’re early, so you’re gonna have to wait to eat!” Ray called.

“I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait,” said Fraser. He came in quietly, unpacking and undressing methodically, putting everything carefully on its assigned peg or shelf in the entryway. Ray knew right away, without even seeing Fraser’s face, that they hadn’t found the guy alive. He went on peeling potatoes. 

“Can I help?” Fraser asked.

Ray handed him a paring knife and the bowl of carrots. “Go for it.”

They peeled vegetables in silence. Ray checked how the meat was doing.

“I didn’t think you’d be back till the end of the week,” said Fraser.

“Weather forecast was shit. I figured I’d rather be stuck inside here than in Yellowknife, right?”

“There would likely be more sources of entertainment in Yellowknife,” said Fraser.

“Yeah, okay, how many sources of entertainment do I need for a week and a half?” Ray reached over and grabbed some of Fraser’s carrots, since he wasn’t actually helping very much. 

“I’ll largely be out on—”

“Fraser, look outside. Even if you wanted me to go back to Yellowknife, I don’t think I could.”

They both looked out the window to their right, where the snow was starting to fall in thin, driving sheets. 

Fraser sighed and wrapped his arms around him from behind, sinking his chin against Ray’s right shoulder. It made Ray not really know what to do with his hands, but it felt nice so he put down the paring knife and tipped his head against Fraser’s.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Fraser murmured.

“Likewise,” said Ray. “You gonna…” And he trailed off, because Fraser was pulling him around to face him, his lips finding Ray’s. They kissed softly, Fraser holding back due to whatever he’d coated his lips with against the cold and Ray leaning into it, because there was very little he minded anymore. He wrapped his arms around Fraser’s neck and felt him breathe in and out, in and out.

“Stove,” said Ray presently, and Fraser stepped back. 

They finished cooking dinner and ate. They sat on the couch afterwards, hip to hip, and watched the fire.

“He was a fool,” said Fraser presently. “And an idiot. He was foolish to think he could outrun the storm, and stupid to think he could get over the ridge.”

“Yup, sounds pretty dumb,” said Ray readily.

“And for so little. For the theft of a couple hundred dollars. His family said he ran from them, not from us, but what if they’re wrong?”

“Then he’s just another kind of idiot,” said Ray.

“I’m not sure. Fear doesn’t develop in a vacuum. Now and then I hear stories about my predecessor and can’t help but wonder if there’s something people don’t want to talk about.”

“Corporal What’s-his-face?” Ray had heard so little of him that he didn’t even remember his name. “Did he do anything?”  

“Honestly, maybe not,” said Fraser. “I hope not. He certainly wasn’t very effective.”

They were quiet for a while, and a high-pitched whistling coming from the southwest corner of the ceiling became noticeable.

“That will need to be fixed when the weather clears,” said Fraser.

“Yeah, that’s pretty annoying,” Ray agreed.

It was hard to hear, though, from the bedroom.

“What’re you gonna do about it?” Ray asked, sometime later in the dark and quiet. 

Fraser shrugged. It was a movement Ray felt rather than saw. “I have a meeting with my boss next week,” said Fraser. “It got postponed thanks to the storm.”

“Oh,” said Ray, and kissed him, because he couldn’t come up with anything reassuring to say and wasn’t sure that was what Fraser wanted, anyway.

▴ ▵

Fraser didn’t make it home the next day. He’d warned Ray as much and so Ray wasn’t worried, just kind of bored. In Yellowknife when he was bored he went and talked to people, but he wasn’t looking to die in the snow here.

Fraser had taken Dief, and Ray got how Dief’s nose might be useful in these conditions but Ray wondered if they shouldn’t get a cabin dog, too. Or a cat. Dief might take more issue with a dog, and there was plenty in here for a cat to climb around on when it was too cold to go outdoors.

Ray had some manuals and a couple binders of photocopied materials he was supposed to be studying and for a while he occupied himself with that, and when he got tired of it he tried one of the photocopied practice tests and did terribly.

Ray had asked Fraser once what he did when he was alone here. He’d meant it as a lead-up to sex and been disappointed, because what Fraser usually did was read books and he always wanted to talk about them. There were two shelves’ worth now compared to the half-shelf when they’d moved in. There was a lot of poetry, and most of the novels seemed to be from the 1800s and Ray wasn’t about those page-long paragraphs. But on the top shelf behind the couch was a row of novels that Ray could only deduce were somehow related to the book exchange—that or gifts from Annie—and he picked one about an English duke with amnesia whose title had been stolen by an evil cousin and settled down for the evening.

When it grew late he went through the books again. The one girl at FSS, Ashley, had a lot to say about yoga and there was a book somewhere in here about it. If Ray could go back knowing what all the poses were it’d be very impressive. 

▴ ▵

It was starting to get light by the time Ray awoke. He’d slept soundly through the gale, though now that he was up it felt like it wanted to shake the house apart.

He wished Dief was here. He prowled around the cabin in his long johns and woolen socks, weighing the added heat of proper daytime clothing against the added effort. In the end he did get dressed, if only for something to do. Through the swirling snow the light in the main room was a dull grey, and the fire hardly seemed to warm it.

Ray thought he might write some letters. Last night he’d eventually moved on to trying the yoga poses, and now he felt a little sore. He’d also started reading one of Fraser’s 19th century novels and all the characters seemed to write a lot of letters, all full of quotations. So he got one of the poetry compilations and some paper and set about writing a letter to his mom. He didn’t actually quote any poetry, because he couldn’t find anything about planes or grocery stores or fishing or anything he wanted to talk about. There were poems about winter, but they made it sound darker and far more still than it was and he didn’t want his mom to get creeped out. But they did need a decent camera, he realized. Photos were maybe the modern equivalent of quotations. Next time in Yellowknife he’d buy one. 

By evening the wind had eased off to a leisurely whooshing sound and the snowflakes were coming down mostly vertical. Fraser tonight, Ray thought, and though he didn’t mop the ceiling he did dust a bit. He did some more yoga, too, but only the poses in the back that were supposed to help with stiff joints.

Presently Ray heard the sound of the snowmobile and arranged himself more leisurely on the couch with his 19th-century novel. Hopefully he wouldn’t be asked what it was actually about. 

Fraser entered, a bit more tousled and wind-blown than he normally was, and when he’d shed his outer layers he just dumped everything in the entryway.

“Oh, that feels good,” he said.

“You okay?” Ray asked curiously.

“I’ve had a very trying few days,” said Fraser, pulling off his sweater and shaking more snow out of it.

“You eat yet?” Ray asked, and Fraser said yes, at the detachment, almost apologetically, as though Ray wouldn’t have felt thoroughly inconvenienced if he’d had to cook something now.

Fraser sat down beside Ray and the novel slipped, unnoticed and unmourned, into the gap between the cushions. Fraser kissed him, starting from the right corner of Ray’s mouth and across, and though Fraser’s hands were still cold it was warm and cozy in the flickering firelight and there was no reason to go all the way to the bedroom. Dief had learned tact by now and was already curled up in a circle in his favorite bed in the corner. 

“But what happened?” Ray asked presently, since he was still curious. 

“For idiots, this one takes the cake,” said Fraser, but Ray knew already that the idiot was going to turn out to be just fine so he couldn’t really get upset about it.

“He wanted to check some traps,” Fraser continued. “Nothing urgent. He’d looked at the weather forecast, too. But he went anyway. And you know who he was? Someone whose car you fixed. Lawrence Wachack.”

Oh, yeah, Dave’s friend’s uncle. “You saying I shouldn’t have fixed it?”

“I doubt that would’ve helped,” said Fraser. “We came upon him yesterday morning, clinging to some bushes, unable to tell in the snowstorm which way led back to the trail and which went over the cliff. I was with Levesque, and we helped him along as best we could, but with the melt-freeze cycles lately the snow was unstable and with three of us on the track, there was an avalanche.”

“Yeah?” Ray prompted.

“It was difficult going,” said Fraser. “We had to go far out of our way, and—well, it got very complicated on several occasions. Until this morning we couldn’t make any meaningful progress.” He fell silent, and Ray realized that, at some point, Fraser had wondered whether he’d make it back at all.

“Better late than never,” said Ray, pulling Fraser closer. Fraser curled in against him, and it wasn’t like there were many other directions he could go, with their feet sharing the little ottoman and Ray stuck almost uncomfortably in the downward slope of the cushion toward the armrest. Fraser wrapped one arm across Ray’s chest.

“Did you worry?” he asked.

“Not really,” Ray admitted. “Ignorance is bliss, and all that. It wasn’t like you’d have made it home last night anyway.”

“That’s the worst of it, somehow. That you wouldn’t even have known.”

“But it was way too snowy for me to have rescued you, even if I’d known.”

“No, not like that,” said Fraser. “Of course you couldn’t have come out along the ridge, that would’ve been suicidal. It’s just the idea of not knowing. Doesn’t it ever bother you? Don’t you wonder, sometimes, what you’re doing?”

“Not really,” said Ray again. He’d spent too much time thinking about himself and wondering if he could ever learn to bend his legs like the photos in the yoga book to worry pointlessly about Fraser, and even if Fraser might’ve found that comforting he didn’t want to admit it. “I was learning yoga,” he said. “Did you know you have a book on it? One of the other pilots at FSS, Ashley, she says it’s great for calming the mind.”

“...Are you suggesting I try yoga, Ray?” asked Fraser in an odd voice.

“It couldn’t hurt!” he said. “I mean, it kinda did, for me, but you’re more flexible.”

“Oh,” said Fraser, and started laughing, and Ray laughed back and figured yoga was actually sort of useful, somehow.

▴ ▵

Fraser still wanted to talk about storms, once the snow cleared. He wanted to know, for one thing, what Ray would’ve done if the storm had lasted longer.

“I would’ve waited,” said Ray. “Is there anything else I could’ve done?” And he paused, but Fraser didn’t contradict him.

