5 June 2004
Due South/Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It's been dark for weeks.

Notes:
I've fucked with geography, slightly, but Due South always did too.  Technically, where Fraser and Ray are is above the treeline.  But what the hell.

Title nicked from Archibald Lampman's poem "Snow."

The song Ray's humming is "Canol Road" by Stan Rogers.





It's been three years now, and he's almost used to the cold.  The dark's taking longer to get to be normal.

It's dark all the time.  They're up above the very-official-arctic-circle, and even if Fraser hadn't shown him on a map, he could tell because (Fraser tells him) they get periods of all-day-dark and all-day-light.  Like summer's all weird sunlight and these clouds of mosquitoes that Ray still notices, no matter how much people swear he'll learn to live with 'em.  The freaking caribou freak out from the bugs, and he can too.

The bugs were a long time ago, though.  Six, eight months.  They've been camped two days travel from Dawson since November sometime, and snowed in since Christmas.  He should have cabin fever like a crazy guy by now.

Fraser sings to him about cabin fever, in the dark.

he laughs and says "it didn't get me this time, not tonight,
I wasn't screaming when I hit the door . . ."

He guesses there are places up here where it'd be easy to go nuts.  The trick's getting used to the quiet.  And not being alone.  So he's up here with Fraser, and a box of husky pups they bought from a kid north of Whitehorse.  Dief's in and out; he hunts in the snow and only comes in occasionally, dragging a dead and frozen-bloody thing to share.

The idea is that the pups'll bond to them.  Make a dog team.  The Mountie detachments have dog teams, but they're different from the teams in most places.  You walk up to somebody's cabin, you're careful for the dogs. Big, hungry, dangerous animals chained in the snow.  Ray has scars all over his right arm from dragging a little girl out of reach of one of those teams.  He's not sure what he thinks of raising their own pack of monsters, but maybe if they feed them enough it won't come to that.  The pups seem friendly enough right now.

Out on a trap-line.  They've got a cabin, supplies for the winter, a couple of rifles, and a trapper's license.  There are still people who come around in the spring and buy furs.  Clean 'em and sell 'em.  It's honest money, and Fraser doesn't have the kind of qualms about it that Ray would have expected.

But, then, he's seen Fraser eat raw, frozen meat, sitting with old women when they were up on the north coast. 

Ray gets restless.  He can't just sit down with some Russian novel like Fraser can, and read for days.  So he goes out to check the line.

Dogteams are okay, but he'll do this with a snowmobile and a pair of snowshoes as long as he can.  It's faster, and the machine casts light.

This flicker of a snowshoe hare across his line of sight.  Lynx shooting after it.  Cat and rabbit and gone.

Most of what he's caught is hare.  Little animals with big feet.  The cat's been at one of them; Ray throws it away into the bush.

Mink in a trap.  It's frozen, clean-smelling in spite of how long it's been dead.  Tiny furry thing in the dark, nothing like the live ones.  It'll bring a lot, in the spring.  Most of the gas Ray uses checking the line is now at least theoretically paid for.

He comes through low pine, down the ridge, and enough of the lamp catches a shape to tell him they've caught something big.  Really fucking big.  Not a wolverine, he thinks; bigger than that.  Can't be a bear.  Too dirt-brown for a wolf.

It isn't dead.

This impossible animal, like a wolf out of somebody's nightmares.  Things that go bump in the night.  Only hurt.  Caught in the cold clamped metal, panting and bleeding.  Tired.

Ray pulls the rifle from his pack.  Shoot it at fifty yards and keep himself in one piece, put the thing out of its misery.

Except, like the things in his dreams, it shifts.  The fur melts and the wolf-perversion face melts and the bones all blur and shrink.  Leaves this skinny, barely-adult man curled naked in the snow, watching him out of raw, exhausted eyes.  His lips are blue at their shadowy edges.

It says, "Hurts."

"Shit."

Ray comes off the snowmobile without snowshoes, sinks to his thighs in the snow.  It's powder in here, not even a decent snowpack.  Has to go back and pull the wood-and-rawhide things loose, lace himself in, struggle over.  Pull the kid into his lap.  It's too dark now to see anything about him, but there's frost on his eyelashes.  He's shaking, hard, but like he might stop in a minute.  Blood loss and shock and cold.

These guys, up along the Mackenzie River, told them stories about ghosts and spirits and things you find in the dark.  This was definitely an animal when Ray pulled in.  He's almost sure.

Who runs naked in the Yukon snow?

But.  Jesus.

There are blankets, cold but real, in his packs.  Hand warmers.  Ray takes ages prying the guy loose, then has to bandage him.  He kinda wishes the mink were a little more recently dead, if only for the warmth it'd give up.

He doesn't know what time it is when he pulls back in to the cabin.  Throws the animal carcasses inside the cage for skinning later and hauls the guy inside.

