Story Notes: There is TV physics, biology, medicine, and crime-fighting in this. Please don't expect excessive realism. ;)

1. The Oldest Trick in the Book

Meg melted against the brick wall of an alley behind the Good Times Bar in downtown Chicago, wishing she had something to hide behind. Things had been going just fine until the suspects she and Fraser were tailing realized they'd left something behind, and had turned back the way they came to retrieve whatever it was. (She'd overheard them talking about a go-go dancer costume, which didn't make any sense on the surface, but perhaps it was a code for something more useful to a bank heist.) Though the shadows in the alley hid them for now, the two men were certain to see her and Fraser when they passed by.

"Any bright ideas?" she hissed at Fraser.

His reply came from alarmingly close to her ear. "I believe our only chance is to appear...distracted."

She chose not to mention that she was already quite distracted. "Any suggestions?" The suspects were perhaps thirty yards away now, and quickly coming closer.

He looked at her consideringly, his gaze resting on her lips. "Well, it is a bit well-worn, but given that our options are rather limited..."

She twigged to what he was saying and felt her jaw drop. "Oh, you've got to be kidd -- "

Two things happened in the next moment: the suspects reached them, and Fraser pulled her against his body and kissed her as if their lives depended on it. Which, to a certain extent, they did.

She supposed that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy it.

The suspects paused upon catching sight of them. Thinking quickly (the fact that she was capable of thought at all was a minor miracle; where the hell had Fraser learned to kiss so well?), she fisted her hand in Fraser's shirt and twisted them so that her back was to the wall and his was to the alley, ensuring that the bank robbers wouldn't have a clear look at their faces. Thankfully, Fraser was wearing jeans and a leather jacket instead of his uniform, so they wouldn't have any cause to suspect RCMP involvement.

The suspects continued to stare at them. Starting to feel a bit of genuine panic, she let out a moan that was not entirely faked, and snaked her left hand inside Fraser's jacket, running her fingers up his spine. Fraser slipped his knee between hers, thrust his hand into her hair, and held her even more tightly against him.

One of the men grunted. "Lascivious acts," he muttered. "There oughta be a law." Finally she heard them start walking away, apparently convinced that she and Fraser were merely a pair of amorous drunks.

She kept kissing him until she could no longer hear their footsteps. For verisimilitude, of course.

When they parted -- oh, who was she kidding: when she managed to drag herself away -- both of them just stood there and stared for a moment. She still had her hand inside his jacket, and his fingers remained twined in her hair.

She finally tilted her head in the direction the thieves had gone. "We should..."

He nodded, his eyes wide. "Of course." He let go of her, and she unfisted her hands from his shirt. Without another word, they resumed their investigation.

2. The Hospital Visit

She knew that her Assistant Liaison Officer was good at remaining still. She'd never seen him so much as blink when he was on sentry duty. But it was different watching him lay motionless in the hospital bed, completely knocked out from the pain medication the doctor had put him on after he was admitted for a concussion, two broken ribs, and an extremely nasty knife wound to the back. At least she found a certain grim comfort in the fact that he'd sent the man who'd attacked him into traction.

Fraser was going to be fine, Dr. Tinibu had said when she'd stormed into the hospital demanding information. Detective Vecchio had scared the hell out of her with a brief, brusque phone call in which he'd said that Fraser was at Cook County General, and not much else. When she found him, she was going to wring his annoying American neck.

She'd ignored the doctor's and nurses' attempts to keep her out of Fraser's room, and settled in a chair next to the bed, mostly to wait for Vecchio's inevitable return so that she could inform him with strong language and perhaps also violence that he was never to scare her like that again, but also so that she could just...watch over her junior officer for a little while. If there was further trouble to be found, she was sure he would wind up in the middle of it if she didn't stop him.

That had been fifteen minutes ago. In her mad rush to the hospital, she had neglected to bring anything to occupy her attention, and she was starting to get rather bored. The view out the window showed an eminently uninteresting brick wall, and she didn't want to wake Fraser by turning on the television.

So really, the only place left to rest her gaze was on the constable, who was still doing his best impression of dead to the world. Even standing still, he was always alert, and it disturbed her to see him like this. Without really thinking about it, she leaned over and brushed her fingers against his cheek, just to reassure herself that he was still warm and alive.

