For Brynn McK by spuffyduds

Ray tries screaming "Benny" and the wind whips it away, and then he tries yelling "Kowalski" and the wind stuffs it back down his throat. And everything's white everywhere, he can't even tell anymore which direction the snow's blowing, it's just solid white.

He's gonna die, he's gonna die, and it's so not fair because, looking back on it, he's made a lot of decisions that ought to have gotten him killed. "I think I'll fuck Frankie Zuko's sister!" "Hey, why not help the crazy Mountie?" "I think I'll beat Frankie Zuko to a pulp!" "Undercover with the mob? Yeah, sure, I'll go be a hero." And he's dodged so many bullets, been hit by so many bullets by now it's just wrong that the decision that's gonna kill him was, "I'd rather not whip it out in front of Kowalski and Fraser."

Ray hadn't been expecting such an early rest stop today, but Fraser had kept swiveling halfway around while he was driving to give Kowalski these concerned looks, and Kowalski would yell out something like "Dog problem or harness problem?" and Fraser would do a complicated half-swiveled-around Canadian shrug, and then a while later he'd look back again and Kowalski would say, "Yeah, something's a little off."

Ray's personal opinion was that the thing that was a little off was that they had a bunch of dogs where they ought to have had an engine. But they stopped, and Kowalski and Fraser got out and were poking at the harnesses and poking at the dogs. Not like Ray was going to be any use with that, he'd be a third wheel or a third--runner, he guessed, so he just stood up and stretched and then realized, hey, call of nature.

And he's trying to convince himself now that he got their attention before he took a few steps away, just a few goddamn steps, but he's not sure. He said "Hey, I'll be right back," but God, he's not sure they noticed, and then the little snowstorm that was going on suddenly exploded, and now he can't see anything but white and he can't hear anything but wind and fuck, he's going to freeze to death twenty feet from the sled and twenty feet from--his best friends, and there's so much stuff he's never done.

****************************************

*******

"The Bookman only wears silk socks," Ray recited.

"No," Phyllis said.

"Fuck. What? Cashmere?" Ray said.

"No, silk is right. But not 'the Bookman.' What'd I tell you?"

Ray sighed. "Fine. I only wear silk socks, and I like v-neck sweaters and hate crew-necks, and--come on, Jesus, I'm tired, how important is this?

Phyllis glared at him. Ray liked her, she was smart and funny but God was she thorough, and man, she had to be sixty-five and she never, ever seemed to get tired. Ray was falling-over tired; Ray was can-we-please-stop-talking-about-mob-fashion-and-let-me-sleep tired.

"Ray," she said, and she reached over and took his hand, squeezed it. That was a first. "This is your armor, okay? Every damn thing we know about the guy is a piece of your plate mail. Anything you forget, anything you think is not important, that's a hole where you're showing through. That's a hole they can stick a sword in, okay?"

She grabbed his other hand, leaned over into his face. "The last guy I prepped," she said. "He forgot one stupid thing. He forgot that the new guy he was hated fish, and he ordered fish and enjoyed it in front of his crew. And when our guys found his body, out in the desert, you wanna know what parts of him were stuffed in his mouth?"

"Not really," Ray said, and let himself realize finally that the look she kept giving him wasn't angry, it was terrified. For him. "The Book--I only wear silk socks, and I like v-neck sweaters--"

******************************************

He's trying to pray but all he can come up with is, "Dear Jesus, I really don't want to see you anytime soon, nothing personal," and then something rubs against his side.

He looks down to see it's a rope. And he's so fucked-up terrified that for a second that doesn't even make sense, it's like the rope got there under its own power and is just nuzzling him like a snake, if snakes nuzzled, and then it clicks. Ray hauls on the rope and a dark shape shows through the white, then turns into Kowalski.

Kowalski's got frost in his scuzzy eight-day beard, and looks completely furious, and he's screaming, "You are the king of the morons, Vecchio," and he is the most beautiful thing Ray has ever seen.

