Snowblind [pg13] Fraser/RayK
TItle: Snowblind
Author: queenklu
Beta by: shri_amato
Pairing: Fraser/RayK
Rating: pg13 dammit
Word Count: ~2k
Summary: Brain sees green, thinks green. Eyes see green, think red.
A/N: This is for linnet_melody from my Twenty One 21st B-Day Prompts! Due South: dawn on the tundra. (Don't care if it's sad, or sleepy, or nostalgic, or porny. As long as there's color and the chill of the morning.) I HOPE YOU LIKE IT BB!
First time Ray got a look at the tundra that wasn’t in a box-like, not on a postcard or a TV set but everywhere, all over the place, a whole lot of frozen going on forever in every single direction, even over his head-he had snow in places snow should never be, including but in no lucky way limited to where it had clumped all over his eyelashes. Like his vision wasn’t bad enough.
Then again, there wasn’t much to see. Oh there were trees, occasionally. Or what he assumed were trees-fuzzy black unmoving pinpoints off on a horizon of big bright white nothing that hurt to look at, like when he stared at Fraser until the serge burned into his retinas and left a Fraser-shaped imprint on things even when he looked away.
Should’ve maybe figured earlier that he had a special Fraser-shaped problem. Just, so many of his problems were Fraser-shaped already-how was he supposed to see that this one was poking its head up like a scrubby tree in the middle of an ice field?
The point, though: Now he knew. Now that he was hallucinating.
~*~
One thing Ray’s eyes had going for them, really the only thing-though sometimes Stella used to say she liked them and that was nice, but this was pre-Stella and Ray would’ve traded eyes with the ugliest thing on the planet if it meant no more coke-bottles-were the color wheels. Ask him to read the bottom line on the E-chart and he’d wind up spelling something dirty on accident just guessing, but throw down a bunch of colored dots and ask what number he saw and he could rattle ‘em off like a champ. Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down. 37, 49, 56, thank you very kindly.
He was in a class once in elementary school where the teacher had them stare at an American flag with all wonky colors-green instead of red, black instead of white, yellow instead of blue. They all stared at it, and then they stared at the white, scuffed up, pencil-holed ceiling, and there it was, Old Glory burned into their eyeballs in all the right colors.
Ray almost fell out of his chair, fingers going clammy and shaky before he sat on them. His eyes had never lied to him about color before. But then the teach was explaining color perception and all the other kids were going ‘ooo’ so Ray shut up, and calmed up, and actually retained information.
Brain sees green, thinks green. Eyes see green, think red.
~*~
Ray had this bad dream in the hammock dangling off that cliff-face. In the dream Fraser crawled in the hammock with him, and okay, so that wasn’t so bad and Ray was kind of grooving on the idea of sharing body heat until he realized that Fraser’s parka was made of snow, crumbling under his hands as Ray pawed at Fraser, trying to get the stuff off him before he froze, Fraser was going to die, Fraser needed to get warm, Christ, get warm Frase get Frase warm, but Ray kept digging and digging until Fraser crumpled into nothing but snowflakes.
He jerked awake with his heart pounding and Fraser calling his name, thick mittened hand patting Ray’s face. Ray turned his head and sank his teeth into the thumb of Fraser’s glove before his eyes teared up enough to melt the snow on his eyelashes.
When he did blink the frost away Fraser’s ice-blue eyes were staring down at him, blown wide open with worry and surprise. His thumb flexed in the leather between Ray’s teeth, and Ray felt so warm so fast it was like being dropped in the sun.
“Oh dear,” Fraser murmured like it wasn't the first time he'd said it, and then said a bunch more stuff that was just gibberish, honestly, and then Fraser tugged his hand away and tugged his big glove off so he just had on the little brown leather ones and fed him pieces of pemmican like Ray was a baby bird up in this nest.
“D’you think I’m a baby bird, Frase?” Ray asked between bites, ignoring the dim part of him that wanted to reach out and lick Fraser’s fingers in favor of chewing.
Fraser frowned. “I think you’re hypothermic.”
“What kind of bird would I be?” Because obviously Fraser needed to take this seriously. “Not a city bird, okay? I could be a tundra bird?”
Fraser’s hand brushed over his hair so soft Ray would have thought he was imagining it, only he was pretty sure he wasn’t that good at imagining things. Not when he was using every last scrap of talent he had to tell himself that was love shining down from Fraser’s worried eyes.
“Ptarmigan,” Fraser said, and Ray had absolutely forgotten what they were talking about.
“Come again?”
“Ptarmigan,” Fraser stressed like he was just saying it wrong. Then, “You would make a fine ptarmigan, Ray.”
“Pea-brained and plain-looking, gotcha,” Ray nodded, awake enough now with the sour taste of pemmican on his tongue to realize how fucking cold he was.
“Hardly,” Fraser said, sounding kind of funny as he snatched his hand back and slipped his mitten back on. “The Willow Ptarmigan or Willow Grouse has a lovely mottled gold-brown plumage in the summer, and unlike every other species of grouse the male shows remarkable loyalty to his mate and hatchlings. They’ve been documented to attack Grizzly Bears in order to protect their nest.”
“Pea-brained,” Ray mumbled, but he felt shy and stupid about it. Oh man, Ray hoped they could wait on the Grizzly fighting until they made it off the mountain. Because yeah, Ray was dumb enough to face down a bear for Fraser, so dumb enough, because Fraser was his-
Oh shit.
“Any chance ptarmigans hibernate in the winter? Like a polar bear? There such thing as a polar ptarmigan? What do you think they’d-“
“Ray,” Fraser huffed. “You’re blithering.” He sounded down, like maybe he was disappointed about Ray’s ability to hold his own against hypothermia, but Ray would rather have him disappointed about that than…Heyyyy. Ray was actually asking about some dumb Canadian wildlife and Fraser was turning down the opportunity to educate him?
