Gift Horse	 Gift Horse by Julad

 Author's webpage: http://members.dencity.com/anhedonia/julad/

 Author's notes: My first due South story, but, ah, probably not my last.
An awful lot of people are to blame for this, and I'm sure I'll show them
the proper gratitude eventually. (g) Feedback and criticism welcome.

  

 All this big white, with its scratchings of black and green, is made of
magic. I just know it in my gut, and I feel it in my lungs, and I see it,
right in front of me. It's just there, big as the horizon and sometimes
weird like twisted black trees, but always close as the glittery sparkly
frost on Fraser's eyelashes when I wake up; so close I can reach out and
touch it and it touches me back until his eyes open and he smiles. The
kinda magic I always already knew was out there somewhere, and knew if I
found it I could just look at it and know it was real. I found it in
Chicago but I didn't know Fraser was just one little piece of it, a
snowflake that blew into the city and charmed what it landed on, and did
it without melting because it was still connected to here. 

 And silence is all settled down around me, like white and quiet just go
together. When my eyes see exactly what my gut is telling me, and my brain
isn't asking, *what's the catch what's the trick what's the angle gimme
the answer*, nothing needs saying. We talk, yeah, for hours sometimes, but
its about music and muscle cars, and existentialism, which I haven't
really figured out, and how to make a fire that doesn't go out, which I'm
getting good at. 

 We don't talk about the Hand of Franklin any more. We never mentioned
Vecchio. I haven't said *Chicago* since we went in the opposite direction
from it. Most of all we haven't said anything about the the layers fading
from between us and weaving around us, so that one morning when I woke up
there was a hand molded loosely around my stiff and I wasn't too
surprised. I just pushed into it a bit, and it squeezed some, which felt
pretty good, and I came. Then I squeezed the cock that was in my hand,
until Fraser buried his face in my neck and sighed, and we slept a bit
more before we got up and kept going. We wake up like that a lot now, and
sometimes it happens before we go to sleep, and sometimes we lay down
together and don't sleep at all. 

 Obviously it's summer, because the sun just winds around like some weird
lassoo or a hypnotising thing, and it doesn't exactly go down, the world
just tilts a bit so that it's out of sight for a while. I'm wired as
Silicon fucking Valley and the sun spinning in circles makes me think
we're walking round and round the North Pole. Fraser tried to explain the
path the sun really would take if we walked around the North Pole at
midsummer, but I got so dizzy I fell down and rolled around in the snow
like a total boonie. 

 But he said midsummer, which is definitely in June or something, and I
remember March the Eleventh, and even though Welsh said *as long as you
need*, I really don't think he meant *don't worry bout calling or coming
back or any of that freaky uptight stuff*. So I finally broke the spell
and said something, maybe it was two days ago, maybe three--who knows,
when it's day all the time? It was just something like, *haven't we seen
that mountain before, cause I remember that part there, it looks like an
eagle*. And Fraser looked up at it and said that he didn't want to
invalidate me or insult my eyesight or anything, but it didn't look like
an eagle to him. 

 Later, when it got less bright and we tried to sleep, with my fire on one
side of me and Frase on the other, I said, *are we lost?* 

 Fraser rolled back and looked at the wishy-washy sky and said, *to be
lost you have to want to be somewhere you're not*. 

 *Okay*, I said, cause it made sense in that way of his that I like.
Fraser rolled close again and pulled the furs tighter around us and we
went to sleep together. 

 Now, though, I wonder just how dumbassed I was to say anything, because
I've walked over a ridge, and ridgy-didge, there's a cabin. It sits there
like a huge fat beetle, the first shelter we've had in, who knows, weeks
or maybe months or however long, but I'm not happy to see it. It gives me
that stomach jolt, like when your car goes off a pier, or when you fall
out of a window, and for a second all you know is that you're really,
really hollow inside. That thick box of logs looks like a sign pointing to
the city, and I didn't know until now that I don't want to go back yet. If
we were going around in circles, Frase, I'm not complaining, let's just do
us another lap. We drive right up to the door while Fraser looks all
inscrutable, and I swear I'll be quiet from now on, swear it silently to
the snow and the sky. 

 But Fraser says that he and Dief smelled a blizzard--what, like you'd
smell bad socks?--and it would be a good idea to have some shelter for it.
And besides, he says, opening the cupboards and showing me, the place is
*plenished*, with bread and cheese and canned vegetables, and our diets
have been quite deficient in something-or-other lately. I suppose now I
can see that our rations ran out a while back, and we've mainly been
eating rabbits whenever Frase and the dogs catch them. So the two of us
sit down at some empty table in the middle of whoknowswhere and eat, and
the hard bread tastes so good, and the bitter cheese, I can't stop eating
it, and jeez, louise, I never licked the plate clean after canned peas
before, but I sure am now. 

