The Bluest of Blue

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John

Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms

Genre: Alaska, Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death,
Bluegrass, Body Dysphoria, Camping, Denali National Park, Dual Timeline, Eventual
Happy Ending, Hiking, John Watson POV, John Watson is a Ranger, John Watson looks
hot as fuck in a Ranger uniform, M/M, National Park Ranger AU, Oops what will
happen when they have to share a single tent, Period Typical Homophobia, Period
Typical Transphobia, Romance, Sherlock Holmes is a Scientist, Strangers to Lovers,
The circle of life will definitely occur in this fic, Trans Character, first person
POV, past references to child abuse, strap-on sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-03-26 15:09:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 196,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13860315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/
SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: John Watson's 10th season as a Denali National Park Ranger was shaping up
to look like all the years before.Until a special team from Europe was flown into
the Park for a summer-long wolf-tracking research project, and the head of that
research team was wearing a perfectly tailored suit.

1. Denali Primer

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up two weeks ago and thought, "oh my god, why haven't I written a Park
Ranger AU?!" My partner has worked as a Denali Ranger, I've spent some quality time
up there with her, I love AU's, and I love putting John and Sherlock in the great
outdoors.
>
> The playlist for this fic is: bluegrass! bluegrass! bluegrass! Each chapter will
have 1 traditional and 1 "newgrass" song for you to enjoy. The people in Denali
love their bluegrass, and even hold an annual bluegrass festival near the park (as
well as around Alaska in general).
>
> The title, "The Bluest of Blue," comes from the Jimmy Martin song "Ocean of
Diamonds."
> The chorus is:
> -
> I'd give an ocean of diamonds or a world filled with flowers
> To hold you closely for just a few hours
> Hear you whisper softly that you love me too
> Would change all the dark clouds to the bluest of blue
> -
> Listen to "Ocean of Diamonds" by Jimmy Martin
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v3zrgRhwMI).
>
> For your newgrass, listen to my all-time favorite musical Sarah Jarosz sing "Come
On Up to the House" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THh_hWrGXYw).

Hello, you!

Thanks for joining me on this Park Ranger romance adventure. Before we dive in, I
wanted to start with a quick primer about Denali. As fun as it is to write mile-
long author’s notes, there’s a lot of terminology and places in this fic that might
be unfamiliar, so I wanted to give as much information as I could up-front to make
it easier for you to read!

This information is largely based off my own experiences and personal knowledge. My
partner has worked as a Denali Park Ranger, and I had the good fortune of spending
some quality time deep in the park with her. This isn’t meant to be a definitive
history on Denali, or a perfect description of the National Park Service. I’m sure
I’ll get plenty wrong! But hopefully this will give you a good picture of what’s
going on before you start to read.

Denali National Park, originally named Mt. McKinley National Park, is the third
largest National Park in the U.S. It’s in the interior of Alaska, southwest of
Fairbanks and north of Anchorage. The Park was established in 1917, and is centered
on the main mountain peak of Denali, which is the tallest peak in North America.
(You may know this mountain as Mt. McKinley – the name was officially changed by
President Obama in 2015 to the word ‘Denali’ – which is the native Athabaskan word
for the mountain, the Native American tribe from that region).

Visiting this National Park is very unique, because the vast majority of the park
is inaccessible to your typical visitor! There are only a handful of official
hiking trails in the park, and only one Park Road that goes from the Park Entrance
out to Kantishna. Aside from that, the only way to explore the park is by hiking
through the backcountry – meaning there are no trails, no signs, no roads, just you
and the landscape and the wild animals.

\--

The Park Road:

Visitors can take their cars only a few miles into the park – after that, you need
to be on an official park bus in order to go further. The park bus system is very
extensive, with different busses going out to different stops along the road. Many
of the Denali bus drivers have been doing it for literally decades, making for a
very tight community among the staff. The “Kantishna Experience” is the bus tour
that you pay for to take you from the Park Entrance (the East Side) all the way out
(7ish hours one way) to Kantishna, the end of the Park Road and where some fancy
lodges are located. A Ranger will narrate your drive out there, and you stop for
photo opportunities.

The road is one lane and dirt, and there are some sections that are extremely
difficult to navigate. These bus drivers are incredibly skilled. Many times busses
pass each other with just inches to spare on either side, and a drop off down a
cliff on the edge of the road (yes, literally).

Employees drive government vans on the Park Road, which we will see come up later!
Most visitors coming to Denali only experience the park through these bus tours.
Only those that have the skills and supplies to do more extensive hiking or
backpacking really go off from the main road and get to see more of the park.

\--

Places in the Park:

Park Entrance: The East Side. This is where most visitors’ entire experience of
Denali happens (unless they take a bus down the Park Road). This contains the main
Visitor Center, gift shop, restaurants, Science Center, the train depot, bus
stations, a few of the official trails, the sled dog kennels, etc. It’s your
typical ‘national park’ setup, where there’s paved walking roads, signage, parking
lots, and the rest. Many Rangers start off in Denali working on the East Side, and
then eventually choose to move out West.

C-Camp: This is the staff housing on the East Side. The vast majority of Denali
park staff are seasonal – meaning they only work in the park for the summers. This
park is closed during the winter, due to the snow. The only people staying on year-
round all stay on the East Side, and they include people like the heads of East and
West side interpretation, a few high ranking rangers, some law enforcement to do
winter patrols, and a full staff in the sled dog kennels to do winter runs and
training.

McKinley Park: The small town just outside the park entrance on the other side of
the train tracks. Filled with hotels, lodges, and also a small community where many
park staff live (rather than living in the temporary staff housing inside the park
at C-Camp).

Sled Dog Kennels: The sled dogs are SO CUTE. All sled dogs in this fic are real
ones I had the chance to meet and hang out with. East side Denali staff are given
the option to sign up to be a sled dog walker, where you are assigned a sled dog to
walk a few times a week. The sled dogs each have their own little pens with a hut
to sleep in, and their name badge painted on the front. During the summer, they
pull a sled with wheels, and in the winter, they do the normal sledding. The
highlight of most visitors’ trips to Denali NP is viewing the Sled Dog show, which
the Interpretive Rangers working in the kennels hold twice a day to show off the
dog’s mushing abilities (and general cuteness / badassery).

Toklat: The West Side. This is where John lives and works, and where my partner did
as well. This is a much smaller Ranger station about 3 hours into the park, where a
handful of Rangers and maintenance crews live and work for the entire summer.
Toklat mainly serves as a rest stop for the visitors on the bus tours. There is a
huge tent (literally a tent, not a building), which functions as a mini visitor
center and also an Alaska Geographic bookstore / gift shop. There’s also bathrooms
and a viewing platform with binoculars and huge moose antlers you can hold up to
your head and take pictures with. The staff housing is farther down the road, and
contains staff cabins, offices, maintenance facilities, and a rec room. The staff
living in Toklat are pretty remote – you have to drive all the way back to the East
Side for any amenities (at the extremely small store in McKinley Park – if you want
actual groceries, rangers take turns making the 4+ hour drive into Fairbanks to
stock up on food).

Eielson Visitor Center: One hour deeper into the park from Toklat, this is the
park’s other main Visitor Center. It’s recently been renovated and looks absolutely
amazing – built practically into the hillside and with a high energy efficiency
rating. This is where most of the Rangers living at Toklat work, staffing this
visitor center, leading guided hikes on the two main trails branching off from
Eielson.

Wonder Lake: The lake that’s about 6 hours into the park along the Park Road.
There’s a canoe that staff can take out into the center of the lake, and it’s so
scenic and remote and gorgeous you’ll want to cry. One ranger lives out at Wonder
Lake for the summer in the tiny staff housing there in order to staff the little
desk for visitors. There’s a few trails that branch out from there, as well as a
campground (one of the few campgrounds inside the park).

\--

Park Rangers:

In this fic, John is a Law Enforcement Ranger. These Rangers are tasked with
ensuring safety within the park, for both visitors and the animals. It’s the most
military-esque position within the Park Service. Most often, Enforcement rangers
are called on scene if someone is hurt (they’re all EMT’s), or a visitor is
endangered by (or endangering) a wild animal, or if backpackers are disregarding
the rules for hiking and camping in the backcountry. Some of them, like John, carry
a gun. They spend the majority of their time doing patrols along the Park Road.

Other types of Rangers:

Interpretive: These are the Park Rangers you most likely think of. The ones in the
visitor centers, leading hikes, giving presentations, etc. The abbreviation used
for this field is “Interp.”

Backcountry: Denali backcountry rangers mostly work in the Backcountry offices on

the East Side. These rangers hold training sessions that you *must* go through and
pass in order to be allowed to backcountry camp in the park. They give safety and
training for how to hike in the backcountry, are in charge of assigning permits to
camp, and every other week do backcountry hiking patrols to make sure visitors
haven’t been lost, or damage anything, or that there isn’t a new animal kill site
which means that Unit should be temporarily shut down.

What the heck are Units? The backcountry of Denali is separated into Units. Only a
certain number of people are allowed to camp in each unit per night, so you need to
apply for a permit. This is to ensure that you will not come across any other
people while you’re hiking or camping, and to lessen the negative effects on the
landscape. Backpacking campers are *not allowed* to be visible from the Park Road
when they set up camp. If bus drivers or Rangers spot a tent, it’s the Law
Enforcement Rangers’ job to determine who those people are, and try and apprehend
them on the way back to explain the rules.

Scientists: These people are considered Rangers, but work in the park to do
research. Ecologists, geologists, animal scientists, etc.
GS-Levels: National Park staff have GS-levels. Very beginner park staff (such as
those working the entrance payment booths, or first year workers) are GS-3 and GS-
4. The more experienced and advanced you get (and/or the more higher education you
achieve), you can move up to GS-5, GS-7, GS-9. Rangers at GS-11 are managers and
heads of staff. GS-13 would be the Chief of Interpretation or the Head Ranger for
the Park.

SCA: I mention SCA in the fic – this stands for Student Conservation Association.
I….. honestly didn’t research whether this existed in the time period I’m placing
this fic. Just pretend it did. The SCA is a way for mostly students and young
people fresh out of college to do internships in conservation, such as in National
Parks. They wear an SCA uniform instead of the traditional Park Ranger uniform.

\--

Wild animals:

Animals in Denali include foxes, brown bears (of which Grizzly bears are a type),
caribou (reindeer are domesticated caribou), moose, wolves, dall sheep, and your
standard smaller animals and birds. Surprisingly, there has only been one death by
bear attack in the park’s history (and it was by a guy who was doing something
stupid). However, bears are literally everywhere. You could be hiking and literally
come across a giant wild bear. Bear safety is HUGE in Denali (as well as moose
safety). I won’t say more now because we’ll learn a lot during the fic!

\--

Whew – I’m sorry that was a lot! But hopefully now you get a better sense of how
Denali operates, and how John’s life as a Ranger would function.

For a park map, see

[HERE](http://www.nps.gov/dena/planyourvisit/maps.htm#11/63.4701/-149.9496).

For the standard Ranger uniform, see

[HERE](http://www.madetomeasuremag.com/clothes-make-the-ranger-national-park-
service-uniforms-serve-a-vital-need).

For some gorgeous images of Denali, see

[HERE](http://www.nps.gov/dena/learn/photosmultimedia/photogallery.htm).

2. April 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Emmylou Harris sing "Wayfaring Stranger" [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqHp5CDl4yQ).
>
> Newgrass: Listen to Kristin Andreassen, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sarah Jarosz sing
"Simmon" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJiAe87WBy4).
April 1991

It was the first day of April, and the cold sky was clear, and the mountain was
calling my name.

I turned the key in the rusted lock of my winter cabin for the last time, reaching
out to pat her log side like an old horse before running my fingers through my too-
long hair.

It had been a harsh winter. Chattering bones and barely enough firewood and one
particularly bad week when I was left eating cold canned soup in the dark when my
generator died, and the walls of snow were too damn high to get my mobile the seven
miles into Talkeetna for extra supplies.

It had been long hours hauling water through hip-deep snow, fixing leaks in the old
roof, and hiding away in the never-ending darkness until the flashlight batteries
wore out and the pages on the book in my hands grew brittle with the cold.

It had been exactly the same as every other winter for the nine years that came
before it.

My mobile took me straight into Talkeetna, long blankets of white stretched as far
as the eye could see. I looked back once at the cabin before turning the final
bend, watching it disappear into the sea of green trees. I wanted to feel anxious
about leaving the quiet, but I could feel Denali at my back like a siren’s call
piercing the sky. Everything I owned besides the bare bones of the cabin was packed
in the two canvas bags strapped to the sled.

I picked up a cheap coffee in town, knocking the thick snow from my boots outside
the door and doing small talk with the woman behind the counter who I only ever saw
four times a year – once on the first day of the season, once on the last day of
the season, and twice during the winter for my main supply runs. She didn’t know my
name, and I didn’t know hers.

“Gonna be a good season for ya,” she said, like she said every year.

I nodded over the coffee steam. “Hope so.”

“Rangers on the radio said you’ve got some big shot researchers coming out,” she
said. “Something ‘bout the wolves.” She was missing her front teeth, and I couldn’t
remember whether they had been there before.

I shrugged. “Guess so,” I said. “Last year it was the caribou. Must be going up the
food chain.”

She didn’t laugh at my bad joke. She told me the same thing she told me every year
on the first day of April as the shop door swung behind me. “Say hi to them bears.
Don’t get killed.”

My Ford was parked exactly where I left it six months before. After nearly an hour
of shoveling off snow and jumping the engine, my two bags were slung in the back,
and the windows were rolled down, and I was speeding down Highway 3 towards the
vast northern horizon, with the mountain peaks cradling me high on my left and the
vast open land to the right. I stopped in Cantwell for another coffee – that one
even worse. The Athabaskan woman behind the counter rolled her eyes. I knew her
name.

“So, you survived another winter,” Chena said, handing me my change. “You know I
gotta brew three times as much coffee the first week of April than normal. All you
Rangers coming back from your winter hideouts, and your hair’s too long.”

I tipped my faded baseball cap at her – the one I always wore during that first
drive back, with the faded stitched-on image of a jumping King Salmon, “Nushagak
River” written on the front. “Just getting you ready for all the tourists. Practice
run.”

She huffed. “No tourist busses make a stop here in Cantwell. Unless someone’s gotta
pee so badly they can’t make it to your neck of the woods in Talkeetna, or on to
Anchorage.”

I looked out the faded window at the one-lane dirt road dotted with snow.
“Talkeetna’s bathrooms are state of the art,” I said to her. “You should see them
these days. They even got real toilet paper.”

Chena threw a wadded-up ball of receipt paper at the back of my head as I walked
out. “Say hi to them bears, Ranger,” she said. “Hope one of ‘em gets ya.”

By the time the outline of the buildings of McKinley Park came into view, my lungs
were nearly aching for a breath of the fresh air. My eyes kept scanning to my left
like they always did, praying to catch a glimpse of the mountain through the fog.
As if I didn’t know it was nearly impossible to see a clear view of Denali in the
beginning of April.

My hands were shaking when I drove through the abandoned park entrance, making my
way down roads I could navigate with my eyes closed until I made it to the center
of C-Camp. I nearly moaned out loud when I jumped down from my truck, and the
Denali gravel crackled under my boots for the first time in half a year. My breath
was a perfect cloud of fog.

The place was empty – I was always one of the first ones to arrive. I dumped my
stuff down on the bunk in one of the temporary rooms and made my way over to the
offices, taking my time to walk down the roadside trail and letting the icy air
slap against the bare skin of my neck above my coat. I meant to go into the offices
and check-in with the year-round Rangers – see how the winter patrols went, and
whether the new sled teams had been fully trained, and what I would be expected to
do for this year’s training as one of the few GS-9’s on staff – whether there were
any new Law Enforcement Rangers posted out in Toklat I’d need to train.

Instead my feet crunched through the fresh snow farther down the lone road, until
the achingly familiar sight of the sled dog kennels came into view. I stepped over
the metal gate and pulled off my gloves with my teeth, and at the sound of my soft
whistle twenty furry heads poked out of their sleeping huts. The dense air filled
with barks and happy yips, and a part of me that always dimmed during the long
winters came back to life.

I made my way past each dog in their fenced yards, stopping to give a quick pat and
get a lick on the hand. I knelt when I came to the last wooden hut in the line,
sticking out my hand so the little nose could catch my scent.

A part of my chest clenched when a familiar pair of cloudy grey eyes emerged from
the hut, nose sniffing madly at the air. The old dog stepped out of the warm
shadows on shaking legs, limping a bit towards my hand before pressing his face
fiercely into my chest.

He was crying, whimpering and wriggling in my arms, and I gripped his fur tightly
in my fingers. “Hey there, Lugnut,” I whispered. I buried my face between his ears
as he leaned his weight against me. “Alright, old man,” I said, desperately glad I
was alone so no one could hear my strained voice. “Wasn’t that long since I last
saw you, huh? Been a good boy for me, haven’t you? Didn’t miss me too much?”

He licked softly at my scruffy cheeks and over my chapped lips. Lugnut had been
assigned as my walking dog my first season in Denali, back when I was fresh-faced
and wide-eyed at it all, newly promoted up to a GS-7 after years spent working
Enforcement patrol rounds in Canyonlands and Death Valley. I had been stationed
near the main Visitor Center at C-Camp, making sure no visitors did anything stupid
like drive off the road, or try to touch a wild animal, and even though I was only
required to walk Lugnut twice a week, every single morning found me showing up at
the kennels near dawn with his leash in hand. Even five years later once I was
promoted out to Toklat as head of West-side Enforcement, I had still driven one of
the old government vans three hours back to the park entrance every other weekend
just to see him.

I held him for a long time, breathing in the scent of his old fur. It was a scent
tied up intimately with my soul – one that reminded me that Lugnut was the only
living thing in Denali who I had ever really told all of my truths. Those long
walks along the park road early before dawn, keeping an eye out for moose grazing
off in the distance, when I would tell him about everything in my life that came
before, and he would sniff us out a trail through the tundra or brush or snow.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

I turned around at the familiar, warm voice, smiling at Molly standing a few feet
behind me. I hadn’t heard her walk up.

She gestured back over her shoulder. “Saw your truck in the lot. When you weren’t
in the offices I thought I’d check here.”

I gave Lugnut one last pat before getting to my feet, holding out my arms to give
her a long hug. “Missed you, kid,” I said.

She pulled back, frowning. “Well, I’m not a kid anymo—”

“I know, I know. You’re big shit now, aren’t you? Youngest head of the kennels
Denali’s ever seen, racing sleds across the park all winter, training all the new
recruits, blah blah blah.”

She slapped my arm, laughing, and I chuckled along with her. I realized it was the
first time I’d really laughed in six months. She perched herself to sit along the
top of one of the handrails, and I leaned down to scratch Lugnut who was sitting
leaning up against my leg, tongue hanging out.

“Winter treat you alright?” I asked.

She smiled, and I could see the pride glowing behind her eyes. “Alright, yeah. Got
a great training run in with the new dog team doing a weeklong run out to the old
trapper cabin in Unit 13. Near zero invisibility for a couple days.”

“Who lead?”

“Clove, actually. I wanted Rupee to try it out but she kept missing my calls. Had
to move her back into the line after two days.”

I nodded, amazed at how easy it was to fall into conversation with Molly after
months of complete silence. It had always been that way though – ever since she
showed up wide-eyed and open-mouthed the year before I got transferred out to
Toklat, decked in an SCA uniform shirt with the sled dogs’ names already memorized
before she’d even met them. She had taken one look at me sitting alone at the first
staff campfire of the year and never let me sit alone again the whole season, even
though I was fifteen years older than her with a reputation of only saying ten
words all summer outside talking to visitors on my patrols.

And to my surprise, I hadn’t minded at all.

Molly watched me pet Lugnut in silence. She didn’t ask me about my winter – I
would’ve given her the same answer I had nearly five times before. “ _Good. Quiet.
Did some hunting. Wrote a lot. Planned new programs. Didn’t talk. Didn’t sleep._ ”

“You’ve heard about the wolf project?” she asked instead.

I looked up from Lugnut’s black nose. “Chena told me back in Cantwell. More
tracking?”

Molly nodded. “Some team coming over from Europe apparently – best in the world, is
what Dan and all them in the head office said. Some new research about how their
territory is changing based on the higher number of visitors each year. You know –
the usual stuff.”

I hummed. “Seems odd to fly in a team from Europe for that. Could easily have
gotten hold of some of the researchers that have been working in Yellowstone, or
Glacier.”

Molly shrugged. “I don’t think they were joking when they said the best in the
world. Some genius, apparently.”

I laughed. “A genius at finding nearly invisible wolves in the fucking third

largest national park? That’s a very specific type of genius.”

Molly grinned and hopped down from the rail, waiting for me to join her for the
Welcome Meeting starting soon. She put her hands on her hips, lowering her voice to
do an impression of Dan – our Head of Interp at the time.

“Best in the world, little Molly. I’m telling ya, best in the whole world! If he
can’t find these wolves, God himself couldn’t do it, I say.”