Ray dives at him. Kowalski teeters but doesn't fall over, even though Ray's got both arms wrapped around him and both legs squeezing around Kowalski's legs, trying to feel him through all their puffy layers, trying to convince himself he's not alone out here, that there's somebody in there, somebody else alive and warm.

"What the fuck--" Kowalski says, and then shuts up, probably because his mouth is full of Ray's tongue. And his mouth is warm and wet and real, he's really here. Ray has verified this and should probably stop now. But he doesn't, just gets his fingers worked under the rope around Kowalski's waist in case he's thinking of going somewhere, and keeps kissing him.

All he's thinking is "Not dead not dead not dead," and then he thinks, "Holy shit, he's kissing back." And that's true for a few seconds, it is no longer just Ray having a freak-out, it is the both of them having a kiss. Then Kowalski pulls back, doesn't look at Ray, just grabs him by the coat and yanks.

They stumble twenty or thirty steps and--there's the sled, with a rope stretching out into the white from the corner opposite the one theirs is attached to. Kowalski hauls on that one and, poof, there's Fraser. Who says, "Is he--"

"He's okay, except the part where he's deranged," Kowalski says.

Fraser grabs Ray by the chin and looks him in the eyes, then sits him down on the edge of the sled and Fraser and Kowalski knock together a quickie lean-to. They stuff him into it and climb in with him, strip off a few of Ray's layers and their own, wrap around him, and Ray didn't know he was still shaking until he realizes he's shaking both of them.

Fraser's talking and talking, "Never do that, Ray, never","sudden zero visibility", "could have died mere feet from us", "Schoolchildren's Blizzard of 1888", talking and talking. "Yeah, I got that, Benny," Ray says through his chattering teeth. Kowalski presses up hard against his other side, says, "Are you sane now?" low in his ear. Ray thinks about saying, "Yeah, I was crazy, what was your excuse?" but both his sides are warm, the warm is spreading through him, and going to sleep seems like a much better idea.

*********************************************

When he walked into the Feeb office for his last prep session he brought Phyllis some flowers, sort of a pre-emptive thank you for probably saving his life a lot. But one of the higher-ups was there and he and Phyllis were involved in some intense whispering--looked like a fight.

Ray stood there quietly for a minute, and managed to catch boss guy saying, "Not a credible source," and "If we'd missed something that big I'd be worried about all our intel--" and Phyllis interrupting with, "You should be worried," and boss coming back with, "I am not aborting at this point--" before the paper around the flowers made a crinkly noise and they noticed him.

The boss guy gave him a huge shiny smile and then leaned against a wall, crossed his arms and didn't leave. Which was weird; mostly Ray and Phyllis had worked alone before. But Ray handed over the flowers, and she smiled at him, kind of a wobbly smile. Then they sat down and went through the usual rapid-fire Mob catechism, Phyllis snapping out questions and Ray answering them now without even having to think; clothes and food, favorite movies, showgirls and callgirls.

"You're doing great, Ray," she finally said. "You'll be fine. Just remember, like I've told you a million times," and she reached out, grabbed his knee hard, "be flexible."

Phyllis had said, "You gotta know this stuff cold, Ray," a million times. She had said, "pieces of armor" and "first-person, goddammit," and "You get startled awake at two a.m., you wake up as him, understand?" But she had never, ever said, "Be flexible."

Ray looked at her, and over at the boss guy who was giving Phyllis a suspicious glare, and said, "Absolutely."

*********************************************

When Ray wakes up he and Kowalski are alone in the lean-to, stuffed into a sleeping bag. He manages a quick look down; long underwear on both of them.

"Fraser didn't think you were cold enough to need naked," Kowalski says. "Thank God. The wind died down, he's off shooting something for dinner."

"I think I was mostly scared I was gonna die," Ray says. "You'd think, hanging around Fraser, I'd be used to that."

"Ha, yeah," Kowalski says.

"I'm pretty much okay now," Ray says. "If you want to go build a fire or something."

Kowalski's eyes get wide suddenly, and he says, "It'd be easier to leave if you got your hands out of my pants."