He opened his eyes.

She pulled her hand back as if from a fire. "Fraser!" she exclaimed, sounding rather squeakier than she would've liked. "I didn't realize you were awake. Do you...do you want me to call a nurse?" The doctor hadn't said anything about needing to be notified when he woke up, but Fraser had received a head injury. Perhaps they'd want to shine lights in his eyes or perform tests.

"Inspector," he said, his voice sounding dreamy and far away. "You're here." He squinted, looking somewhat confused.

"Yes." She felt oddly hurt that he would be surprised to find her sitting next to his hospital bed. The fact that she was his superior officer didn't mean she couldn't care about his welfare.

"I was dreaming about you," he said, sounding no less out of it.

Her eyes widened. "You were?" she asked. Not the right response, she berated herself. If she featured in his concussion- and morphine-induced dreams, she hardly needed to know the details.

But despite how inappropriate it was, he seemed intent on describing the dream to her. "You were wearing a red dress," he said, staring at a point somewhere beyond her shoulder, as if the image were painted on the wall behind her. "The consulate was hosting a reception for the Minister of Defense. She was discussing potential Navy installations in Lake Michigan, I'm afraid to the boredom of everyone around her. Sometime around the point she mentioned floating gun turrets, you suggested that we escape and go for a walk.

"We stepped outside into a field near a mountain range, though of course the consulate faces a busy street. Dream-geography, I suppose. We walked for quite some time, and the sun started to set. The stars began to come out, clearly, like they do in the north. Eventually, we arrived at my father's cabin. I remember thinking that it would be nice to go inside, because with the sun going down it was starting to get chilly, and the bed would be warm."

A little voice in her head was screaming at her to put a stop to this right now, because nothing could come after that sentence that would be appropriate for her to hear. He would never have told her this under normal circumstances, she reminded herself. He was completely zoned out on pain medication. Though knowing Fraser, he probably had enough presence of mind to know she'd excuse practically anything he said with that fact, and was using it to his advantage.

"We had just reached the door when you touched my face and..." He trailed off, sighing a little. "And then I woke up."

She had no idea what to do with that, she realized after a moment. Part of her wanted to reprimand him, as if she had any authority over his dreams. Part of her wanted to cry because it hadn't been real. Part of her wanted to kiss him, as the Meg in his dream had surely been about to when she'd woken him back in this Chicago hospital room.

But before she could follow any of her various impulses, Vecchio entered the room. He was obviously shocked to see her. "How many traffic laws did you break to get here so fast?" he asked.

"About as many as the bones of yours I plan to break for failing to mention on the phone that Constable Fraser wasn't actively dying," she told him in her frostiest voice.

"Hey, they needed me at the nurses' desk. What could I do?" he replied, a smirk barely hidden under the defensive posturing. He'd planned this, she decided, or at least was taking advantage of the opportunity to find amusement at her concern.

Concern that was not at all unreasonable to feel toward a junior officer under her command, she reminded herself, even if the junior officer in question did confess, under the influence of narcotic drugs, to dreaming about her. She stood up, pasting a serene expression on her face. "Well, Constable, I trust you're on the mend," she said. "Let me know when the doctor says you'll be able to return to your duties."

"Of course, ma'am," he said, the perfect subordinate once more. Vecchio's incipient smirk blossomed into a quickly-stifled laugh. Making a haughty about-face, she left the room, and even managed to keep the blush from reaching her face until she was out of their sight.

3. The Damsel in Distress

He hadn't wanted to leave her to fend off the biggest of the thieves all by herself, but she had ordered him to. Well, assuming "Fraser, if you don't get those polar bear sculptures back, I'll hang you from the consulate's flagpole by your suspenders!" could be construed as an order. So he had run after Ray, and after a rather protracted scuffle (the sculptures were very fragile, and worth a fortune in Canadian dollars; they'd had to be careful where their punches landed), the other three thieves now lay groaning in the alleyway.

As soon as the criminals were subdued, he left Ray to tie them up and raced back into the warehouse. He knew the inspector was hardly a damsel in distress; after all, she had the same thorough training as he did. But the fourth thief had been several inches taller than him and wielded a wicked-looking knife. Fraser could picture all too clearly the damage the man might do if he managed to overpower her.