I gave one last pat to Lugnut before reaching out to rough up Molly’s hair. “Only
been two hours and I already miss the silence of my cabin,” I said, putting an arm
around her shoulders as we walked.

A few minutes later, just as the buildings of C-Camp were peeking through the
trees, Molly pressed her palm into the center of my back. “I missed you, too,
John.”

\--

Before I knew it, it was two days until the park gates were set to open to the
public, and I was packing up my bags from the little bunk in C-Camp to make the
final trek three hours west out to Toklat.

Every second I wasn’t doing the first official summer patrols of the season I was
back near the kennels. Taking Lugnut with me on some of our usual walks, stopping
to rest lying beside the fresh snow or carrying him across my shoulders when he
couldn’t make it any further.

Those were the walks when I always doubted myself – those last few precious days
with him before I moved out to Toklat. When I would feel like the most selfish
bastard on the face of the earth, stringing old Lugnut along with walks and pats
before leaving him alone for the majority of the summer. When I would wonder
whether I should follow the advice Molly had been giving me for years – to apply to
move back East, living at C-Camp with the majority of the Rangers, where I could
see him every day just like I used to years ago. When I could see Molly more than a
handful of times at the odd staff meeting, and be more apart of the whole
community. Join the other Rangers for pizza and beer at The Spike after a long day
out on patrols. When I could walk Lugnut all morning and then join Molly and her
friends for trips out to Fairbanks on long weekends, taking advantage of a real
grocery store and a movie theater and civilization.

She’d been telling me to do that for years. And during those final days of
orientation week when I would hold Lugnut close, and bring my books to read sitting
outside his kennel hut, I would be so tempted to do it that it physically hurt in
my chest.

And then I would still pack up my bags, get in the old truck, and drive the three
hours out West towards the mountain – towards the little collection of cabins among
the trees beside the river wash that made up old Toklat - and the relief I would
feel at every passing mile left behind me would remind me that I’d die if I ever
went back East.

The morning we were set to leave, we all gathered in the usual circle in the
parking lot, with the cold gravel crunching like ice under our feet and the vans
all packed and ready to go. Fifteen of us would go out West for the summer – not
counting the maintenance team that would follow in a week, or the two lone Rangers
that would man the little centers out at Wonder Lake and Kantishna.

Nick, the new head of West-side Interp that year, ran his fingers through his beard
before turning his face towards the sky and giving his customary bird call, echoing
immediately across the valley towards the peaks.

“Right, folks. This is it. Speak now or forever hold your peace if you wanna stay
East.”

It was the same joke the West-side chief made every year, and only the three new
GS-4 Rangers and the SCA intern laughed. My mind was elsewhere – back in the
kennels where I had said goodbye to Lugnut that morning, laying down beside him in
the snow by his hut until Molly softly whistled from far away that the other West-
side Rangers were gearing up to leave. I patted the gun in my holster – the first
day I was officially carrying it, and my body felt at ease as the familiar forest
green uniform hung off my limbs – the way it was always a bit too big when I first
arrived after the winters.

“As you’ve all heard, we have some guests joining us out in Toklat for the summer.
Our research team way over from fancy shmancy Europe’ll be trying to find our
goddamn wolves and see why they’ve been changing their hunting grounds the last
decade.”

Nick gestured to his left, and for the first time I realized four strangers
standing off to the side of our huddle. I couldn’t make out their faces through the
sea of Ranger hat brims, and a part of me didn’t particularly care to move to try
and get a better look. I’d see them soon enough. And I probably wouldn’t see them
again for a single minute all summer – between me out on my patrols and them
packing up to go head out into the backcountry for their tracking.

Nick was still talking, “. . . and his team have been working on a new system for
tracking wolf behavior, and their territory. We want to make them feel at home out
at Toklat with us, and I’m sure you’ll get to know them over the summer.”

I tuned out again, looking back behind my shoulder at the distant peaks of Denali
slowly coming into focus above the thick, white clouds. I barely even realized when
the group started disbanding towards their respective vans. I reached down to grab
my backpack, throwing it over a shoulder and heading towards my Enforcement truck.
I always made the drive out West alone, and I had one foot up in the truck when I
heard my name behind me.

“Watson!”

I turned to see Nick running towards me, a bead of sweat dripping down his forehead
beneath his hat brim despite the cold.

“Look, uh, might be a small change of plans here,” he said, running a hand over the
back of his neck.

Something strange zipped up my spine, and I turned and leaned back against the
truck to face him, crossing my arms over my chest. “This your way of telling me I
gotta do Interp?” I joked.

Nick laughed. “No way, man. We’d lose all our visitors in a week.” He took a step
closer, lowering his voice. “Look, I was gonna have Jess drive the research team
out in her van – give them the condensed version of her ‘Kantishna Experience’ talk
to get them oriented as they drove. But . . .”

My throat was dry. “Yeah?”

“But Mr. Holmes asked to ride with you.”

I frowned. “Mr. Who?”

Nick looked at me like I was a bear just learned to talk. “Mr. Holmes. Sherlock
Holmes. The head of the research team.”

I blinked hard and tried to fit the pieces together. “He knows I’m not in Interp,
right? How does he even know me?”

Nick shook his head at a loss. “Don’t know, Watson. Man just walked right up to me
and said, ‘Let that Ranger know I’m riding with him,’ and he pointed to you.”

I huffed a laugh, shaking my head as I turned to climb back into the truck. “Well,”
I said, “If the man wants to ride three hours in complete silence out to Toklat,
let him be my guest.”

Nick’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I owe you one, Watson,” he called out before
jogging back to the small group of Rangers still milling about.

I didn’t watch him go, just started the engine and sat back to wait for this Mr.
Holmes to climb up into my truck, thinking through in my head how I could somehow
explain to him that that first drive of the season into Toklat after the snow
cleared was my sacred religion, and that if he tried to talk to me the whole way
there I would push him out onto the dirt road and let the bears have him.

The truck passenger door opening startled me. I stared straight ahead as a man
effortlessly leapt into the seat without a word. When he was settled with his seat
belt clicked I found I couldn’t get my legs to push in the pedals to move. My
curiosity was raging. I looked over at him, and immediately the blood drained from
my face.
Mr. Holmes was wearing a designer suit, navy blue jacket perfectly tailored and
white button-up clinging to his chest as he breathed. He wasn’t wearing a coat. He
stared straight ahead, running one hand of long, pale fingers through his thick
head of brown curls before reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a big
black brick of a phone, somehow typing on the buttons.

I meant to start driving, but instead I heard myself ask, "The hell is that thing?”

He didn't look up. "A phone."

I stared at his hands moving over the keys. "I've never seen a phone like
that . . ." I started to say.

He nodded down at his hands. "You're correct. You haven't."

My mind was screaming at me to drive - to put the car into gear and just go. But I
cleared my throat and said, "Whatever you're doing, you'll lose signal in fifteen
minutes. Only radio waves here on out."

He kept the device frozen in his hands and looked over at me, and immediately my
mouth ran dry at his pair of pale, grey eyes. A feeling I hadn’t felt in years
settled thickly in my gut, and I thought maybe I would be sick.

He blinked once with long lashes. “Then I’d better make good use of the next
fifteen minutes,” he said, in a deep voice with a British accent that took that
feeling in my gut and flamed it to life up in my chest, settling between my legs in
a way that made me swallow hard over a dry throat.

I tore my eyes away and nodded, clearing my throat before pulling out of the gravel
lot with shaking fingers on the steering wheel. He went back to his typing. Just as
we pulled onto the Park Road, I worked up the courage to tell him what I’d
originally been planning to say, even though a dark part of me wanted to hear him
read the entire Dictionary out loud.

“Look, Mr. Holmes –”

“Don’t waste your breath giving me your speech about how this drive is sacred to
you, and you always do it alone every year, and you’d prefer we do it in silence. I
chose to ride with you to escape the inane babbling that will no doubt happen in
the van holding the rest of my team and one of your Interpretive Rangers. I hope
even you could make the mental connection that that means I would prefer to get
this drive over with in silence as well.”

I waited to feel irritated at the end of his little speech, and instead all I could
feel was a tiny bubble of happy relief brimming up in my chest. “Ok, then,” I said
easily, guiding us down the Park Road through the trees, gradually letting my truck
gain speed on the snow-covered dirt.

I thought I felt his eyes flick quickly to my face, brows raised in something like
mild surprise. After fifteen minutes had passed, he made an irritated sigh, and he
slipped the black device back into the breast pocket of his jacket and settled back
into the seat with a soft frown. It looked insane – watching his pristine, tailored
suit rub against the weathered leather seats of the old truck.

Just when we were passing the Teklanika rest stop he licked his lips and spoke. “I
assume you’ve got some horrible bluegrass cassette tape already in the player?”

I laughed, surprised at how easy the sound flowed from my lips. “That I do,” I
said, and I reached over to flip on the old Jimmy Martin tape, the soft banjo
filling the quiet air of the truck, drowning out the sound of the crunching dirt
beneath the tires. I usually saved it for the first drive out to Wonder Lake, a way
for me to sentimentally christen my first full patrol, but I figured I could make a
little exception, just this once.

We didn’t stop the whole way to Toklat, not even for the bathroom. I forced myself
to look out at the familiar scenery as it passed by – Polychrome and Geode and the
flow of the Alaska Range. Denali was still covered in cloud, but I searched for it
all the same.

It felt impossible to think of the stuff I usually did on that drive – buried old
moments of my past that I only ever brought out again during that first drive out
to Toklat. It made me feel suddenly naked to think of them in the car next to
another person, as if Mr. Holmes could hear my thoughts out loud in the silence. As
if he could somehow know when I was thinking of my childhood in the block of
trailers near Wind Cave in South Dakota, or the last time I saw my parents; my
first winter in my cabin I built by hand outside Talkeetna, the first time I ever
shot a gun with my own hands, or the day that I got on a plane headed clear across
the country to New York, with money in my backpack that I would hand over under a
table for a surgery I’d heard about in the back of a seedy bar.

I nearly sighed out loud as the familiar cluster of log cabins came into view
around the final bend, pouring down the tree-covered mountain and spilling into the
dry rock bed of that fork of the Toklat River. My spine melted once more into the
seat. I thought once of little Lugnut, napping on his side in his hut back on the
East side not realizing that I wouldn’t come back to walk him the next day. But it
was hard to feel bad when the pressure in my shoulders evaporated as I turned off
the Park Road and drove past the Toklat Visitor Tent, making our way slowly down
the snow-lined gravel towards the only place I ever called home.

He didn’t say a word as we pulled in, and I didn’t offer to show him around. I
parked in the main lot by the hoses to wash off the truck, and with just a single
nod and a quick glance at me, Mr. Holmes hopped out of the truck still in his
pristine suit, and he shouldered his bag and walked off into the trees towards the
housing without even asking where to go.

And as I watched him walk up the narrow trails among the cabins, his leather shoes
floating across the snow like he was lighter than air, and his suit pants clinging
to his long, lean thighs, that long-forgotten feeling in my chest nearly choked me,
and I tore my eyes away with a single thought: _Shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! The last thing I'll say is please read the tags!
Carefully! This fic will have a happy ending but there will be a few surprises and
moments of angst along the way.
>
> If you have any questions, please send them my way! Otherwise any feedback is
greatly appreciated :)

3. April 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Note that the last chapter was titled "April 1991," and now, with this chapter,
we are into "April 1992."
>
> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Doc Watson sing "House of the Rising Sun" [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeiXnyvo0d4).
>
> Newgrass: Listen to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant sing "Polly Come Home" [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAL1fSBmpRA).

April 1992

For the first time in over a decade, I didn’t drive my old Ford up Highway 3 on the
first day of April. I didn’t stop in Talkeetna and Cantwell for coffee – didn’t
hear Chena tell me to get myself eaten by a bear.

Instead I stepped off a plane onto the freezing tarmac at Fairbanks Airport on
April 8th, shivering at the sudden burst of cold that seeped under my worn coat. I
quickly found my luggage at the deserted baggage claim – my big canvas duffle the
only bag with an originating tag from Flagstaff, Arizona.

I hadn’t brought anything with me from the Grand Canyon other than my clothes. I’d
spent the winter riding horse patrols along the bottom of the canyon – spending
nights in the various trapper cabins and rest stops that dotted the rock on either
side of the river on the days I didn’t ride back up to the canyon rim.

The snow there hadn’t been the same. There were nights I lay down on a cot in a
comfy lodge, staring up at the ceiling with a warm meal in my belly and freshly
showered hair, and I had _ached_ for my cabin – my little haven outside Talkeetna
with floor to ceiling shelves of books and no running water.

I hadn’t named my horse the whole winter.

I shouldered my bags and headed to grab a taxi for the train depot – knowing I
could hitch a free ride to McKinley Park if they had room, and if I flashed my
badge. I didn’t think about anything on the train – tuned out the commentary going
on by the train conductor for the benefit of the tourists taking disposable camera
photos of the snow-covered tundra through the windows. I ignored the alarm in my
head blaring “ _Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!_ ” as I stepped off the train onto the
platform at McKinley before it had even finished moving, and I didn’t feel any
relief at all when the Denali gravel crunched under my feet.

I made my way across the empty train platform towards the Park Entrance with my
head down, trying and failing to feel like I was coming home. A week of orientation
had already gone by – my contract back at Grand Canyon running a little into the
start of the season at Denali. No one had minded when I’d called to say I’d be late
– no one had even really asked why.

By habit my feet started leading me towards the kennels, and for the first time in
months my chest seemed to unclench. Next thing I knew I was nearly running through
the snow, following the paths I could take with my eyes closed until the outlines
of the familiar sleeping huts came into view. I dropped my bags from my shoulders
onto the ground and started to rip my gloves off with my teeth.

I didn’t stop to pet any of the other dogs coming out of their huts to say hello.
By the time I made it to the last little pen I was short of breath, and my
fingertips shook out of my control. There had been a day – one fateful trip over
that winter – when my horse had been spooked by a bobcat leaping out of the snow.
He’d reared, and I’d fallen hard onto my ass onto snow-covered rocks. By the time
I’d gotten my horse back under control, and made sure neither of us were hurt, I
realized that every last drop of water I had was currently seeping into the dirty
canyon snow. It took a day and a half to get back up out of the canyon and on to
civilization, and the first sip of water I had outside eating old snow had been the
most precious moment of my entire life.

And then, kneeling before Lugnut’s old hut, that same feeling of desperate need
flooded through my veins, choking up my throat until I could barely breathe.

He smelled me and came out on arthritic knees, hobbling towards me in the snow with
his tail going wild. I rushed to him and pulled him into my arms, feeling how much
more skeletal and fragile he felt than the season before.

I buried my face in his fur as he licked along my jaw. “Missed you, old boy,” I
whispered as he yipped. He put his full weight against me, pushing me back into the
snow until I fell over on the ground, and he perched up on my chest and buried his
nose against my neck. “You have a good winter, old man? You show those new pups how
things run around here?” I said as I scratched between his white ears.

And suddenly, as I lay there holding him on top of me, the whole world became
blurred in my eyes. Everything I thought had been tightly packed away – everything
I had slammed the door on that fateful day last August – threatened to spill over
as my clothes grew damp in the snow.

It felt like hours had passed when I heard footsteps crunch behind me.

“I made dinner,” Molly said, as if no time at all had passed since I gave her an
awkward hug goodbye seven months ago on the train platform right before I got on to
take it to the airport in Fairbanks.

My voice was a strained little wisp when I spoke. “Dinner’d be great,” I said.

She took me silently back to her permanent cabin on the outskirts of C-Camp after I
gave my last goodnight pat to Lugnut and carried him back into his hut where it was
warm. Molly opened the old wooden door to a fresh wave of home-cooked chili. I let
her sit me down by the shoulders at the table like a child, and I noticed that as
she left the room she reached out to turn down a framed photograph – one of her and
Greg Lestrade on what looked like a tropical beach. She must have taken a vacation.

“How was the Canyon?” she asked over her shoulder from the small kitchen.

I folded my hands on the smooth, carved wooden surface of her kitchen table – the
one I had built for her as a present two seasons ago.

“A big hole in the ground,” I said.

I could feel her burning curiosity in the line of her shoulders – her fierce desire
to ask questions like, “ _What the hell happened at the end of last summer?_ ” or,
“ _What possessed you to take a job way out in the Canyon?_ ” or, “ _Why don’t you
just move back East so you can see your dog every day?_ ”

She didn’t ask, though. Instead I listened in silent relief as she told me all
about her winter – their sled training runs, and the new litter of pups, and the
new Ranger over from Badlands who made Molly want to pull her own hair out.

Hours after the winter sun had dipped behind the trees, I pushed away from the
table and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. “Should head back over to the
dorms and nab a bunk,” I said.

Molly’s hand caught my wrist. “I got a pull-out couch for a reason,” she said,
rising to open the closet in the hallway and taking down a wool quilt. She tossed
it towards the couch. “You’re sleeping here, John Watson.”
I laughed to cover up the mild embarrassment burning my cheeks, awkwardly rubbing
one elbow with my hand. “You get promoted to GS-13 while I was gone? Giving me
orders?”

She adopted her ‘Dan-voice.’ “A hell of a lot’s changed around here, Watson, I tell
ya. The mountain ain’t a mountain no more – it’s just a big column of clouds. And
the moose all gotta wear pants. And the bears invite us all over for afternoon tea
–”

She stopped mid-word at the mention of afternoon tea, the accidental British phrase
hanging heavy and thick in the air. She cleared her throat and looked down at the
floor. “Sorry, I --- I didn’t mean to bring up –”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, knowing that poor Molly didn’t even know what she was
sorry for. Didn’t know because I’d never told her.

“That’s all over now,” I went on, waving a hand. “No big deal.”

The tension in the room didn’t clear. She fidgeted the woven carpet with her toe in
her thick wool sock. “I was kinda scared you wouldn’t come back this season,” she
finally said in a low voice. “When you called to say you’d be late for orientation,
I thought you’d just never arrive. . .”

Shame burned hotly in my chest. I walked towards her and pulled her into my arms,
barely able to rest my chin on top of her head. “Aw, of course I’d come back,” I
said into her hair. I rubbed her back. “I know I haven’t been . . . open with you.
About last year.” I swallowed hard. “But I’ll always come back. You know I couldn’t
not come back.”

She sniffed and nodded against my chest, and it pierced me with a sharp flash of
pain that I had left her in so much doubt. She pulled back and quickly wiped her
arm over her eyes, stepping away to pull her hair up into a messy bun. “You know
you don’t need to tell me anything,” she said with a soft, teasing grin. “You can
keep being the handsome, mysterious Ranger.”

I smiled at the spark lit back in her eyes as I made my way over to the made-up
couch. “That’s the plan, kid,” I said, and I wished so badly that I meant it.

I waited until Molly was back in her room with the door shut, waving off her offers
of a shower or pajamas and hoping I could play it off as being too lazy to deal
with it all. In the darkness I stripped down to my long sleeve shirt and boxers,
not wanting to get the quilts on her pull-out couch dirty with the snow and grime
still clinging to my jeans. I stood there in the moonlight for what felt like a
long time, looking down at the bulge just barely visible through my boxers and
wondering if I could take it out of the pocket I'd long ago sewn inside. I wanted
to. I never slept with it in, and it would only just become dislodged in my sleep.
All Molly would see if she came out in the middle of the night and happened to
knock over my whole pile of clothes would be two socks rolled together. But if
anything happened, if she woke up before me, if I had to stand up . . .

I kept it in.

That night I dreamt of two pairs of pale grey eyes. The first pair looked tired and
barely hanging on to life, sniffing the air and leaving wet licks across my face.

The second pair looked at me in the dawn sunrise of a small tent. “John,” the
second pair whispered in a deep voice. “John, kiss me.”

 
\--

Two days later I made the drive out to Toklat alone in my truck, leading the
caravan slowly down the snow-covered road. It was silent in the car, and I rolled
down both windows even though the icy air burned my cheeks. I didn’t think of
anything at all – just breathed in the scent of the snow-capped peaks and focused
on the curves of the road.

Two hours in I passed the base of Geode out in the distance, where Sherlock had
thrown a big fit at the top because we couldn’t find a single geode among the rocks
strewn across the peak. I laughed out loud at the sudden memory, and turned towards
the passenger seat to ask him if he wanted to go back this season to see if any
more were there.

And when the passenger seat was empty – because of course it was empty – I bit the
inside of my cheek so hard I started to taste blood, and gripped the steering wheel
until my knuckles turned white with the strain.

Just as the first sight of the Toklat cabins came into view around the bend, I
suddenly understood that coming back was the worst decision I’d ever made.

I didn’t stick around for the usual ‘we made it’ huddle out in the parking lot –
knowing that my absence would be the farthest thing from surprising. I made my way
up through the narrow little trails, cut into the hillside from decades of Ranger
boots, and when each step didn’t bring any relief at all my chest ached a little
more.

My usual cabin was just as I’d left it – pristine and empty as if it had never been
lived in for a day. I opened all the windows to let out the stale air, unpacking my
two measly bags of clothes into the small closet before starting a pot of coffee
with the bag of whole coffee beans I’d left up in one of the cupboards.