"I. What? Oh," Ray says, because yeah, there they are, tucked under Kowalski's waistband in the back. The rest of Ray thinks he's warm enough and not dying, but apparently his hands went diving for heat, and wow Kowalski really is warm back there, soft skin just starting to curve.

He tries to pull his hands out, but they curl without his permission and move slower than he wants them to, so he's trailing fingertips up Kowalski's soft, hot--very much lower back.

"Uhhhnnnnhhh," Kowalski says. His eyes roll back in his head, then he grabs Ray's face and kisses him, fast and hard; Ray's not getting much chance to breathe and he's a little dizzy by the time Kowalski pulls back, gasping, and says, "Fraser's coming back. Soon. That, this would be. Kinda rude."

"Yes. Right," Ray says, and nods a lot.

****************************************

Ray made it through the first few days of Bookman okay. It wasn't easy--he had to remember to yell and throw things when he really only wanted to kvetch a little, and to give fucking huge tips (not my money, he kept reminding himself) and a couple of times he had to laugh at stories that made him want to throw up. But he was making it. And the showgirls/callgirls--the line was a little fuzzy, apparently--that part was easy, that part was a relief.

Four days into it, though, one of his chief lieutenants got back from some mission the Bookman, the real one, had sent him on before he died, a couple of weeks ago. He knocked and Ray's door muscle checked the peephole, let him in, and then stepped out. Okay, private conference, probably important, and Ray had time to shuffle through his memories of Phyllis's deck of pictures, and come up with "Danny Z, very trusted, was off negotiating something to do with...cocaine sales in...Utah? That can't be right..." before Danny locked the door behind him, smiled and said, "I missed you, boss."

He hit his knees on the carpet in front of Ray and went for his zipper, and Ray thought, "Oh. Flexible. I get it," and "He's giving me a blow job and he still calls me boss?!? That's fucked up," and "Jesus Christ, he's giving me a blow job!"

Ray breathed evenly and didn't run screaming and told himself, "This is fine, this is not me, this is fine." Then he looked down at Danny, who looked--worried. Shit, Ray was doing something wrong, or maybe not doing something he usually did. He patted awkwardly at Danny's hair, ran a finger gently across his cheek, and Danny went from looking worried to looking completely confused. Okay, all right--Ray got his fingers into Danny's hair and pulled a little, and the harder he pulled the less confused and worried Danny looked, so he started slamming with his hips and, in between bouts of choking, Danny looked pleased, relieved--like he was doing it right. The usual way.

Ray closed his eyes, felt his orgasm closing in on him, thought, "Oh, yeah, the Book--I'm a real prince."

**************************************************

That afternoon all the not-staring-at-guys progress he's made since he got back from Vegas is pretty much screwed. Fraser's hips swaying right in front of him, driving during the short trip to a "spot where we can make a more longterm camp, Ray." Kowalski sitting next to Ray on the sled, managing even with those huge gloves on to thrash out some kind of complicated drum riff on his own thighs. Fraser walking back into camp with a dead rabbit, and that proud little "I have provided for my tribe" kind of smile that you can tell he's trying to tamp down. Kowalski's hands with the skinning knife, and the fact that Ray can find those hands sexy while they're working on a wet red scrawny dead thing--yeah. Ray's screwed.

He barely sleeps that night, and he tries to tell himself it's because he slept most of the afternoon, but he's pretty sure it's really because Fraser's breathing soft and slow on one side of him, so regular it's kind of hypnotic, and Ray could probably just roll over that way and plant one on his open, relaxed, beautiful mouth. Which would be terrific until Fraser woke up and was horrified. And he also can't sleep because on the other side of him Kowalski is alternating between quiet calm sleeping, and noisy wiggly twitch-and-mumble. And if Ray rolled over that way Kowalski would probably let him, would relax under him and open his mouth and--yeah, that would be terrific. Until Fraser woke up and was horrified.

Ray slides further down into his sleeping bag until his mouth is covered, so he can do a really quiet despairing moan.