His lungs burning, he shot through the open door to the warehouse. There were no sounds of a fight, and his stomach flipped over. Was he too late? Had she...

"Ahem."

He looked toward the source of the sound and saw, to his astonishment, the inspector perched on top of the burly thief, her knee in the small of his back and her fingers holding his wrists together. In her other hand, she held the knife he'd been carrying, the point a millimeter from his neck. Her assailant appeared to have the makings of a fine black eye, as well as a split lip and several other bruises along his jaw. From his position on the floor, he let out the occasional moan of pain.

"Let me have your tie for his hands," she said, the tiniest of self-satisfied smiles crossing her face.

He was already unknotting it. "Of course, ma'am."

4. The Cure for Hypothermia

A shot rang out in the silent taiga. It gave her reason to both curse and be thankful: Adrian Klee might have just put a bullet into some part of Fraser's body, but at least now she knew which direction to travel in. Wilderness tracking had never been her forte at Depot.

She ran as fast as she could through the snow. Damn this terrain, anyway; why couldn't Fraser have had a madman with a grudge from one of his previous cases come after him somewhere civilized? She was never approving another of his vacation requests.

She slowed as she approached the area where the shot had come from, ducking behind glacier-deposited rocks and tall evergreens. It would hardly do her rescue operation any good if she got herself shot.

A flash of movement, something dark against the whiteness of the snow, caught her eye. It was Klee, hiding behind his own boulder sticking out of the iced-over river and aiming a handgun toward the opposite side. She felt a rush of relief. If Klee had incapacitated Fraser with the shot, then he wouldn't continue to take such a defensive stance.

Her gun raised, she stepped out from her cover. "RCMP! Put down your weapon!" she yelled.

Klee turned, obviously startled. She kept her aim steady and slowly approached him. "Mr. Klee, if you do not drop your weapon, I will shoot." Drop it, drop it, drop it, she mentally chanted. She wanted to bring him in, not kill him.

Apparently the man knew when he was beaten. He slowly lowered his gun to the ice, kicked it away from his body, then stood back up, hands raised. Thank you. "Don't move," she told him. She began walking faster, her own gun still ready to fire, but he didn't seem intent on causing any more trouble.

She reached the riverbank. Completely expressionless, his hands still raised, Klee stood about ten feet out on the ice. While it was holding him now, she knew enough about river ice to be wary of adding her weight to it. "Step back onto the shore," she ordered.

Klee remained stone-faced for a moment, but then a smirk slowly appeared on his face. "Thought you told me not to move, Inspector."

"Now I'm telling you to get off the ice."

His smile grew wider, taking on a sneering aspect. "Or what? You'll shoot me?"

Don't tempt me, she thought. "The shore. Now," she snapped.

"I don't think so."

She was going to have to go out there. God knew where Fraser was, or if he required medical attention, and she needed to subdue Klee and find her junior officer before further harm befell him.

She hadn't heard any telltale cracking from the ice, and when she brushed aside some of the light snow covering it with her boot, it looked solid enough between the shore and Klee's position. She fitted her steps into Klee's footprints, judging that the ice which had held him would also take her weight, and approached him slowly, resting for a moment with each new step before continuing, hyperaware of any sign that the ice was weakening.

What seemed like an eternity later, she reached him. She pulled out the handcuffs she'd requisitioned from Sergeant McMaster back at the Fort Service detachment and, with the muzzle of her gun pressed against his back, forced both of Klee's hands behind him and into the cuffs.

"Inspector!"

Fraser, she thought gratefully. His voice had come from the other side of the river, and with a glance she found him standing on the shore, apparently uninjured.

"The ice across most of the river is very thin," Fraser called. "I suggest immediate return to shore."

"Yes, thank you, Constable," she responded dryly. As if she were going to spend a second longer than necessary out on top of the river. She could see several spots just a few feet further out that had the ominous gray tinge of rotten ice. "Let's go." She started pushing Klee away from the rock, carefully aiming him away from the weak areas. They were going to have to walk further apart than she preferred in order to avoid breaking through the ice, so she let him get a few steps ahead of her.