He doesn't know how Fraser knew.  Maybe he only knew Ray was coming in, cold.  But he has tea going, and when Ray throws the wrapped body at him, Fraser steps in.  Pulls the guy in near the fire and starts pulling blankets off their bed.

Here, at least, there's light.  Coal oil and firelight, yeah, but Ray can see that what he's hauled in is a skinny mess of not-quite-a-kid.  Bad scars and ginger hair, bloody and tattooed, wrapped in hemp-and-bone jewellery.  Like somebody you'd see at a city festival, or a kid from the underground record stores Ray used to go to in Chicago.  Only naked.  Half-frozen and cut up and lost in the arctic.

It's not something he gets to explain to Fraser until the kid's buried in most of their blankets in front of the fire, and Ray's holding tea in both hands.

"I wasn't.  How the hell'd we catch a kid, Fraser?  There's not supposed to be anybody out here."

"There shouldn't be.  There are no roads except the one we came in on.  There are no fly-in camps operating at this time of year.  The mines are miles away."

"So, what?  They threw him out of a plane?"

"He has a distinct lack of bruises, Ray.  I don't think he fell."

"And we didn't hear any planes.  Yeah.  Look, um, Fraser?"

"Yes?"

"If I told you he was an animal when I found him, you'd think I was crazy, right?"

Fraser says, "Tell me."

"I swear, when I pulled up, I thought he was a . . . I dunno.  A something.  Like an animal I hadn't seen before.  Something ugly and weird looking."

Out of the pile of blankets, ". . . wolf"

Fraser says, "What?"

" . . . wolf . . . this trap . . ."

Fraser says, "Show me your arms, then."

Skinny, pale arm sticks out.  Just the one.  It has tattoos on it, up and down.  Fraser traces a few of the lines.  "You're part of the Pacific Northwest pack.  What are you doing up here?"

"we" soft whimper "migrated . . . lost our california land . . . spread out . . ."  The other arm pushes out; the first one retracts.  " m' first winter"

Fraser nods.  "This is Mackenzie range.  Did you ask them permission to be here?"

"mm hm"

"Alright, then.  Thank you.  Go back to sleep."

Fraser pads back to Ray.  Big guy in jeans and longjohns and sweater and extra socks.  It looks natural on him, like fur.  He says, "You caught a werewolf.  We'll have to apologize."

Ray thinks about this for a while.  He doesn't yell; he's proud of that.  Catching Fraser's habits from these years of living with him.  But.

Jesus.

"Werewolf," he says, eventually.

"Yes, Ray."

"Like, vampire, frankenstein, werewolf?"

"Frankenstein's monster, Ray.  Frankenstein himself was the creator.  We have a copy of the novel, if you'd like to check."

"Yeah, but that's a story, Fraze."

"Werewolves, however, are not.  There's been a pack up here for many years. They're intelligent, but quite shy of people, so it's never been a problem.  Until this year, apparently, when the Pacific Northwest pack came up to join them, because none of those werewolves know to avoid traps."

"Werewolf."

"It derives from an Old English word form meaning 'man-wolf'.  Though the bite is still the most common means of transformation, many packs are familial."

"m'cousin.  bimme"

Fraser nods.  He gets up, walks over to the closet and digs for more blankets.  Lays them on the bed.

"Are you coming, Ray?  Or did you want to read?"

"Werewolf."

"I'm sure he'll still be there in a few hours.  His leg wound will heal more quickly than a wound of yours would, but it's hardly instantaneous."  Fraser piles logs onto the fire.  He must have brought wood in earlier; there's a huge stack of it by the door.

Eventually, he gathers Ray up and takes him to bed too.  Pulls him in and wraps up behind him.  Both of them wrapped in fleece and wool, spooned up for warmth, facing the fire.  Ray watches the werewolf sleep under his pile of blankets for a long time.

---

He wakes up and the werewolf's wearing his clothes, sitting cross-legged on the couch and talking to Fraser very seriously about Mark Twain.  Messy hair a few shades darker than Ray's pokes up.  Bits of it are dyed blue.  The hand-wave suggests they're coming to some really essential point about Puddn'head Wilson.

"Good morning, Ray."  It's dark, but Fraser has an interior clock better than Ray's wristwatch.  After their first winter, when Ray slept all the time and for way longer than he should have, he learned to trust Fraser to keep him on schedule.

There's a werewolf eating their bannock and strawberry jam.  Licking his fingers, too.

Fraser says, "Perhaps some introductions are in order."

The werewolf sticks out a hand.  "Oz."

"Um, Ray."  Ray shakes the hand.  Its nails are painted black.

"Cool."

"Bannock, Ray?"

---

Oz has good taste in music.  Great taste in music.  Way better than Fraser.  And he can sort of hum whatever song he's talking about until Ray can hear it too.  He can sit still for longer than anyone Ray's ever seen, except for Fraser.

