Author's Notes: Written for the birthday of the lovely and talented JS Cavalcante.

I never noticed the seasons back in Chicago.

Cities have got two settings: hot and cold. You figure out it's winter when you're freezing your ass off trying to dig the car out of the shitty parking space in front of your building. Summer only registers when you flip on the TV news and they're rolling footage of eggs frying on the pavement. I never lived near a park so I couldn't see the leaves turn and drop off the trees; mostly I could tell the seasons by the shop window displays on State Street. White plastic snow for Christmas, big red construction paper hearts on Valentine's Day, purple eggs and that shredded green artificial shit that's supposed to look like grass for Easter. It always made me think nature came in crayon colors, that it was something you bought in a store.

But up here there's no way to ignore the way the seasons run. Summer's too short and bleeds quickly into autumn. The trees all turn at the same time: one week they're green, the next a thousand shades of yellow and red and gold, and the sky is a bright crystal-clear blue above it all. You can sense the winter behind it, ice and snow and dark for eight months straight. Then there's thaw, and spring, and summer again. Short seasons (except for the winter) but everything's real up here. No more paper hearts or plastic trees. No more day-glow colors.

When people ask me what I'm doing in the Arctic, I flash on the way Ben gave nature to me. I'm a part of the earth up here in a way I never could have been down in Chicago. When we were out on the ice for those six months I fell into the rhythm of the world, shared that Zen thing Ben's always had. We both felt shifts in the wind, tasted the differences in snow that meant storm or fair weather. He taught me to read the tracks of animals. Find the nests of ptarmigans and the dens of snow foxes. Made me see that you can't find winter in a store window, spring is something you have to believe will come back around, and summer you treasure as long as you can.

Love's like that too, and I didn't understand that back in the city. I thought that love never changes unless it's dying. But love's like a migrating animal, or a season that passes slowly and leaves its mark. Some days it comes, and some days it goes, but if you've read the signs you'll know that it always come back around when the time is right.

I learned how true and how hard that was the first winter we were together. Ben was overdue on patrol, spent much longer out in the field than anyone thought was safe. When the old Inuit say it's a bad time to be out on the ice you gotta trust that they know what they're talking about. I was so scared that whole week. I thought for sure he was dead, and I spent a long time sitting in the dark trying to talk myself out of loving him. Because there's only so much a guy can stand, y'know? Up here we're everything to each other.

I imagined him dying a thousand times in my head, those images playing out like the worst kind of horror movie inside my skull. Ben trapped in a crevasse, marooned out on an ice floe, up against a gang of those miscreants he always manages to find in the middle of thousands of miles of nothing. I played those images over and over (stop rewind stop fast-forward) and I willed that love to die. Survival instinct, maybe, because I knew I couldn't go on if I wasn't with him.

He finally showed up nine days overdue, miscreants in hand, a tight, tired look on his face that said the whole trip had been hell but he'd made it. He'd come back to me. His whole face lit up when he saw me standing there, but his smile disappeared when he noticed that I'd packed my bags and left them stacked in the middle of our living room.

"I can't," I'd told him. "I can't love you like this. I can't think that you're dead for a week and keep going. I'm not strong enough."

Something flickered in his eyes, and I wondered if maybe he was thinking back to the night he'd asked me to stay, pressing his lips against my chest, those big broad hands of his stroking my back, sliding down to my hips. "Stay," he'd said. That one little word had made me so happy I couldn't breathe. Already I needed him like oxygen. After he'd asked and I'd said, "Yes," and watched him take my cock into his warm, honeyed mouth, I'd thought for a second what losing him would mean. The end of Ray Kowalski, and I'd just gotten him back. That's scary fucking shit.

Yeah, he was thinking about that, putting two and two together, maybe thinking about his mom waiting up nights for his dad to come back from the same patrol routes he was responsible for now. I sure as hell thought of Stella and the all-nighters she used to pull for me. Fuck, the power we give to the people we love.

He dropped his head and his shoulders sagged. "If...if you think it will be easier for you, to...to go-"

I'd barked out a laugh, an ugly sound that made me think of the little bark Sparky gave when he got hit by that car. "Nothing about this is easy, Frase. I figure, I leave now, I got a shot at staying sane, and maybe I don't hate you in ten years. Because right now I could fucking kill you, y'know?"

He watched as I loaded my bags into the truck.

It was part of the cycle, something I had to do to get my head screwed on straight. I left him and went back to Chicago, back to the city where the seasons exist only in simulacra. Got my old job back, my apartment, my turtle. Tried to remember who I used to be. Tried to forget those colors in the northern sky, in the autumn forests. In the shy blush of his smile.

I lasted until spring. When they dyed the Chicago River green for Saint Patrick's I had a dream about the day we'd spent out at the creek that runs along the back of our property. A summer day, hot as blazes, but the creek was glacier-fed and only Ben was stupid enough to swim in it. He didn't bother with trunks and I'd sat under a tree and watched him, watched his pale, beautiful body cut through the water. Later he lay with his head in my lap and I tried to memorize the pattern the sunlight shining through the trees made on his skin. Fuzzy-edged shadows that I could sweep my hands through.

We made love under the trees. Ben kept his eyes on mine the whole time he moved inside me. I was full of him, and he was full of me, eyes shining with something that made me break open inside. He came with that familiar groan, that soft grunt and low whisper of my name, and I tilted my head up to the sky and said a prayer of thanks.

In Chicago the memory of that day swirled around me like the green waters of the river, and I decided that losing Ray Kowalski was probably a fair trade if it meant I could have Fraser back.

It wasn't that easy, of course. I had to convince Fraser that he could trust me again, and the thing with Fraser is, he don't trust easy. I'd left him, and in Fraser's world that's the one thing he can forgive but not forget. I got a place in town, drove out to see him most nights. He'd whittle or sew and fix harnesses and I'd try to explain that I don't know who I am without him. But I'm no good with words.

Luckily, Fraser's a good tracker, and so he knows about patterns and migration and the cycle of things. I guess he finally decided that me freaking out and going back to Chicago was just something that had to happen. Inevitable, like the winter. It hurts like hell and it makes you believe you'll never be warm again, but it passes and suddenly everything comes alive. It took a while for Fraser to figure it out. He said that he wouldn't let me make promises anymore, and for a while I think he meant it. But one night when I went up to the cabin to see him I saw that he'd cleared out some space for my stuff, opened his heart for me again.

"Nothing's permanent," he told me then. It sounded like an answer to a problem he'd been trying to work out for a long time. I shook my head.

"No, nothing lasts forever, but everything circles back. Wheel keeps on turning. You get it?"

He was quiet, and in the silence I could hear gears turning and grinding away. Maybe it wasn't want he wanted from me--maybe he wanted some promise that we'd always love each other in exactly the same way--but finally he just sighed, and put his big warm hand on the back of my neck.

"I want you to come back. I...I need you to come back, Ray. I have to know that you always will."

I kissed him then, and tried to show him what he already knew. Dark to light, winter to spring, change all around. The only constant.

Turn, turn, turn.