"Sorry, Inspector." With an expression that she had just enough time to categorize as a sneer, Klee danced away from her and brought his heel down onto the biggest patch of rotten ice. It broke with a thunderous crack.

Adrian Klee disappeared.

The current sucked him downstream before Meg could even process what had happened. She had time to get exactly half a curse out before the opening in the ice reached her and she too plunged into the river.

She later realized that the only thing which saved her life was that she had been standing so near the rock Klee had been using for cover. With instincts speeded by adrenaline, she let go of her gun and threw herself at the rock, fighting for handholds on the rough surface and abrading the hell out of her palms but finally, finally closing her hands around a jagged hump near the waterline.

She raised her head just above the surface, coughing. She'd taken on a mouthful of water when she fell, and it felt as though her insides were icing over from it. The air she sucked in seared her frozen mouth, but it was sweet nonetheless. "Fraser!" she screamed, although she knew there was little he could do from across the river.

Her hands started to slip as she kicked and fought to crawl back up onto the unbroken ice. The current was strong, incredibly strong, and she knew that if she didn't get out of the water within another minute at most, she wasn't going to be able to keep her grip on the rock. Gritting her teeth, she renewed her efforts to crawl back over the edge of the hole. The icy water was starting to make her limbs feel sluggish, inflexible, and her mouth kept dipping below the waterline, but she kept struggling. Her entire world narrowed to the ice, the river, and the rock. The current was not going to pull her under without a fight.

Though that didn't mean it wasn't likely to win.

Just as her right hand slipped off the rock entirely, she felt fingers close around her wrist. With a shoulder-dislocating yank, Fraser hauled her onto the ice, barely pausing to grab her other hand before dragging her back to the shore. The air, cooler than the water, felt like a thousand tiny icicles digging into her body. She almost cried with the pain.

"Inspector?" Fraser asked when he'd pulled her up onto the riverbank. He kneeled next to her. "Inspector!"

She coughed out the last of the water she'd inhaled. "This is the last time I come up here to rescue you," she forced out once the fit was over. The air seemed as heavy as the water in her lungs; she could feel them laboring to process it. She'd never been this cold in her life.

"I do appreciate it." Through eyes that she struggled to keep open, she could see him smile briefly. "I have a camp nearby. Klee set fire to my tent, but the bedroll may be salvageable."

"I saw," she murmured. She'd tracked both of them out to this emptiness, miles from the late Sergeant Fraser's cabin, and had come across Fraser's former camp just before hearing the shot that had led her to the river. What possessed the man to go camping in the snow when he had a perfectly good cabin to rough it in on his vacation, she had no idea. At least his unexpected absence from the cabin had slowed Klee down enough that she had been able to capture him before he did bodily harm to her junior officer.

Even if he had then escaped from her and thrown himself to the death she'd barely avoided herself. Meg had few incidents that featured in her nightmares, but she knew her list had just grown by one.

Without warning, Fraser slid his arms under her knees and shoulders, lifting her as if she weighed no more than a child. Though startled, she automatically put her arms around his neck as he began walking toward the camp. Undignified as it was, she supposed it was the fastest way to some kind of warmth; she would never have been able to walk even the hundred meters back to the camp in this condition. She felt like some kind of ice creature had moved into her center and sent out wintry feelers through her limbs and around her mind, shrouding her thoughts in cold fog.

By the time they arrived, her body's natural response to the cold had kicked in, and she was shivering violently in Fraser's arms. She felt a bit like a cat squirming to be set free, and tried to suppress the shivers, but had no luck. Fraser gently deposited her, still shaking, next to the banked fire, and quickly dragged a slightly singed, but still serviceable, sleeping bag next to her. "It appears everything else was destroyed in the fire, but this should help. Do you need assistance getting out of your wet clothing?"

If she'd been able to, she would've blushed. Her fingers were stiff, and she was still shivering, but she thought she could still undo buttons and zippers. "I'll be fine."

He turned his back to her, both to give her privacy and to get the fire going again. As quickly as she could, she pulled off her coat, scarf, and boots, then followed with the rest of her clothes. She slipped into the sleeping bag before taking off her undergarments, folding them into the pile of clothing. She zipped up the sleeping bag, and would have pulled it over her head -- it was marvelously dry -- but she wanted to see how Fraser was progressing with the fire.