The pups, once Fraser'd let them out of the lean-to behind the cabin, were interested but wary.  There was a long, weird hour while Oz crouched down to the ground and sniffed and growled and the pups all showed their bellies to him.

Since then, though, they apparently think Oz is one of them, became sometimes Ray'll look up from a book and see Oz asleep in a puppy pile.  So much for the dogs bonding with Ray.

And.  Oz apparently isn't going anywhere, but it's not that they quite want him to.  Cabin fever hasn't been fatal yet, but there's this extra kick to having a third person around, like Ray's got a social life back.  Or an extra dog, depending on the circumstances.

Three days, give or take, before Diefenbaker comes back.  He goes hunting a lot.  Out in the dark, he does wolfish things that seem to be good for his mental health.

The pups all defer to Diefenbaker.  They smell him coming and all crawl back behind Oz.  Oz's nostrils flare, and he crouches.  Lays down low while the wolf bounds in.

White bared fangs and all this growling, and Ray tries to remember the last time Diefenbaker actually struck him as scary.

Then this long tussle that ends with Oz on his back, belly bared, and Diefenbaker on top of him.  Oz tilts his head back and whines softly.  Diefenbaker leans in, bites Oz's throat without breaking the skin, and steps off.

Oz stays down while Diefenbaker greets Fraser.  Just rolls to his belly and lies prone, watching.  Without looking at Ray, he says, "What's wrong with him?"

"Dief's deaf."

"'k.  Thanks."

Diefenbaker goes to greet Fraser.  They have this long, mostly Fraser-sided conversation about Oz, where he came from and whether he's trustworthy.  Oz stays on the floor, curled around himself and hugging the nearest puppy.  Eventually, Dief comes back, less aggressively, and smells Oz again.  Keeps sniffing and pushing until Oz peels off his sweater and jeans, and blurs.  And there, that is what Ray saw.  Not quite a wolf, not the way Dief's a wolf, but definitely animal.  Still low to the ground and submitting to the check-out.

Fraser says, "Satisfied?"

Dief huffs and Oz changes back.  Slides back into his clothes and sits on the floor, looking doggy.  After a while, he starts humming some ancient Cure song.  Ray joins in.

---

Oz hunts.  He comes out of the dark naked, dresses in the lean-to, and Ray almost doesn't notice there's blood around the edges of his mouth.  Dief goes too, sometimes.  There are howls, off in the distance, but Oz's pack hasn't come back for him.  Ray suspects that smarts.  Like, a lot, probably.

It doesn't show much.  Just, occasionally Oz slides closer to him or Fraser, leans into the resulting head-scratch, the same one they give Dief when he butts them.  But Dief's a dog, and Oz isn't.  He's.  Something. A kid, mostly.  A transplanted Californian with a strange personal problem and no family left.

If he walks in and finds Oz with both arms wrapped around Fraser's waist, leaning into him, Ray might bristle a bit, but he understands.

They're locked in for the "night," lights down and just the fire and Oz asleep in a heap of puppies.  Ray went to bed in multiple layers, and Fraser had a few on himself, but it's silver-beautiful outside the cabin, and the room's almost warm, and in the course of an hour of kissing, most of their clothes come off.  Nearly-naked and wrapped around each other, Ray mostly underneath and hooking a knee around Fraser's hip.

If in the middle of that -- what's honestly great, slightly teenaged sex with this guy he somehow wound up in the Canadian north with -- Ray looks over at Oz, what does it mean that Oz is watching them?  Calm and maybe a bit wistful.  What does it mean that Ray doesn't say anything, just locks his mouth to Fraser and fucks like he's involved in some kind of bizarre fetishist porno thing?

---

Fraser checks the trap-line.  Ray settles down on the floor of the cabin and re-starts his quest to make the puppies like him.  Oz is ignoring them.  He's exercising his not-a-dog privileges by lying on the couch with a book.

The pups like Ray alright, but not enough.  He needs them to be his.  Any team will follow Fraser; he has this freaky dog-nature.  Ray usually has to let someone else drive, and if he's going to live up here, that won't work.

So he's down on the floor, playing with them, trying to make himself into a dog so they'll love him more.  And eventually, with the addition of a certain amount of food to the mix, they play back.  Jump on him and gnaw at him and then he's part of this mass of fur on the floor.  Warm puppy-pile (half-grown huskies, now, but who cares?) and happy Ray.

Tomorrow or the next day, he'll take them out for a run.  It's dark, but if they love him this much, they should stay close.  He has to trust them that far.

He settles in on the rug with the dogs.  Just sorta drifting.  His sleep cycles are a mess.  He sleeps all the time, not that it matters much.  Wakes up later, curled in front of the fire with dogs all around him and Oz's thigh pillowing his head.  Oz is reading one of Fraser's battered paperbacks.  Crime and Punishment.

