by Misha
Author's website: http://www.madstop.org/misha
Disclaimer: The characters, alas, are not mine. This was not created for profit, more's the pity.
Author's Notes: Thanks to Ali, for betaing and making me post.
Story Notes:
Sleeping Beauty
(c) February, 2002 Misha
The characters, alas, are not mine. This was not created for profit, more's the pity.
Rated PG for implied slashy bits.
Sleeping Beauty is an old tale. The story's been distorted a little over the years, so I've attempted to fix it.
Once upon a time, there was a prince who fell asleep and was awakened. There was an evil witch, but that bit about the roses was made up.
Inuktitut didn't have a word for Chicago snow. Fluffy snow, drifting slowly down. Wet snow, dry snow, snow that made good snowballs, snow that would melt and freeze and turn to ice, snow on the ground, falling snow... Yet there was no describing the filthy black masses, streaked with yellow and brown that had once been the purest crystals drifting slowly earthward. Dirty snow.
Benton Fraser had always loved the cold purity of the Northern snows. Now he felt an odd kinship with the spattered, pitted bank of dirty Chicago snow just outside his apartment building. His back gave him a sharp twinge of discomfort, only verging on pain, and his legs shook with fatigue. His physical condition was nothing compared to the stain on his soul.
He could just imagine the spreading darkness that Victoria, angel, demon, had left behind her. Her touch lingered, shattered glass and oily plastic snowflakes clinging to a solitary key, or the oily brown stain pooling, cooling in the Chicago snow. His mind touched briefly on the question of her current location, and shied unhappily away.
No, he would not think on her. Instead he would head North with his good friend Ray, the man who had, his mind stumbled still over the event, shot him while aiming for V-... aiming for Her. He would head North and let the North soothe him, let the cool snows and aching, cruel beauty of that place cover his heart, and make it sleep, and heal.
And so he went. And a year passed. And he did not love.
There was a perilous journey. There are always perilous journeys. Still, no roses.
The next time Fraser went to the North, it was no longer winter. He had lost himself, and found himself again, and in that finding, had woken the sleeping, aching place of in his heart. He went North to heal, but found only the chase.
For Fraser, there was no place for self in the chase. His quarry was ahead of him, but only just. The track was fresh, almost painfully obvious now. Damp stains of ground water oozed up in the shallow wells of muddy boot prints.
He wanted to lean over and taste the water, the mud, the sheer exuberant life that was forcing him onward, but he knew the taste of mud, and it was nothing next to the taste of blood and saliva -- blood from his lips, cracked from wind and the heavy, panting chase.
No, there was no need to taste now, not with the hot scent of his prey almost within reach. Water trickled, thundered nearby, and the wind whispered of life as it sang through the trees. This was no snowy haven for peace.
Later, he promised himself as he finally brought his quarry to bay, he would rest and heal later.
There was something in there about a castle, too.
Home had long been a fleeting thing for him, never the strained sense of place that he remembered from his childhood, or the anonymous lodgings at a dozen different postings that were but a gateway to the North and the chase. He'd been content, here and there, but had never truly found himself at home.
In Chicago, he'd first found out what it truly was to have a home, and family, and bittersweetly, his taste of his friend's family only pointed out to him just how much he didn't have. The destruction of his housing, the place that could have been a home, had he tried, sent him into a mind-numbing shock that was only compounded by his friend's disappearance.
Everything had changed in a hail of gunfire and a rain of yellow ducks, and Benton found himself staring at the closet door at the oddest of times, contemplating a string of jalapeno lights, a turtle and a pair of thick glasses. He wondered at these times if the new Ray was demon or angel, and if demon, would the scar on his soul rip open and spill out?
The kiss was more toward the end than the beginning, but it was a good middle.
North again, though not quite so far this time. Gold and pirates, and partnership fracturing around the ripping scar within. All the frustration, that angry mass of hate that he carried around with him, was slowly seeping out, poisoning that quick, easy camaraderie he'd first established with his new Ray.
And yet, the chase was hot on his tongue, the iron-tang almost lost under the taste of the Lake, but present and inexorable. Ray was part and parcel of that taste, his blood and his breath bound somehow to Benton in the belly of a sinking ship.
The kiss changed nothing. No, that meeting of mouths merely saved Ray, and him, and continued the chase in a slow slide towards true partnership. It was the sweet slap of metal to palm, the kiss of gun to hand and the crystal perfection of the end of the hunt, that kiss was what ripped the last of the scar away. Some kisses happen across a distance that mere lips cannot bridge.
He bled again, but the poison was gone, and the wound would heal without the ugly mass of keloid that Victoria had bequeathed him. He bled clean, blood finally replacing the last of the ice in his veins, bound up with nothing but the presence and partnership of Ray Kowalski. No demon he, nor angel, just the tarnished soul of a man, a good man.
Poets say things about thorny paths, but they tend to muck with the details.
Standing in the pristine snowbank, surrounded by white silence with only one man for company, Benton Fraser smiled. He was home. His smile grew with quiet wonder. This was more - he was Home. His blood sang with the chase, and as Ray struggled out of the snow, his heart beat a little faster for the presence of his partner.
This was his territory, cruel snow and cold, life-threatening landscape and hard, awesome beauty. It was his land, his chase. He and Ray would run this race together, run it, and survive, and triumph.
How could they not? To be sure, there were dangers aplenty, not the least of which was the niggling commentary from his father, sowing doubts between them, but it mattered little. His soul was healed, awakened fully. He could trust his partner, his family, his Ray with all he had. No obstacle would withstand that.
And they lived happily. The bit about the roses? Fraser always did prefer snowdrops.
Feedback welcome at <misha@drizzle.com>
End Sleeping Beauty by Misha: misha@drizzle.com
Author and story notes above.