“Frase, you sick?”
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Fraser asked instead of answering, and Ray’s eyes got wide.
“Whoa! Fraser, where’d your fingers go?”
“I’m still wearing my gloves,” Fraser said like that meant something, which Ray had to figure it did.
~*~
Ray’d seen things that weren’t there before, no biggie. Anyone who grows up in the kind of slums Ray lived in tried weed least once in their life before, and Ray’s once was behind the rusty bleachers with Bobby Donovan. The sunlight through the cracks was liquid yellow, dripping over the skin of his belly bared by his rucked up shirt. He poked at it and snickered, and Bobby tried licking it up like melted butter before they dissolved into helpless giggles. Ray got hard, but Bobby said that his brother told him that happened sometimes, and offered to help take care of it.
Ray was pretty sure he hallucinated Bobby having about four hands at once, too, but it still freaked him out bad enough to not try weed again. He had a hard enough time seeing things that were there-he didn’t need to worry about things that weren’t.
He didn’t stop thinking about boys and their hands, though.
~*~
That dream gnawed at Ray when he was tucked against Fraser’s back, face pressed to the fur of Fraser’s hood, trying to explain about seeing red and thinking green and all that, but he didn’t think Fraser got it. And later when he sidled up to Fraser by the fire and tried to get a read on him, hinting hey hey when we’re back in Chicago ol’ buddy ol’ pal, and Fraser-Mr. PC-did a little blithering of his own about thousands of miles and months without seeing each other and Jesus Christ, Ray had never hated the Ice Queen more for interrupting, but he might’ve hurt Fraser if she hadn’t, so.
Ice King and Queen. Ice Royalty.
He kept seeing Fraser all frozen and made of snow tangling with the image of that smile on Fraser’s mug when they crash-landed in the tundra. Fraser was going to stay. He couldn’t see how lonely he’d be up here, not after he’d acl-ackle-got used to being around people. Fraser’d freeze up again sure as anything, maybe even worse than before.
The way Ray saw it, a good chunk of his duties as partner to Benton Fraser was standing next to him with an imaginary hair dryer melting off the freezer burn.
But Ray tried picturing forcing Fraser to come back and hit a wall. Again and again he hit that wall until he was dizzy with it. Could not knock that smile off Fraser’s face for the world, didn’t have it in him, because...because Fraser wasn’t made of snow. He was made of tundra with the snow on top.
Ray couldn’t melt snow all the way in Chicago. But he wasn’t sure his extension chord reached all the way to Canada.
~*~
“You and I are nothing like your old man and Buck Frobisher.”
“What?” Fraser grunted blearily, and tried to fight Ray off him in a half-awake flail Ray was having none of. “Ray, what on earth-“
Ray loved sleeping bags, officially. It was no work at all to pin Fraser down, just by flopping on top of him wrapped up in his own. They were like human-sized caterpillars bundled up in this cocoon, and tents were awesome too because once Fraser woke up enough to realize where they were he stopped struggling so as not to knock down the tent.
“You know as smart as you are, sometimes you make a ptarmigan feel brainy. Wake up, focus.” But Fraser’s eyes were already wide open and staring at him, frowning like he was reassessing Ray’s clean bill of health one of the Medi-Mounties gave him after making him drink his weight in water.
“Ray,” Fraser said, sounding weary on down to his bones, “It has been a really trying day-“
“It’s officially tomorrow, Frase, and you know what happens tomorrow?” He’d stayed up hand picking these words to the beat of Fraser’s even breathing, and Ray took one of his own. “Tomorrow I call Welsh, and he asks me when I’m set to get my ass on a plane. And since you haven’t said it, I’m just-fuck, I’m just gonna.” He couldn’t do this, not so close to Fraser, so he sat up with a slither of nylon, still wrapped in his bag.
“I am not particularly interested in a cross-continental relationship of the partnership kind with you. I am interested in the up close and entirely personal relationship of the relationship kind. With you. If that is not, uh, okey-dokey, then a working relationship of the regular kind is okay, for as long as you’ll let me stick around. I can also take a hint, if that’s what this is, despite what you may think of me and The Hint not getting the memo in regards to the Stella. So if this is the hint, then, you know. Tell me. Don’t spin me yarns about Buck Frobisher and your dad, okay, because-‘cause we aren’t them, Frase, don’t you see that? They’re like, two heads on the-no, like some trick two-headed coin, which is great, greatness, it worked for them but they were always looking two different directions, all the time, and never looking at each other and, and Fraser I’m always gonna be looking at you.”
Fraser’s breathing was kind of funny, once Ray calmed down enough to listen to it. And it didn’t matter if his expression was frozen, because Fraser thawed under his mouth.
~*~
Tundra in the spring was on Ray’s top five favorite things, followed by tundra in autumn when everything turned red-gold-brown like ptarmigan feathers and sunset on Fraser’s bare skin, and winter when the packed ice in the driveway got as blue as Fraser’s eyes when he smiled up at Ray from their white flannel sheets. But in spring, it was like the earth showed off everything that had always been in Benton Fraser from the get-go, the Fraser Ray spent two years waving a hair dryer looking for.
The little stubby trees struggling up through the snow turned to great big twisting giants, the sky went soft and welcoming, and all this wildlife Ray never would’ve guessed at came out to frolic.
Turned out Benton was a real big fan of frolicking. And without the ‘fro’ but everybody knew that.
Bring on the grizzlies, Ray thought with a gulp of instant coffee, and kept his eyes on the horizon.
THE END