Oz leans in and kisses him.

---

The longer Oz spends with them, the less dog-y he seems, like he's crawling back up towards being human.  Ray chops wood and Oz helps him carry it.  They debate the merits of freeze-e pops versus conventional Popsicles.  Oz may be from California, but Ray knows sugar; he can hold his own.

It's eerie, having a conversation about sun and warmth and sugar in a world where it never gets light.  Ray turns away from stoking the fire, after, and sees Oz with both arms wrapped around himself, and he wonders, really wonders, what makes a kid like that run away.  Okay, werewolf, but Oz is so basically likable.  He's not talkative, but he's sociable and intense, and Ray suspects there's a fairly stable family waiting for him somewhere. 

Yeah, a family of werewolves.  Suburban werewolves.

"Hey," Ray says.  "C'mere."  And kisses Oz when he comes over.

When Fraser comes in, Ray and Oz are curled up on the bed, covered with an extra blanket but not actually under-the-covers.  It's not how Ray wanted to tell him.  Fraser's . . . he knows about snow and werewolves, but he has issues that Ray's still digging his way into, five years on.

Impending doom.

Except, Oz says, "Oh, hey.  No.  Not like that."  He unrolls himself from Ray and the quilt and crosses the room.  He's not a kid, not really.  Twenty-something, a young'n only in comparison to Ray.  He steps in and picks up Fraser's hand.  Kisses that.

He's so small.  There's no way he could reach to kiss a man who wasn't reaching down to him, but he makes it work.  Fingers like romance.  And just this tiny belly-showing-roll saying, he's all yours.

---

Fire and fur.

Him and Fraser, naked in bed, and Oz in there between them.  He's little, narrow like a girl, like Ray remembers Stella being, and nothing like Fraser.  Nothing like Ray himself.  But Oz is friendly and touching, nosing into Fraser's neck, rubbing a hand along Ray's arm.

Oz wiggles when he's happy.  Like a puppy, but without the kinky associations.  He's more ginger than the pile of malamutes in the corner; that'll have to do for a distinction.

Fraser's mouth over Oz's shoulder locks on Ray's mouth. 

Ray wasn't sure.  Sex between him and Fraser's never been a stable thing.  Not that he thinks Fraser's going to leave or anything.  Fraser has the fidelity of rock.  But he goes away, in his head, or goes and sits in the snow, and every time Fraser looks at Ray, Ray wonders if there's that image of a house in flames.  The lovers Fraser trusted too much.

This could be so, so bad.

But Oz isn't . . . he's not asking for either of them.  He was just lonely or something.  And intensely into both Ray and Fraser.  So.  Sex thing.

Not sex sex.  The slippery stuff doesn't mix well with wool blankets at the best of times, but this is less than that.  Naked kissing touching.

And after a while Oz turns over and nuzzles Ray for a while.  Runs his little fingers over Ray's skin.  Green-hazel sparkle so close to Ray's eyes when they kiss.

Or Fraser wrapped around Ray, and Oz leaning back a little.  Like he can see things at this six-inch distance that he couldn't see from six feet way.  And maybe he can.  There've got to be insights in watching a raw-muscle and baby-faced Mountie slide down Ray's skinny-rangy body and suck him.  Big lush mouth wrapped around Ray's cock.  Seems like he ought to be social, include Oz in this somehow, but it's not an act designed for three, and anyway, he's never been able to give sex-Fraser less than his full attention.

And Fraser only watches him when Ray crawls down after, curls up with a blanket-shell at his back and gives it back.  Sucking Fraser's cock like he was born to it.  Something he'd been waiting to learn all his life.  Pink-dark flesh and male-skin smell and Fraser-taste.  Muttering a bit at the back of his mouth while he sucks, vibrating them both.

Oz's eyes glitter in the dark, and for just a second Ray feels go away, this is my cave spark out of his own eyes toward the boy in the corner.

---

It's not like they kick him out in the snow.  There's still food and fire and puppies and blankets and the occasional kiss.  But Oz goes out more.  He disappears for hours in the dark, and Ray hears him howling.

Ray's reading, legs across Fraser's lap, when Oz comes in.  Changes into human form but stays naked.

Soft ginger forehead brushes Ray's.  Butterfly kiss.

Fraser says, "Will you tell them we're sorry we hurt you?"

"You bet.  They're not really mad.  Said I should be more careful."

Ray says, "You know you can come back, right?"

"Yep."  One more kiss, on his mouth, careful.  "I'll be okay."

It's almost daylight out.  The sun pushes hard at the horizon lately, and the light bends up to them.

Oz stands in his wolf skin in the snow and howls.

Other howls answer him.  Werewolves aren't quite like wolves.  He's heard Dief baying from miles away, and it sounds nothing like that.  This is almost like voices. 




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