“You’re that patient?” Fraser asked.

“If I have to be.” All those years of stakeouts had taught him something, at least. “Is that not what you wanted? Would you rather I died out on that ridge?”

“Of course not,” said Fraser sharply. “Patience is a valuable skill when crossing unstable snow. You have a number of talents well-suited to the Territories.”

“True,” said Ray, “and do you think I’m not using them? Some of the stuff my dad taught me has come in real handy, even if it’s snowmobiles or planes instead. Or that guy’s car I shouldn’t have fixed.”

“You’re using them admirably,” said Fraser crossly. “I never said you shouldn’t have fixed his car.”

“Well, you’re still jealous.”

“Jealous of what?”

“The planes.”

“Yes, I’m feeling challenged by some single-engine tail-draggers,” said Fraser.

“That’s rude,” said Ray, jabbing his index finger at Fraser. “You should be glad they can’t hear you right now.”

“What I think of them won’t affect how they handle the weather.”

“That’s a matter of patience too,” said Ray, and only afterward realized that Fraser getting stuck in an avalanche had literally nothing to do with Ray getting stuck in Yellowknife. It was really annoying once he got around to thinking of it.

▴ ▵

Two days later he flew up to Inuvik. He picked up Maggie, because she had to go down to Yellowknife for something.

“Hey, you’ve been married,” she said out of nowhere, somewhere passing Fort Good Hope. “How’d you—how’d you decide to try again? How do you get past that?”

“I don’t know if I did get past it,” said Ray, because Stella was looking to be a part of his life for the foreseeable future, and Maggie didn’t have that luxury anyway.

“Do you regret it, then?” she asked.

“I don’t know what the point of regret is anymore,” said Ray. “Not unless you’re gearing up for another go at all the things you did wrong last time and need to know what to watch out for. If you’re doing something new then it doesn’t really apply.”

“Huh,” she said. “You know, you’re not as dumb as you look.”

▴ ▵

Ray had long felt that it was only a matter of time until one of the planes broke while he was in it. He did wish it could’ve been something less dramatic than his engine sputtering to a stop, high above the boreal forest. None of the checklists did any good, and he was out of radio range of the nearest control tower. He could only guess it was something to do with the fuel valves, and if it was then it didn’t really matter since there was nothing he could do about them from up here.

He didn’t panic, because he was too busy getting down on the ground in one piece. And when he’d landed on a providential stretch of forest road and took stock of his situation he didn’t panic either, because he still had most of the provisions Fraser had given him and the tire tracks in the snow couldn’t be more than a couple days old. Hopefully the incoming snow wouldn’t be enough to delay the next one. He fired off one of the flares and decided to save the rest for after the clouds cleared. He wondered if they would be any good if he had to defend the Cessna from ravening wolves. 

Ray settled in to wait. If he’d been Fraser, it might have been sort of fun, out here all alone in the softly falling snow, more or less cozy. He could recite poetry to all the nature or work out what sort of trucks came through here, with a careful analysis of tire treads and licking of any oil spots. 

Ray contemplated timelines. Hay River expected him in half an hour, but it wasn’t like he was a commercial flight and when he didn’t show up they’d figure he’d returned to Yellowknife on account of the weather. And someone would call somebody and work it out eventually that if Ray wasn’t anywhere then something had gone wrong, but it’d probably take a few hours. And as for the trucks, Fraser would’ve known if they passed through here every day or only every few, but Ray didn’t. Even if one picked him up tomorrow morning, it’d still be hours more before everyone talked to everyone else. Fraser would be back at the detachment by 6 tonight and word would’ve likely gone out by then, but they were too far north to be called in for any search and the weather wasn’t going to allow it, anyway. So, with all that in mind: how long was Fraser gonna spend wondering if he was dead? 

It wasn’t a very fun way to pass the time.

It was a while before Ray was hungry enough to break out the emergency rations, but the pemmican was starting to look almost appetizing and he bit into it cautiously.

It was Maggie’s pemmican. Fuck. 

▴ ▵

It was sometime still mostly-dark in the morning when the logging truck came upon him. 

“We should charge you landing fees,” said the driver. “Yellowknife okay?”

It was more than okay. Ray stretched his legs in the glorious heat of the cab and listened to the life story of Brad from Regina. Did Brad have some way of contacting somebody before they reached Yellowknife, no he did not. 

“Let them sweat!” said Brad. “Haven’t you ever thought about this, like, being dead for all anybody knows, and then they all learn what they’d be missing?”

Ray couldn’t deny it. It had always seemed very romantic to him, to have someone think you might be dead and then show up on their doorstep, but in reality it was very stressful. He kept wondering what kind of day Fraser was having at work. It was hard to explain to Brad. 

They rumbled into town a little after 2pm, and even though Ray really ought to have talked to the authorities first to let them know he wasn’t dead and to call off any SAR teams, and then to the flight school guys to do the same and also tell them where their plane was stuck, he walked into the empty front office of FSS, grabbed the phone and called the detachment. 

Constable Smith answered the phone. 

“Is Fraser there?” Ray asked. 

“I’m afraid Corporal Fraser can’t come to the phone right now, but if you—”

“Constable Smith,” said Ray forcefully, “if I find out you are choosing a time like this to willfully fail to recognize my voice—”

“Mister Kowalski!” Constable Smith squeaked. “My apologies, we’ve had a—distracting day! I am very glad to hear your voice! Where are you? How did you—”

“John,” said Ray, “where is Fraser.”

“He was called out to assist with a dispute upriver,” said Constable Smith. “I’m afraid it might be several hours before he returns.”

“Okay, look,” said Ray, “I’m in Yellowknife, and I’m not dead, and I’m gonna be back there this evening if I have anything to say about it, so if you see Fraser before I do, tell him that, okay?” And Ray hung up before he got an answer, because he had too much else to do, like deal with the small cluster of people who’d formed around the desk, staring intently and almost accusingly at him.

“I’ve gotta get home,” said Ray, and they understood. He was flown back a few hours later and went on foot to the detachment. If Fraser wasn’t back yet he figured he’d hang around and wait for once. 

It was getting dark, the purple sky reflecting off the snow and turning everything into a hazy violet dimness. The front windows of the detachment cast long orange lights onto the street. 

Ray heard him before he saw him, crunching through the snow around the corner from the lot, with his pack still slung over one shoulder and his gaze intent on the ground. Ray was quite sure he hadn’t seen Constable Smith yet. 

“Fraser,” Ray called. 

Fraser looked up. On his face, first, was the expression Ray’d seen a thousand times, almost every time he’d stumbled upon him somewhere, a little surprised and curious and welcoming and pleased, but as Ray neared him he saw it change into confusion and then freeze. Fraser stopped walking. 

Back when Ray had fantasized vaguely about this kind of situation, Stella would sprint toward him, screaming his name and with her arms outstretched. But it was Ray who was running, skidding a little on the ice, saying “Fraser, hey, Fraser,” and he was the one with the arms outstretched, whose hands cupped Fraser’s staring face. 

“Fraser,” said Ray again. “I landed on some logging road somewhere—there was a storm, I couldn’t—you know?” 

“Oh,” said Fraser, wide-eyed in the fading snowy light. His arms came up around Ray’s waist, and then, with a kind of shudder, he buried his face against Ray’s neck for a long moment. Ray wrapped his arms around Fraser’s shoulders and held him closer. 

“Twenty-four hours?” asked Ray, when Fraser pulled back a bit. 

“Twenty-five.” Fraser swallowed. “I’d gone to the airstrip to talk to Dave about the greenhouse plans—that’s when we heard.”

“Sorry,” said Ray, even though it was the stupid plane’s fault. Fraser just shook his head.

A car honked at them. They were still in the middle of the road, Ray realized, and he dragged Fraser to the side as the car stopped beside them.

“Kowalski, is that you?” The driver was Paul. Half the cargo from the flight was in the back of his truck now.

“I heard you were in a plane crash,” said Paul conversationally. 

“Well, I wasn’t,” said Ray. “It’s not even crashed, it’s fine, no thanks to its stupid valves. So go home, I bet you have a lot of toilet paper to unpack.”

Paul laughed and sped off, and Fraser frowned at Ray.

“Really, Ray, everyone here was very worried,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, I just…” Ray still had one hand around Fraser’s back, and he pulled him closer. “I’ve had kind of a long day. Can we go home?”

“Yes,” Fraser breathed, and in short order they’d taken their leave of Constable Smith and were around the bend, Ray driving, the purple of the sky having condensed into a low pink band on the horizon. Dief bolted out to meet them, jumping all over Ray in a way he didn’t normally, and Ray thought Fraser must’ve talked to him last night. He hoped it hadn’t just been Dief but didn’t want to say so in front of him. 

They cooked dinner together. There were pork chops in the fridge that had been meant for tomorrow when Ray was actually supposed to be here, but tomorrow they could do something else. They ate largely in silence because Ray was too hungry to do much else, but he asked Fraser about the greenhouse situation and gave him the overview of his night in the Cessna and told him off for putting Maggie’s pemmican in his emergency rations.

“There’s nothing wrong with Maggie’s pemmican,” said Fraser. 

It wasn’t until later, on the couch in the front of the fire, that Ray dared ask what anybody in town had been saying. It was not only stressful, this missing-maybe-dead thing, but somehow extremely awkward. If anybody was disappointed by his reappearance he really hoped they wouldn’t say so. He didn’t need that in his life. 

“There was plenty of consternation this morning, once word got around,” said Fraser. “Annie was nearly in tears. She kept bringing up wolves, for some reason. It wasn’t very helpful.”

“Did you think I was dead?” Ray asked, the words tripping off his tongue before he could stop them. 

“I couldn’t,” said Fraser. “I didn’t dare.”

Ray looked over at him. He was staring fixedly into the fire, but he must’ve felt Ray’s eyes on him, because he turned his head then. 

