Two Better Hemispheres
by Nos4a2no9
Author's Notes: Written for ds_snippets for the prompt "ticket", but it outgrew the word count limit quickly. Unbeta'd, and so all mistakes and odd imagery is my fault.
Story Notes: Title taken from John Donne's "The Good-Morrow."
Two Better Hemispheres
They are haunted by children. By the son and daughter they'll never have.
Ray sees his son in the ten year-olds who play Mites hockey at the Inuvik Municipal Rink. He coaches youth hockey now, and it's not entirely because he wants to punish himself.
He ruffles the children's hair and teaches them about icing, and shows them how to make a pass. He thinks that his son would be that age by now, if Stella had wanted to have a child with him.
He knows that he and Stella wouldn't have been happy like that, married with children. And he knows now - he knows - that his love for Stella would have faded into dust, blown away by a strong wind from the north. Scattered, and lost.
He would have had a child, a son, but no one to raise him with. In the end, Stella's choice had been the right one. He'd stopped regretting the trip to the clinic years ago.
Still. When the Inuvik Flyers take to the ice, cat-calling each other, grinning and waving to their parents in the stands, he can't help but feel a sharp pang of loss. The sensation is eased a little when he comes home to a warm, bright cabin. Candles burn brightly in the window, calling him home.
So does the shape of Fraser in the window, looking for him in the darkness.
Fraser has a picture he keeps tucked in a volume of poetry, where Ray is not likely to find it. The photograph - just a grainy black and white capture from a security camera - replaced another he'd lost in a fire many years ago. In that earlier, lost photograph, her face had been half-turned from the camera, dark hair falling to obscure her features. That was the way he would always think of Victoria. Caught, briefly, in the act of turning away.
But fire consumed that earlier portrait of her, and all he has now is the newer picture, the one of a thin, haunted, sharp-eyed woman holding a toddler in her arms. Victoria glares at him through the security camera, and the look in her eyes is that of a lioness. She seems prepared to claw at anyone who gets too close to her or her child.
He can't see the little girl's face. Perhaps something would be different, if he could. But she is safely anonymous. All he can see is the back of her head, glossy black curls catching the light from the security gates at Heathrow. Her chubby little arms are wrapped tight around Victoria, and her legs dangle, patent-leather shoes as black and shiny as her hair. The child holds a stuffed wolf.
It's this last detail that makes it impossible for him to look at the photograph for very long.
The security camera still is six years old. The child would be at least eight now, and wherever she is - Mexico, Italy, the Ivory Coast, some other warm place - he can only see the look in Victoria's eyes, warning him to stay away.
He will not tear a child from her mother's arms. He's known far too many orphans already.
Still, he looks for the child always, in the small northern towns scattered across the Arctic. In Chicago and Pensacola, when they visit old friends like Ray and Stella Vecchio. In Phoenix, when they go to visit Ray's family.
Perhaps one day he'll find out what she looks like. And he'll finally know if his daughter inherited his blue eyes.
They are haunted by children. By the living, and the lost.
When Fraser lights a candle for Ray at night, he means it as a votive comfort.
THE END
End Two Better Hemispheres by Nos4a2no9
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