I didn’t once look at the bed, as if the outlines of two bodies would somehow still
be visible in the thin mattress, hidden beneath the scratchy sheets like a secret
carved into the earth. I kept my eyes fixed straight on the wall as I pinned my
only photograph near the pillow – a Polaroid of me and Lugnut on the last day of my
first season, where my smile rivaled the sun, and his little paws were blurry from
wriggling in my arms.

I cooked up a simple dinner out of the non-perishable food I’d left for myself at
the end of last season, making a mental note of when to go into Cantwell or
Fairbanks to re-stock up. My socked feet moved through the cabin so softly I felt
like a ghost in my own place, roving from the old stove to the sink to the wooden
table without ever really noticing where I was standing.

The early darkness had just settled through the thick, misty trees when a soft
knock sounded at my cabin door. For one blinding moment my heart skipped a beat.
Blood sang in my veins, and my feet shot me towards the door like a rocket, hand
outstretched and reaching for the doorknob.

Then I froze.

It wouldn’t be the hand I was expecting to see on the other side of the door. I
wouldn’t even _want_ it to be that hand on the other side of the door. Not after
everything, not after what had happened . . .
I took a deep breath, ashamed at myself and furious that just two fucking days back
in Denali had reduced me to some pathetic ball of weepy memories – taken the Ranger
I’d once again become over the winter down in the canyon and stripped him down to a
man puttering around a silent kitchen waiting for a knock at the door that would
never come.

I opened the door to see Hannah, the new SCA kid on staff for Toklat. She looked
nervous.

“John!” she said. She flinched. “Or, sorry, I should have said Ranger Wat—”

“John’s fine,” I said, forcing myself to look friendly. “It’s all first names
around here.”

She smiled and tucked her hair back behind her ear. “Right, well . . . I was
wondering. . .” She bit her lip, then the next words came out in a breathless rush.
“Most of the other Rangers are all getting together for a campfire tonight, and
there will be s’mores, and we’ll all start off the season together, but then you
weren’t there, and I know you missed orientation because you were off at Grand
Canyon, and so I thought that someone should tell you so you could maybe join us?”

My stomach clenched. In that single second of silence after Hannah finished

speaking, I couldn’t decide what in the world would be more humiliating: if the
other Rangers, knowing I would never join them for such a thing, put the new kid up
to having to come up and invite me anyway? Or if I looked so lonely and ostracized
to someone who only met me two days ago that she felt I needed an invite no matter
what the other Rangers said to convince her otherwise.

And it hurt me that something so innocent and kind was making me grip the doorframe
with my fingers.

I relaxed my shoulders, ducking my head to rub the back of my neck. “Aw, Hannah, I
appreciate you coming up here for that, but . . . I’d like to get settled in. Need
a little time to recoup.”

I caught the flash of sadness that rang in her eyes, and I realized that the latter
explanation was correct.

She smiled, already starting to back away from the door. “Right, gotcha,” she said.
“Well. . . next time.”

I resisted the urge to chase out after her as her blonde curls disappeared into the
darkness. “But thank you,” I said, unsure if she could still hear me.

When I closed the door after her, and the silence of my cabin screamed in my ears,
I suddenly couldn’t remember for the life of me why I had declined.

Hours later I sat on the edge of the thin mattress, afraid to lie back and fall
asleep for fear I would once again dream of grey eyes. I was dressed in only my
boxers, having turned the heat up a bit in the cabin, and the darkness hid the fact
that the space between my legs looked empty; the rolled-up socks sat in the
otherwise empty drawer beside my bed, hidden so I wouldn’t have to look at them
with the pathetic Nike swoop stitched on in black.

A glance earlier at my staff schedule reminded me it was medication day, and the
little pouch sat in my lap like a led weight. Even after decades, even sitting
alone in the pitch dark, I still looked once over my shoulder as I undid the
zipper, deathly loud in the silent room. The syringe was cold to the touch as I
pressed it into my skin.
He had held it, once. He had held it gently in his fingers and effortlessly pushed
it into my thigh, leaning forward to kiss me with a wet, open mouth as the fresh
testosterone burned in my body. The fingers of his other hand had gripped tightly
at my hair.

That night I only dreamt of one pale grey pair of eyes.

\--

Three days into the season came time for my first full patrol out to Wonder Lake
and back. I’d been spending the last two days getting the newer Enforcement Rangers
out at Toklat up to speed – making sure they were briefed with my expectations
since I hadn’t been there for orientation.

I rose early to thick darkness, the winter sun still not coming up until later in
the morning. My old routine guiding my hands and feet even though it had been half
a year. Boiled the water, put on coffee, dropped the spoonful of peanut butter into
my oatmeal, pulled on my uniform, checked my radio and my gun, packed my bag.

The little clock hanging crooked above the stove told me I still had a good thirty
minutes before I needed to report down to the offices and get in my truck. The
darkness outside was just beginning to clear, bathing the wash of trees and cabins
in a rich silver grey. I pulled on my boots outside on the rickety porch and
shivered at the cold even under my thick jacket, taking along nothing but a can of
bear spray and my morning black coffee in an old forest green Stanley travel mug.

The cabins were dark and silent as I crept my way past, weaving through the trees
and down the icy dirt slope until I emerged onto the wide, flat expanse of river
rock coating the small valley. I didn’t walk far – just a few steps out until I
felt surrounded by the mountains, looking out ahead at the distant row of peaks as
they slowly became bathed with soft streaks of golden light, reflecting in the
brambles of the tundra below.

Far off in the distance, a moose ambled across the rock, pausing once to look my
way before turning his head back down to the thick grass.

I thought of Lugnut as I sipped at the thick, black coffee. Remembering the day
halfway through my third season when I’d had to come back towards the Visitor
Center for an emergency call, and Lugnut had smelled me passing by close to the
kennels, and he’d dug at the ground until the pole attached to his leash became
loose, then pulled and heaved until he was free and running through C-Camp with a
leash and metal pole dragging behind him, barking up a storm with a trail of
Rangers chasing after him. And I’d heard his barks and the commotion from where I
was knelt over a collapsed visitor who’d been spooked by a caribou, and had to leap
up and catch Lugnut before he could tackle me to the ground, slobber flying through
the air as he licked at my face and yelped.

I smiled at the memory down into my coffee, thinking of him waking up just then
across the park in his little hut, probably begging for breakfast and trying to
look downtrodden on purpose so someone would sneak him an extra treat.

I barely heard the footsteps coming up behind me.

“How was the hole in the ground?” a voice said – and that voice shocked through my
chest and made the entire earth drop and tilt. I lost my breath, hand clenching my
mug so hard I thought it might crack. My heart thudded in my chest, and I shifted
my legs so I wouldn’t fall.

It was impossible.

Because that voice was supposed to be in London, clear across the world, not
standing behind me in the middle of Denali just before sunrise.

I didn’t turn back, knowing that if I did I would sink to my knees and lose it.

I cleared my throat and tried to speak, hoping the line of my shoulders somehow
looked steady. “The fuck are you doing here?”

I heard his feet take two more small steps on the loose river rock, echoing like
earthquakes in my ears. “I assume you still have wolves in this endless
wilderness,” he said casually. Too casually.

My heart leapt up into my throat, clenching my jaw and making the air shake in my
lungs. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it to be reality or the start of me going
insane.

I closed my eyes, softly shaking my head. In the distance I heard the other Rangers
gathering at their trucks, signaling the time for shifts to start. “I can’t do this
right now,” I said out to the river rock in front of me.

The rock crunched behind me – footsteps slowly backing away. “You know where to
find me,” he said.

I laughed, a harsh sound exploding from my chest. “Apparently I do,” I gritted out,
hating how my eyes fought with me to turn back and see his face.

I kept looking forward, waiting for his footsteps to continue to recede into the
distance. When he didn’t move, and only the wind rippled across the rocks, I
started to look over my shoulder, tempted to check if he was still there.

“John,” I heard, and I shut my eyes again at my name in his voice. “I’m glad you
came back,” he said, and then he was walking away, footsteps disappearing into the
mountain at our backs.

I waited until I couldn’t hear him anymore, every emotion under the sun burning in
my chest. I started to turn around, figuring he was still standing near just to see
my reaction. “What the hell are you trying –”

My words froze in my mouth when I saw that he really was gone – no hint of long
legs or brown curls in sight. The fact that I had missed getting a look at him –
proving to my eyes that he was really real, real and _here_ \- rang through me with
a distressing cry so sharp it made me moan. Without thinking I bent down and picked
up one of the rocks in my hand, then hurled it with all my might out across the dry
bed.

And as I threw it, shoulder straining with the sudden burst of effort, I let one
word rip from my lungs in an agonized cry, echoing through the valley and rumbling
up my spine.

“Shit!” I yelled out, startling even myself, and I didn’t feel any better after
than I did before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for the truly INCREDIBLE response so far to this fic! I'm
delighted that so many people are as delighted at the prospect of a Ranger AU as I
am :)
>
> I don't think any new terms came up in this chapter that need to be defined, but
please let me know if you have questions! Your kind feedback means more than you
even realize.
>
> Y'all are great and powerful and the best!

4. May 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional bluegrass: Listen to Ralph Stanley sing "I'll Fly Away" [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF9tRrDX_0).
>
> Newgrass: Listen to the classic "The Lighthouse's Tale" by Nickel Creek [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY7MliXa9nY).
>
> *Heads up for some mentions of body dysphoria (at least the way John's
experiencing it) in this chapter after the campfire scene.*
>
> Enjoy :)

May 1991

The season started out as if a British man in a tailored suit wasn’t even there.

I didn’t see him again for two weeks – not even a glimpse through the trees or a
silhouette behind a closed curtain. Word among the Rangers was that Mr. Holmes was
“learning every corner of the park,” but how he was doing that without ever leaving
his goddam cabin was a mystery to us all, and I forbid myself from reflecting on
how much it bothered me that I hadn’t seen him – hadn’t heard his voice in so many
days that I’d already forgotten what it sounded like. Mostly.

I met the rest of his team, though. Two young kids still in college – Max and
Barbara, who went by Babs – who anytime they even so much as mentioned Mr. Holmes
got a look in their eyes that was a mix of half awe and half terror. And there was
the other head researcher, Greg Lestrade – guy who looked more out of the Denali
wilderness than a lecture room at Cambridge, who’d made a point of finding me on
our second day out at Toklat and shook my hand, saying, “God knows why Sherlock
wanted to ride with you, but congratulations for having survived.”

And I hadn’t known how to ask him why he thought I wouldn’t survive a silent car
ride with no complaints – not even any whining to use the bathroom.

Molly met them all too when she and the other kennel Rangers made their traditional
‘end of week two’ visit out to Toklat for dinner and a campfire. The only campfires
of the year I ever attended were the ones with Molly there. I shuddered to think of
what she would do to me if I dared not to show up. I stood by her side a little
back from the main group, basking in the crackling warmth of the embers on my
cheeks and nursing a few lukewarm beers while the other Rangers passed around vodka
and sang a horrible rendition of “Africa.”

She reached over to touch my jaw. “You need a shave,” she said, “Unless you’re
trying to blend in with the bears.”
I hated the shiver of fear that ran up my spine – as if she would somehow be able
to feel that the hairs on my face were the result of a needle in my thigh instead
of the natural way Nick’s beard burst forth bushy from his chin and jaw. I hated
that I even still thought that after two full decades living that way. And I hated
even more that the touch of my closest friend had made me want to flinch away
instead of lean into her palm.

I scratched the side of my face with my fingers, ruffling through my beard. “Grew
it long mostly over the winter to keep my face from freezing off,” I said. “You’ll
see my pretty face again soon enough once it warms up.”

She laughed beside me, bumping her shoulder into mine. “Deal,” she said. “Don’t
call me if you need help pulling all the ladies off you after you shave – I’ll just
stand back and laugh.”

I coughed as if I was surprised to cover over my embarrassment. “Don’t worry, kid.

I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t help me one bit.”

And I thought, standing there as Molly went back to sit with the other kennel
Rangers for the rest of the fire, glancing back once at me and patting the space
beside her even though I shook my head, how it was the most devastating thing in
the whole damn Alaskan wilderness that I hadn’t let Molly know me well enough for
her to say “guys” instead of “ladies.”

I saw Greg’s eyes land on her from where I was leaning back against a tree before
Molly even noticed, riveted from across the campfire and staring through the
flames. I watched the emotions on his face as if in slow motion – surprise, and
awe, and determination, then fear. I understood it all. The man couldn’t have been
that much younger than me, meaning he was at least ten years older than her. And he
was the new guy trying to fit in, and she was the head of Kennels, gorgeous and
sparkling and entertaining the whole group with her story about Disco getting
terrified of a fox when he was just a pup.

I watched him slowly rise from his seat on a sawed-off log stump, making his way
around the outskirts of the campfire warring with himself whether to get any closer
to her or stay away. I caught his eye across the crowd, and for some reason, I felt
a sudden sense of kinship pull between us – something about the way he’d shaken my
hand and looked me in the eye. I nodded at him softly, and he changed course to
make his way to me.

“John,” he said in greeting while raising his beer, his accent more warm and rough
than Mr. Holmes’ had been.

I raised my own bottle and shoved my other hand down in my jeans pocket. “Park
treating you alright so far?”

He nodded. “Bloody gorgeous, this place. I’m jealous of all you lucky bastards get
to live here year after year.”

I chuckled under my breath, nodding. “It is the dream.”

We stood there in silence that didn’t feel uncomfortable at all, with the cold tree
bark against our backs and the fire embers on our chests. I could feel his eyes
trying and failing not to watch Molly, as she licked the melted marshmallow from
her s’more off her fingers and pleaded with Jess to tell the story of the visitor
who once asked her if the bears spoke ‘Native American or English.’

He cleared his throat, finally, and shifted towards me to lower his voice. “Molly
Hooper. . .” he started. He coughed and cleared his throat again. “She’s . . .”

I decided to save him. “Yeah, she’s pretty great.”

He shifted his feet in the dirt. “I know you and her are . . . close. The two of
you aren’t . . . well, I just want to make sure if . . .”

It was the same question I’d gotten at least three times every season without fail.
I shook my head quickly, getting ready to give my usual answer of, “ _Nah, she’s
like a little sister to me,_ ” or, “ _No, just my good friend,_ ” or “ _Not my
type,_ ” or “ _Got my eye on another gal – go ahead._ ”

And instead, for some horrifying reason, I opened my mouth and said, “We’re not
together, me and her. I don’t feel things . . . that way.”

The earth seemed to freeze. I wanted to scream and punch myself in the face and
sink down away to hide in the ground. I said a silent curse under my breath,
ducking my head to squeeze hard at the back of my neck and wondering when I could
start to make my way back up to my cabin.

Wondering if this Greg Lestrade maybe didn’t notice the implication behind what I’d
just said. Wondering if I could beg him on my hands and knees to stay silent if he
did.

His hand caught my arm – I hadn’t even realized that I was starting to shuffle
away. “Hey, man, don’t – it’s . . .”

I forced myself to look up at him, already trying to tune out whatever he was going
to say, steeling my shoulders.

And then he said in a low voice, holding my gaze, “I, uh. . . I go both ways,
myself. It’s alright.”

I blinked. ‘Relief’ was too small a word. I felt the entire park take a deep sigh.
I nodded, afraid that if I tried to speak my voice would shake, leaning back
against the tree next to him instead so he would know I was alright with him, too.

And just like that, after more than two decades working in the Park Service, a
coworker suddenly knew that I was gay for the very first time – a coworker who I
had just met a handful of days before, and who I probably wouldn’t see another day
past this season.

And even if this Greg Lestrade didn’t know I hadn’t acted on anything since years
before I came to Denali, aside from that one fateful night behind the bar, and even
if he didn’t know I’d ever even gone by another name, he knew that I liked men.
That I would sleep with them if I wanted to – if I could.

And I didn’t feel afraid.

After fifteen more minutes had passed, and the Rangers were starting to rise to go
off to bed, I nodded over at Molly, who was laughing with her arm around another
kennel Ranger.

“Should get to know her,” I said to Greg softly. “I have a good feeling she’d like
you.”

He hid his smile behind his hand. “I feel like a bloody teenager,” he said. He
pushed off from the tree trunk, brushing sap off the back of his coat. “I’ll do
that, though – get to know her.” He started to walk back towards the cabins, and I
called out after him.

“I’m about to say goodbye – want me to introduce you?”

He looked once more at her, biting his lip. “I’ll take things slow,” he said.
“Feels right to take it slow.”

I nodded at him, waving once as he turned to disappear into the trees, inwardly
wanting to fly that I still didn’t feel any fear over the fact that he _knew_.

Molly pulled me into a drunken hug when I tapped her shoulder, reaching her hand up
again to scratch at my beard. “John, you dick, you left me alone the whole night!”

I laughed, smoothing her brown hair back from her face. “You looked alright enough
to me.”

She held onto my shoulders hard, looking straight into my eyes. “John,” she said
seriously. “John, you have to tell me.” She shook me once, her grip fierce. “Is he
single?”

I threw back my head to laugh up at the stars. “He’s single alright,” I said,
bringing her close against my side. “Single and pretty interested, considering he
asked me if we were together after staring at you the whole night.”

Molly wrapped her arm around my waist to steady herself. “Well thank _fuck_ for
that,” she said, giggling as we trudged up the slope. When we reached Jess’s cabin
where Molly would spend the night, I leaned forward to kiss the top of her head on
the wooden porch.

“Go after him,” I said. “He’ll say yes.”

She smiled again, eyes wet and glittering. “Now we just have to find one for you,”
she said back, gripping onto my coat over my chest.

I covered her hands with my own, pulling them away to lead her towards the door. “I
got a grizzly that’s interested in me over near Stony Dome,” I said. “The moose all
tell me she’s great in bed – I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Molly covered her mouth and laughed as she stumbled inside the cabin. I leaned my
head in, “Take care of her, Jess!” I called out, and I heard a “You got it,” coming
from the bedroom.

The three beers I’d had still buzzed through my veins when I shut the door behind
me to my own dark cabin, making my head spin since I’d barely eaten any dinner.
Without thinking I stumbled into the bedroom instead of grabbing my shower kit and
heading for the shower house like my usual end-of-day routine.

I have no idea what came over me.

In a rush I stripped off every bit of clothing from my body except for my boxers,
panting for no reason and already throbbing between my legs. For the first time in
over a year, and for absolutely no discernible reason, I sat on my thin mattress
and leaned back against the cabin wall, closing my eyes before reaching down to
place my palm over the bulge between my legs.

I pressed down and sighed, tracing the line of it with my fingers before grinding
down harder with the heel of my palm, trying to put pressure on my real skin
beneath. I thought of nothing as I bucked up with my hips against my palm, keeping
my eyes closed so I couldn’t see the unnatural shape of the socks up close. I was
growing wet between my legs – could feel it dripping down my inner thigh. I told
myself I was leaking, hard and throbbing at the tip of my huge cock, which was long
and growing erect under my palm. I told myself that over and over as I rubbed,
waiting until I was moaning under my breath before reaching into my boxers with a
shaking hand, trailing my fingertips through my hair before reaching between my
thighs.

And the second my fingers wrapped around my small, swollen clit, the second they
felt the wet folds surrounding it, the breath stopped short in my lungs. My skin
instantly went cold.

I whipped my hand out of my boxers, bringing both hands to cover my face as the
blood drained from between my legs, leaving my skin cold and damp instead of
pulsing with warmth. I could smell myself on my fingers.

I groaned into my palms, clutching handfuls of my hair. I didn’t know what I was
thinking – that somehow, after a few drinks, and watching Molly and Greg
successfully flirt, that I could kid myself into coming back to my empty cabin and
making myself feel good, too. Making myself come the way I always wanted to in my
dirtiest, most secret wet dreams. I blinked hard, reaching down to strip my boxers
from my legs. I hurled them across the room, not even flinching when the rolled-up
socks knocked my belt off its hook on the wall.

I pulled the quilt over my naked body and rolled onto my sweaty stomach and chest,
pressing my cheek hard into the pillow. I felt more sober in that moment than I
ever had in my entire life, clenching my eyes shut and willing myself to come back
into my skin. My forty-one year old skin. My Ranger skin. My _male_ skin.

And slowly, after a long time, I started to feel once more within my solid muscle
and bone. I let myself relax, unclenching my stomach and thighs. Quietly, cloaked
in the dark, I began to roll my hips against the mattress underneath me the way I
normally did on the nights when I needed some release. I heard voices in my head –
the same disembodied men I always made up in my mind while I humped my own sheets,
telling me I was good, so fucking huge, pounding them hard. I came silently a few
minutes later, with my eyes closed and my hands clenched into the sheets hard
enough to tear the cotton. I wanted to fall immediately asleep on my chest, even
without a shower. But instead I lay on my stomach for a very long time, thinking of
everything and nothing all at once.