“It would’ve been wrong,” said Fraser. “You could have held out far longer than you did. To give you up for lost when you might’ve been out there, waiting, that would’ve been—unconscionable. When the team from Yellowknife stopped looking I would have gone out myself.”

“Oh,” said Ray. He thought of the blank spaces on the maps, the deep, endless dark as seen from overhead. “You wouldn’t find me,” he said. “If it was like that, I mean.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Fraser softly.

The fire snapped and crackled while they said nothing. Sometimes Ray felt like the fire provided a lot of unwanted commentary.

Presently, Fraser said, “It, ah, occurs to me that their maintenance standards might be falling short of the regulations.”

“Maybe,” said Ray. He suspected it wasn’t all that unusual. 

“But you’re still...set on this course?” 

Ray glanced over at him, eyes narrowed. Fraser rubbed his eyebrow and looked away. What was Fraser looking for, he wondered, because if it was for Ray to give up on the whole thing and play house for the rest of his days, he had another think coming. 

“Of course I am,” said Ray. “I’m not traumatized or anything.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you were.”

“Are you?” asked Ray. “Do you want me to stop, I mean? Because I’m not gonna.” He was way too far into this thing by now. If Fraser ever got unexpectedly and maliciously transferred south Ray was probably going to have to live in the cabin by himself. 

“I would never ask that of you,” said Fraser fiercely, turning back to glare at him. 

“I’m not asking if you’re asking me!” said Ray, although he was glad of the denial all the same.

“I wouldn’t want that of you either.” Fraser was still glaring. “I’m glad you’ve found something here that’s all your own. And for my own part, I appreciate the connection to Inuvik, and to Yellowknife and the rest of the world in general, that I know I wouldn’t have here otherwise.

“And yet,” he continued, looking away now, “yes—I worry. I was your partner at the 2-7. I know the kind of risks you take.”

“Yeah, for you,” said Ray, “or someone else with a gun to their head. I’m not risking my skin for Paul’s toilet paper. You, on the other hand…”

Fraser reddened slightly. “I realize I have no room to judge.”

“Okay, so don’t,” said Ray, “and I won’t judge you on the lengths you go to find some dumbass who fell off a cliff and is 99% sure to be already dead, either. Neither of us has any room.”

“Fine,” said Fraser. “If you think the two are equivalent.”

“That’s not—ugh,” Ray huffed, and flopped back against the cushions. “I didn’t mean they’re equivalent. But can you try to get it?”

He wasn’t sure quite how it had happened, but very suddenly he was on his back on the couch with Fraser’s hands planted on either side of his head.

“Do you think I’m not trying?” said Fraser incredulously. “What do you think this is, then? I find it hard to believe I make it look that easy.”

Ray stared up at him and shook his head fractionally. “That’s not what I meant either,” he said. “I meant—I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe it would help if you figured out what you meant before you said it,” said Fraser.

“Nobody does that.” Ray squirmed slightly, because Fraser was making him feel almost trapped, and Fraser duly shuffled back a little but didn’t stop looming. “Or at least I never have. It’s just, you keep going around, challenging me about how can I know what I’m doing, and that’s not fair play. Not everyone can know everything.”

“Ray,” said Fraser, “I don’t know why you think I have a goddamn clue.”

“Oh. Don’t you?”

“Nope,” said Fraser.

“Oh, well then.” Ray wished he’d been more prepared for this admission; he could’ve really gotten one over on Fraser with some advanced planning. “But you’ve never even come on a flight with me.”

Fraser frowned down at him. “You’ve never invited me.”

“You never asked,” said Ray, and it felt wrong and somehow untrue even though Fraser really never had and probably hadn’t ever wanted to, either. But that wasn’t why Ray hadn’t invited him.

“If I ask, then…” said Fraser. 

“Then yeah,” said Ray, “of course you can.” 

“Oh,” said Fraser. “Well, I would like to, so let’s arrange a date.”

“Okay, I’ll figure something out soon,” said Ray, and still felt like he was lying somehow. But Fraser seemed satisfied and Ray hadn’t slept well enough in the Cessna to have much energy to argue with himself.

“Let me know when,” said Fraser. 

▴ ▵

Ray found time on Fraser’s next day off. He’d tried to make it sound like he’d be making the flight anyway, but it had actually been really annoying to work out and he hoped Fraser couldn’t tell. Because Ray did want to, really. Sort of.

They arrived at the airstrip just before sunrise.

“Okay, so,” said Ray, adjusting his headset. “Here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for.”

“I did wonder if you were ever going to ask me,” said Fraser.

“I meant to a long time ago, it’s just, schedules, and it’s—personal, you know.”

“Hmm. Yes. To be free from gravity, up there with all the toilet paper.”

“A lot of the time it’s groceries. Speaking of—”

Fraser passed a hand over his face. “For one day, Ray, I want to not talk about greenhouses.”

“Never mentioned ‘em,” said Ray.

They took off to the northwest, away from the sun. The obvious answer for why Ray had never invited Fraser, and what Fraser likely thought, was that he figured Fraser would be unnerving or judge him for it somehow, but that wasn’t quite right. The northwest sky was purple and the gold-tipped clouds were entirely different from every time before, and he could’ve come up with his own exam question about what the hell the wind was doing down through the valley.

Really, he was just afraid Fraser wouldn’t like it, and that he would have to spend the rest of his life trying to explain and feeling sorry for him for it.

He turned eastward, toward the scattering of clouds and the dawn. Beyond the engine noise and buffeted by gusts, there was something calm and quiet about it, far above the world, with nothing but the sun in their eyes. 

“Oh,” said Fraser. Ray glanced over, and Fraser was looking at him, not the sunrise, but he knew then that he needn’t have worried. Fraser smiled at him.

They didn’t speak much. Ray took them in a wide loop, as far east as Deline and as far north as Fort Good Hope. Fraser spent most of it peering out the window below them and Ray let him know when they were passing over the little airstrips Stan used in the summer on the Canol trail. The SAR teams used those sometimes too and Fraser knew some of them.

The sun was well up in the eastern sky by the time they landed, though some of the clouds were still pinkish. The airport was busier now, with a couple cargo flights being loaded and a Twin Otter picking up passengers. Ray would be heading down to Yellowknife after this.

“I’m sorry,” said Fraser, as they taxied over to the parking spot. “I really didn’t realize.”

“Realize what?” asked Ray, a little too aggressively, because he was feeling kind of exposed in a way he didn’t want to be asked to justify.

“I—” Fraser turned away to look out his window at the Cessna 182 in the next spot. “That it is personal. That you weren’t just fobbing me off.”

“Honestly, I didn’t think you liked flying that much, either,” Ray offered.

Fraser shrugged. “Lack of experience?”

“You’ve been on a plane around here a million times,” said Ray.

“I never saw it that way before,” said Fraser, and he looked like he meant to be smiling, but whatever he was thinking was too serious for it. “I think I’ve always been too distracted to appreciate the beauty of it.”

“You?” said Ray. “Not noticing the beauty of something?”

“It takes work, sometimes,” said Fraser. “That’s what a lot of people don’t seem to realize. That sometimes you have to make the choice to look, and it’s so easy to get caught up in duties and tasks and to just forget that there’s beauty in everything if you stop for long enough to notice. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so grateful to share my life here with you. Between the two of us we can cover most of it, can’t we?”

“Yeah,” said Ray, and he thought suddenly of campfires in Grant Park, or some of those slogs through endless whiteness on the adventure, or the other afternoon walking home when Fraser had pulled him to a stop and they’d stared at how pink the lake was in the sunset. He was grateful, too, to be in it with somebody else.

Someone knocked on Ray’s door.

“You alright in there?” said Dave, and Ray sighed and climbed out. He was flying a different plane down to Yellowknife and some other pilot was waiting on this one. He looked over at Fraser around its nose and grinned at him. It had been nice in a way, keeping it all for himself, but he was glad he wasn’t anymore.

▴ ▵

All too soon there were exams and a checkride looming threateningly on the horizon. Ray wondered if he’d been overoptimistic, back when he’d scheduled it all. He had the hours and the instrument rating and couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to postpone. He spent a week back at the cabin just studying, in a sea of notes and charts and manuals and binders.

When Fraser came home on the fifth night that week, he stood silently for a few minutes, watching Ray pull his hair out.

“I know you’re there,” said Ray eventually, not looking up. “If you have something to say you’d better say it, or I’m gonna get up and clock you one.”

“You might clock me one anyway,” said Fraser, “but are you sure you’re ready? You can always postpone it. It’s not a race.”

“I’m ready as I ever will be,” Ray snapped. “I don’t have a good memory for tests, okay. If I was flying, I’d remember. If you asked me right now, I’d remember. On a written test, I don’t know. Oral, I don’t know. I’m not ever gonna feel ready.” 

“Maybe you should take a break for the night,” Fraser suggested, surveying the mess surrounding Ray. “I’m sure I’ve read that a good night’s sleep helps to cement something within your memory.”

“Have you read anywhere that punching someone does any good?” Ray asked wistfully, but allowed himself to be led over to the kitchen and to provide input on the cooking of the caribou steak.  

“I know I can pass the checkride,” said Ray, after dinner, glaring at the fire from the couch and not thinking about that go-around last week that his instructor hadn’t liked much.

“I’m sure you can,” said Fraser. “Did I ever tell you that story of the bear who took in a human hunter? He was lost, one night in deep winter, but he stumbled upon the bear’s cave…”

Ray listened, somewhat sleepily, and while he rarely analyzed Fraser’s far-north stories this one seemed to involve a lot of compass directions and improbable clouds. The hunter was now hiding in a cave but the bear was 10km northwest in clear skies and based on the altitudes provided this was a very confusing story.

“Fraser, what is this,” said Ray. “This can’t be one of Annie’s family stories, it makes no sense.”

“Well, no,” said Fraser. “It’s an edited version of a story one of her kids told me. I think she came up with it herself. But you’ve always complained about cloud names, types of fog, and other weather phenomena that you know but have trouble remembering in exam conditions. I thought a story about them might help.”

