singillatim | open & closed | if I get too close and I'm not how you hoped

The pups — Brock, Mackenzie, and Boris — are too small to be harnessed, and will remain that way for almost another whole year, but that doesn't mean they can't begin their training. Fraser has all three of them out in the yard of 16 Thompson's Drive, Diefenbaker watching from where he's lazing in the long, slanting rays of the afternoon sun.

Someone watching might be excused for not realizing that the tableau before them consists of serious training methods: it looks just like playtime. Fraser, dressed down in jeans and a flannel shirt over a turtleneck, mittens on his hands and his boots caked with snow, twists and jukes and runs, playing what seems like a chaotic game of tag with the three half-grown pups, who jump and chase and mouth at him, tails up and wagging.

As training goes, it seems fun for everyone involved.

Svetlana watches the scene from the window, grinning to herself as she checks on the vegetables in the stew. They still have a while to go, which means that she has plenty of time to get her coat on and go outside with them.

"Are you just going to let them have all the fun without you, lazy thing?" she says to Dief in Russian, as their conversations usually go. But he does get a happy scratch between his ears.

"I thought you were working!" she calls out in English to the happy little group.

Dief grumbles slightly, but allows the caress, eyes slitting slightly at the sensation. Her voice causes an immediate uproar among the pups: Boris, who has become particularly infatuated with her, abandons his siblings for a moment to come running up to her, tongue out and ears pricked up.

From the yard, Fraser laughs, brushing snow off his pants. "We are working," he promises. "They're getting good exercise, learning to work as a team."

"Oh, and what sort of team is that?" she wonders, showering Boris with affection, kneeling down so she can plant a kiss on top of his head.

"The sort of team who plays and does no work?"

The half-grown pup wriggles around her, delighted by her attention, while Brock and Mackenzie fall to play-fighting, wrestling in the snow. "Once they're used to the harness, they'll want to work," Ben promises, wading through the snow to Sveta's side. He smiles down at her, then leans to give her cheek a kiss.

"Do you need my help with something?"

"No. I am just admiring the view," she says, blushing pink at the cold and the kiss.

"The stew is on the fire, whenever you're ready. Did you catch me a rabbit?"

"Yes. It's hanging in the shed, dressed and ready." The string that had bound them together had given him remarkable insight into her, into her wants and fears and deepest self, and he knows it had done the same for her with him, but he's never needed a magical string connecting him to the woman he loves to anticipate her needs. There are, in fact, three rabbits hanging dressed in the shed.

"I can get it for you, if you want."

"No," she tells him and she's eager enough to prove it. There was a time when she would have balked at seeing something like that in the shed, but these months have changed her into a true woman of the wilds.

Or at least some semblance of one.

She shakes her head and squeezes his hand, also looking a little bit for that red string. She had loved having him so close, like she was back at home. Like she could see his aura and truly feel him, knowing that he felt her.

There's a strange absence to that now, but she doesn't feel sad about it.

She had it once, and that's what matters.

"But you do need to come inside soon. The sun won't last."

He nods without looking up at the sun to gauge how many more minutes of light there might be; she's right. Months here and she's become much more adept at reading the sky, the sun. She might even be able to stay in a place like his father's cabin back home, where even a town like Milton would seem like a bustling metropolis.

But she's not looking at the sky now; she's looking at their hands. His own are mittened, but that hadn't stopped the strings that had unspooled from his fingertips before. "Do you miss it?"

He hadn't known how to feel about those strings, most of them. But there were a few he'd cherished, and one was the gleaming red one that had led him unerringly to her, straight as a compass needle pointing due north.

Edited 2025-03-08 02:47 (UTC)

She's made herself useful here, found a way to be a doctor and to survive. Part of her wants to impress him, wants to make him proud, and part of her does it to prove that she can. Prove to some part of herself that she isn't just a spoiled, naive girl from the city who likes to watch her soaps and read her fantasy books.

She's a woman who can adapt and finds happiness anywhere.

His question catches her a little off guard.

"Oh. I suppose I do sometimes, but I don't need a string to tell me how you feel. It's written on your face. But I did like - knowing that you were safe."

It certainly feels like it's written on his face, and across every other part of him. It's been years since he felt this cracked open and vulnerable in front of another person. He's helplessly caught in her orbit, as adoring in his own reserved way as the puppies who love to crowd around her feet and beg for her attention. "That was a helpful benefit," he agrees, curving his hand around hers for a moment.

"I liked knowing you were safe, too, when I couldn't be with you."

"I am always safe!" she protests, mostly teasing and trying to lighten his mood, bring a smile to his face. She gives his hand a little tug, trying to encourage him to follow.

"I keep your house clean and your puppies entertained!" she says, sounding stern in the way that means she is just the opposite.

"It's your house, too," he reminds her, happy to let her lead his mood into a cheerier one. He stamps outside the door, getting snow off his boots and jeans before whistling for the puppies. They come running, clattering up the stairs, but opt to stay outside in the snow once he goes in.

"And Boris is certainly your puppy, even if the rest of them aren't." Which isn't something he really thinks could be successfully argued.