Three days later, when I woke in the middle of the night to hear footsteps
crunching outside near my cabin window, I peered through the curtain to try and see
what was going on by the light of the stars. And I wasn’t surprised in the least to
see Molly leading Greg by the hand back to his own cabin, giggling before gripping
his coat in her hands and pushing him back against the door with a deep kiss.

And I hated that mixed in with my joy at seeing her happy, a tiny voice of jealousy
whispered in her voice in the back of my mind, “ _Now we just have to find one for
you._ ”

\--

Two weeks later, I had one foot up in my truck and one hand on the wheel when I
heard my name being called out behind me.

“Watson!” Nick was calling as he jogged across the gravel. He was the only person
who ever called everyone by their last names. I stepped down and waited.

“First of all,” he said once he reached me, leaning a hand against my truck. “Word
on the radio from the first patrol this morning is a new wolf kill site down in
Unit 35. Less than a mile from the Road. One of the goddamn Kantishna lodge bus
drivers was stopping too close to let people get pictures– need you to go down and
make sure the area’s cleared. I already radio’d it in to Backcountry on the East so
they’ll close the Unit.”

I nodded. “Got it. So Adam will take the usual patrol?”

When Nick nodded, I figured the conversation was done, and started to climb up into
my truck.

“Second thing,” Nick said, and his voice sounded slightly nervous. “You, uh . . .
you got a passenger for today. To the kill site.”

It could only be one person for Nick to sound that hesitant, but still I asked,
hoping, “Greg? One of the kids?”

A new voice suddenly sounded from over Nick’s shoulder. “The one you didn’t name,”
the voice said, and Mr. Holmes came strolling into view like he wasn’t walking
across unsteady gravel – dressed now in a Ranger’s uniform tailored so tightly it
clung to the lines of his chest and long thighs, with the buttons of his uniform
shirt open one button too low and the brimmed hat sitting just-so on top of his
curls.

My heart sank down into my gut just as a forbidden pulse throbbed between my legs.
I nodded at Nick that everything would be fine and settled myself up in the truck.
“Get in, then,” I said so Mr. Holmes could hear me.

Nick held up his hands in prayer, mouthing, “I owe you one,” and I wondered yet
again why the entire world apparently thought that riding silently in a truck with
this man was the worst possible thing.

Actually, it was the worst possible thing, for me, at least. But not for the
reasons everyone else was thinking of.

I could smell his cologne when he got in the truck, effortlessly settling back into
the seat and throwing his hat onto the dashboard, ruffling his curls. I held my
breath against the soft rush of peppercorn and cedar.

“Thought maybe you’d gotten lost out in the backcountry,” I said as I started the
engine and pulled out of the lot. “You disappeared after that first day.”

He sighed beside me. “Sadly no, although that would be agreeable to being trapped
upstairs from Geoff and your head of kennels shagging each other senseless three
times a week. How she’s managing to commute back and forth so much from the
entrance is beyond me, and I’ve told George he’s an idiot for not just catching the
damn tourist bus and traveling out to her. I don’t need his help out here every
second of every day.”

To my own surprise, I laughed. “You sure don’t hide your opinions,” I said.

He looked over at me with a frown, stilling his fingers in his lap which had been
aimlessly fiddling. “Normally that annoys people. Why isn’t it annoying you? Why
did you laugh?”

“Well, for starters, you just called your colleague two different wrong names in
one minute –”

“Irrelevant – that isn’t inherently humorous –”

“—and you also just implied you’d rather be lost out in the wilderness than hear
your friend get some. Which, decent guy like Greg, you’d figure you’d be at least a
little happy for him.”

He paused beside me, and for a moment I feared I had said something wrong. He was
silent as we passed by a tour bus coming the opposite direction, and I did my usual
wave at the bus driver while turning on my hazard’s.

Finally he sucked in a gasp and held his hands up to his lips. “ _Oh_ , of course.
You and he must have bonded over dating men. I should have noticed it earlier. How
tedious.”

It was my turn to suck in a breath. My chest raged at me, an alarm blaring through
my gut saying, “ _get away, get away, get away._ ” An odd, unfamiliar sense of
betrayal flooded my bloodstream.

I took a shaky breath. “How did –”

“No, Glen didn’t tell me, and no, it’s not obvious to anyone else in this
godforsaken park just by looking at you. You look as heterosexual as they come. I
see things everyone else misses.” He glanced at me quickly, some of the brazen
confidence flickering in his eyes for just a moment. “Your secret is safe with me,”
he said softly, and something about the way he said _”your secret_ ” sent a shiver
of alarm down my spine – that he was somehow referring to more than just being gay,
that he saw through me . . .that he _knew_ I had more than that one secret to
tell . . .

But somehow, against everything I’d ever experienced before in my life, I trusted
that he meant I was safe, no matter how many of my secrets he knew. Trusted it like
I trusted my own topo maps and compass to lead me back to the Park Road after days
out in the wilderness. I decided I’d try and analyze why the hell that was the case
later, when I wasn’t trying not to look at the tops of his hands or smell his
cologne.

I swallowed hard and tore my gaze back to the road, aware that his grey eyes were
still tracing the side of my face.

“Ok, then,” I said quietly, and he hummed and nodded and gazed out the window as if
nothing had even happened, staying silent the whole rest of the two-hour trip out
to thirty-five.

The stretch of Park Road near thirty-five when we got to it was a madhouse – four
Kantishna tour busses parked along the road, visitors rambling through the roadside
tundra with cameras in tow, a herd of caribou come over the ridge to see what the
hell was going on, and far off in the distance what looked like the remains of a
baby moose carcass, the wolves having long since abandoned the kill site due to the
noise and crowds.

I groaned as we pulled up, pulling my hat onto my head. “Stay in the truck until I
get this sorted out. Then we’ll see how close you can safely get to the site.”

He lifted his feet up onto the dashboard, performing a mock salute. “Control the
masses, Ranger,” he said before bringing his fingertips to either side of his
forehead and closing his eyes.
I took one last look at him and shook my head, telling myself I was just curious
instead of tracing the long line of his pale throat with my eyes – the sharp curve
of smooth-shaven jaw.

I paused after the door was closed, leaning back in the rolled-down window. “Don’t
be one of those researchers who tries to save the fucking wolf if my gun has to get
involved,” I said.

His eyes flew open and he turned his face towards me, and for a moment I thought
there was a flicker of something passing through his eyes as he looked me up and
down, some little hint of want or warmth, but then it was gone.

He turned back to sit straight in his seat and closed his eyes again. “Just don’t
shoot anything interesting,” he said, and I let myself laugh as I walked away,
trying to school my smile before I arrived at the chaotic crowd.

It took me almost an hour to get the site safe and cleared – rounding up visitors
back into the busses and scolding the lodge drivers, picking up random trash and
debris that had been dropped while gently shooing off a few curious caribou who
were getting too close to the bus wheels.

When the last bus finally made its way over the horizon and around the bend,
disappearing into a cloud of dirt kicked up from the wheels, I looked over at the
kill site off in the distance, trying to assess whether it was safe to get any
closer. I reached for the binoculars in my pocket, wanting to use them to scan the
area for signs of any bears.

But my eyes didn’t see tundra or distant peaks through the lenses.

Instead they saw a blur of brown curls moving quickly across the land. I tore the
binoculars away from my face to see Mr. Holmes sprinting out through the brush
towards the kill site, nothing in his hands except what looked like a magnifying
glass and a ruler.

I cursed and chucked the binoculars back in the truck, reaching for my keys and bag
before chasing off after him.

“Mr. Holmes!” I called out. He didn’t even hesitate. His long legs ate up the
uneven tundra ground, leaping effortlessly through thick brush and over gnarled,
dry moss.

“Mr. Holmes, wait! It isn’t safe!” I called out again, stumbling a few times as I
kept my eyes on him instead of my own feet.

When he still kept sprinting over the brush and rocks, I forced my legs to pick up
speed and tried another tactic.

“I’ll shoot your goddamn leg off if you don’t fucking stop!”

That worked. Mr. Holmes stopped in his tracks, hands on his hips to try to catch
his breath and staring up at the sky in frustration. When I caught up to him I
could see a single bead of sweat dripping down the side of his neck.

I talked over my panting. “What the _fuck_ was that? What were you thinking?”

He looked unconcerned. “Pretty sure that’s not the appropriate language for Rangers
to use with unruly visitors,” he said.

I huffed and shook my head. “’Unruly visitor’ my ass. You just sprinted towards an
active kill site – there could be fucking bears coming around any of these bends –
and you weren’t even making noise. Don’t even have spray!”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. There are absolutely zero bears in this vicinity.”

“And you know that because you’re God?”

“I know that because I know where every bear is in this entire park – within a two-
hundred -meter radius of accuracy, anyway. The nearest adult male is at least one
Unit over, and the nearest adult female with cubs even farther. And obviously the
wolves have given up on this kill since your ‘unruly visitors’ all came in and
swarmed with their cameras. Therefore it’s perfectly safe.”

My mind raced trying to catch up with the implications of everything he just said.
“It’s impossible to know where every bear is in this park. Barely any of them are
officially tracked –”

“What exactly do you think I’ve been doing during these past weeks since we
arrived? Enjoying the interior of my cabin? It’s simple. It’s arithmetic. The
tracked bears exhibit patterns, therefore the other bears will also exhibit
patterns – take into consideration the weather, their breeding habits, the
estimated population, other animal migrations, food availability, visitor
influence, etcetera and you can reasonably predict where every bear currently is.
And if you’re not an idiot, you’ll have a topographic map of the park memorized and
mentally accessible so you can keep track and update accordingly in real time.”

It sounded like such a load of shit – so godforsakenly impossible that I couldn’t

even begin to explain to him all the reasons he was insane. Then I remembered
Molly’s words from Dan, “ _Genius, best in the world._ ”

And why the NPS spent money to fly his team over from Europe started to make a lot
more sense.

I crossed my arms and looked over at him, momentarily stunned at the outline of the
curve of his back against the purple Denali peaks behind him. “If all that’s true,
that’s fucking amazing,” I said. “But it sounds like a load of shit.”

He lifted his chin a bit, reaching up to wipe his forehead with the back of his
hand. “Then I’ll prove it to you over the summer,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You better,” I answered, my voice unexpectedly rough and low. I saw his eyes
widen, thought I imagined a shiver pass over his forearms, and then he was clearing
his throat, gesturing back to the kill site about one-hundred feet away.

“Now, after you, Ranger,” he said, dramatically bowing.

I rolled my eyes, glancing once across the landscape before re-checking my bear
spray and gun clipped to my belt. I started walking, not missing the satisfied
smile that passed over his face.

“I could get you in a lot of shit for this,” I said. “Blatantly disregarding what’s
practically the number one park safety rule – listen to the Rangers.”

He chuckled, a deep sound that rumbled in my own chest. “Well,” he said casually as
we walked side by side. “When you do, I might happen to mention how you threatened
to shoot off my leg.”

I laughed, such a free and natural sound I felt it like physical warmth in my
throat, and when he laughed along with me, and our eyes locked for one second too
long before I looked away, I thought that maybe being stuck in silent car rides
with Sherlock Holmes was a burden I wouldn’t mind being saddled with again.

He studied the kill site for nearly two hours, getting on his hands and knees with
his magnifying glass, taking measurements with the ruler, and, to the sound of my
protests, tasting pieces of grass and clumps of dirt.

I stood back and watched him, pretending I was mostly scanning the horizon for any
wildlife while my eyes kept straying to the curve of his back and shoulders under
the tan uniform shirt.

“You’re not gonna write any of this down?” I asked him at one point.

His only answer was pointing to his forehead as he looked closer at a faded
pawprint in the moss.

Just when the sun was starting to dip behind the distant peaks, pouring down their
snowy slopes with orange and gold, I cleared my throat, pushing off from the nearby
rock I’d been leaning against.

“Should get back, Mr. Holmes,” I said.

To my surprise, he straightened up immediately from his crouch without protest,

brushing the dirt from the knees of his pants and wiping dust from his brow with
his forearm. “Sherlock,” he said simply as he started walking the half-mile back
towards the Road, not pausing for me to catch up or even looking back over his
shoulder.

“Sherlock,” I tried out under my breath, even though he couldn’t hear me from where
he was already scrambling across a stretch of river rock.

We walked back to the truck in silence – one I never once felt the need to fill. I
tossed him a canteen of water when we were seated back in the truck, and he caught
it like we’d been doing the same routine for years, taking long, slow gulps before
handing it back to me without a word.

When we were halfway back to Toklat, Sherlock reached into the pocket of his shirt
and drew out a pack of cigarettes, twirling it once in his fingers before reaching
to flip open the lid.

“No fucking way,” I said, giving him a hard look. “Don’t tell me you’re about to
try to smoke in a _National Park_.”

He rolled his eyes and continued to flick open the lid, reaching in and lifting out
a stick of gum with two long fingers.

“Happy now?” he said sarcastically. “Not going to shoot my leg off?”

I huffed and shook my head out at the darkening road, keeping my eye on the hairpin
turns. “You trying to quit so you keep it in the carton to trick yourself? Seems a
bit beneath your intellect.”

“I’m not trying to quit,” he said, sounding offended as he popped the stick of
nicotine gum into his mouth. “But I know I’ll get murdered if I try to light up in
a place like this. I keep them in the carton so Giles doesn’t steal any. _He’s_ the
one trying to quit. Probably some misguided attempt to further win your kennel
girl’s affections.”

I heard myself chuckling. “For such a genius you sure have a hard time remembering
a handful of names. What do you think my name even is – just Ranger?”

He looked over at me, waiting until I glanced to my side to meet his gaze. “I know
your name,” he said, in a tone of voice that felt like I’d been waiting a hundred
years just to hear it.

I shivered against my will, trying not to squirm in the seat as I felt an

embarrassing pulse between my thighs, warm between my hips. “You’ll have to prove
it to me,” I said just as the sunset lit up the sky.

He put his foot up on the dashboard, looking out his window at the tundra below.
“You have yourself a deal, Ranger,” he said softly, and I met his gaze for a moment
in the window reflection before forcing myself to look back at the winding dirt
road.

That time, when we got back to Toklat, he didn’t dash off wordlessly from the truck
after we parked. Instead he walked over and casually hefted the hose over his
shoulder, starting to spray down the truck before I’d even gotten down from the
driver’s seat.

“How do you even know what you’re doing?” I said, watching him from a distance so I
wouldn’t get wet.

He walked around to get the other side. “I watched you do it last time. Isn’t
rocket science.”

“You didn’t even stick around last time,” I said before I could stop myself. “You
just dashed off.”

I thought I caught the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. I waited for an
answer – for _something_ \- as he finished with the hose and splashed a handful of
leftover water over his face and hair. Some droplets dripped down his long neck,
pooling in the dip of his collarbone. I licked my lips behind his back.

He plopped his hat back over his curls. “Consider it my apology for being so rude
then,” he said, with an odd look in his eyes. He nodded once, “Ranger,” before
turning to walk casually up the slope towards his cabin, immediately disappearing
into the shade of the mist and trees.

I stood there for a long time staring in the direction where he walked, long after
I could no longer see his curls bobbing through the trees. Long after I couldn’t
hear his feet crunching through the dirt.

And then, before I could stop myself, I shook my head and leaped back up into
still-dripping truck, tearing out of the gravel so quickly I nearly skidded into
the shrubs. The next day was my day off; I didn’t need to be anywhere early. I
turned left onto the Road, heading east without looking back.

Lugnut would be waiting for me, and I had a few new things I needed to tell him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your kind comments are my bread and wine - my milk and honey. Lugnut appreciates
your comments. He adores them. And so do I. Your grace and kindness and enthusiasm
are all so greatly appreciated!
>
> Enjoy, let me know if you have any questions, and thanks so much for reading :)
>
> *** Quick Answers to some questions I've gotten: 'Mobile' referred to a
snowmobile. This fic *will* jump back and forth between 1991 and 1992, so don't
worry if you were confused last chapter - answers are coming. There *will* be
animal death, hence the tag. I'm not being subtle about it (sad sad sad I know) but
I promise I will give ample warnings! And there will be an ultimate happy ending!

5. May 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm changing up the music recs a bit! Seeing as how I'm completely head over
heels obsessed with my queen Sarah Jarosz, each chapter will now have one Bluegrass
and one Sarah Jarosz song. I think you'll thank me. She's a goddess.
>
> Bluegrass: Listen to Tim O'Brien sing "You Were on My Mind"
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jL3fycVjfk/).
> (Thank you so much to hotshoeagain on tumblr for reminding me that song existed!)
>
> Queen Sarah: Listen to "Back of my Mind" (and swoon over it)
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQjo4C-FdSM/).
>
> Enjoy!

May 1992

For two weeks I avoided camp around Toklat like the plague.

During the day, if I wasn’t out on patrols or picking up extra shifts, I was
setting off down the Road with the windows rolled down, needing to be anywhere
other than a cabin just fifty feet from his. I stayed far away from the places in
the park where we’d visited last summer – old wolf kill sites and migration routes
he’d dragged me to near Savage River and Igloo Creek, and day hikes I’d made him go
on with me in return up around Polychrome and Mount Galen.

Instead I went to parts of the park I hadn’t been to in years – parts I had seen
once and then promptly forgotten, and parts that had remained a speck on a map
until then. Each day, when my shift ended, I simply walked off the Road, out across
the tundra and down bushy drainage, climbing up steep hills and craggy mountains to
see the valleys and hidden little pools behind them. My boots grew worn and grey
after just a few days, and my muscles burned and ached – blisters covering my toes.

I had expected it all to make me feel young again – the John I’d been before
Sherlock Holmes ever stepped up into my truck. I could get it all out of my system
and remember who I was – a Ranger and a homesteader, employee and a friend. Forget
that I had ever in my life been called someone’s lover.

But instead I ended each day sagging with exhaustion, crawling into my bed only
when I couldn’t take another step. I’d stare at my ceiling with dry eyes through
the long night, trying to think of Lugnut or Molly or Talkeetna, and hating myself
for wanting to get up and leave. To sneak into his cabin and crawl between his
sheets – tell him that I didn’t give a shit about what happened if only he held me
for just one more night.

And each morning, when I woke up still spent and sore, I told myself that maybe the
next hike, or the next one, would make me feel young and content to stay in my own
bed.

So I kept hiking.
I came across some backcountry hikers one day, lost and frazzled and desperate to
find the Road – so grateful to run into a Ranger that the young woman burst into
tears and pulled me into a hug. Another day saw me accidentally startling a grazing
moose, something that hadn’t happened to me since way back in my first season. It
had happened just ten feet from my bunk at C-Camp, and I’d been too caught off
guard to start running in a zig zag like I was supposed to do, and was saved by one
of the bus drivers coming back from eating dinner, shaking his head at me
afterwards like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever seen.

I encountered grizzlies twice – once a mom and cubs a little too close for comfort,
making me have to grip my spray in my hand while I raised my arms and called out
Molly’s preferred line of, “I’m human! If you eat me I’ll just taste like the
chemicals in our food!”

And then, two weeks into my new hiking regimen, everything came to a halt.

I was heading back towards my truck by some smaller lakes a few miles east of
Wonder. The mountains were sighing around me, settling down for a soft night of
sleep. My feet and legs were aching, begging to be done for the day and crawl into
bed. I heard a twig snap up a slope to my right, and I looked up expecting to see a
moose or a bear, hand already reaching for the spray on my belt.

But then a huge herd of caribou came ambling over the nearest hill, spilling into
the twilight valley like marbles pouring down smooth, green silk. I stopped and
lost my breath, willing myself to disappear into the bushes at my back so they
wouldn’t be bothered by me and change their course.

The entire earth was softened, silent and cradling the caribou as they made their
slow way across the glittering tundra, as if all of us were suspended in the smooth
ball of water at the tip of a velvet flower petal – the horsetail and violets that
Molly tried to grow in her little garden each summer. I watched them for a long
time, moving in pairs to nibble at the moss while the young ones chased each other
and jumped off the rocks.

And I thought of watching an almost identical scene last summer – the memory
hitting me so sharply in my chest I had to bend over with my hands on my knees.
There had been a warm body beside mine, and fingertips hesitantly brushing against
my own, and a voice saying, “ _You know, Ranger, you’re the only person I’ve ever
met in my life whose presence doesn’t bore me to tears, and despite all of my
research, I can’t for the life of me figure out_ why.”

I blinked hard and immediately started running back to my truck, accidentally

startling a few of the caribou as I moved. I closed the door and sat with my hands
on the steering wheel for a very long time, willing my heartbeat to slow down so I
could take in full breaths of air, and for my fingertips to stop reaching out to
hold an invisible hand.

And suddenly I was keenly, _achingly_ aware that I couldn’t continue the whole
season living that way – that eventually I would have to see him again, or speak to
him like normal. That one day I would have to hear him say “John,” or “Ranger,” and
not close my eyes tightly at the sound, or hunch over at the thrum of physical pain
in my chest.

That I couldn’t just make myself disappear into the land.