“That story isn’t even possible,” said Ray.

“I didn’t know that,” said Fraser. “Is theoretical possibility a problem?”

It turned out it kind of wasn’t. It all made a lot more sense, the way Fraser and Annie’s kid had staged things in the fictional canyon, even though no hunter or inexplicably-winged bear would ever be that stupid.

“That’s what stories are for,” said Fraser. “Now you might have a computer to tell you what to do, or compasses and maps and manuals that all point you in the right direction, but at one point, all there ever was was a story. It’s supposed to help you remember.”

Fraser had been taught to use stories on things like meteorology or physics or just good life advice. At the heart of them all lay important information: the flash floods in this canyon come without warning. The ice on this lake isn’t as solid as it looks. Be prepared to defend your camp against bears here.

“I wonder what they’d think if I talked about this whole flying bear story in the oral exam,” said Ray, snickering at the thought.

“I could give you a pretty good guess,” said Fraser flatly.

Ray looked over at him, and his grin died. “I just meant it—” He stopped. “Was it that kind of thing, those detachments where you said it wasn’t a good fit?”

“Among other things,” said Fraser. “Don’t sell bureaucracy short.”

“Oh,” said Ray. “Well, I’ll probably still do it if I totally blank out, so if they ask me what the hell I’m talking about, do you want me to say it came from you or that I got it in a dream?”

Fraser cracked a smile at that. “I definitely want full credit,” he said.

▴ ▵

One late afternoon in May, Ray went back to the cabin and ran laps around the lake until Fraser came home. 

“I did it,” said Ray. “Thanks to you and your bear stories.”

They stood and smiled stupidly at each other, while Dief bounced impatiently around their feet.

“Did you talk to Dave?” Fraser asked.

“Yup. Going for training next week.”

“You have to go for more training already?” Fraser’s dismay was almost comical. 

“You know it. There’s always more.” Dave’s father was already talking about adding a whole new aircraft type to the fleet—they’d gotten a new government contract out of Yellowknife. 

Fraser sighed. “Well, at least you’ll get paid this time,” he said, and Ray laughed. “And—do you know what day this is?”

“It’s the…” Ray trailed off, trying to think whether the moon was doing something unusual or if an obscure local holiday was being celebrated.

“It’s been exactly a year since we arrived here,” said Fraser.

“Oh,” said Ray, knowing suddenly what he must be thinking of. “Let’s go for a hike.”

Fraser must’ve had a picnic dinner already planned, based on how quickly he packed. Ray carried the bottle of champagne he’d bought in town, and they climbed the switchbacks to the cliffs. They didn’t talk much on the way up. 

It was a warmer day than the last time. That, or he’d acclimated better the second time around. There were still patches of snow on the cliff tops but they found a dry space with a good view.

They unwrapped their sandwiches and Ray unwrapped the champagne. He popped the cork, and about half of it foamed out over his hand before he could get any into the cups.

“Well—cheers,” he said, clicking their stainless steel cups together. “To me and to planes and to a whole year of this place. It’s been good, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Fraser. That was all he said, and Fraser without words was always something to enjoy. Ray smiled over at him, and Fraser smiled back.

They were a little earlier this time, and so the sky was still more or less blue. But Ray could tell it wasn’t going to be a golden sunset tonight. There were clouds along the horizon, already glowing a bit, and he thought it was going to be a nice pink and orange one when all was said and done. There was a flight leaving for Inuvik in 45 minutes and it was going to have an excellent view. He ate his sandwich and drank his champagne and it tasted good. 

It was funny, trying to remember his first impressions now. A year ago he hadn’t exactly assigned roles to all the buildings, but he did recall seeing the detachment and thinking it was a particularly sad-looking house. And from up here the river seemed so flat and peaceful, with none of the excitement where it tumbled over the rocks around the easterly bend, the hidden nooks where he fished with Stan. Even the floating ice chunks seemed small and tranquil.

“It’s a good thing I asked you to stay, isn’t it,” said Fraser presently. 

“Oh, no,” said Ray. “You don’t get to go taking all the credit. You wouldn’t have even asked me if I hadn’t asked you to.”

“Well, yes, you’re probably right about that,” said Fraser, without even a pause. 

“Didn’t you know you wanted me to stay?”

“Of course I did!”

“Well, why didn’t you ask before that, then?”

“I thought—” Fraser stopped, staring in front of him at his boots.

“What?” said Ray. “Tell me, what kind of crazy thing did you think?”

“I thought you were going to ask me to come back to Chicago with you,” Fraser admitted. “I would’ve said yes, if you had.”

“Huh,” said Ray. That hadn’t even been on his radar. Chicago had stopped feeling like a viable option sometime around the point where they’d left it several thousand miles behind them.

So Fraser would’ve gone back. Ray leaned back and indulged in the fantasy for a moment. Ray and Fraser, still partners in the city, maybe in this alternate universe all the old crew was still around, maybe Vecchio too, because Ray kinda liked him now. It was a nice fantasy, but not one that filled him with any particular regret.

“Did you want to go back to Chicago?” Ray asked Fraser.

“Well, I—it wasn’t one of my particular goals. But I’m sure in light of the recent events the RCMP would’ve done their best to accommodate my request.” 

So, in a word: no. Good. Ray did not want to go shipping a million boxes again anytime soon. “Did you think I wanted to?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Fraser. “I’d always meant to ask you, but when the time came, I discovered that you’d already decided against it, and I told myself it was unnecessary to complicate matters by asking how much of a compromise you’d made.” He turned to look at Ray then. “Was that selfish of me?”

“Here’s the thing,” said Ray, “do you even listen to yourself? Because what you said a minute ago, you know, was you would’ve gone wherever I did. Is that selfish? I dunno, Fraser, you tell me, because I don’t know what you think that word means.”

“I don’t think I listen to myself the same way you do,” said Fraser. 

“You don’t,” Ray agreed. “You oughta give yourself the benefit of the doubt a little more. I do it all the time and I’m still alive.”

“The question of what country to live in is a little more complicated than keeping each other breathing,” said Fraser.

“Look, if I’d wanted to go back to Chicago with you then, I’d have asked you then.” Probably. There was a chance he’d have been too chickenshit to do it, but he definitely wasn’t now , which was the point. 

“But you called the Territories a malicious wasteland that was actively trying to kill you, more than once.”

“Yeah, okay, so it took a little while,” said Ray, thinking back to some of the stuff he’d said the first week of the quest. “And I’m still gonna complain about the weather, but I have it on good authority that they do that in Aruba too.”

“How did you know?” asked Fraser. “I didn’t, not at first.”

“Well, it—seemed alright. Worth trying out, at least. And I figured you were up for trying it out too, so why not?”

“So you would’ve gone elsewhere, too, if I’d wanted to?” asked Fraser in a cautious tone.

“Well, I mean,” said Ray, because he wanted to be fair, “I probably could’ve been happy in a lot of places. Even the 2-7, hell, the 1-9, if it came to that. But I was already happy here, you know? Like when we were up here at sunset that day. No shame in taking the easy way out when you already like it best, right?”

“No shame at all,” Fraser agreed, and poured them out some more champagne.

▴ ▵

Before Ray knew it the ice was gone and here it was: summer. There was none of the stifling heat he knew from Chicago but it wasn’t the slightest bit wintry and Ray felt the term “subarctic” had too much arctic in it. 

He was flying for real now, cargo flights back and forth to Yellowknife, mostly. He was technically based there, so he couldn’t always get back home and the bunk bed at Mary Rose’s would be an ongoing thing for a while. Fraser picked him up in the truck one evening, while he was sitting on a bench watching tourists in experimental aircraft fly off into the south.

“Don’t you get tired of them?” asked Fraser, but he already knew the answer and Ray shook his head and grinned.

Last summer they’d been so busy with the build that he hadn’t really noticed the tourists. They didn’t look anything like the Chicago breed. They looked more like Fraser’s friend Delmar, and Ray wasn’t sure how or why they had enough money to go cavorting around the wilderness with fishing rods and hunting rifles. Those charter flights to remote airstrips were pricey. Maybe being a mountain man was quite lucrative. Dave and friends flew them up from Yellowknife in droves and Ray brought supplies because he was only doing the cargo flights for now. 

They had a party at the cabin on July 1st. Fraser said it was a combination Canada Day/Independence-Day-for-displaced-Americans party, and invited up random American tourists that he’d found in town. 

“We didn’t celebrate either last year,” said Fraser, quite seriously, “so we have to make up for it.”

Buck Frobisher had turned up again and came up early for a tour. Fraser was conveniently busy at the detachment and so it fell to Ray to show him around the lake and up to the best vantage points overlooking the town. It wasn’t windy and the lake was flat and blue under the sky.

“I hate to break it to you,” said Frobisher, “but that’s a pond.”

“Take it up with Fraser,” said Ray, getting more comfortable on his rock and looking out at the gleaming river snaking its way down the valley. It was just past noon and bright and quiet. It’d be a couple hours before anyone started showing up and while he really ought to go down and start preparing things he felt he could put it off a while longer. 

“You understand it now,” said Frobisher abruptly. “This land, these people. It’s no wasteland, you know.”

“No, it’s not.” It’d be a silly thing to think at the height of summer, with thick green vegetation blanketing the hills.

“I’ll admit I wasn’t sure you thought so, back when I sent you two off on the sled.”

“Nothing wrong with wastelands either,” said Ray, almost defensively. Those weird far-northern landscapes fit the bill, sometimes, and he didn’t mind it. But he was glad none of this felt quite so strange. “We stayed at the inn for a while, right when we got here.”

“Ah, yes,” said Frobisher. “Paul’s place, right? He was so kind as to offer me accommodations for the night.”

That made Ray wonder if they’d been supposed to offer, only they hadn’t known he was coming. What a lucky escape.