****************************************************

Coming back to Chicago while he was still undercover hadn't been as freaky as he thought it might be, because he wasn't looking at it with his own eyes--he was still Bookman, nothing jumped out at him all full of homesickness because, as long as he was the Bookman, he wasn't really home. But then Fraser showed up, Kowalski trailing along behind him like some kind of pissed-off duckling, and Ray looked in the mirror and pulled off that stupid mustache and--there he was, and there his old life was.

And it was confusing, startling, weird. It was like--coming out of a movie, and you'd forgotten you went to a matinee and weren't expecting to come out into all this light. Everything was bright and hyperreal and--not nearly as real as the movie somehow; Ray wasn't surrounded by dark and neon and bigger-than-life bad guys with guns.

He kept blinking.

It turned out, though, there was at least one bigger-than-life bad guy with a gun.

In a hospital bed, with Fraser standing next to it looking guilty? Yeah, Ray was home.

**************************************************

The next day on the sled, Ray really can't stop looking at Kowalski. It's hopeless. He thinks he's being pretty subtle, though, sideways looks through his lashes, until Kowalski grins at him, slides down a little on the bench seat and lets his knees fall open. Bastard. Ray is not, is not doing anything about that with Fraser half a swivel from seeing it, and besides he's got on giant gloves and Kowalski has on God knows how many layers. Neither of them would actually be able to feel anything, it'd be like--the princess and the penis, Ray thinks, and cracks up.

"What?!?" Kowalsksi snarls, but he's still grinning.

"I don't--never mind," Ray says, but he can't stop laughing. His stomach is starting to hurt and he can't remember when he last laughed this hard; it was definitely pre-Vegas. Kowalski keeps staring at him but finally that wolf grin changes, goes a little soft, and he bumps shoulders with Ray and says, "Freak."

Which is when Ray notices that Fraser has already half-swiveled, and has an ah face on; one of his "Oh, I get it now," ah faces, not one of his "Your peculiar customs amuse me" or "I'm going to pretend I'm not incredibly insulted" ah faces.

"Ah," Fraser says.

"Benny?" Ray says, and he can feel, even through all the clothes, Kowalski going rigid beside him. Ray's waiting to see what that look turns into, because--yeah, this is Fraser, he's not going to be morally horrified. Fraser's always seemed to think that everybody but him is entitled to--whatever warmth they can find, whoever they find it with. But he might be horrified at not having known, or at being stuck out here alone with the two of them, who, Ray's thinking, are maybe not alone anymore.

He just looks--thoughtful, though, and turns back around to drive.

*************************************************

Once he got out of the hospital he thought everything would feel pretty much normal again, as normal as it could with Fraser gone, but it turned out there was still a lot of the Bookman around, between Ray and his family, between him and the world. He was starting to get a little panicked about it, starting to think about the department's very strong suggestion that he see a shrink, much as he hated the idea. But then it turned out that the secret to jumpstarting normalcy was Frannie.

She was driving him around in his okay-until-he-found-another-Riviera car, while he went from city office to city office trying to get his driver's license restored, because it had expired while he was in Vegas. He had a valid one, except that it had his picture but a dead mob guy's signature, which seemed to confuse the bureaucrats. She pulled up outside city hall and did a pretty decent parallel-parking job, which he was never going to tell her. Ray turned in his seat and said (in this really chilly voice that he was having a hard time dropping) "Stay right here, and don't get fucking nail polish on the upholstery this time, capisce?"

Frannie rolled her eyes at him. "Capisce??" she said. "What are you, Marvin Brando?"

And "capisce" just--fell away from him. Dropped like a peeled-off plate of armor; he could almost hear the clang. Left an open spot with the air coming in, and Frannie reached across and poked him hard right there in the chest with one finger. Poked right where it was all Ray.

Ray leaned across and grabbed her, banging an elbow on the steering wheel and hugging the hell out of her.

"Whuh?" she said.

"You've, uh. You've gotten really good at parallel parking," Ray said.

"You're a nut job," she said, but she was smiling at him when he got out of the car.