She can't help the grin as she watches the pups on the porch. "I did name him," she reminds him with a giggle.

"And I am not the one trekking mud into the house!" she says, pointing at his boots. Her own are still on, but she stays on the porch, preparing to walk back out to the shed.

"Go and stir my vegetables, Constable Fraser," she says, reaching up to grab his shirt so she can kiss him.

Fraser leans against the inner wall with one hand, lifting each foot one at a time to unlace his boots and tug them off, setting the first neatly on the mat inside the house before he leans into her kiss, smiling against her lips. "Yes, sir."

He takes a moment to take his other boot off, then heads inside, sock-footed, to the kitchen. Sveta's stew is bubbling gently on the stove, already smelling rich and delicious even without the addition of meat. He reaches for a wooden spoon and gives the simmering vegetables a stir as requested, watching as they spiral around the pot.

When she returns, it's with the rabbit, which she takes to the counter to divide. The bones get put to the side for the dogs, but the rest is cut up and placed in the stew. And Ben, of course, gets a kiss to the cheek for his effort.

"I never thought this would be the woman I would become," she tells him honestly. "I don't think that, even if I return home, that this will ever leave me."

He shifts to make room for her at the stove, stirring solicitously as she drops each piece of meat into the stew. An abrupt thought hits that it would be nice to have a little music, but there's no Aurora tonight and they don't have a player anyway.

"I don't think there are many people out there who could have adapted as easily as you have," he tells her, a small smile curving his mouth and crinkling the corners of his eyes. "What happened to that city girl I found out on the ice?"

She washes her hands in water she keeps for that purpose, drying them before they can get too cold. "Mm, she fell in love with a very handsome man who showed her all of the beauty that living out here can give you."

She slides her arms around his waist. "I - enjoy the life we have created here," she admits, watching the rhythmic stirring of the stew. "I don't like the strange things that happen or the - the constant worry about illness and disease." Especially because of Goodsir's disappearance, leaving Sveta as the only doctor. "But these moments? I love them."

He leans back against her, just a little, tipping his head toward her though his eyes stay fixed on the stew as it cooks. "You don't mind how simple it is?"

It's not for everyone, he knows, especially someone like Sveta, like Ray, used to the bustle and noise and convenience of city living. He recalls Ray showing up at the cabin door in a snowsuit as loud as the ones Holland March seems to find, awkward in the wilds but no less dedicated to solving the case there in the snow as he is in Chicago.

"Once upon a time, I would have," she says, her voice muffled in his shirt as she holds him tight in an embrace. "But now, I think that it has shown me what's important in my life. Family, friends, food - " She looks up to him, her eyes soft. "And love."

He smiles at that, shifting one arm to put it around her shoulders, drawing her in. "I know you miss your television programmes," he tells her, fondly amused. "But you really have adapted marvelously, solnishko. I wish I could bring you to my father's cabin... it's up north, but not so far as here, and it's simple, but supplies aren't hard to get. It's peaceful there. Beautiful, in its way."

She does miss her shows and her books and all of the small things. She misses her flat with the terrible wallpaper. She misses the smell of smoke in the air.

But she doesn't miss anything enough to want to leave.

"I would like that," she admits, easy and without hesitation. "I - I want to go home with you one day, Ben. I have found you and it does not seem right that we should ever be apart."

He turns toward her, blank astonishment stamped clearly across his face. He's so rarely surprised like this, right down to his core; he even forgets to stir the stew, his hand and the wooden spoon in it coming to a halt in the simmering broth. "Do you mean that?"

It's not that he doubts her, exactly, it's just — well, of course he'd dreamed about it, wasting time imagining scenarios that couldn't possibly come to pass. He'd daydreamed about introducing her to Ray and the rest of the Vecchios, of showing her around Chicago, of bringing her, finally, back home to the North where the Auroras are only Auroras and there's nothing that could hurt them that his rifle couldn't stop.

His eyes search hers, taken aback and achingly hopeful. "But... your mission at home..."

She stands a little taller and kisses his cheek. "My mission at home is - not mine. It was given to me because of Fate. This is outside of Fate. Besides, it's been a year. Their lives continue on in whatever way that they do. They can do this without me."

And if it means that they have to abandon the Balance, then so be it.

She swallows back emotion, and fear, and speaks firmly.

"I don't want to live my life constrained and kept away from doing what I know is right. I don't want to give up my soul for people who have never loved me."

He doesn't move as she kisses his cheek, except to lean a little closer to her, his hand drifting to the small of her back, where his fingers spread, warm and firm. Ben looks down at her, searching her eyes as she tells him that she doesn't want to go back to her own world, to the life she lived there. His voice, when he speaks, is low and a little hoarse with everything he's feeling, everything he has so much trouble releasing from the tight grip he keeps on himself. "I can't imagine being able to continue on without you."

Maybe her friends and allies can. Maybe they don't need her the way he seems to now, with all the light and warmth and joy she's brought into what had been, he knows, a starkly empty life outside of his job and his duty and the work he did with Ray. He blinks, rapid, the import of everything she's saying washing over him. "I think you'd love Chicago."

open & closed | if I get too close and I'm not how you hoped

—Sveta

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