They went down to the cabin before long, and Frobisher was even mildly useful as a sort of fire-starter. They’d saved a minuscule amount of butane, and he was too busy nosing around their supplies and their stove and their wiring to ask Ray to sing O Canada for him as proof.

People started showing up mid-afternoon. The first were a couple American tourists who were disconcerted to find no raging party as of yet and only a smiling Buck Frobisher, but since they were the sort of tourists who came here at all they weren’t nearly as put off as they should have been.

Fraser got back not long after, with a couple more town residents along for the ride, and soon more guests followed. The people with kids got there earliest, since they’d lost patience with their offspring pestering them about it. Fraser laid out a couple ground rules, which were: no playing with fire, no bypassing locked doors, and no going into the lake. They had a canoe, but Fraser had hidden it behind the compost heap because he didn’t want to deal with small children attempting to drown themselves in it. Ray knew he’d be the one who’d have to clean it off and already dreaded it.

Fraser would’ve hidden the vegetable garden if he could’ve, but as Ray walked some people down to the start of the lake trail he heard Annie’s husband asking Fraser something about greenhouses.

Before long Ray found himself on kid-watching duty, but it wasn’t too onerous. The nice thing about kids was that sometimes the only things they needed were some baseballs and occasionally some adults to aggressively throw the balls at them, and now that Ray was remembering his own childhood, that did seem about right. The rules of this game were purposefully vague. There was plenty of time in between to chat with the other adults, eat some snacks, drink some more pop or beer or the (nonalcoholic, daytime) punch Fraser had made. And it was fun trying to hit Annie’s oldest kid in the shins. 

Fraser came over to him presently with a loaded plate. “You need to keep your strength up,” he said, plucking the baseball from Ray’s hand. “I insist on relieving you.”

Fraser, Ray noticed, was a lot more dedicatedly aggressive about the ball-throwing. Stan sat down on the folding chair next to his and handed him another beer.

“I never asked what you said to Jenna, your last party,” said Stan after a moment. “She said something about you, and then dumped me the next day.”

“What?!” said Ray, since he’d never heard that they’d broken up at all.

“I mean, we got back together a week later, so no hard feelings,” said Stan. “But I always wondered.”

“I don’t remember.” Something about knowing this was the place, he thought. 

“Of course you don’t,” said Stan, and sighed. “Next party I’ll get you both on the spot.” 

“She’s not here tonight, then?”

“She’s too busy selling her furniture,” Stan grumbled.

“Oh,” said Ray, laughing. “Tell her I’m sorry! I never warned her about that part.”

Late sunsets were somehow harder to get used to at a party than while working. It felt like a judgment upon them that anyone was falling asleep while it was still light outside, but it wasn’t really. Meanwhile Buck Frobisher had decided he was a cook now, and while Ray was a little worried he’d sneak in some secret ingredient that would give everybody food poisoning, it was really convenient. 

Eventually it got dark-ish. Maggie showed up around 11pm, much to Ray’s surprise—like she couldn’t go anywhere if he didn’t bring her—along with a guy Ray vaguely recognized as one of Dave’s pilot friends. They looked comfortable together and he wondered if she was hanging around airports now, too. 

But he was caught up with a trail tour for the latecomers, so it was a while before he came upon Fraser and Maggie, huddled together over the drinks table, and heard Maggie saying something about trying to recruit people for a forthcoming RCMP opening in Inuvik. 

“If you’d asked a year ago,” he heard Fraser say, and Ray hovered to the side, waiting to see if he’d say anything else.

“A year ago?” said Maggie. “Hadn’t you already bought this place, a year ago?”

“A year and two months ago,” Fraser amended. “How come you don’t want to come down here for our opening?”

“Ask Ray,” said Maggie, and unfortunately Ray was already too close to the table to reverse, because he didn’t know what Maggie meant. “Huh, Ray?” she added, noticing him.

“I dunno,” said Ray. On the table there was still plenty of Jack and plenty of coke left, so he poured himself one. “I have no idea what all you Mounties are doing and I don’t want to.”

“Fair enough,” said Maggie. “I just meant the part about marriage, you know.”

“Maggie!” someone yelled from down by the lake. Not the pilot friend she’d come with, but one of that group. “Did you get lost??”

“Shut up, Matt!” she yelled back, but she headed back down with various beers and mixed drinks balanced in her arms.

“What about marriage,” said Fraser rather blankly.

“Oh, that it isn’t all that important unless you want to try the same thing again. Maggie, for instance, I think she’s trying something new.”

“What are you trying?” asked Fraser. 

“I’m not trying anything,” said Ray. 

“Oh,” said Fraser, and sounded so weirdly disappointed that Ray added, “Hey, that’s a good thing, okay?”

“You know...Stella and all that?” Ray added, when Fraser continued to frown at him.

“Ah, you meant your past marriage,” said Fraser finally. “I thought you were talking about future marriages.”

“Not planning on any of those,” said Ray.

“You’re sure about that?” asked Fraser. “It’ll be an option, you know. One of these years.”

One of these years, Ray thought, had a very nice ring to it. Then the rest of it sank in, and he stared at Fraser. “Is this some kind of proposal?”

“No!” said Fraser firmly. “But—when it happens. Because it will, eventually. Sometime this next decade, I think.” He stopped. 

“Uh, well, sure,” said Ray, “like, yeah, when it happens,” and took another swig of the jack and coke.

An American tourist came up to grab a drink then, and still they stood staring at each other for a moment. Ray grinned abruptly. One of these years, he thought, he’d tell people how Fraser made a very uninspired proposal over a drinks table at a party, and Fraser would argue that it hadn’t been anything like that. Judging by that look Fraser was giving him, he knew it, too.

It was 2am before it was dark enough for Levesque’s fireworks. The 10-year-olds went around dutifully waking up the small fry and grown-ups who’d passed out on their blankets in the grass. Fraser said he’d only been resting his eyes and was treated to a very doubtful look from Annie’s second oldest.

“Sure Levesque doesn’t need your help?” Ray asked.

“I gave him some pointers earlier,” said Fraser. “I’m sure he’ll do fine.”

Levesque and his helpers had set up on the shore of the lake. The first firework was a little orange one, and while it reflected very nicely on the still water it didn’t give Ray the fear of imminent death he’d been waiting for. 

But that must’ve been a warmup, because the next was huge and bright, filling the sky overhead and blinding his eyes against the few visible stars. It was, in that sense, kind of like a 4th of July in Chicago firework. It was about this level of darkness when they started those. Ray hoped nothing would hit the cabin and burn it to the ground.

“I brought an extra fire extinguisher from the detachment just in case,” Fraser murmured to him, during a lull in the proceedings. “It’s just inside the front door.”

Trust him to have read Ray’s mind. “I don’t think—” Ray started, and got drowned out by the next boom, green and purple this time. “I don’t think they’ll really set anything on fire.”

“They’re perfectly competent,” Fraser agreed. “That man on the left—Jake, I don’t know if you two ever properly met—does the official fireworks displays in Yellowknife most years. Levesque convinced him to come here for this.”

“Wow, nice,” said Ray, and then, “why has there been such a big gap, though?”

“Government-quality pyrotechnician,” said Fraser, “not government-quality fireworks.”

The pyrotechnicians, professional and amateur, got things going again shortly. There were big round fireworks in bright colors, and the golden kind that sparkled down at you, and some in circles and hearts and other shapes. There was one sequence where Ray only realized after the third circle that the preceding shape was supposed to be a 2. 

And at the end, there was a finale that might’ve put any Chicago show to shame. The problem in Chicago had been that no one was ever sure, when a lot of fireworks went off in rapid succession, if it was really the finale or just a sort of intermediate stage. It was extremely obvious here.

The kids shrieked, and Buck Frobisher whooped, and the northern sky was all green and purple and blue and gold, kind of like the northern lights but brighter and even more fleeting. 

“That was almost like an official display,” said Paul, as they were carrying their blankets back to the house. “Those usually do some red and white, though.”

“Those were sold out!” said Constable Smith, popping up beside them. “Or so expensive. Corporal Fraser suggested an aurora borealis theme, and I think it was a great alternative, don’t you?”

Paul agreed, and Ray realized that Smith had been one of the guys down at the lake. 

Even more people wanted to stay over tonight than the last time. It was hard to find a good reason to deny them when they’d all brought their own sleeping bags and promised to be dead quiet and gone by 7am—even if it was a little suspicious of some of them to have brought sleeping bags at all. Ray had predicted it and had picked up extra milk and eggs and bacon.

Just past 3:30am, in the bedroom, Ray asked Fraser if he wasn’t glad Delmar hadn’t been able to make it this time.

“I feel bad not letting them in here,” said Fraser. “They’re packed in like sardines.”

“You want the sardines all surrounding our bed?” asked Ray. 

Fraser laughed. “I was imagining us on the floor, and someone else in our bed.”

“You’re lucky you don’t have to survive up here alone,” said Ray. 

He felt Fraser laugh again in the dark.

▴ ▵

By late July Ray had ceased to feel confused about the tourists. However they’d ended up here, the main point was that they had, and he owed a lot of flights to them. 

Fraser didn’t feel the same, since he had to hunt them down for their illegal hunting and their illegal travel ideas. It was easy to drown, crossing the Mackenzie River. 

One day Fraser walked off a plane just after Ray had landed, sweaty and unhappy.

“We dropped them supplies,” he said. “If they know how to use them I’ll be surprised.”

“They’ll be fine,” said Ray. “Stan will pick them up tomorrow.”

“Were you ever that stupid?” Fraser asked. “Did you ever go out of your way to bury yourself under a landslide for no reason?”

“I almost died in an avalanche with you a couple times,” said Ray.

“I knew what I was doing.”

“Yeah, but that’s what they all think.”

Fraser said nothing for a moment. 

“Uh-huh,” said Ray.

“What?” Fraser snapped.

“Yeah, that’s really what everyone thinks. That they know what they’re doing. Deal with it.”