***************************************************************

Ray freaks out for a minute the next morning, because Fraser looks up from the mush he's stirring in a pan and says, in his snippiest voice, which is pretty damn snippy, "Somebody's been getting a little agitated about the lack of one-on-one time." And Ray thinks, oh shit, he noticed, and "one-on-one time?" that's what they're calling it now? And then Fraser shoots a grouchy look at Dief and says, "I explain to him that it's different when I have human friends around as well, and then he tries to lay a charge of speciesism..."

"Hey," Ray says. "God forbid you should get accused of speciesism. Take some time with the wolf." His throat has gone dry and it comes out kind of squeaky.

"You're sure you two don't mind?" Fraser says.

Ray shakes his head vehemently and Kowalski chimes in with, "Nah, take today, you and Dief go wild."

Fraser makes sure the two of them know what to do in case of anything ever, and then loads up a day pack, gets his snowshoes on, marches off grumbling about needy canines while Dief runs happy circles around him.

Ray and Kowalski look at each other, and Ray's opened his mouth to say, "So...what do you wanna do?" when Kowalski tackles him. Flattens him in the snow and kisses the hell out of him, and then Ray manages to throw him off and roll on top of him, and they don't quite end up in the fire.

"Let's take this indoors," Kowalski gasps.

"You wanna call that indoors, okay," Ray gasps back, and they stagger toward the tent.

They zip two bags together, shed their clothes speedily and crawl in.

Ray's really wishing it was warm enough to get more than a millisecond of a look at each other, but then Kowalski bashes their mouths back together and puts his freezing cold hand on Ray's dick.

"ARK!" Ray says. He's not really up to translating that, but Kowalski gets it, says, "Sorry, sorry," takes the hand away, puts both his hands in his armpits to warm up. "In a minute, yeah?" he says, and goes back to kissing.

Which is fine, Ray's actually okay with waiting however long Kowalski's hands take to warm up, because the kissing is great. Everybody he was with in Vegas seemed to think kissing for a long time was...inefficient, or something.

He's really relaxed into it, and Kowalski's warm-now hands are scooting down his belly when Fraser sticks his head in the tent door and says, "Oh."

****************************************************

So, hanging out with Frannie let him drop a lot of the Bookman. And some of it fell away on its own; one evening he was having his nightly glass of buttermilk and suddenly thought, "Jesus Christ, this tastes like buttermilk," spat it out in the kitchen sink and brushed his teeth six times.

And he figured any day now the guy thing would disappear. The thing where, once he was having regular nights with Danny, he started...noticing other guys, their mouths; wondering what they'd look like on their knees, on hands and knees.

But it didn't disappear. It--died down, a little, although it got harder to keep it semi-dead after Kowalski came back from his weird Fraser adventure. It was hard not to look at somebody who was just moving all the time.

And they ended up spending a lot of time together, because almost the first minute Kowalski walked back in the station he cornered Ray and said, "I got a proposition for you," and Ray said, "Buh?"

"You, me, Fraser, dead guy's hand," Kowalski said.

"You--I--what?"

"We were up there, looking for it, right? And it was cool, we were having a freaky Fraser kind of good time. But he just wasn't--all the way happy. I mean, you know the guy, not like he'd say anything, but--"

"Lots of little sighs," Ray said.

"Exactly. So I finally said, 'Frase, you're in a place where your balls might freeze off any second and Mother Nature wants you dead, why aren't you the happiest guy on the planet?'"

"And?"

"And, turns out, he's worried about you. I mean, we didn't take off until he'd heard from Welsh that you were out of the woods, but--I guess he was worried about, you know. Reentry after undercover, and everything, too."

"Yeah," Ray said, and felt--weirdly mushy. That Fraser would feel that way, and that Kowalski, who'd been mostly a prick the couple of days they'd spent together, would tell him Fraser did.