 I was such a dumbscuzz before this. Back in Chicago, I told him, *food
only tastes better in the Yukon because you get hungrier there*. I was so
fucking wrong. Food tastes better out here because it just plain tastes
better, and if I wasn't this hungry all the other times I ate, then I was
just plain missing out, and a sucker. Telling him that makes him smile,
the way he smiles when he's secretly pleased but not saying, and when I
want to know why, he gives me a look which is a tight beam of juggernaut,
the Mountie-polite version of Just You Wait Mister. It shuts my trap so
fast I can hear my guts throbbing. That look is promising something like
the end of cold buddies-in-the-wilderness groping and the start of
something way hotter, and I ain't gonna say a word to risk it. 

 It happens in the funny round bathtub which took hours to get ready, all
that putting snow in a cauldron and chopping all that wood and starting a
fire so that, crickle-crackle, like magic, the wood turns itself into coal
and the snow into hot water. This is the kind of magic I really believe
in, now, in the place in my heart which has been remade pure and white and
untouched and *huge*, huge as the white world we're wandering around in,
empty in the way Fraser talks about here and the existentialists talked
about nothingness, something gravid and immaculate, something that's
always pure inside of you. 

 In the bathtub, after we've both shaved and scrubbed one another down,
and when our hands start smoothing across pink skin beneath the water, he
touches my cheek and closes his eyes, some beyond-words emotion on his
face in the firelight, and he's beautiful. When his lips touch mine, in
the screen on my eyelids I still see snowflakes falling, but I'm growling
into his mouth and gnawing at him. His lip is bleeding and I suck it while
his teeth tear at mine. I've been so hungry for this, and he tastes as
good as bread and cheese and vegetables, and feels as good in my mouth. 

 It's good to know it's this good when we're starving, cause if we go back
to Chicago together--*together* together--there'll be crime and dirt and
most of all, rules, all spiky and prickly and thick, which say this is
totally, in a thousand ways, forbidden. Good to know it'll always be this
good, after weeks of yearning for him till my guts are all knotted and my
chest is cramped and I'm dying of separation. 

 That's not for thinking about, though, all those Ifs and Whens when
there's Now, and Fraser moaning urgently against my mouth. We're entwined
in water that's warm like a body, in a room heated by fire, so that I
can't feel what's him or me or water or air, there's just one big *us*,
all mixed together like magic has made it. He shudders, or I do, and soon
one of us is deep inside the other, and, a fuzzily urgent later, somebody
cries out. We kiss some more, for maybe days or maybe weeks, until the
fire gets good and blazing again. 

 Now I think it's me who's sucking on his fingers as we rumple one another
into blankets... Yeah, yeah, it's me. I'm clutching his wrist as he tries
to pull his hand away, but, please Ray, please, he says, and there's a
beautiful shiny cock that I suck on instead. It feels like it's my body
twisting under me, and my body shoving against it, and everywhere around
all of me is Fraser, like the skin that holds together all the bits and
pieces of Stanley Ray Kowalski. Then he falls apart and his *ah ah* noises
unravel me too, and all of my bits and pieces go flying, hoping to collide
with bits and pieces of Fraser so I can take them and keep them and be
sure they're in good hands... 

 ... this time it's the kitchen table; I love fucking on a table but who
knew I'd ever climb up Fraser and slide down the other side and make him
hold me down and have his puzzled but willing way with me. He does it so
fantastic, until I squirm right off the edge and knock all the chairs
over. We spin around on the carpet like a compass at magnetic north, and
I'm laughing on top of the world, but mid-laughter I freak out and only
his kisses stop me blurting that now we're up here, every direction is
south, south, south... 

 ... and now the outside has gone as close to dark as it gets. Funny, I
think: this is about as dark as it gets in the e-lectricitied city, and
the wind screaming past the cabin sounds like a hundred sirens on their
way to some huge disaster site, with twisted metal and yellow tarpaulins
filmed from a helicopter for the Late Breaking News. 

 The two of us are less mixed up and more knotted together--distinct parts
touching everywhere, under a pile of fur. I squirm myself deeper into the
warmth of him, trying to escape the noise. He still smells all crisp and
glowing, all soap and ice and a bit of woodsmoke. His chest under my cheek
is hard, but the skin is so damn soft that he seems half a baby. Fraser is
tricky like that, with his whole Mountie thing. I don't know when I
finally figured it out, that he's a man like a rugged mountain, and a baby
with beautiful eyes for the world, and that those are exactly the same
thing about him. 

 He's dozed off, and I should sleep for a year but I can't, I'm too wired
by all this twilight. And I still don't know where this place is, or when
this is happening, or even what we're doing, or who I am, or why he likes
having me with him, and how come it wasn't Vecchio, or even what's next,
let alone the big nasty one, the kicker, the giant capital-lettered How
The Fuck Does It All End? 

 I don't know. 

 But lying here, tonight, I'm sure of something more sure than I've been
of anything: when a clean, warm Mountie wraps his arms around you, and
rests his head on your shoulder, and says your name as he goes to sleep,
you just hold onto him as tight as you can, and you don't ask any
questions. 

 ******end******