“There should at least be some kind of...proof of basic competency required before they go out there.”

“You want to assess them yourself? Okay, I’ll call Dave’s dad, and he’ll call people in Yellowknife, and we’ll get a proposal by 2005 and it’ll be way more expensive than just rescuing them all. A lot of them aren’t even incompent, they’re just too cheap.”

“You’re not being helpful,” said Fraser.

▴ ▵

By late August Fraser was in a screaming rage with all of it.

“What you need,” said Ray, prying the tongs out of his grip since he wasn’t doing anything useful with them, “is a vacation.” He flipped the sausages. It was just the right temperature for an outdoor meal, warm enough that you could sit still for a while and cold enough that you couldn’t do it indefinitely. 

“Between our adventure and the building of this cabin, I used up nearly all the days I had remaining,” said Fraser.

“You’ll have more by now. It’s been a year.”

Fraser blinked. “So it has.”

“So I was thinking,” said Ray, “how about a...birthday present?”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“Okay, it’s for, uh...what’s a September holiday? It can be a really early Christmas present too. Point is, we fly somewhere. I'll take care of the tickets. You haven’t been out of town in a year except for when you went up north with Vecchio.”

“Where to?” asked Fraser, and the fact that he’d asked that first told Ray that he would do it for sure.

“I was thinking Florida,” said Ray. “Soak up some sun, drink some pina coladas, get chased by some crocodiles or something. Best of all, don’t have to pay for a hotel.”

“We’re very busy still, I don’t know if I could take the time off…” 

But it turned out he could, and he did, starting at the end of September. The hardest part was to convince him to take a whole three weeks. Ray was gonna have to go back after the first one, and had to nearly sell his soul to get the first one at all, but he didn’t dare tell Fraser that or else he’d have just stayed home. 

The anticipation made the weather delays up from Yellowknife way less tedious. One afternoon he had time for lunch in Inuvik and stopped by to say hi to Maggie. She told him to tell Fraser to bring her back a baby alligator.

▴ ▵

After 19 hours of travel and three intermediate stops, Ray and Fraser landed in Miami. Stella and Vecchio picked them up from the airport in their nice, air conditioned, roomy sedan and brought them to their nice, air conditioned, roomy condo a short drive north. They were only a couple blocks from the beach and you could see the ocean if you looked past the buildings in front of them at the right angle. 

“Just leave your stuff in the guest room,” said Vecchio. “I’ve gotta show you the bowling alley, and I need to get back there now anyway. The evening rush’ll be starting soon and the weekend supervisor is new.”

Ray would’ve liked to have lain on the king bed with his legs stretched out straight for about five hours first, but he was very curious about the bowling alley, and of course there was no way Fraser wasn’t going. Stella came along too, though Vecchio said something about a case while she waved it off and rolled her eyes.

It was a ten-minute walk from the condo, and judging by the area he wasn’t so surprised when it turned out to be...nice. Kind of classy, even, if that was something a bowling alley could be.

“Yeah, it’s for a bunch of rich retired people,” said Stella, when Ray expressed this to her. “They all grew up bowling in Indiana or wherever but now that they’ve made it big they need to do it within a stone’s throw of Miami instead.”

“You like it?” asked Ray, as they stared at the gleaming lanes. There were 20, and 15 were occupied with various groups. Fraser had disappeared with Vecchio to examine the building’s inner workings.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve gotten to know all kinds of new people. And it’s so much better for golfing partners than work has ever been. Back in Chicago, almost everyone I got to know was through work.”

“Isn’t this work?”

Stella shook her head. “Not enough consequences.”

“Huh,” said Ray. That had never been how he’d looked at things. He’d never have survived being a cop or even flying passengers if he had. “Is that how—Ray feels, too?” he asked, and hoped she hadn’t heard the pause before the name. It just felt weird, sometimes.

“He’s the one who came up with that description,” said Stella. “Sometimes he tells people he’s retired—though whatever he says, it’s not exactly his only job either.”

“What is he doing?” asked Ray.

“The easiest way to explain it is that he’s a PI,” said Stella, which sounded like one of her lawyer explanations if he’d ever heard one.

Fraser and Vecchio reemerged from behind the lanes at that point, and the supervisor seemed to have things well in hand despite his inexperience (he had actually supervised several bowling alleys, just not this one). They returned to the condo, where the sun was setting and dinner on the beach was clearly called for. 

“You know we got like two hours of sleep last night?” said Ray, but Stella and Vecchio thought beaches were excellent places to sleep.

“Well, sure, as long as you can drag us back,” said Ray. “Going to sleep on a beach might be nice but I don't really want to wake up on one.” Fraser said nothing, and had been suspiciously silent and unmoving in his spot on the couch for a while now. Ray knew he could sleep sitting up straight.

“It’s worth it,” said Vecchio. “When’s the last time you’ve been to a real ocean beach? Have you been to a real ocean beach?” They all, as one, turned to look at Fraser. He opened his eyes.

“Yes, I have been to a real ocean beach before,” Fraser assured them. 

“Well, not this one,” said Vecchio, “so get your swimsuit. Never thought I’d see you growing soft, Benny.”

“Says the man who practically lives in a retirement community,” Fraser jeered, but he went and got his swimsuit. So Ray sucked it up and went to the beach instead of to bed, and it was pretty nice, after all, once they got there.

▴ ▵

Fraser being Fraser, he wanted to watch the sunrise over the ocean on every clear morning. The first morning Ray was already awake thanks to the time difference, and they stole out of the condo in the faint blue of early dawn.  

The beach was quiet and they were alone aside from a handful of joggers and the gulls calling overhead. The water felt icy cold but Fraser had lured him into their lake often enough that he barely minded. Ray stood just past where the waves were breaking, bouncing up and over them, while Fraser kicked a little farther out. The sun came up and the water all around them sparkled. 

The next morning Fraser tried to be quiet, and Ray had said something the night before about sleeping for twelve hours but when he woke up anyway he realized he would’ve been sorry if he hadn’t.

“Don’t bother being quiet, next time,” said Ray, as they headed down the path to the beach. The sky was partially clouded this morning and an almost threatening orange-red. Something to do with low pressure air masses moving in, but he didn’t have to fly anywhere and so he enjoyed the unearthly glow. “Be as loud as you want.”

“Oh, I will,” Fraser assured him, and Ray felt suddenly, startlingly grateful to have someone who’d wake him up for sunrise.

The waves were chilly and energetic and Ray got saltwater in his eyes more than once. They stayed longer than they’d meant to and Vecchio and Stella were awake by the time they came back, damp and all-over goosebumps. 

“Oh, right, you’re used to the arctic,” said Vecchio.

“Ah, yes, these temperatures can be difficult to handle,” said Fraser, and it would’ve sounded better if his teeth hadn’t been chattering. 

It rained then, so they went bowling and were thoroughly unimpressive compared to their hosts. They went to a new place for dinner, Italian that even Vecchio approved of, and Vecchio and Stella argued about wine the whole way through and it was very funny because Ray couldn’t tell the difference and had also drunk a lot of all of them. After that it was the bowling alley again, and they tried trick shots. Fraser did reasonably well since he was the only person who wasn’t tipsy.

Ray was almost beginning to believe Stella’s and Vecchio’s previous assertions that bowling alleys were very calm places. 

▴ ▵

On Thursday at 11:05am, just after opening, a middle-aged, sandy-haired guy pulled a gun in the entranceway and said they were all hostages. Since the only people there were Ray, Vecchio, and two retired bowling aficionados who’d moved down here from Michigan, they all just frowned at him in irritation.

“Give me the money,” said the guy, waving his gun wildly between them.

“We just opened,” said Vecchio. “There isn’t any money here yet.”

“Where is it, then?” the guy snapped. Ray noticed he had a tattoo of a crocodile on his left bicep. It was kind of mangled-looking. 

“In the back,” said Vecchio, with a long-suffering sigh. “In a safe. I take it that’s where you want to go?”

“Is there some reason I shouldn’t?” asked the gunman, his eyes darting between them.

“Nope,” sighed Vecchio. “Alright, let’s do this. Come along, everyone!”

The gunman waved his gun inexpertly at them as they went. Ray was more worried that he’d shoot someone by accident than on purpose, and that thing had a hair trigger so he didn’t want to risk rubbing him the wrong way. Fraser and Stella were around here somewhere. 

They entered the main room. Lane 3 was out of service, because the machine that reset the pins was broken. He and Vecchio both saw it: a suspicious movement in the darkness where the pins ought to have been. He caught Vecchio’s eye. 

“I can’t believe this!” Ray yelled, stomping to a halt in front of lane 3. “I come here for a vacation and—”

“Oh, you think this nothing more than a vacation spot, is this a joke to you—”

“I expect more respect in a bowling alley!” yelled one of the old guys, and Ray wasn’t sure if he’d caught on to the make-a-distraction thing or if he’d just had a lot pent up inside him.

At any rate, the gunman never saw the ball, rolling unerringly and at top speed towards his feet. He tipped forward; Vecchio grabbed him as he fell while Ray plucked the gun out of his suddenly-loosened grip. 

Fraser and Stella emerged from behind the lane, somewhat cobwebby. Vecchio hardly glanced at them while yelling at the erstwhile gunman about his rights. 

“A citizen's arrest, Ray?” asked Fraser.

“Well, not quite,” Vecchio admitted. “Can’t believe this guy is my first collar in Florida, though. I mean, look at him.” They did, and crocodile-tattoo avoided eye contact. 

“Good bowling, though,” said Ray. 

“He was only one pin,” said one of the retirees. He shook his head. “Could’ve taken more of us down if you’d tried.” 

Ray caught Stella giving the guy a considering look and wondered if this was the beginning of some kind of human-pin bowling league and whether he would get out of Florida fast enough to escape it. 

“Your throw?” Vecchio asked Fraser.