And so, fifteen days after Sherlock Holmes snuck up behind me on the river rock
just before sunrise, I stood over the little kitchen sink of my cabin in the dim
light of the flickering lamp, hours before I would normally wake up for a usual
morning shift. My bare feet on the wooden floor were covered in wraps over my
blisters, and I could feel my sweatpants barely clinging on to my hips and thighs –
thinner now after so much exercise and not enough food or sleep.

A pot of boiled water sat ready on the stove. I hung the little mirror I kept for
shaving on the handle of one of the kitchen cabinets. Then I stood deathly still
and held the razor in my hand, convincing myself to get on with it and begin.

The beard reminded me of him.

How I used to wake up some mornings in a tent or in my bedroom to his fingertips

stroking across my bristly cheek. How he would run his palm softly across the hairs
on my face, stroking my jaw when he brought his lips to mine. How it would leave
burns on him, bright pink marks streaked across the inside of his thighs and over
his ribs, reminding me that I had touched him there and kissed his bare skin.

It took me over an hour to shave it all off. Each stroke of the razor felt like a
wisp of goodbye – cutting off the ghosts of his fingertips that had still clung to
my face all winter. Slicing away the memories of his eyes on my bare chest.

He had shaved me, once. Shaved me in my cabin kitchen in the exact place I stood in
that moment, pleased with himself and grinning as he leaned forward to press his
lips to each new section of smooth, shaved skin.

He’d held my face in his hands for a long moment after he was done, and finally
looked straight into my eyes and said, “ _You look handsome_.”

And I’d wanted to tell him, sitting there looking straight up into his face, how
nobody had ever told me that in all the long decades of my life. How when I was
eight years old my mom had put a bow in my hair before the church picnic and told
me I looked beautiful, and how I’d gotten a slap that left a red palmprint on my
cheek for the whole morning when I’d asked her why she didn’t call me handsome
instead.

But I hadn’t told him any of that, and I knew then that I never would.

When I finished my shave, I cleaned the razor and dumped out the water, meaning to
take down the small mirror and get on with my new day. Instead I found myself
looking at my face in the mirror, tracing the dark bags under my eyes and lines
around my mouth. Shame burned hotly in my throat when I saw how my cheeks had
sunken over the past weeks, bringing out the too-delicate lines of my too-small
face like old horrific ghosts appearing slowly through the mist.

It was moments like that when I wondered how no one had ever guessed.

I leaned against my hands on the cold kitchen countertop, staring at my face for a
long time in the blurry mirror. I saw my twenty-year-old self as if nothing had
changed, wearing baseball caps pulled down too low and a strip of cotton wrapped
painfully tight around my chest. When I was working on the cattle ranch just south
of Badlands, where I’d showed up on the first day of the season for work with
everything I owned slung across my back. Where I’d said my name was John for the
first time to another soul, and nobody had given a damn to ask anything other than
whether I wanted to be paid on the first day of the month or the fifteenth. And
every cent I earned that summer went straight into a backpack that wound up on a
plane headed all the way to New York City. And later that year, on the first day I
was handed a Ranger’s uniform, the nametag attached to the brand new jacket said
“John Watson.” I’d waited until all the other new employees had already changed and
gone, and then I’d winced as the tan shirt pressed against the bandages still
covering my tender new chest.
And that person was looking back at me in the mirror as if two decades hadn’t
passed.

I’d wanted to tell Sherlock about that person, one night especially lying side by
side and fully-clothed in a tent perched on top of the Muldrow Glacier, with the
wind battling against the thin sides and moaning over our breaths. I’d wanted to
tell him about the last time that person ever saw the backs of his parents, or the
first time that person whispered the name ‘John’ under the blankets in the middle
of the night on the day he turned sixteen, wanting to try out the feel of it on his
lips.

But we hadn’t talked about those things. We never did, really. And instead Sherlock
had turned onto his back, yanked off his jeans and gripped me hard between my legs.
He’d moaned and whispered, “ _Do it, John. Come on, come on and fuck me,_ ” and I’d
kissed his mouth and fucked him what felt like hundreds of years ago.

I splashed a handful of ice cold water over my newly smooth face and breathed
warmth into a towel, coming back to myself. When I got dressed into my uniform in
the half-dark, I did it slowly, reverently, like I’d done that very first time. I
adjusted the collar and pins on my shirt with care. And after I reached down to fit
the bulge into the pocket in my boxers, I stood there in my bedroom and placed my
hand between my legs, holding it through my pants and waiting until I couldn’t tell
the difference between socks and real skin.

I took time for it all – packing my cheese sandwich and jerky for later that day,
holstering my gun, slipping on my worn boots. When I opened my cabin door to head
down for my shift, I held my head high, not looking down at my feet on the ground
as I walked. It was the first time in two weeks I hadn’t snuck out to my truck
before the sun had risen.

I saw him almost immediately.

He was coming out of the shower house, curls still wet and clinging to his neck,
and with the towel wrapped around his shoulders over his damp clothes. He stopped
in his tracks, eyes fixed on the side of my face as I moved through the trees
towards the parking lot.

I thought I would keep walking – show him I had moved on, and was living my normal
life, and that this was my home. That he could come back any time he liked and not
affect my life at all. Make him think that I didn’t wake up in the night and still
reach for him beside me – even in tiny cabins at the bottom of the goddamn Grand
Canyon.

But I slowed down, then stopped. And I turned to look at him.

It hurt.

All the air sucked out of my lungs in a painful rush. My fingers twitched. I wanted
to change course in the gravel and run towards him instead, touch his warm body
with my own hands to prove to myself that he was real, that he was really there, in
_Denali_.

I stayed put where I was. I caught his gaze, piercing me through the trees like the
first time I ever saw the Northern Lights above the peaks. He looked older, decades
older, than the man who had jumped into my truck in a tailored suit just over a
year ago. He was standing there, staring at me with his mouth hanging half open.
His eyes were soft and afraid, and I lied to myself that I also saw in them
something like yearning.
He opened his mouth, starting to speak, “John, are you –”

I put up my hand to stop him, breathing hard through my nose. “Not now,” I said
softly. I looked at him for another moment before forcing myself to keep walking
down the path towards the parking lot.

I didn’t realize until I was already ten feet away that, “ _not now_ ” also meant,
“ _one day, eventually._ ” And I felt his gaze burning into my back the whole way
down to my truck.

\--

Next chance I got to see Lugnut I sat with him by his hut. He looked too exhausted
to go for much of a walk. The snow had melted from the kennel yard, leaving parts
of the ground finally dry. I let him sit between my legs and lean back against my
chest. He stretched up his head so I would scratch the full length of his neck. My
lips brushed against his snout when I whispered to him.

“He’s back, old man,” I murmured, curling my fingers through his thick grey fur.
“Don’t know what the hell he’s up to, but he’s back.”

Lugnut turned his head and looked straight into my eyes, leaning his face to the
side as he watched my lips move – that way he always did that had me convinced he
could understand me.

“Thought I’d never see him again,” I went on, letting my voice get raspy since only
Lugnut was there to hear me. “After that trip out in Unit 8 . . . well, I told you
about that before, didn’t I? I bet you remember every word.” I scratched between
his ears, and he closed his eyes with a happy growl. “But then he just turned up
here a few weeks ago. Walked up behind me at Toklat like nothing even happened.” I
swallowed hard. “And I couldn’t even look at him, old boy. I can’t just . . . I
need to move on, now. I thought I _had_ moved on. Isn’t that what you told me to
do?”

Lugnut wiggled in my arms, bumping his head against my hand so I would continue
scratching his ears. I did, leaning down to kiss into his fur.

“He looks so much older,” I said, remembering the sad lines of his eyes from the
other morning by the shower house – the way he hadn’t been floating effortlessly
across the uneven gravel. Hadn’t had some witty, sarcastic thing to say, or been
twiddling energetically with his hands. “More . . . soft. Not all sharp edges. And
he’s too thin.”

Lugnut pawed at me and whimpered. I laughed under my breath. “You saying I look the
same?” I asked.

When Lugnut leaned back against me, I slowly closed my eyes. For one brief flash I
saw my own life like a movie – me and Sherlock last summer starting off on our
first backpacking trip out near Turtle Mountain, running after each other like we
were twenty years old and laughing as we whacked through the brush and scrambled up
scree. The way he smiled - his private smile he saved just for me - when I caught
him in my arms and kissed him just after we crossed one of the small forks of the
river, icy water still dripping from our wet calves and thighs. Just the two of us
alone in the world.
And then, like a nightmare pouring black over the golden memory, I saw the look on
his face from a few months later, just before I turned my back and walked away for
good – the shattered eyes and pale face I left behind me on the mountain.

I sighed and held Lugnut back against my chest, gently patting his side. “I
probably look older now, too,” I said.

And as I pressed my cheek against his face and breathed in the scent of his fur, I
finally said words I’d been denying myself all winter. They felt heavy in my mouth.
“I miss him, old Lug,” I whispered. “He’s right here in the same park, and I still
miss him so fucking much.”

He licked away the single tear at the corner of my eye, wagging his tail at the
taste of the salt.

Later that night I paid Molly a visit, waving off her offer again to spend the
night on her couch. After dinner an odd silence settled over us at her table – one
more uncomfortable than I’d ever felt around her before.

Finally, she spoke. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly.

I frowned, heart starting to speed up in my chest. “Know what?”

She looked at me with big, sad eyes. “When Greg said he was coming back for half
this season to continue the project, he never mentioned . . . he didn’t tell me
that Sherlock was coming back, too – that he would be here the whole summer. I
would have told you.”

The entire earth felt deadly silent after she said his name, her voice too sharp
and loud in the small space of her warm cabin.

I ducked my head. “Wouldn’t have blamed you if you had known,” I finally said. “If
I were you I wouldn’t have known how to tell me.”

Silence fell again between us, thick and heavy and impenetrable as Molly fiddled
with the ends of her long hair. I could practically hear her mind whirring as she
softly frowned and chewed her lip.

“Word is you’ve been hiking up a storm,” she said. “Thought you’d decided just to
go off and live with the bears – scoping out the best sleeping spots.”

Her joke fell flat – I couldn’t bring myself to smile. I shrugged. “Just . . .
needed to get out a bit more, I guess.”

She tried to hold my gaze. “You look . . .” she paused, then a grin twitched at the
corner of her mouth. “Honestly, you look like shit,” she finally said.

I laughed, stroking my smooth cheek forgetting my beard wasn’t there anymore.

“Honestly, kid, I feel a bit like shit,” I said back.

She leaned forward, and I felt the air in the room change and shift, buzzing at the
tip of her tongue which was dyed deep purple from the early blackberries she’d
brought back as a treat from Fairbanks.

“John,” she said. Every muscle in my body tensed. “Can I ask you something?”

I suddenly felt that everything was about to be ruined. It was the question I’d
been dreading for twenty long years. The question that I heard in my nightmares,
dreams where I was paraded stripped naked in front of crowds of people, and
everyone pointed between my legs.

My tongue was numb. “Yes,” I made myself say.

She looked down at her folded hands for the longest minute of my life. “I don’t
know how to ask you this without sounding blunt,” she said.

My blood was roaring. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, so I just nodded, clenching
my hands in the fabric of my jeans.

When she looked back up at me, her eyes were big and clear. “John,” she said
seriously. “Are you gay?”

I nearly laughed out loud in relief. I felt my muscles explode with the release of
sharp tension, and my hands started to shake where I pressed them into my thighs.

I hoped I wasn’t actually smiling. I leaned forward across the table to match her
own pose. I cleared my throat. “I am.”

She nodded and licked her lips. “So everything with Sherlock . . . the time you
spent together –”

“We weren’t just friends.”

She nodded again. “And whatever happened at the end of the summer – that last trip
you mentioned right before you left for the Canyon –”

I forced myself to keep looking at her. “Wasn’t just a falling out,” I said.

Suddenly she reached out and placed her hand on top of mine, her palm warming my
fingers against the wood of the kitchen table. I turned my hand upwards to catch
her fingers in mine.

Something clicked in my mind. “Greg never told you?” I asked.

She shook her head, and I was surprised that there wasn’t any hurt or anger in her
eyes. “I never asked him,” she said. “Didn’t even realize he knew.” She frowned.
“Does that mean . . . are you . . . out?”

That time I did laugh. “God, no,” I said, holding her hand in both of mine. “Greg’s
the only one who ever knew. He just happened to –” I stopped mid-word, realizing I
didn’t know whether Molly knew he’d been with men.

She squeezed my fingers. “I know about him.”

I hummed. “Yeah, well . . . he sort of . . guessed, and I confirmed. Something I

said to him the night he first asked me if I was with you.”

“The campfire?”

“The campfire.”

Suddenly she smiled, lighting up the room now that the fire had grown low. “I’ve
been really stupid, then, haven’t I?”

I shook my head no, feeling ashamed even though I couldn’t pinpoint why. “Not
stupid at all, kid. I’ve just had your whole lifetime’s worth of practice at hiding
it.”
The smile fell quickly from her face. “So . . .” she bit her lip. “All this
time . . you’ve never –”

My throat felt tight. “Only with him.”

Her face looked unbearably sad. I wanted to reach out and wipe away the lines
between her brows with my thumb. She gripped my hands harder. “I just want you to
be happy,” she whispered, and her voice was rough.

I swallowed hard. “I am happy, Molls.” I tried to smile. “Got my dream job.” I

winked at her. “My dream girl.”

She laughed through her nose, rolling her eyes. “That’s not what I meant, and you
know it.”

I pulled my hands away back into my lap and looked down at the table. “I know.”

And I didn’t know how to tell her that the reason I hadn’t shared a bed with
another man in the twenty long years before Sherlock Holmes wasn’t because of all
the reasons probably running through her head. I didn’t know how to tell her,
sitting there beautiful and soft in her safe little kitchen, that the reason I’d
never tried was because I didn’t want the shit to get kicked out of me the moment
the other guy reached down my pants and felt a rolled-up sock. Didn’t want to ruin
the warm, clean air of her world by telling her that the precious few times I’d
ever allowed myself to be with someone I’d only given them a blow job and then
walked away alone.

Because then she’d understand that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t just some ex to avoid at
work. She’d see that he had been my . . . that he had been _everything_ \- an
everything which I’d thrown away.

And I knew that she would be sadder for me than I was even sad for myself.

I cleared my throat, not knowing how long I’d sat there just staring down at my
hands. I suddenly ached for the comfort of my beard on my face – something to
soften the lines of my mouth and make me feel less bare and exposed.

I looked up at her, waiting patiently and leaning back in her chair. “Are you angry
I never told you before?” I asked, unsure if I actually wanted to hear her answer.

She gave me a hard look. “Now you’re being the idiot.”

I laughed, leaning back in my chair as well with a sigh. “Right, then, not angry.”

“Definitely not angry.”

An hour later, after coffee and some of Molly’s homemade pie to ease the thick
emotions still hanging about in the air, Molly turned to me in her kitchen where I
was washing her dishes in the sink.

“Should I tell you a secret now, then?” she asked.

I raised my eyebrow at her, still scrubbing the plate in my hands. “Gonna finally
admit you’ve been desperately in love with me all these years?”

She threw the dish towel at my head. “You’re impossible. It’s something I want to
tell Greg, actually,” she went on. I could feel her fidgeting by my side at the
counter. “Something I’m gonna tell him when he moves back out here in a few weeks.”
I paused and turned to her, up to my forearms in soapy water. “Well?”

Her eyes lit up the way fresh snowfall reflected the sun – the fields of purple and
gold wildflowers dotting the tundra like a rich quilt.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

I froze, blinking hard at her shining face. “And you’re . . . and you want –”

Her eyes were wet. “More than anything.”

Emotion ripped through me like a wave, from my throat to my toes. “Fuck, kid,” I
said with a rough voice. “Fuck, that’s –” I held up my hands, still dripping wet.
“Come here.”

The hug she gave me was the fiercest one of my entire life, and it lasted until
long after the water in the sink had gone cold.

And I didn’t think of Sherlock Holmes for another second that night.

And it wasn’t until hours later, all the way back in my own bed, that I remembered
how my mom had once held my chin hard between her fingers, the day we found out my
eighteen-year-old older sister was due to have twins at the clinic three towns
over.

“One day you’re gonna be the one gets pregnant,” she’d said to me. “And you better
hope to God you’ve got a ring on your finger before you’re ready to push ‘em out,
or I swear to you, you’ll be no daughter of mine.”

\--

Nick was grinning when he jogged up to me outside Eielson, weaving his way through
a group of visitors waiting for the next bus. I’d been spending my lunch hour
catching up with one of the bus dispatchers – young guy named Aaron who knew some
of my old coworkers from Canyonlands. The sky was thick and overcast, threatening
rain.

“Watson!” Nick called out. I waved to him and moved closer, stopping twice to
assure visitors who spotted my uniform that yes, the bus really was coming, and no,
I couldn’t radio the driver to tell him to speed up.

“Alright, Nick?” I asked when we moved to stand over on one of the built-in lookout
balconies.

Nick squinted up at the rainclouds. “Jesus, Watson, it’s harder than finding a
needle in a haystack to get a hold of you these days,” he said, still smiling.
“What – you just up and remembered a few weeks ago that you could hike?”

I laughed, rubbing the back of my neck. “Something like that.”

Nick reached up to scratch his beard. “Well, way you’ve been saving our asses
taking on these extra shifts lately, I can’t say I’m complaining. Put in a good
word for you, actually. Up with the offices.”

I smiled, even though a promotion up to GS-11 was the absolute last thing I’d ever
wanted. “Appreciate that, Nick,” I said.

He waved me off and nodded, then clapped his hands together. “Right, then, got some
good news for ya!” he said. “My little way of trying to repay you for working your
ass off this season – and the ten seasons before it.”

I laughed and crossed my arms over my chest, uncomfortable and wary. “Alright
then?”

He smiled a deep, warm smile and reached forward to put his hand on my shoulder.
“Know your old pal is back with us this season,” he said.

My face paled. I hoped the panic didn’t show on my face. “You mean Mr. Holmes?” I
asked, keeping my voice steady.

Nick threw back his head and laughed, speaking out to an invisible audience. “’Mr.
Holmes’ he says like you two weren’t peas in a pod all last summer.”

I gave a weak smile, hoping he would get on with whatever horrifying thing he was
clearly about to say.

Nick took a deep breath. “Actually, I’ll tell ya I was still pretty shocked when he
called me over the winter. ‘Second season?’ I said to him. ‘NPS hadn’t planned on
having y’all out here for more than one season.’ And he said – well first he asked
me if you were coming back from the Canyon, which I told him we were crossing our
fingers that you were. And then, you know what he told me – he said he’d come back
out even without the NPS money. Do it through his own grants or pro-bono just to
pick up the research project where they left off. Run it for a second year and do
more tracking. ‘I’d do anything to get back to Denali’ he told me on the phone.
‘Got some unfinished business there’ – you know, meaning the wolves. Thought I’d
hit my head and gone to heaven,” he finished, face bright and shining.

I wanted to run away and be alone and vomit. I hadn’t known any of that – hadn’t
known that it was his idea, that he had called Nick, that he had _begged_.

I thought of the flash of longing I’d seen on his face outside the shower house,
and a mix of anger and guilt and shame churned hotly in my gut.

“Yeah,” I finally said, taking off my hat to run a hand through my hair. “Yeah,
he’s, uh. . . he’s really something. The way he gets devoted to a project.”

Nick laughed again. “You’re an odd one, Watson,” he said with a grin, as if we’d
been drinking and fishing buddies for years. “So, the good news I promised you.”

He stopped to clear his throat, and my heart hammered in my chest.

“The way I see it, you and him have barely had time to stand on the same patch of
dirt since you both got here,” he went on. “So I went ahead and changed around your
shifts for the next few weeks. Gonna be his research partner, just like you were
most of last season. You know, take him around in your truck and out on hikes like
you did before. Aaron and Jeff have agreed to cover your normal patrols – it’s all
set to go.”

My hands were shaking, and my spine felt like it would up and snap. I barely got
out words. “And Sherlock agreed to this?” I asked.

Nick leaned his head to the side. “Oh, he went on and on about not wanting to
bother you during your work, and how he’d be fine out on his own, and a load of
other bull. But don’t you lie to me for one second and tell me the both of you
weren’t hoping for a repeat of last season. Consider it my way of saying ‘job well
done,’ Watson.” He finished and winked at me, standing back with his hands on his
hips and probably waiting for me to sink to my knees and thank him, or give him
applause.

Instead I closed my eyes for just a second longer than a normal blink, taking a
deep breath to keep myself from screaming into Nick’s face that I lived in the
bottom of the fucking Grand Canyon for six months just to escape Sherlock Holmes,
and now he’s putting me two goddamn feet away from him in the front seat of a
truck, where his cologne will suffocate every breath I try to take with soft cedar.

I schooled my face as best I could and wiped my hand over my mouth. “Gee, Nick. I,
uh . . . I don’t know what to say.”

Nick rolled his eyes and huffed a laugh, already starting to walk away. “You can
thank me later, Watson. God knows I wasn’t expecting a bouquet of flowers or
anything.” He spoke over his shoulder. “New schedule’s taped to your cabin door –
at least Hannah said she would do it. Don’t have too much fun.”

