****

It got colder, and darker, or so Ben said, and I went out often enough to exercise Niri and not much more. There was actually a recreation hall in town, had a walking track and everything, and John and I took the dogs there sometimes so we could walk and chat. Charles and Maggie and Ben hitched up dogsled teams and took us sledding, too - that was a hell of an experience. Dogsledding blind was nothing like dogsledding sighted, and the same with snowmobiles, but it was fun anyway.

I drew the line at ice skating.

Back down to Yellowknife for more tests, and to tell you the truth, I'd gotten so damned used to them dangling their "unknowns" and "unpredictables" and "maybes" that it actually was a hell of a shock when the neurologist finally used the P word - permanent. To be honest, I'd actually thought it would be kind of a relief to finally know for sure.

I was wrong.

I kind of fell apart for a little while, just a few days, but I'd gone through worse back at the beginning, and this time Ben was with me - you know, with me. And I didn't think "helpless" and "useless" thoughts anymore. John had mentioned the possibility of me working with him and Charles, expanding the sled dog/guide dog business, and Maggie had talked about maybe a dispatch job at the station that sounded even better. They'd have to change the computer setup a bit for me, but it could be done. Anyway, I got blue for a while, but not as bad and not as long, and I bounced back okay. And there was still that surgery we could try, maybe in the spring. So I was pretty okay after all.

One evening I was getting kind of restless - I'd felt, I don't know, off all day, little bit headachy, little bit draggy, just basically weird, and Ben said I'd been indoors too long. It was actually a nice night out, he said, clear and no wind and not horribly cold, so we bundled up and I put Niri in her harness and we went for a walk.

"It's a lovely night," Ben said. "Are you warm enough, Ray?"

"Yeah, I'm okay," I said, although I was a little cold, and being outside wasn't really helping any. The snow was pretty deep, too, and wherever we were walking, nobody had broken a trail. "Where are we?"

"Heading out of town," Ben said. "Not to the forest yet; it's open here."

A second later I put my foot down wrong - couldn't blame it on Niri; it was just the deep snow - and down I went, flailing and yelping. Niri whipped around to make sure I was all right, and Dief joined in, and of course Ben, and I was damned near buried under worried bodies.

"Hey, hey, I'm okay," I laughed, fending off dog-tongues. "Just taking a little break here."

"A break?" Ben laughed, relieved, and he grabbed my hand to pull him up, but I just laughed and pulled him down instead, and then used the opportunity to roll over on top of him and wrestle around in the snow. And that made me feel better, all right, cold and snow or not, and we wound up in a snowbank, Ben on his back and me on my back, too, kind of in the crook of his arm.

"Yeah, a pretty nice night after all," I chuckled, a little out of breath. Man, the colored lights were really going tonight, kind of rippling, and there were blurry little white sparkles in there too for a change. I shook my head and the white sparkles got clearer. "Man, I got to remember to tell the doc about that."

"What?" Ben said, and he sounded kind of worried.

"Just the colored lights," I said. "Blue and green and purple, and some little bitty white ones . . . "

There was a long moment of silence, and then Ben said in the strangest, kind of shaky voice, "Ray, that's the aurora borealis. The Northern Lights."

And I didn't get it for a moment, and I tugged off my gloves and put my hands up to see if my eyes were open and suddenly the colored lights disappeared.

And I took my hands away.

And they came back.

And I must have made some sound, some kind of sign, because the next thing I saw was Ben's face, and I saw Ben's face, and yeah it was pretty dim and kind of blurry, too, but that was because it was night and I was crying, and there he was, Benton Fraser with the Northern Lights all around him, and if in the next second I went blind again and never saw another thing, I hoped that was the picture I'd carry in my head for the rest of my life.

Well, I didn't go blind again, although over the next couple of days my vision would go blurry and weird and then come back again, but by the time we got a plane down to Yellowknife to see the neurologist again it had pretty much settled down to normal, or as normal as seeing ever got for Mister Astigmatism Kowalski. And the joke was on me, 'cause of course I'd left my glasses back in Chicago, and when I called Mom and Dad and told 'em I needed my glasses sent up here, Mom cried on the phone and Dad got kind of choked up too.

Everybody I'd met in Inuvik was thrilled to death for me - it was kind of weird, finally seeing the faces that went with the voices. Most of 'em didn't look anything like I'd pictured them. John didn't look as bad as I'd figured, just kind of odd, kind of, I don't know, unfinished, like Odo on Deep Space Nine or something. And Michelle wasn't as gorgeous as she sounded - actually she was pretty frumpy. Then I saw her sitting with John, playing with Windsor, and I changed my mind. She was gorgeous after all. I'd just been looking with the wrong eyes.

I talked to John about Niri. She was a guide dog, after all, and I had my eyes again. But John said no, that Niri and I had bonded, and when he asked Niri what she thought, she knocked me over, draped herself over me and washed my face. So that was that.

Ben and I talked a lot about what would happen next. I was pretty good with staying in Inuvik if that's what he wanted - I mean, hell, if there was stuff for me to do up here blind, then I was pretty damn sure I could manage something with working eyes. Ben put the brakes on that, though.

"You almost lost a career that means a great deal to you," he said. "I think you should go back and remember what you'd be giving up. Besides, this posting was only temporary. There's no permanent position available here at the present."

"So this isn't your way of getting rid of me, huh?" I said, grinning because I know Ben better than that.

"Of course it's not," Ben said, and I got to watch his eyes sparkle before he kissed me.

So I took enough unpaid leave - cashed in on all that goodwill from the Governor - to let Ben finish out his temporary assignment, and we got ready to move back to Chicago, where the first order of business would be moving Ben into my apartment. We'd give Inuvik some more thought, maybe after a year or two, and in the meantime, there were always vacations.

One last night in Inuvik, and we spent it lying in front of the fire, bellies full of caribou chili, and I rolled over and propped myself on Ben's chest and watched the way the firelight danced in his hair.

"I want you," I whispered.

"And I you," he whispered back. "Very, very much. What's your pleasure?"

"I want to see you," I said. "I want to see you fucking me."

And that time I got to see Ben blush, and it wasn't all embarrassment, either, because we'd only done that a couple times - we'd kind of got sidetracked when they'd said my blindness was permanent, and for a while I hadn't felt much like doing anything.

But there in front of the fire with my man, I wanted it all.

Ben didn't say a word, just fetched the lube - we'd had the condom talk - and some baby oil, and I lay there and purred while he gave me another massage, but this time, I'm telling you, there was no way I was going to fall asleep. And by the time Ben had rubbed his way down my back and kissed and licked his way down my front, and his mouth was on my dick and his fingers were up my butt, I was seeing stars behind my eyelids in a whole new way that was nothing like blindness. And he got his legs kind of under my hips in an odd way, and he slid in so gently, so slowly that I was just about screaming with frustration - and then he startled the hell out of me, kind of flipped me up and him back, and before I knew it, he was on his back and I was straddling him, and it felt like he'd grown like three inches in the last few seconds, and it felt mighty, mighty good.

And Ben pushed up, and I got the idea just fine and moved, getting the angle just right, and there was Ben in the firelight, all spread out for me to see in all different kinds of ways, hands and mouth and eyes and ass, and he was seeing me too, probably in ways they don't have names for. And with all that going on, even though we were both trying to make it last, there was no way we could hold out. And I swear to God, I kept my eyes open while I came, because I didn't want to miss the teeniest, tiniest second of that look on Ben's face, in the light of the fire, in the light of us.

But the next time, and the time after that, and all the times still to come, what we'll remember is seeing each other again, for the first time, under the Northern Lights.