She sat up, clutching the fabric of the sleeping bag so that it covered her shoulders. Fraser had gotten the fire started again, and the heat felt incredible on her face. "Are you...?" he asked, still facing away from her.

"I'm decent," she said, feeling a burst of fondness for his overdeveloped sense of propriety.

He collected her clothing, laying it out near the fire on the twisted metal sticks of what had once been the frame of his tent, then gave her a critical glance. "You've stopped shivering," he said, sounding less pleased than she would've expected.

"I guess I have." She still felt like a block of ice had settled inside her abdomen, but not shivering was a good thing, she supposed. Wasn't it? Thinking hadn't become any easier since she'd gotten out of her wet clothes. "Is this bedroll made out of some kind of super-insulating seal pelt or something?"

"No, it's not." He definitely didn't sound pleased. "That's what worries me." Abruptly, he shrugged out of his coat and began unbuttoning his shirt.

"Fraser, what the hell are you doing?" she cried. She'd always felt a little niggling concern about his sanity, but this...

He started undoing the laces of his boots. "The fact that you've stopped shivering indicates that your core body temperature has dropped to a dangerous level. If we were near shelter, that wouldn't be cause for undue concern, but since we're out in the open, the only way to raise your temperature to a safe level is for us to share body heat through skin-to-skin contact."

Off went his undershirt, and she resisted the urge to note aloud that her temperature was climbing just from the sight of his pale, perfect chest. "Fraser. Absolutely not." For God's sake, she was naked. Under no circumstances was she going to allow him to climb into this sleeping bag with her. Especially not if his pants came off too.

Luckily, he seemed to think that stripping only halfway down was plenty. He knelt beside her, and she worked at keeping her eyes on his face. "Inspector," he said, more serious than she had ever seen him except for a very small handful of occasions. "If you don't let me do this, the hypothermia will in all likelihood be fatal."

She closed her eyes. He was right, damn him. Her survival training was coming back in bits and pieces, and she knew as well as he did that she stood an excellent chance of dying if she didn't warm up soon. And since a cabin with central heating and a roaring fire probably wasn't going to spontaneously appear in front of her, letting him lie against her, bare skin to bare skin, was pretty much her only option for surviving until they were able to get somewhere warm.

It could be worse, she tried to console herself. At least she was absolutely, rock-solidly certain that Fraser would not try to take advantage of her in this situation. "All right," she said, laying down and turning onto her side so that there was room for him to join her.

"Thank you, ma'am." She supposed he would've done it anyway even if she hadn't given him permission -- letting someone die when he could save them went against his moral code even more than disobeying an order -- but at least he'd given her the chance to agree first, which was something.

He scrambled into the sleeping bag (apparently he had decided that the trousers would impede the warming-up process, she noticed, though he'd at least kept his boxers on), and she almost had a heart attack when he pressed his chest flush against her back. She decided to pretend that it was entirely due to the fact that he was warm and she was freezing. Emerging from this with her dignity intact was becoming an ever-greater concern.

She squirmed a bit, trying to simultaneously soak up as much warmth from him as she could and put herself into the least contact possible with his body. She succeeded at neither, and it only made her cranky. "If you tell anyone about this..." she threatened, not quite growling.

"That you showed commendable bravery in detaining Adrian Klee before he caused either of us permanent injury, and we returned without further incident to Fort Service?" he asked, and she knew without even being able to see it that he had that irritatingly naive expression of his on his face, the one she'd always suspected was completely false. He knew damn well what she meant.

"I'd hardly call the man purposely jumping onto a weak spot in the ice and drowning 'without further incident,'" she said, both to avoid thinking about their current situation, and because a man -- a criminal, but a human being nevertheless -- had died today, and that weighed heavy on her mind. "I was supposed to bring him to justice, not let him die."

Fraser had been keeping his hands decorously at his sides, but now he placed one on her shoulder, squeezing lightly in an attempt to comfort her. "He chose not to accept the kind of justice we could give him. There was nothing more you could've done."