I stood frozen as he walked away, immediately getting into an animated conversation

with another group of visitors about the types of food bears eat.

The world felt blurry – moving in slow motion through a haze. I walked back towards
the small paved parking lot to my truck, forcing myself not to think of anything
but each foot stepping in front of the other. The whole drive back to Toklat, I
kept my mind clear and blank, focusing on each curve of the road and then the curve
after that.

A fierce, deep part of me just wanted to keep driving – drive all the way East and
bury my face between Lugnut’s ears. Then put him in my truck passenger seat and
drive down Highway 3 towards Talkeetna, never once looking up in the rearview
mirror at the Alaska Range.

Instead I pulled off at Toklat, keeping my head low as I walked quickly up to my

cabin after washing the truck and refilling the gas. A piece of paper was pinned to
my door, “ _Keep our favorite Brit safe! XO, Hannah_ ” written in a loopy scrawl
across the front.

I opened it with surprisingly steady hands, mind still blank.

It said that I was meeting Sherlock to drive him out near Stony the next morning at
seven.

Suddenly I crumpled the paper in my hand. My stomach rose up into my throat.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I leaned forward to bang my forehead against the rough wood of
the door.

He had said “fuck,” once – had said it many times. Said it underneath me when he
was on his back, his fingers clutching hard at my worn, thin sheets. Said it on
that backpacking trip last summer, when I leaned forward for the very first time
and dragged my lips and beard along his jaw, whispering his name into his skin like
a warm secret.

Said it under his breath with hot tears in his eyes, right after I turned around
and started walking away. Right before he said I had it all wrong, and that he
didn’t mean it.

Right before he begged me to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Admission time: in case you haven't noticed by now, I have such a RAGING CRUSH on
Ranger Watson.
>
> Your comments mean so damn much to me. They make me smile like a lunatic and want
to get on a plane straight back to Denali. I am so, so grateful for all of you who
have taken time to send me kind words, or rec this fic to others, or send me your
genius music recs!
>
> I'm truly BLOWN AWAY by the positive feedback to this fic so far! I love sharing
this landscape and these characters with you all. Next update coming soon: we
journey back to 1991 and watch our flirting lovebirds get closer. . .
>
> Oh, and Lugnut says hi.

6. May - June 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris sing "Traveling Kind"
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65y-TtsSzM/).
>
> Queen Sarah Jarosz: listen to "I Can't Love You Now"
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcX5ZEIAE2Q/).
>
> Note: Remember that animal death tag? It comes up once in this chapter. It has
NOTHING to do with Lugnut in this chapter, but there is a dead animal from a
distance which Sherlock and John come across.
>
> Enjoy :)

May - June 1991

Before I even realized what was happening, it became our new routine.

Suddenly, after twenty years working park patrols on my own, lost in my own head as
I scanned each new horizon, I found myself with a passenger in my truck five days a
week. We never really planned it – he never officially asked, and I certainly
didn’t invite him. But every morning, when I came out from my cabin with my bag
slung over my shoulder and coffee in hand, Sherlock Holmes was waiting for me
leaning against the nearest tree. He’d wait until I reached him before uncrossing
his arms and giving a nod.

“Ranger,” he always said in greeting as he started walking casually by my side.

“Don’t have anything better to do today?” I always asked him. He’d smirk as he
reached over and stole my Stanley out of my hand, taking two long gulps of my
coffee before wiping the back of his hand across his mouth with a wince.

“Christ, that’s revolting,” he said to me every single morning. And every single
morning I said back, “Then bring your own.”

He would sit patiently through all my patrols, never complaining about wherever we
had to go when I was radio’d – waiting in the truck sometimes for hours while I
dealt with whatever situation came up. Some days he told me a little more about his
research – wolf packs he’d tracked in other parks around Europe, or he’d go on for
an hour straight just about one particular plant. I never said anything, and when
he didn’t speak, it was silence. A silence that felt as natural as the gravel
crunching under the tires, keeping me company so I wouldn’t get lost off in my own
head.

And the second I was off the clock, or the second my radio went silent, it’s like a
flip would switch on in his brain. He would come alive, muttering under his breath
and directing me exactly where to go before he would hop out of the truck before it
had even finished moving and dash off into the trees, searching out an invisible
pile of wolf scat or a pawprint, whispering at me to shut up when I called out to
slow down so he could focus on retaining all of his research in his own damn head.

Only three days in to this odd new arrangement, I pulled over to wait for a passing
bus and turned towards Sherlock in the front seat. He was sitting in a great ball
with his feet up on the dashboard, leaning his head back into the headrest in a way
that made his slowly tanning neck look a whole mile long. I hated how my heart
missed a beat in my chest as I took half a second to watch his grey eyes lazily
gaze out over the hills.

“What are you even getting out of this?” I suddenly asked him. He hummed and looked
over at me, and I swallowed hard over a dry throat, holding my breath so I wouldn’t
have to smell his soft cologne, mixed with a day’s worth of light sweat and dirt.

“I’m being driven,” he said simply, looking at me like I was an idiot.

I rolled my eyes. “Right, but you could get literally anyone else to drive you.
Someone who could take you where you actually want to go all day so you’re not
wasting hours sitting waiting in a truck.” When he stayed silent, I looked straight
at him. “You could hop on literally any bus driving the Road. You could drive your
own self, even. I know that Nick would hand over the keys to one of the vans for
your team to use – don’t tell me Greg, Max and Babs aren’t doing their own field
research, too.”

He sat back and looked straight ahead out at the road, flinging his hand out
towards the view. “I’m simply enjoying an opportunity to view the scenery – seeing
the sights,” he said, oddly as if he’d never uttered that phrase before in his
life.

I laughed. “Oh, so those first few weeks you spent holed up in your cabin with your
maps and your graphs – when everyone said you were learning every inch of the park,
that was just practice for sitting around half the day in a beat-up truck?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and gave a single laugh. “This your way of
telling me I’ve outstayed my welcome?”

And suddenly the prospect of my passenger seat being empty, even though it had only
been three days of him filling it, pulled like a sharp ache at the base of my
chest.

“No,” I said too loudly, too quickly after his question.

He looked over at me and blinked once, holding my gaze. “Then it appears you’ll
have to put up with my presence on your patrols for a bit longer, Ranger.”

I looked at him for a second too long before nodding and turning back to keep
driving down the Road. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining his body leaning slightly
closer to mine along the bench seat.

One week in there was a stack of new cassettes on the dashboard.

“You brought those to Denali with you?” I asked as we climbed in to get going.

He shook his head. “Needed something other than that one unbearable tape you keep
in here – the banjo sounds like it was forged from the materials of a wolf kill
site.”

I rolled my eyes and shuffled through the tapes in my hands. “These are all
classical,” I said.

“Oh congratulations, you can read.”

I ignored him. “If you didn’t bring these . . . there’s no way you got these
shipped all the way out to Toklat faster than a month.”

He shrugged and looked out the window, fingers tapping anxiously for us to start.
“I have my methods,” was all he said, and I decided to let it drop.

The next day there was another stack of tapes on the dashboard – all of them
bluegrass, my favorite songs and artists even though he’d never asked. I never
asked him about it, never even thanked him, and I knew he wasn’t expecting me to
say anything about it at all.

And a few days later, when I walked up to him leaning against his tree, he didn’t
say anything or thank me when I handed him his own travel mug full of coffee, with
powdered milk and some old baking sugar like I figured he would like it. And when
we got back to Toklat late that night, after he’d spent hours studying the clawed -
up bark on a grove of small trees, the only words he said to me after I cut the
engine were, “No milk, tomorrow, Ranger. Just sugar will do.”

Fridays became the days where I got to have my fun. Days where I would drag a
sulking and trudging Sherlock Holmes to places of the park where there were bound
to be no wolves in sight. Where he would stand by the side of the Road with his
arms crossed over his chest saying, “You can’t possibly be serious that you think
this will somehow be enjoyable.”

And I would just roll my eyes and start walking, hefting my backpack up higher on
my shoulders and following the most logical path across the tundra. And every
single Friday, when I was ten steps away, he would inevitably follow after giving a
great huff.

I took him to some of my favorite places in the park – some short hikes in the
backcountry up near Moose Creek and McKinley River, and following along branches of
the Toklat through Polychrome. It was odd, hiking and hearing another person’s
footsteps just behind me. He always let me lead when we got far enough away from
the Road, never even questioned if I knew which direction to go – staring off into
the distance and impatiently tapping his feet whenever I stopped to check our route
against my weathered maps.

“You wanna have a look?” I asked him our first time on one of these hikes,
shuffling over so he could have get a look at the map, too.

He didn’t even look down. “Already have it memorized,” he said, as if the map
itself had offended him.

“So you have an opinion on where to go?”

He looked bored and said, “Nope,” loudly popping the ‘p’, and so I shrugged and
rolled the maps back up into my pack, and that was that.
Aside from a few multi-day backcountry patrols and some brief trips with Molly and
the other kennel Rangers, I’d never really hiked with another person before. I
expected it to be annoying – the silence of my own thoughts interrupted by the
sounds of another person breathing, having to follow when another person wanted to
stop and rest, or re-consult the topo maps, or reflect out loud on the blisters
growing on their feet. Having to hear another person’s bear calls or musings.

And instead I quickly found that my heart beat in time to Sherlock’s footsteps just
behind me. That when I turned my head over my shoulder while scanning the horizon
line for signs of wildlife, and I caught the familiar sight of his sweat-dripping
curls in the corner of my vision, that a strange warmth would settle like honey in
my throat, momentarily making my breath grow ragged.

We never talked on those hikes – like an unspoken rule. Barely even said any words
when deciding which new route to take, whether to cut down a drainage or go up
around the edge of a new valley, to skirt around the base of a mountain of scree or
scramble up over it to reach the other side. Often just a point and a nod would do
fine, and every once in a while, when I made a suggestion that would make our trip
just a little bit longer, I heard a soft, “ _Fine_ ,” muttered under his breath.

Any sign of a wolf though – even the tiniest hint of a nearby pack or migration –
and he took off like a rocket, sprinting on silent legs across the uneven ground
before I could even yell out for him to stop. The first few times he did this I
just let him go, barely even picking up my speed to keep pace.

Then one day, embarrassingly late into our new routine, I remembered that the idiot
was carrying literally nothing on him other than his customary magnifying glass and
ruler, and the second I realized he was off alone in the wilderness with no
supplies, I took off after him, calling out my breathless bear call while
scrambling through thick brush in the direction he had run, praying that I hadn’t
just let the park’s lead wolf researcher get himself killed.

After a quarter-mile of jogging, I half-crawled up over the crest of a small hill,

giving a loud whistle in case any wildlife were hiding among the boulders dotting
the peak.

I didn’t hear any wildlife in response, but I did hear, “Goddammit!” echoing across
the small valley below. I climbed over a boulder and looked down the slope to see
Sherlock standing near the base in waist-thick brush, half-surrounded by blooming
wildflowers with his hands on his hips and looking back up at me with fire in his
eyes.

My heart skipped a beat and fear pulsed through my body. “What happened? You
alright?” I called down, cupping my palms around my mouth.

I started to make my way quickly down the slope, hoping and praying he hadn’t
twisted an ankle or gotten cut. I picked up his fallen hat half-way down, nearly
hidden in the thick moss. He didn’t answer me until I was almost by his side.

“I _was_ alright,” he finally hissed out.

I took a step back, caught off guard. “You hurt? You twisted something?”

He looked at me like I was the dumbest human being he’d ever seen. “Yes, Ranger,
I’m standing here furious because I twisted a measly ankle,” he said, sarcasm
dripping from his words.

I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm my thudding heartbeat in my
chest back to normal, wondering in the back of my mind when was the last time I’d
been so afraid. “The hell did you curse out like that for, then?”

He clenched his jaw hard before speaking in an irritated rush. “Your ridiculous and
completely unnecessary wildlife whistle scared off the female and two pups I was
slowly approaching. Do you have any idea how completely unheard of it is to see a
black-fur wolf pup in the pack in this area of the park? It’s practically
undocumented. And now it never will be – properly, at least - since your bloody
display of food chain dominance frightened them off into those distant boulders.”

I blinked hard and tried to focus on what the hell he’d just said. Off in the
distance I saw the head of a wolf pop up for a split second before disappearing
again within the boulders. “You tried . . . you were _sneaking up_ on a wolf and
her two pups?”

He glared at me. “I’d hardly call a highly skilled, silent pursuit ‘sneaking –‘”

“And you were just hoping they’d be delighted to see you when you got close enough
for them to smell?”

“I knew exactly how close I could get without them smelling me. The wind speed and
direction and the amount of sweat on my body – Honestly, I’ve been studying these
animals for more than fifteen years, and you come in and –"

“Are you a fucking idiot?”

His face looked like I’d just slapped him on the cheek. His words died in his
mouth. For some reason, the sight of Sherlock Holmes cut off mid-rant, mouth
hanging half-open and eyes blown wide, was so out of place that I felt laughter
rising up in my chest.

“You fucking idiot,” I said again, this time chuckling, and then, before I knew it,
I was laughing out loud, deep, gasping laughs bringing tears to my eyes. He stared
at me speechless for only a moment before a light caught in his eyes, and his mouth
started to twitch, and then we were laughing together, his deep, warm chuckle
sending ripples up my spine, dazzling off the wildflowers that filled the whole
valley.

Finally I wiped my eyes, trying to catch my breath. “How you haven’t been found
mauled out in the wilderness yet is beyond me,” I said, still a bit breathless.

He tilted his head with a smile still on his lips. “I’ll give you that,” he said.

I shook my head at him and slipped my pack from off my shoulders, unzipping it to
dig through the contents inside. “Look, if you’re going to run off into the sunset
and you don’t want me chasing after you, you need to carry something other than a
goddamn ruler,” I said.

“I told you, I don’t need –”

“Or else I’ll whistle as loud as I can every goddamn time you run off.”

He huffed and rolled his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fine,” he said,
staring over my head out towards the boulders where the wolves had disappeared. I
pulled out an extra compass and bear spray from my pack, rising to my feet.

“These are the bare minimum,” I said, holding them out for him to take. When he
didn’t move his arms, I bit back another incredulous laugh and tried to look
irritated instead. I reached out and dragged him closer to me by the shoulder,
reaching out to move his jacket aside so I could reach the pockets of his pants.
“You’re unbelievable,” I said under my breath, and that’s when it happened.

I wrapped the fingers of one hand between the top of his belt and his pants to get
a good grip, shoving the compass and bear spray into his pocket with the other. We
were standing close – close enough that I could feel his breath puff against my
forehead, and the buckle of my own belt was nearly touching the top of his thigh. I
yanked him a bit closer by the belt and shoved my hand deeper into his front
pocket, making sure the compass and the spray were securely inside, and that’s when
I heard him suck in a quick breath from just above me, and the tiniest, smallest
wisp of a sound escaped the back of his throat. There was an odd feeling pressed
against the space between my stomach and my hip, something warm.

I looked down and realized that he was hard.

Everything froze for one second. I stared openly at the hard outline of his
erection in his pants pressed up against my body, dangerously close to where my
fingers still clung on to his belt. I was panting. I looked up at him and came face
to face with a pair of wide, shocked eyes, staring at me with something like
surprise mixed with horror.

It all happened so fast. Before I could even blink he was flinching away from me,
stepping back so quickly I nearly fell forward into the empty space. He avoided my
gaze and turned the other way. He crushed his hat back onto his head while looking
down at his feet as if making sure he hadn’t left any trace behind in the tundra.

“Sherlock –” I tried to say.

He brushed past me back in the direction we had just come, long legs quickly eating
up the ground along the slope and leaving me behind at the base. He didn’t even
look over his shoulder to make sure I was following.

I watched him go with my stomach in knots. My throat burned. My mind raced to try
and figure out where that flash of horror in his eyes had come from – because it
had been horror, true horror, and not just embarrassment over some accident.

I wondered if he felt I had touched him inappropriately by grabbing on to his belt,

if he’d let himself succumb to the random biological urge – a freak accident since
I was touching him so close to his groin - and then suddenly remembered that I had
admitted to Greg that I liked men. If he had been afraid that I was somehow about
to take advantage of him– all alone out in the wilderness with nobody to come to
his aid.

If he somehow, _somehow_ , knew my other secret, and if the thought of his body
being pressed against mine, if the thought of touching me, being touched by my
hands . . .

I couldn’t even follow that train of thought. I blinked hard and rubbed my hands
over my face, somehow already certain that my job in the Park Service was over.
That Sherlock Holmes was on his way back to Toklat and straight to Nick’s office. “
_Your Ranger grabbed me by the pants when we were all alone,_ ” he would say. “ _He
admitted to my colleague that he’s a queer. Ask Greg Lestrade._ ”

Or would he say, would he ask them, with a sick smile on his face, “ _You know your
Ranger Watson wasn’t born with the name John?”_

“Ranger,” I suddenly heard, ripping me from my thoughts.

I startled and looked up in the direction of the sound. Sherlock was standing at
the top of the hill, rubbing one elbow with his other hand across his stomach. I
stared at him blankly.

“Should start to head back,” he said in a calm voice, gesturing with his head over
his shoulder towards the Road.

I took a deep breath and scratched hard at my beard, shouldering my pack before
forcing myself to start to walk towards him up the slope. He waited until I was
almost at his side before slowly turning and leading the way, hands in his pockets
with his eyes watching his feet.

The two miles back to the Road were the longest two miles of my whole life. It was
deadly quiet except for the sounds of our steps and breathing – the occasional
wildlife call that we seemed to take silent turns calling out. I forced my mind to
remain blank, saying a quiet goodbye to the wilderness with each next step I took,
feeling like I was walking towards a thick, black doom. Eventually my steps grew
slower, following about fifty feet behind him. I forbid myself from looking up at
the lines of his shoulders cutting across the landscape – the way his curls always
frizzed up a bit under his hat in the breeze.

The wind carried the scent of him straight to me where I walked, and the whole way
back I breathed only through my mouth to avoid the peppercorn and cedar mixed with
a sheen of warm sweat.

He silently climbed in when we finally reached the truck, sitting up straight with
his hands in his lap and staring out the window, waiting for me to start driving. I
gripped the steering wheel hard with my hands. I felt I had to work up the courage
to say something to save myself, knowing that it was my last chance before we
headed back to Toklat.

I licked my lips and stared straight ahead. I could barely breathe. “I’m . . .” I
started. I felt him immediately tense up beside me. It took all the strength in my
core to keep talking. “I’m so sorry . . . for that,” I forced myself to say. “I . .
. I didn’t mean to—” I paused and rubbed my hand over my face, breathing hard into
my palm. I was going to start begging, I could feel it. “Please, please don’t say –
I’ll do anything to try and –”

“I’m not on my way to your manager’s office right now, if that’s what you’re
thinking.” His voice was soft and slow, not the sharp, clipped way his words
normally flowed from his mouth. He was still looking out the window, and his body
looked young and small the way he was hunched down in the seat.

His words took an extra second to sink in. “But –”

“If anything I am entirely to blame in this situation,” he cut me off quietly.

“You’ve done nothing wrong.”

I tried to loosen my grip on the steering wheel, watching my knuckles turn white.
My voice was slightly shaky. “Wasn’t your fault either, you know. Just . . . just
an accident.”

He hummed vaguely. “An accident.”

I wanted to start driving, but instead I took another deep breath. Words came
spilling out of me before I could stop them.

“Nobody knows,” I said quietly. “Nobody’s ever known.”

I heard him shift in the car, and then he was turning to look straight at me. I
forced myself to meet his gaze, and his eyes looked dark grey. He waited a long
moment before speaking, and I felt that he was reading something important in the
lines of my face.

“Believe me when I say it would be incredibly hypocritical of me to out you to

anyone,” he finally said. He swallowed hard. “I told you your secret is safe.”

His words finally clicked in my brain, and I took in a sharp breath. “Oh,” was all
I said.

He lifted up the corner of his mouth in a small smile, even though it didn’t reach
his eyes. “Yes, _oh_.”

I kept looking at the side of his face even after he turned to keep staring out the
window. Something about the way his spine still hunched and sagged looked so wrong.
I wanted to reach over and grip his shoulders and pull him upright once more – the
calm, cool confidence he’d only ever radiated in Denali.

I felt bold, as if I was about to step off the edge of a cliff with no knowledge of
the bottom. “So,” I said, almost a whisper. “Are you . . . do people know –”

“No,” he said quietly when I paused. And then he took a breath and spoke so softly
I could barely hear him, even in the thick silence of the car. His eyes flickered
briefly back to my face when he whispered, “Never. Well, almost never.”

Something changed in that moment – covering over the tense space between us and
making it calm, as if I’d just emerged from a warm shower and there was a soft,
clean towel being draped over my shoulders. I started the engine without saying
anything, ignoring the odd ache that pulsed through my chest and the desire to
reach out and just take his hand in mine.

Five minutes in to the short drive back to Toklat, he reached out and flipped on
one of his classical tapes in the player, rolling himself up like usual to place
his feet up on the dash. When we got back to Toklat, I pulled into the space by the
hoses and cut the engine, waiting for him to hop out like usual and disappear up
into the trees.