"So I said, here's what we'll do. You talk to the Mounties, get your new posting, and tell them 'by the way, I'm taking some more time off in a few weeks,' because your stock is high now, buddy, you can get away with that, and it's not for you, it's for Vecchio, so shut up about how you shouldn't. And I'll go back, work for a while, sweet-talk Welsh, and talk Vecchio into it while he's healing up all the way from the bullet. And Fraser said yes. You in?"

"Yeah," Ray said.

They spent the next several weeks making plans, and reserving flights, and calling Fraser, and occasionally having a beer together. And Kowalski kept going over and over all the things that could kill Ray up there. Ray tried to explain that he already knew that Canada had homicidal feelings for him, but Kowalski would not let up on the warnings; it was Phyllis all over again. Except that after Ray thought that, he had a picture in his head of Kowalski grabbing his knee and saying, "Be flexible," and then he had to bolt for the bar's men's room and jerk off.

That had never happened with Phyllis.

**************************************************

"Uh, hi," Ray says to Fraser's head sticking in the tent flap, and Kowalski's hands stop moving on Ray's belly. Kowalski blinks at Fraser for a second and then pulls the sleeping bag up over his face.

"Oh, very mature," Ray whispers to him. He looks back at Fraser and tries to come up with anything he can possibly say. "It isn't what you think" isn't an option, because, well, it is what he thinks.

And Fraser suddenly beams at him. "I knew you two would get along eventually," he says.

"Get along?" Ray says.

"Rather spectacularly, apparently."

"So," Ray says, "you're...okay with this? It doesn't make you feel, uh, awkward? Left out?"

"I was hoping," Fraser says, and--now he's blushing? "It doesn't have to. Make me feel. Left out."

Ray just lies there, looking at him, trying desperately to think of something else Fraser could possibly mean, because there's no way in hell he means that. But Kowalski pops his head back up out of the bag and says, "YES."

Then looks at Ray and says, "Uh, yes, right?"

Fraser's blushing more and smiling more, so, good God, he did mean that.

"Yes," Ray says. "Yes. Yeah. Okay."

Fraser shucks off his clothes, and Ray gets a little better look than he did at Kowalski because he's not undressing himself at the same time, and damn.

Fraser scoots right into the middle, and even with two bags zipped together that's too crowded. Their knees are all bashing together, and Ray's hand keeps getting pinned under...somebody, and Fraser accidentally headbutts him in the ear. But there's kissing, lots of it, and after a while they get some kind of rhythm going with their hips, sort of half-rolling back and forth against each other. Fraser's murmuring, "Yes, lovely," and Kowalski's saying "Fuck, fuck, yes," and Ray's just breathing.

Fraser comes first, while he's rolled in Ray's direction. Ray takes a minute to just enjoy Fraser trembling and speechless, moaning into Ray's neck and slicking up his stomach, and then Ray slides his hand down into the warm, gets it slippery and reaches across Fraser for Kowalski. He gives him a "This okay?" look and Kowalski says, "Jesus, yes."

Ray strokes him hard and Kowalski goes off pretty quickly, and Ray's rubbing up against Fraser's hip that whole time so he's not far behind.

They all just lie there panting for a while, and then Ray says, "Benny? Why'd you come back so quick?"

"Ah, Dief felt that he was...done bonding."

"Uh huh." Ray says.

"Yeah, sure, Frase," Kowalski says. "I'm buying that." He makes a face, adds " I think these sleeping bags are not really safe for the weather any more. Also, they're disgusting."

"We happen," Fraser says, "to be currently just a few hours from a small town. With a motel. Rustic, but it has beds."

He wiggles around some, probably trying to get out of the wet spot, which is pretty hopeless because at this point the whole bag is a wet spot. "Large beds," he adds, and giggles. And a few seconds after that he's snoring.

Ray looks over his head at Kowalski. "Happen to be close to a town," he says.

"I'm pretty sure we just got played," Kowalski says.

"Yeah," Ray says, and they grin at each other like a couple of idiots.

Ray slumps back down--to rest for a minute before they pack up, and to watch Fraser sleeping. He's gonna have to have a little talk with Fraser about just assuming he gets the middle--Ray's pretty sure that's the warmest spot.