“Oh no, that was Stella,” said Fraser. “She’s a far better bowler, as I would expect of one who gets so much practice.” He beamed, and Stella frowned, because she’d noticed the spiderweb hanging down her forehead. But Ray caught the look Vecchio was giving her, even if she and Fraser were now more preoccupied with the spiderweb. Well, Ray thought, at least Vecchio appreciated her. 

After the gunman was duly taken away and all statements were given, they went to the beach to relax. Vecchio insisted, and he and Stella brought beach chairs and mixed drinks in Gatorade bottles. Ray figured it was the Florida equivalent of going for a walk back home. 

“Nothing like this ever happened until you two showed up,” Vecchio complained.

“Well, there was that guy who thought he was evading property taxes...” Stella suggested.

“That was expected,” Vecchio said. “Excitement you’re prepared for hardly counts. It’s like skydiving, climbing Everest, that kind of thing. I know some guys who’d die of a heart attack if they were ever in your place on the stand, but do you think you’re risking your life? No.” 

“Who says I don’t?” Stella stretched and folded her arms behind her head, and nobody ever looked less like they thought they were gonna die of fright.

It was a calm day, with the waves breaking close to shore. Fraser decided it was as good a time as any to give Ray another swimming lesson, and they splashed around in the shallows as the sky turned pink overhead.

“That Gatorade seems to have improved your technique,” said Fraser bemusedly.

“Oh, are you promoting drunk swimming now?” It was much easier treading water when it was full of salt and only about 6 inches over Ray’s head. He only had to move slightly to the left if he needed a break.

“Of course not,” said Fraser. “If I thought you were actually drunk I would never have brought you out here.”

Ray kicked a little farther out to the right and found it didn’t bother him. It was so much easier than swimming in the hotel pool in Yellowknife with the AC flight attendants and he’d done that once while actually drunk. 

“This is nice,” said Ray, turning in a circle to better observe the pastel watercolor sky overhead. “You know, I could probably even live here, if I had to.”

“Why so grudging?” asked Fraser. “It’s beautiful here.”

“Oh, I know.” It was just different from the kind of beauty he was used to now. To be honest, Ray couldn’t remember the last time he’d been somewhere he couldn’t have lived quite happily. He was pretty sure they’d all been pre-Fraser.

▴ ▵

Friday was the last night Ray was there, and Stella and Vecchio took them out to a nice dinner place on the beach and generally made Ray feel like an honored guest. They still had Fraser for a while longer, so it was a nice surprise. 

“You know, you’re not just a plus one,” said Stella, as they walked down the sidewalk behind Fraser and Vecchio.

“Sure, yeah,” said Ray. He couldn’t imagine Vecchio having him down here without Fraser.

“Hey, Ray likes you,” said Stella. “And I would’ve invited you if he hadn’t. I like hearing about your flying adventures, even if I’m glad I’m nowhere near them. And about life up there in general, you know? We all moved pretty far. Even Fraser. It’s fun to compare experiences.”

“True,” said Ray. “We’ve got avalanches but no alligators, right? And my parents were okay with it. Yours?”

“They were alright,” she said, “once they figured it out, at least.”

“Yeah, exactly,” said Ray.

There was sand on the sidewalk now. It felt nothing like Norman Wells, which never had groups of girls wandering around in bikinis. Here, though, they were only about as startling as the packs of bear-like hunting tourists were there.

They all ate steak at a table by the beach. It smelled of citronella and Ray was pretty sure he’d gotten bitten anyway but he didn’t pay much attention. Back at the condo, Ray surveyed his belongings, strewn over the guest room, and wondered how he still hadn’t learned to pack bags efficiently. 

“Here, let me,” said Fraser in response to his sad look, and then suddenly it was all sorted. Ray flipped the light off, and they lay down on the bed in the darkness, lit intermittently by the headlights of passing cars.

Fraser wanted to know his schedule for the next two weeks, at least the general idea of it. “When I’m on the beach next Tuesday evening,” Fraser explained, “I can think, ah, Ray is flying passengers to Hay River just now. Or mail to Deline. Or is in Yellowknife, out for dinner with Air Canada flight attendants. The imagining is a kind of entertainment. Better than a lot of beach reads.”

“Well, you’d better buy a book, then,” said Ray, “because I have no clue. I don’t remember anything about my schedule.” That was what all the printouts in the office were for, so he didn’t have to keep it in his head. “But I’ll call you about it on Wednesday. I know I’m off Wednesday, at least I’m pretty sure.”

“What if you’re not?” asked Fraser.

“Then I’ll be a day early or a day late.” It hadn’t ever been too big a deal back home. 

“Alright,” said Fraser.

“What’s the problem?” asked Ray, because he knew there was something. “What’s the difference? This has happened a lot already.”

“You were gone, then,” said Fraser. “I wasn’t.”

Ray still had no idea what the difference was. “What, you think I won’t be able to find it? I’ll forget the way? Come on.”

“No,” said Fraser. “I—” He turned his head away. “Two weeks can feel like an eternity at times.”

“Look,” said Ray, “do you trust me by now or what?”

“Of course I trust you!” Fraser sounded offended.

“Well, then we’ll see each other in two weeks, won’t we? What’s the big problem?”

The lights of passing cars flickered across the ceiling while Ray waited for an answer. A fly bumped twice against the outside of the screen and buzzed sluggishly off. 

“It feels wasteful, almost,” said Fraser finally, “voluntarily giving up a whole two weeks of you.”

“Fraser, that’s ridiculous. You’ve spent way more than two weeks’ worth of days away from me at the detachment—”

“Voluntarily, I said.”

“Oh, have you been trying to quit your job and I hadn’t heard about it?” asked Ray. “Because—no, don’t even say it, I wouldn’t ever want you to, because don’t tell me there aren’t nights you go to sleep alone and think thank god I have the bed to myself.”

Fraser shut his mouth, then opened it again, while Ray narrowed his eyes at him.

“I wouldn’t dream of denying it, Ray,” he said.

“There you go, then,” said Ray, satisfied. “So have your vacation. And I’ll be there on the other end when you get back, nothing’s gonna stop me. And nothing’s gonna stop you , either.”

Silence. More car lights and something that sounded like a motorcycle. Ray couldn’t tell if he’d made a point or if Fraser was too confused to come up with an answer, and didn’t really care. 

“If you feel like the next two weeks are wasteful,” Ray suggested, “how about the next two hours?”

“Two hours?” said Fraser, and sounded so dubious that Ray started laughing.

“Or we can go in the other direction and see what we can do in two minutes,” said Ray.

What followed took twelve minutes by the nightstand clock. It would’ve been closer to two if they hadn’t kept cracking up while checking their time. 

▴ ▵

Ray made it back home with only one overly-long wait for a connection. In town hardly anyone had noticed he’d been gone, but they all wanted to know where Fraser was. It made sense, since his schedule was erratic and Fraser’s wasn’t, but it was still kind of annoying.

“He’s on vacation in Florida,” Ray told an old lady at the store who might’ve been Dave’s friend’s aunt and might’ve been someone he’d never seen before in his life. “He’s staying with some friends.”

“Florida!” said the old lady. “I hope he watches out for alligators!”

“He watches very closely,” said Ray. “If he doesn’t bring one back as a pet I’ll count myself lucky.”

Ray spent the end of the week in Yellowknife on a schedule that ended too late at night to get back home. He called Fraser once from the airport and once from Mary Rose’s. The second time, there was a lot of background noise and it turned out Vecchio and Stella had some friends over to meet the Mountie.

“And Ken, who’s a park ranger, is taking us all on a private tour through the Everglades tomorrow morning!” said Fraser.

“Are you sure it’s gonna be morning,” said Ray, because it was late already and the background laughter didn’t sound sober. 

“Oh yes,” said Fraser, “everyone was very clear on that point,” and Ray got a mental image of Fraser in a boat surrounded by people puking over the sides. He’d probably say something about how hopefully the vomit would attract some interesting wildlife.

He was just hanging up when Mary Rose hurried in, with hair-dye-coated gloves still on her hands (living room dye jobs were a perk included in the rent), to tell him that an Anthony was here to see him. So he abandoned his plans of sitting around sadly and wishing he was in Florida and went bar-hopping with the Air Canada flight attendants instead, since none of them were going anywhere until tomorrow afternoon. They were all away from home and family too and knew how to have fun anyway. 

The next day he ran into Chris, the United pilot, waiting on favorable weather and loads to Deline. He rode up with Ray and they talked about Chicago. It was still there. Still the same, and Ray found that strangely reassuring. It didn’t need him. 

▴ ▵

When they’d booked the flights Fraser had scheduled a three-night stop in Chicago on the way back. He had a lot of people to catch up with, after all. On the second of those nights, Ray landed at the airstrip and was informed by Dave’s long-suffering understudy that someone in Chicago kept trying to call him. 

He dutifully called the number back and got someone who sounded exactly like Welsh.

“Ray!” this person shouted (there was a lot of background noise). “Can’t believe we’re missing you here! But I’d better put the lady on, she’s very insistent!”

“Ray!” shouted a new person, and now Ray was pretty sure it was Frannie. “Ray, why couldn’t you come to Chicago?!”

“I have to fly planes!” Ray yelled.

“We’re at Huey and Dewey’s club!” Frannie screamed. “You’ve gotta come next time!”

“I wish I wasn’t missing it!” Ray shouted back, feeling absolutely no shame since it was only about 90% a lie. He’d go check it out sometime, now that Fraser could properly prepare him for the experience. “Was that Lieutenant Welsh there?”

“Oh yeah, he loves it!” shouted Frannie. “Here’s Fraser!”

“Hello, Ray,” said Fraser’s voice, not shouting at all.

“How come you’re the only one not shouting?” said Ray, in a normal voice.

“Sorry?” said Fraser.

“Can you hear me?” yelled Ray.

“Barely,” said Fraser, and Ray honestly couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

“Call me from Calgary if you have time!” Ray shouted. “Love you!”