Instead he didn’t move, still curled up in his seat. “I’ll deal with the truck,” he
said, meaning the washing and gas.

I stared at him. “You don’t have to –”

“You always do it,” he said, his voice still unrecognizably quiet and soft. When I
finally handed over the keys, deciding to just go with it, his fingers brushed
against mine for a second too long.

“I want to check up on a kill site near Unit 5 tomorrow,” he said. He cleared his
throat. “If you still want to, if you don’t mind –”

“Of course,” I said quickly. I curled his fingers around the truck keys, hoping I
wasn’t smiling like a lunatic that my entire life clearly wasn’t about to end.
“I’ll take you first thing.”

He nodded and looked at me, eyes now clear, before hopping down from the truck and
moving over to the hoses. My hand burned in the places where our fingers had
touched the whole walk back up to my cabin through the trees, and I collapsed
asleep on my couch, still in all my dirty clothes, the second after I shut the door
behind me.
 

\--

People noticed after that.

“Two peas in a pod, the two of you, I swear,” Nick said one morning as he caught
sight of me and Sherlock walking down to my truck. “And Greg told me at the
beginning of the season you would do everything alone,” he said to Sherlock.

Sherlock stopped in his tracks and gave him a look. “That’s ridiculous – a pod
contains more than just two peas inside it. There’s nothing about their biology to
suggest something inherently special about just two –”

“Yeah, well, normally he’s pretty quiet,” I said to cut him off, hiding the
unexpected nerves twisting in my gut that my coworkers were starting to notice
Sherlock always by my side – as if I’d walked out of my cabin in a dream not
wearing any pants, trying to play it all off like it was normal. “Think he’s just
bumming rides from me so he doesn’t have to drive himself around the park.”

Nick barked a laugh up at the sky, hands on his hips. “Ah, Watson,” he said as
Sherlock kept walking down the hill. “You know where to find me if he gets too much
in your hair.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, wondering how I could respond to that without
blurting out that Sherlock Holmes would never, in a million years, get too much in
my hair.

“Ranger!” Sherlock called out from where he waited by the truck, hands over his
chest like a child.

I rolled my eyes and looked back once at Nick. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said,
starting off after Sherlock and waving behind me.

I heard Nick give another laugh behind me as I walked away. “Two peas in a pod,” he
said again, chuckling.

Greg caught my arm after a staff meeting later that week. I hadn’t seen him in a
while beyond a passing smile and wave, and I accepted the warm handshake he gave me
with a genuine smile.

“Haven’t seen you around that much,” I told him.

He laughed. “Christ, I could say the same thing about you. Was afraid Sherlock had
off and kidnapped you when I hadn’t seen you in a bit, and then Max said the last
time he’d seen you had been driving away early one morning with Sherlock in your
truck.”

Greg waited for me to answer with a smile and a questioning look in his eyes. I
wiped my hand over my mouth and scratched at my beard – something Molly always made
fun of me for doing whenever I got caught in an Interp conversation with a visitor.

“Yeah, I, uh . . . I’ve been taking him around a bit, I guess.”

Greg’s smiling frown grew deeper. “And you agreed to this? You’re still alive?”

That odd sensation that I was missing something when it came to Sherlock Holmes
flared up again in my chest. “Honestly,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets.
“He’s quiet as a mouse most of the time. Just waits around during my patrols and
then tells me what sites he wants to go to for research when I’m done. Bolts off
whenever he sniffs out a wolf, though. It’s like he’s got a wolf sonar tucked away
somewhere in his head.”

I left out the part where I took Sherlock on hikes every Friday. Somehow, even
though I’d never felt that way before, it now felt like a tiny secret – something I
had to protect, and which would whither and die if it ever was told.

Greg laughed and tilted his head. “That sounds more like him,” he said. His mouth
turned serious, and he gave me a long look. “Look, John,” he said, leaning towards
me where we stood. “You ever need a break from him following you around, you just
let me know.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve even
made it this long.”

Something like anger flared for a moment in my chest. I stood up straighter. “It’s
kinda nice, actually,” I said, feeling like I was trying not to give something away
without even knowing what that ‘something’ was. “Having a little company when I’m
out in the park. And it’s cool to watch his research – the parts where he isn’t
tasting weird shit the kill sites at least.”

Greg’s eyes were warm. “You actually like the bastard, don’t you?” he asked,
grinning.

I ducked my head a bit, trying not to smile too wide. “Guess I do.”

Greg hummed. “Actually, it’s probably good for him, too. Someone to make sure he
doesn’t end up mauled in the middle of the wilderness.”

I laughed, hearing my own words thrown back at me. “I told him the same thing,” I
said. “Took me weeks just to get him to carry his own damn bear spray.”

Greg’s eyes widened. “You actually got him to carry spray?”

“And a compass.”

“Well, shit,” Greg said and rocked back on his heels. “I’ve known the man and
worked with him for nearly fifteen years, and I’ve never _once_ seen him carry more
than that goddamn magnifying glass and ruler.”

“Actually –” I stopped myself, feeling that I was somehow about to go behind

Sherlock’s back – betray some unspoken rule between us to not ask or answer
anything remotely about ourselves. My curiosity was raging, though, keeping me up
at night. “Actually, I meant to ask you. . .” I started.

Greg grinned. “You can try, mate, but you probably know loads more about him than
me at this point.”

I ignored the little burst of warmth that fluttered in my chest. “Well,” I went on.
“You all are following the tracking collars they put on in ’86, right? So why . . .
I mean he’s always . . .what the hell is he even doing?”

Greg laughed and shook his head, letting out a sigh. “I ask myself that question
about twenty times a year,” he said. “Me, Max, and Babs – well, that’s what we’re
doing. Following the trackers, mapping out the territorial changes and all that.
Documenting kill sites and signs of habitat.”

I nodded my head, following. “Right . . .”

“But Sherlock,” Greg shook his head again. “Never needed to use tracking collar
feedback in all the years I’ve worked with him. You weren’t too far off with that
joke about his wolf sonar – he just . . . looks at a goddamn site and somehow
_knows_. He’s found and saved packs that would’ve died in a matter of years if it
hadn’t been for him.” He looked at me, eyes soft. “So you see now why we just let
him do whatever the hell he wants. Sherlock wants to stay locked up in a cabin and
not talk to anyone for weeks? Fine. Sherlock wants to somehow goad a Ranger into
driving him across the park? Fine. Sherlock wants to jump out of a bloody moving
car just to sniff some wolf scat? Be my guest.”

I laughed along with him, relieved somehow at the warmth which Greg was using to
talk about him, now that we established I wasn’t trying to get Sherlock the hell
out of my truck.

“As long as he knows what he’s doing, then,” I said.

“Greg!”

We both looked up to see Molly waving from the turn off from the Park Road. She’d
pulled her van over with the window rolled down, on her trip out to Wonder Lake
with the people from the kennels for a day picnic.

Greg’s face lit up, his brown eyes shining the way sunlight warmed the copper rock
and stone at the base of Denali’s peak.

I nodded towards the Road. “Tell her hello for me,” I said.

“Oh, hi John!” we heard called out. Molly waved again out the window as I lifted my
hand in response.

“Just a minute!” Greg yelled back. He looked at me just as I was stepping aside to
let him pass, reaching out to grip my shoulder with his hand. His palm was warm.

“One last thing,” he said. I lifted my eyebrows for him to continue, wondering
where he was going with this – what he felt was so necessary to say. I desperately
hoped he wasn’t going to bring up what we spoke about at the campfire – ask me to
stay silent, or assure me that he would stay silent too.

Hoped he wasn’t about to ask me if there was another reason I was letting Sherlock
Holmes ride along in my truck.

He cleared his throat. “All I’ll say is, I have more respect for Sherlock Holmes
than any other person alive,” he said seriously. “Don’t think that . . . with me
asking you if you’re alright with him tagging along and all, or poking fun at that
odd little head of his . . . I would trust him with my life. Have done, in the
past, when we’ve been out in the wilderness together.”

I nodded, embarrassed that my throat was closing up. Greg went on, “But Sherlock
doesn’t know how to _be_ with people. All my years of working with him and I’ve
never said two sentences to him that didn’t have something to do with wolves.”

I frowned, still confused. “Right . . .”

“He chooses to ride in that truck with you,” he said. “Who knows why, but he does.”

And suddenly, like a burst of sunlight breaking through the clouds, I understood
exactly what Greg was trying to say. I smiled at him and nodded, clearing my throat
so I could speak clearly. “I’ll watch out for him,” I told him, and there was a
little wave of relief that passed through his deep eyes.

Molly honked the horn behind us. I stepped aside. “She’ll run over you with that
thing if you don’t get your ass over there,” I said. And Greg gave my shoulder one
last quick pat before jogging down the gravel road towards Molly’s old, grey van.

\--

I woke up to the sound of my cabin door slamming.

“Ranger!”

My eyes flew open, heart already racing as adrenaline ripped me from the middle of
a deep sleep. My room was still dark, and the sheets felt heavy on my limbs. For a
moment I wondered if I was dreaming, imagining the footsteps hurtling towards my
bedroom door, or the rush of air that followed when that door was thrown open.

“Up! Hurry up or we’ll miss it!”

But I knew I couldn’t be imagining that voice in my own bedroom – not in that much
detail, and not at that volume.

And then it dawned on me: Sherlock Holmes was apparently in my bedroom, and I was
sleeping only in my boxers under a very thin sheet.

“Shit!” I flinched and yanked up the covers over my chest, praying that the room
was too dark for him to have seen anything other than a dark blob. My blood roared
in my veins. I rolled over onto my stomach, still trying to force myself awake.
“What the hell are you doing?” I moaned.

I saw a silhouette topped with curls bounce impatiently in the doorway from the
faint light coming from the gaslight in the kitchen, apparently unconcerned that
I’d just cursed myself awake.

“Reports from overnight of new activity over in Unit 12,” he said in a rush. “A
pack hasn’t been spotted there in decades – if we hurry we might see the evidence
of which pack it is before the bloody busses scare everything away. Now come _on_.”

I rubbed my hands over my face and looked up at him, his features a little clearer
now as my eyes adjusted to the faint light. “Fuck, Sherlock, you can’t just barge
into my goddamn cabin like that.” I glanced over at the glowing red numbers of the
clock. “It’s fucking five in the morning on my fucking day off.”

“Your language at this hour leaves much to be desired,” he said. “I’m well aware of
the date and time, and now you are aware that there is a once in a lifetime wolf
pack sighting happening right now, which will be entirely your fault if I miss for
documentation.”

I groaned and turned my face into my pillow. “Drive yourself,” I mumbled.

When he paused for a moment too long to answer that question, I looked back up at
him still standing in the doorway. I could see him open and close his mouth a few
times.

“Please,” he finally said, soft on the tip of his tongue. “Will you take me?”
I sighed, knowing my answer before I even opened my mouth. “God, fine,” I said,
stretching my arms over my head. “Just – just give me a second, yeah?”

To my relief Sherlock nodded then backed out of the room, slowly closing the
bedroom door behind him. I groaned and pulled myself out of bed, mind still in a
daze as I searched in the darkness for the black tank top I’d been wearing before
bed the night before. I pulled it on over my arms which still felt like lead, then,
without thinking at all, made my way for my bedroom door, the only thought on my
mind being getting a pot of thick coffee started.

I squinted against the burst of light coming from my cabin lamp. I shielded my eyes
with my hand and ran another one through my beard and hair. Sherlock was standing
fully dressed by the main window, looking out at the moonlight still bathing the
trees. He was tapping his fingers impatiently on the windowsill.

“Need coffee,” I muttered, making my way into the small kitchen.

He turned around at my voice, and his eyes locked on to me. For a second, just a
second, I saw his eyes widen, heard his breath hitch as he stared straight at my
arms and chest. For one blinding moment I thought maybe I’d walked out without a
shirt, but then I remembered I was covered, the two ropy, pink lines hidden. I gave
him a small frown as he still stared at me, lips slightly parted. Then he shook his
head quickly and blinked hard a few times before turning to look back out the
window.

“You have sixty seconds to be ready,” he said in his usual voice.

I shook my head, wondering if I’d just imagined that awkward moment. I moved
towards the kettle on the stove and flicked it on, pulling down a scoop full of
coffee beans from the cabinet and going about my usual routine – as if I hadn’t
been woken up by a man bursting into my bedroom.

He was silent as I got ready, surprisingly not complaining when I obviously took
longer than sixty seconds. Once the coffee was brewing I moved back towards my
room.

“Lemme get changed,” I said, to which he just nodded, still staring out the window.

I shut the door and flicked on the little lamp, moving towards the tiny closet
tucked into the wall. I pulled out my usual day-off clothes – jeans and a flannel
and my non-uniform jacket. I looked down to pull up my jeans, then gasped.

I hadn’t had anything in my boxers.

I hadn’t had anything in there – no bulge at all between my legs – and I’d just
walked out in front of the most goddamn observant man on the entire planet,
practically flaunting that the space between my thighs was empty. I’d walked out
there and not even _thought_ about it – not even noticed that something was wrong.
I’d stood right in front of him making coffee. He’d stared right at me as I came
out of my room, bathed directly in the light from the lamp.

My skin ran cold. Sweat started to prickle at the back of my neck and under my
arms, and I could hear my ragged breathing as I stood frozen in the closet, half-
holding my jeans in my hands.

My fingers shook.

The knock on my door startled me. “I’ll resort to other tactics besides politeness
very soon,” I heard through the door.

I caught my breath and forced myself to move, slowly pulling on my jeans over numb
legs. “So your version of politeness was bursting into my cabin in the middle of
the night?”

I heard him huff. “I said please,” he said back, nearly whining. “And this is
hardly the middle of the night.”

I yanked on my flannel. “For god’s sake, you’re like a toddler.”

My throat felt dry as I pulled the sock from my bedside drawer, holding it for a
longer moment than usual in my hand. Fear still burned at the base of my spine –
fear mixed with confusion that he seemed to be carrying on as usual. That he had to
have seen, he _had_ to have noticed, and yet, maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he
hadn’t seen at all.

I slipped my hand down my jeans and into my boxers, adjusting until my jeans fit
naturally around the bulge. For one brief moment a thought flashed through my mind
– that maybe I could just walk out there again without it. Could go a full day
without worrying about how it looked – constantly aware of it rubbing oddly between
my legs, or looking out of place, or shifting uncomfortably against my bare skin,
rubbing it raw. If I could simply put it back in the drawer and walk out and live
my day.

The moment passed just as quickly as it had come on. I kept it in.

Sherlock handed me my Stanley full of black coffee when I emerged – somehow having
also found the mug I usually used for his, too. I washed my face and teeth with a
cupful of hauled water over the sink before nodding at him that I was ready to head
out. I could practically feel the energy vibrating from him as we walked down
towards the truck.

“Right then, towards which Unit?” I asked once we were pulling out of the parking
lot.

He was tapping his fingers rapidly against the travel mug in his hands. “Thirty-
three.”

We didn’t say anything more during the short drive – less than forty-five minutes
to the little lookout near Stony where we could safely park. The sun was just
starting to pour gold over the tallest peaks, bathing the tundra in a swirling
silver mist. I shouldered my pack and set off to follow his lead, weaving down a
steep drainage that let out into the valley, calling out, “Hey bear,” even more
than usual so we wouldn’t startle awake a still-sleeping grizzly.

When we reached the bottom, he held out his hand, speaking for the first time since
we entered the truck. “I’m probably about to run off,” he said, eyes still scanning
the distance for signs of the pack.

It was his usual code. I reached into my backpack and pulled out his spray and
compass, placing them into his outstretched hand.

“Just give me the whistle,” I told him – the little bird call he would give
whenever he got too far for me to track.

He nodded, then took two steps, then immediately dropped to his hands and knees. He
sniffed at some invisible part of the river rock, lifting a tuft of moss right up
to his nose, and then, quicker than lightning, he was on his feet and running,
sprinting down the dry fork of the river we’d been following and before long
disappearing around a bend of moss and brush.

I rolled my eyes and let him go, taking the time to look at the sunrise surrounding
me, feeling it slowly warm the hidden parts of my body down in my bones.

An hour passed before I heard the whistle. I’d been following along the same dry
bed, only having to change course once when I came a bit too close to a grazing
moose. The whistle came from high up on my right on top of a plateau. I scanned
along the ridge, looking for a drainage I could climb up, or a smoother path. In
the dawn sunlight my eyes caught sight of a caribou trail, zig zagging steadily up
the side of the slope.

I followed it up, turning back over my shoulder to see if we could begin to see the
curves of the Road from that height. Far off in the distance, just a little speck
floating across the earth, I saw the glinting lines of one of the earliest
Kantishna Experience busses winding its way through the steepest part of Stony
pass.

I spotted Sherlock immediately once I reached the top, standing near a glittering
pool in the little dip of a valley cradled by a wall of higher peaks. He was
standing completely still, looking out at something on the other side of the pool.
I thought I saw something move in the direction he was looking – a little speck of
dark fur far too small to be a bear.

He didn’t look at me when I came up beside him. Our breaths fogged together in the
cold air.

After a few minutes of standing shoulder to shoulder in silence he spoke. “It’s the
pup,” he said quietly. I frowned and squinted harder in the direction he was
staring, scanning the tundra on the other side of the pool.

Then I saw it.

That little speck of fur I’d seen hadn’t been moving. It was crumpled on the
ground, its belly pink and covered in blood where it twisted unnaturally towards
the sky. It was the dark-furred pup Sherlock had seen a few weeks back, dead for
less than an hour.

I didn’t know what to say. We stood there staring at the carcass for another few
minutes, and I could feel an odd emotion radiating from him beside me – something
that felt like failure, mixed with disappointment, mixed with something else.

Finally I spoke, whispering for no reason at all. “Shouldn’t stay here too long,” I
said. “Prey will probably come back to finish it off for something to eat.”

He nodded. I knew he knew that, but he still didn’t move. Just when I was opening
my mouth to say it again, he pointed slowly out at the hills behind where the pup
was lying.

A wolf was silently creeping down the grass slope, keeping its head low and
scanning the area of the pool. We both stood frozen still – even my breathing was
just the tiniest sips in my lungs. The wolf made its way through the shadows of the
dawn light, slowly making its way towards the pup by the water’s edge.

“The mother,” Sherlock whispered, so soft I could barely hear him.

I sucked in a breath, recognizing the sleek fur and dark ears from a few weeks
before. She kept her nose to the ground as she walked, hunched over as if she would
dash away at any moment.

I shivered up my spine when she finally reached the pup. She stood frozen, sniffing
around its head covered in crusted blood. She reached out with a paw and gently
pushed it a few times, nudging between its ears with her snout to straighten out
its snapped neck.

She looked down at it for a long time, and the earth was utterly still. Then she
raised her head up towards the clear golden sky and howled, a long mournful sound
that vibrated in my core and shivered along my arms. I heard Sherlock’s breath
shudder beside me, and for a moment our fingertips brushed together between our
thighs.

A chorus of howls echoed her from far off in the distance.

“Let’s go,” Sherlock suddenly said, turning away without another glance to make his
way back towards where we came. I watched her for another moment as she looked down
at the pup, then turned to follow him back down into the dry river bed.

He was off all morning – silent and still as we drove back to Toklat, not even
curling his feet up on the dashboard or pushing in a tape. He murmured a quiet,
“Thanks,” as he hopped down from the truck back in the lot, disappearing up the
hill before I could say anything other than, “Yeah.”

I spent the day catching up on rest on my couch with a book in my hands. I realized
after hours passed that I hadn’t turned the page.

I found him again that evening – strolling along the river rock that ran alongside
Toklat with his hands in his pockets and a curve in his spine. I caught his eye and
waved back towards my truck behind me. “Come on,” I said. He looked at me for a
moment before starting to walk towards me, and I formed a quick plan on the spot as
we walked towards the truck.

He didn’t ask where we were going as he climbed in beside me. I could still feel
that odd emotion radiating from his skin, making the air in the truck feel so thick
I rolled the windows down just to feel like I could breathe. I sped back towards
Stony just as twilight started to fall, softening the earth with a smooth velvet
haze and causing the tundra to look like rolling hills of green pearls.

I parked in the place where I knew it would happen, pulling over to the side in
case a late bus came through.

“Come on,” I said, stepping down from the truck and quietly shutting the door. I
climbed up onto the roof, patting the space beside me for him to sit.

He looked up at me from the dirt road. “If you’re about to suggest stargazing or
some other pointless activity, I’ll take off and walk back to Toklat.”

I rolled my eyes, patting the roof again. “Just get your ass up here and be quiet,”
I said. “We’re not fucking stargazing.”

He sighed like I was the most exhausting person on the whole planet, then smoothly
leapt up to join me, sitting a careful few inches apart. When he started to fidget,
I put my hand on his knee for just a moment.

“Just wait,” I whispered.

His whole body stilled at my touch, and I knew I didn’t imagine the way his spine
seemed to sway in my direction. He took a deep breath, one that echoed in my own
lungs, and we sat there and waited, held in the soft silence that had descended on
the park.