She didn't want to talk about this anymore. His assurance that she couldn't have prevented Klee's death wasn't going to help, true or not. Finding herself with nowhere else to direct the conversation, she remained silent for a long time, concentrating on the soft rise and fall of his chest against her back. She could feel his breath stir the topmost strands of hair on her head, and the infinitesimal movements of his legs or arms as he tried to keep his limbs from going to sleep. At some point, he began slowly stroking her shoulder, gently moving his fingertips back and forth over the same few inches of skin. She wasn't entirely sure he was aware of what he was doing, and she decided her conscience could live without pointing it out.

Eventually, more to keep herself from falling asleep than anything else, she started blowing on her hands, which were still stiff and chilly.

Fraser caught her right hand in his, his larger fingers nearly swallowing it whole. He just held it for a moment, resting his knuckles against her collar bone, before beginning to rub slowly, restoring the circulation. Despite the tight quarters of the sleeping bag, he managed to snake his left arm under her neck to do the same to her other hand. "Better?" he asked after a long moment.

"Yes. Thank you." She hoped he wouldn't stop; in addition to the warmth, she liked the feeling of his arms almost circling her, his wrists resting against her shoulders and his elbow crooked on the side of her ribcage.

He didn't stop. But he did say, "I believe it's been long enough for your temperature to return to a safe level. If you'd like me to see how close your clothes are to drying out..."

She couldn't very well tell him she didn't want him to do that, that she'd like nothing more than for him to stay curled against her in this sleeping bag forever, or at least for the next several hours. On the other hand, she couldn't find it in herself to agree that he should leave. Instead, she changed the subject. "Do you ever wonder how you end up in such ridiculous situations?"

"Ridiculous situations?"

Like sharing a sleeping bag with your commanding officer, wearing only your underwear, in the middle of the tundra, she thought, but instead said, "You almost drowned in a bank vault."

"Ah." He was silent for several seconds. Finally, he said, "Someone once told me that Mounties are supposed to have ideals."

She furrowed her brow. "Do ideals really require you to nearly drown in a bank vault? Or almost suffocate in an egg incubator?" She certainly hadn't meant her statement to encompass such farfetched circumstances -- although she had encouraged him to follow Lyndon Buxley that night.

"If it's necessary to bring a criminal to justice or to prevent harm from befalling another person."

"Hmm." She supposed he was right. It was just that she'd never met anyone who took idealism to the extremes he did...

He took a deep breath. "I like to think they also encourage following the dictates of one's heart, even if they go against...certain expectations."

Her eyes, which had been sleepily drifting shut, shot open. "You do?"

"Yes." He was almost whispering now.

She felt her breath catch in her throat. "And what...what does your heart want?"

When he replied, his mouth was mere millimeters from her ear. "The same as yours, I think."

She couldn't quite bring herself to turn and face him, though she desperately wanted to look him in the eye. Instead, she brought his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. "You're not wrong," she murmured.

She had tried to put the tension between them out of her mind, because she'd been in his position before, and she'd vowed to never treat anyone else like that. But for the past year and a half, Fraser had been the one who...he hadn't pushed, he'd never do that, but when he could, when circumstances allowed, he kept holding out his hand. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to take it.

His mouth brushed the skin behind her ear. "And do your ideals allow you to follow your heart?"

The words were easier now, like something had melted inside her and set them free. "I like to think so."

She could hear the smile in his voice. "I'm glad to hear it."

He seemed to understand the fragility of what was happening between them as well as she did; though she was lying next to him without a stitch of clothing on, he didn't try to touch her anywhere else. He simply stayed where he was, holding her hands and pressing the occasional feathery kiss against her hair or neck. Feeling almost playful, she kissed each of his fingers in turn. They passed more time than she might have expected this way.

Once her clothes dried, they hiked back to his father's cabin, since the sun was setting and they would never make it to the Fort Service detachment before nightfall. When they reached the front door, she put her hand on his arm before he could open it. "Wait a second."

He turned, puzzled. "Is something wrong?"

Her lips twitched. "No. Just something I've been wanting to do for about a year." She touched his cheek, and saw the light dawn. Finally letting herself smile, she leaned forward and kissed him as the stars came out in the clear northern sky.