Disclaimer: These characters are not mine and I do not profit from their use.

Author's Notes: Many thanks to llassah for pulling beta-duty and making this piece into a whole instead of two fragmentary bits of introspection. You're the bee's knees, baby!

Story Notes: For the "space" challenge at ds_flashfiction

Space and Time

Canada, Ray thinks, is space. It's Canada's number one export, right after lumber and fish and comedians. White space.

It's where the Underground Railway ends. It's the place where all those Vietnam draft-dodgers ended up. It's the big blank whiteness on the map in school above the good ol' USA, except sometimes it's cast in pink or red or blue like all the other old British colonies. Ray always thought that was a little strange, all that white Canadian nothing the same color as warm places like Australia and New Zealand and the tiny little countries in Africa that Ray could never keep track of because their names kept changing.

Canada is silence, too, and snow and ice and darkness. Maybe it's noisy in the cities closer to the border but Ray hasn't been to any of them so he wouldn't know. He's just been to Ottawa once, with Fraser, and Inuvik, and a couple of airports in between. So his experience with Canadian cities is what you might call limited. And apparently Inuvik is considered a city despite the fact that only a couple of thousand people live here. When Ray considers that more people than that work in the Sears Tower back home he gets a little depressed. Because it's so much space. No place he's ever been has seemed so empty before, and with every day that passes he feels how hard it is to fill it up, to make it noisy and vibrant and full. Canada is like the space inside Fraser, which he thinks may have been growing for a long, long time. Ray wants to fill that space, too.

Canadians are a little confusing. He's met most of the people who live up here year-round - Fraser seemed to know everyone, even the new people who came up here while he was down in Chicago for those three years. And it was weird at first, getting introduced by Fraser. There was space in his words, just a little pause before turning and saying to Bev N'ppata or John Erickson or the Reverend, "This is Ray Kowalski." Space too in the way Ray would take just a split-second to realize Fraser meant him; he was so used to answering to Vecchio that he didn't recognize his own name the first few times, or what the warm tone in Fraser's voice meant. What the space meant.

The residents of Inuvik met him with space. At first he thought it was because they'd caught on about him and Fraser. When he'd told his mom about his plans to move up here and live with the Mountie his mom had just nodded and said, "Well, at least those Canadians are an accepting bunch." Ray hadn't been so sure. Because Canada was just space, after all, just a place people ran to when other places got too hot. Slaves and draft-dodgers and cartographers who couldn't be bothered to fill their maps in with anything other than mountain ranges and rivers all ran for the space of Canada. Ray trusted the blankness of Canada but not its people. People were people anywhere.

Except...except it was better than he'd expected. Easier. And yeah, a couple of the old-timers weren't too happy that the new head of the RCMP detachment sucked dick, and Ray felt a distinct chill when he walked into some of the bars and stores in town that had nothing to do with the weather, but on the whole people seemed okay with it. The Eskimos ("Inuit, Ray. Really.") didn't seem to care much - they probably figured one white guy was just as bad as another, queer or not, so they just gave Ray his space. The other constables, who were mostly kids right out of Depot, all worshiped Fraser and couldn't care less. Ray hung around the station sometimes and they'd actually listen to his old Chicago cop stories, fascinated by talk about the challenges of policing a city larger than Vancouver and Edmonton and Calgary combined.

Even the people he'd expected to care, whose job it was to care, didn't seem to mind. The Reverend had known Fraser since he was a kid; Fraser told Ray in bed late one night, after they'd been in Inuvik about a month, that the Rev had only asked if he was happy. There'd been something in Fraser's voice that had made Ray's throat constrict when he'd told him about it. Rather than say anything, Ray had just hugged Fraser tight. Fraser had hugged him right back, not leaving any space between them. None at all.

So Canada is okay. Ray sometimes got the distinct impression that he might never understand the place, with its silences and its solitude and its empty white edges, but that was okay with him. He was starting to understand Fraser a little better. And that was what was important, that was Ray's fucking raison d'etre. Because the space inside Fraser, all that Canadian-made space, didn't just feel like nothingness, like a blank spot on a map or a place to hide out.

It was home.

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America, Fraser thinks, is time. It is three years and four months and twenty-six days of exile, of biding his time and waiting for banishment to end. It is also time to grieve for the loss of a father and for the loss of a homeland. It is time to heal, to forget, to forgive. It is both a purgatory and a sanctuary, a place where he was not welcome and yet was taken in anyway. A contradiction, then, in time.

America is two hundred and twenty years of contradictions, an odd collection of colourful personalities and inhuman brutalities and strange events all strung together like pearls along a string that everyone the world over seems to recognize. His own nation, that simple, empty country of farmers and fishermen, has never been able to compete. Canadians have no grand historical narrative, no manifest destiny or romantic spectacle of revolutionary war. The Americans have always had time on their side but they have never known quite what do to with it. Time seems to weigh heavily upon them in ways that Fraser doubts he will ever understand.

He discovered, during those one thousand two hundred and eleven days spent in America, how freeing time could be. Those moments of liberation were not temporally significant: a day in a crypt, a night bivouacked in an elderly woman's backyard, nineteen seconds exchanging air and life in the depths of the lake the Americans call Michigan. In the grand scope of things, that time barely constituted a blink of history's proverbial eye. But those moments in time offered precious seconds of insight. Despite the American propensity for contradiction, Fraser only came to understand the true value and nature of time during his long, strange stay in Chicago.

Time now means something very different. It has ceased to be a history lesson, or a yardstick against which to measure all that he has lost, has never had. He thinks of it as his Ray-time. Rather than dates on a calendar or the tiny increments on his father's watch, time now rests in the lazy morning light that slants through the window in their bedroom. In the way Ray says his name, soft and strong, in the darkness of the Arctic night. In Ray's kinetic gestures, his deliberate movements, his grace, his impatience. Small moments of time, staked out in a shared embrace, a tender touch, a whisper or a promise or a demand of "more," "harder," "always."

Ray-time changes the very rhythm and beat of Fraser's world. It makes everything move faster, slower, or forces it to stand still. When they were hunting for Franklin they lost track of the date: it was March when they began their quest, May when it ended. And all of the lost days in between were swallowed up by evenings by the fire, days trekking across the empty tundra, nights in their tent where Fraser learned the new dimensions of time. And for the first time in his life he cannot recall the specific date when something momentous occurred, only that many small moments blended into one another and the shape of the world changed.

And so time has closed, narrowed, focused. Fraser knows he may never understand the changes to the temporal fabric of his small universe, but the not-knowing is remarkably easy to bear. Time with Ray does not feel like an academic puzzle or a way to mark off the passing moments of his life.

Time is home, and he lives there with Ray. The rest may be left to history.