Author's Notes: Thank you kindly to Primroseburrows for the beta.

Sometimes Fraser felt guilty.

It was irrational, of course, because the idea that this new ice age was somehow his fault was ridiculous. But there it was.

In Chicago's hottest summer, when he had stood guard on the stairs of the Consulate, feeling sweat soak into his uniform, he had imagined winter. The dirty streets that were thick with car exhaust would be covered with merciful white; the passers-by who pointed or jeered at him would be muffled and silenced by the cold.

It was no longer a fantasy, and there were people who had starved and frozen to death. And so, guilt.

***

Most people had gone south. Some of them had planned it carefully, moving their furniture and belongings well before fuel grew too scarce for moving vans. The Vecchios, for example, had moved down to live with Ray Vecchio and Stella in Florida. Others lived on, ignoring the changes around them until they woke up one morning in a too-large house with little insulation that they could no longer afford to heat. And then they would leave, abandoning their things for the overpopulation and relative warmth of the south.

Some remained, and those were the stubborn ones. They crowded together for warmth and survival, not for lack of space.

Tatiana, for instance, had lived in Siberia as a child, the daughter of politically undesirable parents. She was old, but tough, and she had a remarkable knack for getting malfunctioning machinery to work again.

Alex was from a farm on the countryside outside Chicago, the farm where their little group of cabins stood now. She'd declared that she would bring her child up where she had lived all her life. It wasn't as if they'd actually have a better chance in the south, what with the crowds and the famines.

Aaron hadn't been quite so sure, but he'd stayed for their sake.

Sarah was Quinn's granddaughter, and had sought Fraser out when Tuktoyaktuk was evacuated. She was used to a harsh climate and had a good hand with the dogs.

Fraser and Ray had stayed for each other. For the memory of Chicago. For the memory of Dief, who had died from old age and was buried in the yard. For the days of sledding across unbroken snow. For the challenge of it, and because they didn't want to give up.

***

Chicago was a ghost city, for the most part. Fraser hadn't thought that nature would take back its own with quite such a speed, but then ice and snow did their work quickly.

The water mains had broken and the water found its way out, flooding buildings and freezing on the floors. Panes of glass had shattered on the skyscrapers, leaving them half-blind and staring. None of them had collapsed yet, but Fraser imagined that it was only a matter of time, with ice working its patient fingers into the concrete, freezing and expanding in the small cracks.

Even in the short, chilly summers, snow still lay in drifts inside the shadowed buildings where the sun couldn't reach.

Things died. The apple tree bloomed bravely each spring, its white flowers dying in the frost and falling to the ground like more snowflakes. It looked like defiance, although Fraser knew that the tree was only responding to the light of spring. Still, he grieved for it when there were no leaves or flowers anymore.

***

"Tell me a story," Ray murmured, drawing Fraser's arms closer around him under the blankets.

Ray didn't like the silence, Fraser knew. Ray was used to the constant background murmur of the TV, radio, or CD player, but they had none of that now. Well, there was a radio, but they only used it occasionally, when they could get the generator going.

Fraser preferred silence, when one wasn't actively listening to something. Before, it had annoyed him when Ray left the TV on when they weren't watching it, but he usually said nothing, just turned it off when Ray wasn't looking.

Fraser spoke, to fill the darkness with sound for Ray.

"About twenty thousand years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet began to retreat." Ray snuggled closer to him and sighed. "It had covered most of Canada and much of the northern United States--the place that would become Chicago, for example, was entirely under the ice."

Fraser told the story of the land bridge over the Bering Strait that had let the native peoples pass over to North America, how the Great Lakes had formed from meltwater pooling at the edge of the retreating ice, how the land was crushed and mixed to form moraine and till. How the ice had come and gone again over the many ice ages and the short, warm interglacial periods.

Ray's breathing was slow and even by now.

"Many species died out. But many survived, too, living at the extreme of their abilities. And they came back, after the ice was gone. For example, it's been proven by genetic analysis that Arctic bell-heather survived only in the Bering Strait area and spread back from there. It's circumpolar now. Or it was."

Fraser was silent for a moment, breathing in the scent of Ray's hair. Then he continued, speaking almost to himself. "My point is that life survives. We may die. The apple tree is dead already. But life goes on, somewhere, somehow. And the ice will retreat again."

He fell silent. Ray slept and said nothing, but Fraser didn't need words for comfort, just Ray's body against him and the warmth that they made together. A small resistance against the cold, and futile, perhaps, in the long run, but for now they lived, and it was enough.