“I love you too, Ray,” said Fraser. “I’ll see you soon.”

Ray hung up the phone and wondered how many people in Chicago had listened to him. He cared less than he’d thought he would.

▴ ▵

There was weather over the midwest. Ray kept track of the flights and worried, because Chicago to Calgary had been late and Calgary to Yellowknife hadn’t been, but when he didn’t hear anything he relaxed and went for a walk around the lake with Dief. Dief had spent a lot of time with Annie recently and was a little cranky about it. 

They drove into town just past sunset and waited for the flight. It was a clear night and Ray saw its lights well before it lined up with the runway. It was a Twin Otter and probably had a full load of passengers. Fraser came straight over and Ray pulled him into a hug, and somehow they went home without getting into any half-hour conversations with anyone else at the airport. 

There was still some light in the western sky when they pulled up in front of the cabin. Ray jumped around in the pseudo-yard with Dief while Fraser was busy showering. Eventually they retired to the couch, and in the middle of a story about a pastry chef and a mountain climber Fraser broke off rather shamefacedly and said, “but I haven’t even asked you about what you’ve done these past two weeks!”

“You can’t stop there ,” said Ray, since the pastry chef was currently dangling off a balcony on the 18th floor of the Hilton hotel. “Besides, don’t people always want to hear all about how someone liked their gift? I want every single story about Fraser and Vecchio having fun in the sun together.”

“Oh, well then, where was I...”

The fire had mostly burned down by the time Fraser had finished telling about Florida’s various miscreants (crazier than even Chicago, apparently), Stella’s cocktail experimentation (Ray had lived through one of those phases before and figured the only reason Fraser hadn’t died of poisoning was because he regularly licked garbage) and how they’d gotten chased by a crocodile on the way to the airport (this was at least the fourth crocodile and/or alligator chase), and Ray had told him everything he thought he’d want to know (which with Fraser could be literally anything, so it took awhile). Ray had slid down to where his head was resting on Fraser’s shoulder, Fraser all warm and solid down his right side, and he closed his eyes and thought about how nice it was. 

“Thank goodness for that gate agent in Calgary,” said Fraser presently, “or I’d probably still be in Yellowknife right now!”

“There, now,” said Ray sleepily, “was that so hard?”

Fraser took a breath. “You were right,” he said. “I admit it, I needed a vacation, and there is no good reason to refuse to take what time I’m afforded, even if our schedules don’t entirely line up.”

“Not the vacation,” said Ray. “Not the going, I mean the coming back. Was it hard?”

Fraser was quite still against Ray’s side, and Ray craned his neck to look up at him. He was staring straight ahead, an odd expression on his face. 

“Frase,” said Ray, sitting up, and Fraser turned toward him.

“No,” said Fraser. “No, of course it wasn’t.”

“Right,” said Ray. “No matter how many drinks with little umbrellas, and girls in bikinis, and deadly animals to play with. No matter if they’re like your family there, because family can be in a lot of places at once. So I never worried that you were gonna decide that palm trees were more your style, or run off and join some perverted threesome marriage with Stella and Vecchio.”

“If you’re saying that’s what I do,” started Fraser rather hotIy, “I have never—”

Ray held up both his hands. “No, listen,” he said. “I’m not angling for an apology here or anything. I know by now it’s not that you don’t believe me. But just ‘cause I know that it don’t mean I have to like it, okay. I just want you to admit that you do it. That you keep asking how I know. ”

Fraser turned back towards the fire. “Well—yes,” he said. “It’s something I wonder about.” 

“But not all the time, right?” said Ray. “For instance, when you were chasing that guy on the balconies. And don’t tell me you spent every second of those crocodile and alligator chases pining for me, because I know you didn’t.”

“No, of course I didn’t. But I thought of you often. Some nights in that guest room it was nearly impossible to sleep.”

“But at the end of it there was here, right? Dief, and a fire burning, and a warm bed, and a roof built the way you like it, and a view out over the lake and the mountains—”

“And you,” said Fraser.

“Yeah, and me, don’t interrupt. And a town with Maggie who flies over with her terrible pemmican—hey! I said, don’t interrupt! and Annie who bakes you bread, and the constables who worship the ground you walk on, and all these people who are obsessed with greenhouses, and—a whole bunch of people who think you’re great.”

“They think you’re great too,” said Fraser.

“Why’re you saying that like it’s an argument?” Ray demanded. “I know they think I’m great. We’re friends. They’d better think I’m great. What I’m saying is—when you were in Stella and Vecchio’s guest room, feeling a little sorry for yourself for being the only one sleeping alone—hey, shh! When you were feeling sorry for yourself, because you were, did you ever once think, oh, I could fix this if I stayed in Florida?” Ray gave Fraser a sort of sideways jab with his right knee, because he wasn’t moving. 

“No,” said Fraser softly. “Every time I come around the bend and see the lights of this house shining like a beacon in the dark I stop and wonder at it. It’s so much more than I ever imagined I would have.”

“Right,” said Ray. “You know this place, you know where home is, and even if you got stranded in, in China or something you’d find your way back because you’d feel it, here—” he poked Fraser in the center of his chest— “like—like something’s pulling you.”

“Like a compass turning toward magnetic north,” said Fraser.

“Yeah. That.” Trust Fraser to put it prettier. “And it’s not fair of you to think that everyone else doesn't feel all these great big feelings, just because they don’t have the words for it either.”

“I don’t think that,” said Fraser. “It’s simply—difficult to fathom, I suppose, in certain contexts. Which is a failing on my part, not on yours or anyone else’s. Ray, I’ve never doubted you, hard as that might be to comprehend.”

“I know that,” said Ray. “I don’t see what there is to doubt yourself over either, though.”

“Don’t you?” Fraser gave a breathless little laugh. “Blundering into a new detachment, a whole new life here, no chance to prepare, alongside a partner who was somehow a little more sure of it all every time I turned to look?”

“Yeah, well, it was new,” said Ray. 

“But you’re good at being new at things,” said Fraser.

Ray didn’t respond immediately. Instead he watched the reflected flicker of the firelight across the ceiling and thought how that was what his old boss at the 1-9 must’ve meant, the first time he’d gone undercover. 

“You could keep asking me,” Ray offered eventually. “If you want. A new invitation for every new season, so you’d always know I want to stay.”

Fraser shook his head. “I don’t want to ask,” he said. “I want to know, too. Sometimes, now, I think that I do—” He broke off, a little flushed. “I don’t know what else you could be thinking, otherwise.”

“Sometimes is a start,” Ray said. A year ago on the roof it hadn’t been anywhere near sometimes.

“But you know,” said Fraser.

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Ray shrugged helplessly. Because of the way Fraser said his name, or looked at him sidelong while they stood in the produce section at the store—but that was very vague. Because the compass in Ray’s chest wouldn’t work if Fraser wasn’t north—but that was circular reasoning. “Because when I’m around you I like things,” said Ray, “like ice fishing, or weird local volleyball leagues. And people too, that I would never have gotten to know otherwise, like Levesque or Annie. And I think it’s the same for you, like with the airstrip guys, or how I had to talk you into Florida. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. Don’t you?”

Fraser brought his right hand up to cup Ray’s face, following the contours of his cheekbone around and down. “I think I’ve been looking for something—less obvious,” he said. 

“Okay,” said Ray, and leaned into Fraser’s touch, though he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. 

“And it was so obvious that I disregarded it,” Fraser continued. “So you know, because we make each other better, and happier for it?”

“Yeah?” said Ray. “What else are you looking for?”

“I don’t know,” said Fraser, and for once he sounded like he didn’t think it mattered if he knew something or not. 

▴ ▵

October was prime stargazing season. The next clear night that they both had free, they took out their sleeping bags and blankets and made camp in the grass. Ray had a mug of coffee (decaf) and Fraser a mug of some weird bark stuff (somewhere along the line, Ray had learned it wasn’t legally considered tea). Dief ran around them in figure-eights of increasing scope until he finally settled down between their legs. 

Ray kept his glasses on, this time. If he looked hard enough he might see all two thousand. 

Fraser murmured about the stars in a desultory manner. Algol, almost 93 light years away, and Alpheratz and Algenib and other stars, half of whose names seemed to start with A, pinpoints in the all-encompassing dark. Ray pointed out some of the stars and constellations himself. People hadn’t travelled by them all these years for no reason. 

He could feel Fraser’s hair tickling against his neck. The hot drinks were long since finished.

“Ever want to try the Southern Hemisphere?” Ray asked. “All kinds of new stuff in the sky, I hear.”

“I’d like to see the Southern Cross,” said Fraser, rather wistfully. 

“Would you?” said Ray. “Because I know this guy from Chicago—Chris, I think I mentioned him—”

“With the twin girls?” 

“Yeah, him. And he’ll give us passes anywhere we want to go—he’s with United, and they go to Australia. If you want. If we coordinate our vacations next year…” He tipped his head over on the pillow, and met Fraser’s eyes looking back at him. 

“Could we?” Fraser asked, and Ray felt a little glow inside at the idea, to give Fraser something he’d wanted and hadn’t known he could ask for. 

“Yeah,” said Ray. “We could.”

“Oh,” said Fraser. He turned a little towards Ray. “Yes. I’d love to.”

“Spring might be good,” said Ray. “In between the ice roads and the ferries. And I’ll have two weeks of vacation time saved up by then.”

“Yeah,” said Fraser quietly. “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll put the request in once we start doing next year’s vacation.”

There were so many stars overhead on nights like this. More than even Fraser could memorize. And Fraser had his forehead against Ray’s shoulder now, not even looking, so it was just Ray and the vast and overwhelming sky staring back at each other.

“You ever feel like one of those stars?” Ray asked. “Like the light from them, I mean, like it’s been 16,000 years and you only just got here?”

“It’s light,” Fraser said. “It couldn’t have gotten here any faster than it did.”

“Now you’re catching on,” said Ray.