We didn’t have to wait long. About five minutes later, right on time, the first few
heads of the herd of caribou poked their heads over the nearby hill, starting to
rise up over the crest for their nightly migration down into the valley across the
Road. They spilled down the hillside, gently clomping through the brush as their
thick coats glittered beneath the slowly rising stars. Soon the entire hillside
sloping down to the road was covered in grazing caribou, moving smooth like water
through waves of soft moss.

I’d seen this scene a handful of times before – it was an open secret among the
Rangers that coming near this point in the road around this time meant a pretty
good shot at seeing this particular herd move through. And still, I felt like I was
showing Sherlock Holmes the most secret thing on the entire earth – like somehow,
written in the little noses of the baby caribou sprinting in pairs across the
rocks, Sherlock could see the physical heart pumping blood in my chest.

Like somehow, written in the reflection of the stars on their hooves, Sherlock
could hear the first time I ever said the name John.

We watched them in silence for a long time, long after the sun had started to dip
below the peaks. Our shoulders leaned against each other, and I could feel his
chest rising and falling as he breathed. He was warm, impossibly warm, where his
body pressed against mine. Between the tops of our thighs, the tips of our fingers
barely touched, holding on to the now-cold metal hood of the truck.

Just when I was about to suggest we head back, he spoke. “You know, Ranger,” he
said, his voice blending in with the wind blowing gently across the tundra. “You’re
the only person I’ve ever met in my life whose presence doesn’t bore me to tears,
and despite all of my research, I can’t for the life of me figure out _why_.”

My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t turn to look at him, afraid that if I did
I would lean forward and press my cheek against his, wanting to feel the smooth
lines of his angular jaw against my own.

Instead I moved the fingers of my right hand, slowly, just barely, until they
rested on top of some of his, hidden in the space between our thighs from the wide
world. He hummed softly when our hands touched, and he never pulled away.

It was dark when we made it back. Neither of us had said anything more the whole
trip – not since the moment my fingers rested on top of his. He looked at me for a
long moment after I cut the engine, and it seemed like his eyes were tracing every
line of my face. Then he nodded, just once, before stepping down from the truck,
immediately swallowed up by the darkness and hidden from the stars.

When I was back in my cabin, I stood in the center of the kitchen for a long time,
looking at my socked feet against the floor – looking at nothing. I got undressed
slowly in the half-dark of my bedroom, a strange buzz still settling in my chest
and the tips of my fingers, as if I was waiting for a gun to go off so I could
sprint across a field. When I was completely naked, I walked over to my small
closet, meaning just to reach in and grab a fresh pair of boxers to throw on.

Instead I caught sight of myself in the crooked full-length mirror – the one I
barely ever used but was too lazy to ever take down. I looked at myself for longer
than I ever remembered doing in my whole life, slowly tracing my collarbones and
the lines of my shoulders. The little trio of dark freckles at the base of my
throat. The two scars on my chest, still harsh and red even after all these years
from the botched healing after the surgery. The too-slim lines of my waist and
hips, even covered in muscle and thick, pale hair. The space between my legs – the
place which burned my eyes to look at. My knees – covered in bruises and faint
scars from playing as a child. The dent in my left shin from the time I tried to
hop a fence when I was ranching.

I looked at it all, until I couldn’t even tell how much time had passed. Then I
covered my face with my hands, the familiar scratch of my beard rasping softly
against my calloused palms. I breathed a deep sigh, feeling it all the way to my
toes.

And I wondered what the fuck I’d been thinking putting my hand on top of Sherlock
Holmes’ - _me_ , of all goddamn people - right in full view of the wide open stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for reading. Your comments make Lugnut roll onto his back for
belly rubs and your kudos make me feel like I'm watching a herd of caribou at
twilight. I am truly, truly grateful.
>
> Fun fact: Sarah Jarosz is currently on tour as part of a band "I'm With Her" -
with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan. I've seen Sarah Jarosz live three times, and
she is one of those musicians who sounds even better live. If you have a chance to
catch one of their shows, I can't recommend it highly enough! We'll be driving 18
hours just to see them :)
>
> Next time: we're back in 1992. John has to take Sherlock back out on his patrols,
and John gets an unexpected late-night knock at his cabin door.

7. May - June 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Alison Krauss and Union Station sing "Lay My Burden Down"
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y0XK1aRPsk/).
>
> Sarah Jarosz: listen to "Take Me Back" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=o09TRCS-m-w/).
>
> *Note (Mild Spoilers): This chapter contains a traumatic memory from John's past
that involves accidentally being seen in a shower. I wanted to put that up front in
case anyone feels it would be upsetting for them to read. I can also honestly say
that this chapter is the one and only time the words "pussy" and "tits" will ever
be used in this fic (they're really not my fav, but it will make unfortunate sense
in context). This chapter also directly involves / contains references to drugs and
drug use. Honestly, it's a pretty sad chapter. It's not "the sad Lugnut chapter"
that we all know is coming, but it's still sad. Practice self care and read when it
feels right and safe for you to read!

May - June 1992

At five forty-five in the morning I stood fully dressed in my kitchen, holding a

cup of coffee in my hand that had long grown cold and staring across the room in
the dark.

The coffee mug I’d always used for Sherlock the last summer sat empty on the
countertop next to my hand. I hadn’t yet decided whether I was going to fill it up.

Through the thick darkness outside the window – the little cluster of nearby cabins
and trees – I could just barely make out a faint light coming from one of the cabin
windows. I knew exactly which cabin that light was coming from, glowing through the
curtain the way the Park Road always seemed to explode from the earth in glittering
silver, when you’d been searching for it after days being out in the backcountry
all alone.

A familiar shadow passed in front of the window about every other minute, slowly
walking across the worn hardwood with his head tipped down. He was pacing, I could
tell. I hated the part of me that desperately wanted to know whether he was just
doing his usual routine – staying up all night trying to track wolf packs in his
head – or whether he was pacing for a different reason altogether. Whether this
time, this morning, he was pacing for the same reason I was standing awake in the
dark drinking a cold cup of coffee.

I was thinking of him.

I was thinking of the first morning I’d ever woken up beside him – just days before
I tipped us over the edge by taking his face in my hands and kissing his mouth. I
was thinking of the way the early morning light had illuminated the tent. The way
my breath had fogged in the air, and the way the condensation dripped down the
sides of the tent because of the two warm bodies inside – and there had been a bird
singing just outside, greeting the early dawn through thick, white mist.

The way his arm had been wrapped tightly around my waist through our layers of
clothes. The way I could feel the full length of his sleeping bag molded along my
spine, rising and falling as he breathed deeply in sleep.

The way I hadn’t been afraid at all to wake up so close to another human being. The
way I’d pressed my spine back into his warm chest, and the way he hadn’t moved back
after he’d woken up with me in his arms.

An hour later my hand hovered over the other mug on the counter. I’d boiled new
water and poured over another cup of coffee, and I watched as the steam rose up
into the grey air. The folded-over bag of sugar I’d only ever used for him sat
nearby, still taped shut.

I wanted to think of the first day I’d ever brought it to him, how his eyes had lit
up as I met him by his usual tree, and the way our fingers touched when I handed it
over without a word.

Instead I thought of his face the moment after I’d said, “ _I’m leaving_.” Pure
devastation that had left hot shame in my throat my whole solo hike back.

I left the fresh coffee and the sugar and the mug behind.

He wasn’t waiting for me by the tree when I walked out right at seven. I ignored
the little flash of disappointment in my chest and told myself to be relieved –
that maybe he’d been just as angry at Nick’s new schedule change as me, and maybe
he’d just decided to blow it all off. Let sleeping dogs lie.

But he was waiting for me by the truck, leaning against the hood. I forced myself
not to hesitate in my step as I walked down to meet him, giving him a brief nod.
His eyes flicked quickly to my own coffee cup in my hands – just the one. I thought
I saw a flash of something in his gaze, an emotion so fast I couldn’t even
catalogue it as disappointment, but immediately I felt like an absolute shit for
not bringing him that extra mug.

We settled into the seats in silence. He was wearing different clothes than he had
the season before – no longer the official Ranger uniform since the NPS wasn’t
paying his way. He had on worn jeans and a plaid flannel buried under a thick tan
coat. They hung off him in a way that made him look small beneath the fabric – so
different from the way I’d seen clothes fit him before that it took me the whole
rest of the morning to realize he’d worn those same clothes last summer.

I held my breath in anticipation of the rush of his cologne, but it never came. He
smelled like clothes kept in a trunk for too long, and a little bit of generic soap
just at the base of his neck.

The engine sounded violently loud in the quiet camp, echoing like dynamite blasts
through the dry river bed of the Toklat. I spoke to him for the first time after
the engine was already purring, needing something to hide the way my lungs were
constricting my voice.

“Do you know which Units you wanted to check out fir—”

“This wasn’t my idea,” he cut me off.

His voice sucked the breath from my throat. I waited, balancing on a sharp ledge,
for the entire park to up and explode – to turn into ash.

“Right,” I said. I opened my mouth to tell him about my conversation with Nick, but
he went on, staring straight ahead with his hands folded in his lap. His feet
weren’t up on the dashboard.

“I told your insufferable head of Interp that I was perfectly fine going out to do
my research on my own,” he said. “I’ve the bus schedule memorized and could easily
borrow any one of your government vans. You are perfectly within your rights to
leave now, and I’ll take myself where I need to go. I can tell Nick that I still
accompanied you – it’s easy enough to steal an extra van out from under his nose
and return it before he even realizes. Or I’ll tell him you and I came to an
agreement that you’d rather do your usual patrols. Or I’ll say I’d rather review
the collar tracking data from the season before for the next few weeks and wait
until Greg gets here to do field research with him. Any of those choices would be
perfectly fine with me – just say which one I should tell Nick and then you can go
about your day. We need never mention this again, and I assure you, you’ll hardly
see me for the rest of your summer. Your patrols can go on as normal.”

I tried to catch my breath, mind reeling after his speech. I felt breathless as I
spoke, “Sherlock –”

“And you can also be rest assured that nothing of last summer will ever come to
light,” he went on, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the cold tone of his voice – the
prepared speech being read off a page, flat and perfectly smooth. “I told you once
that your secrets are safe with me, and that will never change. You have nothing to
fear from my returning here to carry on the research for another year. No one will
be the wiser about whatever occurred between us.”

The truck was dead silent after he finished speaking. Suddenly I was furious. The
quiet rage bubbled up unwanted in my chest – the fact that he could sit there,
perfectly calm and straight in his seat, and talk about all of this like it was
some business transaction to work out and sign. The fact that he was simply waiting
for me to tell him which lie to pass on to Nick.

The fact that he thought that I thought he would unmask me to everyone in Denali –
that, even after everything, I would think low enough of him to fear what he could
say, as if he held some great power over me because he’d kissed my naked skin.

That he could talk about those precious few months where we had . . . where we had
been _one_ , as something like a mistake that I would make him lie and swear never
to reveal. Never to tell anyone that he knew exactly what was hidden beneath my
uniform.

I turned to look at him, fully intending to tell him off – tell him to go fuck
himself if he thought he had the upper hand. That he could waltz back into Denali
with everything under control like some grand master plan. That while I was wasting
away in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that he was simply thinking about an
unfinished research project he wanted to get back to – concocting a way to do it
that would involve the least amount of John Watson possible.

He turned to look at me too, slightly flinching back in his seat, and then I saw
his eyes.

Deep grey circles on the delicate skin beneath his lashes, and the gaunt lines of
his cheekbones, and the way the barest edge of his eyes were outlined in soft red.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, or in weeks.

The tips of his eyelashes were wet, as if he’d been . . .

I sighed and forced the anger to leave my body, realizing in a great rush that it
had only been anger at myself – that I had gotten hold of the brilliant man who’d
once leapt up into my truck in a suit and reduced him into _this_ in the span of
one short summer.

I put my hands back on the wheel and shifted the truck into gear. “We’re not gonna
do any of that,” I told him as I started to drive, hoping my voice didn’t sound as
resigned as I felt. “Now, which unit?” I asked again.

I could feel him staring at the side of my face, tracing the still smooth-shaven
lines of my jaw. I knew exactly what he was thinking – probably indignant that I
was taking away his plan, making him go along with being in my truck as if it was
somehow the most patronizing thing in all the earth. I waited for the onslaught and
rebuttal, the listing of more plans and potential lies.

Instead he just breathed out a long sigh though his nose. He disappeared even more
beneath the too-big clothes.

“Twenty-nine,” he said towards the window. “Please.”

“Right,” I said again, like it was the only word I knew.

Ten minutes in to the drive and he still hadn’t put his feet up on the dashboard. I
reached down and picked up my Stanley, taking a sip before holding it out.

“Coffee?” I asked, hating how desperately I wanted him to reach out and steal it
from my hands.

He shook his head slowly. “Already had some,” he said.

I took another sip just so I wouldn’t have to awkwardly put the mug back into the
holder, feeling like I’d just held out a stale treat to Lugnut, which he’d rejected
after sniffing it for a few seconds in my palm. We didn’t say anything more the
whole drive to twenty-nine.

I pulled my truck off to the side after Sherlock said, “Here.” I stepped down and
began to rummage around in my bag, looking for the extra compass and bear spray I’d
packed at five o’clock that morning with shaking hands.
When I looked up to hand them to him, Sherlock was shouldering a bag of his own –
one I hadn’t even noticed he’d had with him in the truck.

My hand stayed awkwardly outstretched between us. “You still need these?” I asked.

He shook his head and reached over his shoulder to pat the bag on his back.
“Figured I’d finally get my own,” he said.

My hand still stayed in the air for a second too long before I put the spray and
compass back in my own pocket. I cleared my throat, feeling like I’d never before
walked off into the wilderness – as if taking more than five steps away from the
Road would leave me lost forever in the backcountry until I died. I nodded out at
the tundra. “Lead the way,” I said.

We set off. He didn’t speed ahead, and he didn’t walk behind me. Instead he walked
just barely in front of me and to the side, in a way he never had before on all the
trips we’d ever taken. Every once in a while, his neck turned to the side towards
his shoulder, as if he was about to look behind and make sure I was still there,
but he never looked all the way back. Our feet stayed out of sync, never falling
into step, and I felt each of his footsteps like a jarring rhythm against the beat
of my heart pumping blood in my chest. I never once smelled his sweat carried on
the soft breeze.

He found the research site without any trouble at all, just over a mile back into
the brush. I stood off to the side with my hands in my pockets as he got out his
supplies – his ruler and his magnifying glass, a paper map and pencil.

I used to watch him when he did this. Stand leaning against a nearby rock or grab a
seat in the soft moss as he examined a site for hours, doing nothing at all except
watching the smooth curve of his back, now and then scanning the horizon for any
signs of wildlife to make sure we were safe. He would illuminate the whole
landscape – a bright burst of light streaking across the tundra as he crawled
around on his knees with his nose two inches from the ground, or lifted samples up
to the sunlight, or dashed off to follow another lead.

He would do all of that knowing that I was watching his every move – a private
version of himself, stripped bare, that I knew was for my eyes alone.

That day I couldn’t watch. It looked so wrong, the way he knelt gently on his knees
by the site and dutifully scribbled measurements and notes onto the map – the way
he kept his pencil behind his ear when he wasn’t using it. The way he never once
looked back over his shoulder to smile at me, knowing immediately where I was
standing even though it had been an hour since he last looked.

After a few minutes I moved away, following a slope up to a little bluff

overlooking the valley with the Road winding through it in the distance. I counted
the busses as they passed – the old silver park busses and the forest green
Kantishna lodge tours, usually lifting a hand to wave at a little kid who would
notice me perched up in the hills, smiling like hell out the window and making the
whole bus think they’d just seen a moose or a bear.

About half an hour later there were footsteps coming up behind me. “I’m ready to
go,” I heard.

I frowned and turned back over my shoulder. “Already?”

He nodded and turned to walk down the hill, quickly disappearing behind the rocky
green slope. I scrambled to my feet to catch up, feeling like I’d just been tossed
off a cliff without wings – as if the fact the earth was round had suddenly been
announced as incorrect.

He didn’t wait for me to catch up on the way back. I followed far behind, every now
and then catching sight of his curls peeking up through the hills or just
disappearing around a bend. I heard his bear call once, in a tone of voice that
made me realize he must have encountered one fairly close.

Last summer his bear call had been listing off every reason it would be illogical
for the bear to come closer and attack. The speech would continue sometimes for
hours after the bear had lumbered away, in a way that had made me laugh so hard I’d
have to bend over and put my hands on my knees.

That time it was just the standard, “hey bear, hey bear,” and the sound of it made
my chest ache in a very raw way – the sharpest thing I’d felt since he’d said my
name behind me just before sunrise weeks ago.

He was waiting in the truck when I reached the Road, taking a long sip of water
with the window rolled down. I threw my bag in the back and climbed up next to him.
“Where to next?” I asked, starting the engine.

He capped the water without offering me any. “No need. I’ve got everything I needed
from this site.”

When I was dead silent, he went on, as if explaining himself was the most tedious
thing he’d ever experienced in his life. “Greg asked me to use the first weeks I
was here to check up on the collar data that got tracked over the winter. I’ve just
checked on up that data. Therefore, I’m now fine until Greg arrives and we come up
with our new plan for this season.”

I wanted to stare at him. I wanted to ask him since when in hell he called Greg
‘Greg,’ and since when he actually gave a shit about the tracking data, and since
when he did anything anyone else told him to do when it came to wolves.

But those questions felt too familiar – reserved for a man I would hold in my arms
later that night instead of a coworker whom I hadn’t even asked about how he spent
his winter. I shrugged and started up the engine, hating the fact that my gut
clenched at the thought of returning to Toklat so soon. “So, I’ll just take you
back then?” I asked.

He nodded. “Please.”

When we pulled back onto the Road, I gestured a hand towards the dashboard. “You
wanna listen to anything?” I asked. “I’ve still got –”

My words died on my tongue. I hadn’t meant to admit that I still had every tape
he’d ever given me, stashed away in the glove box even though I hadn’t even looked
at them in almost a year.

He acted like he didn’t notice me stop mid-sentence. “If you want,” he said.

I didn’t put in a tape.

When we got back to Toklat, he hopped down and immediately walked over to the hose.
I let him do it, standing back from the truck and holding one elbow in my hand,
knowing that I had absolutely no reason for not leaving to walk back up to my
cabin, or heading to the offices to see if they needed me to pick up an extra
patrol.

When he was done he grabbed his bag from the front seat. My mind screamed at me to
move, to just nod and walk away, but suddenly the thought of walking away felt like
a goodbye I wasn’t ready to say – as if we could just stand forever by the truck in
thick silence, never getting closer but never moving farther apart either. Stuck
forever in an orbit that I would have claimed a month ago never again to need.

Wild words hovered in my throat the moment he looked up and we locked eyes. Words
that would ask him if he realized how often I dreamt of him during the winter –
that I would wake up some nights with the blanket balled up in my arms. Words that
would admit to him I hadn’t been able to come since the last time he touched me –
that I was back to the pathetic sock because I couldn’t bring myself to touch the
real looking cock he’d given me that one early morning in a cold tent.

Words that would beg him just to forget it all, forget everything we both said. Beg
him to call me Ranger one more time, or hold my hand in his – trace the pink line
at the top of my ribs with his lips so I could feel the numb skin for just one more
night.

I don’t know how long we stood there looking at each other over the bed of the
truck. He held my gaze as he spoke, “Thank you for taking me, John.”

I swallowed hard. “Of course.”

He walked away then, slowly moving through the trees towards his cabin. I watched
him go, and suddenly a truth flashed through my chest.

I knew, just like I knew the day I was leaving South Dakota for good, that Sherlock
Holmes would never sit in the passenger seat of my truck again.

\--

I saw Lugnut a few days later.

He flopped over onto his back the moment he saw me across the kennel yard, his
tongue rolling out of his mouth while his tail slapped dust clouds in the dirt.

I sank to my knees and buried my face in the fur on his belly while he licked
wildly at my forehead. “Look at you, old man,” I said. “Still young enough to show
me some tricks when I come by?”

He wiggled more in the dirt, pressing his paws against my face and snarling for me
to keep petting him. I laughed, and my lungs seized painfully over the unfamiliar
sound, as if they’d forgotten how to do it after so many days without.

I rubbed both of his ears hard with my hands, looking down into the familiar blue-
grey eyes. “Should we go for a walk, old Lug?”

He yipped and moved to turn over onto his stomach. I reached out for the leash
nearby, dangling it the way I used to do to get him excited to go. I watched him
struggle to his feet, so slowly I eventually reached out to pick up his thin hips
with my hands.

I attached the leash with a tight throat, and my hands shook so badly it took me
three tries to secure the lead. “We’ll walk, old man,” I told him, feeling like I
was somehow in a play of my own life – reenacting the past except all the other
characters were wrong. “Let’s walk for a bit, huh? You still got time for me, old
boy?”

He followed slowly beside me, even as I walked with smaller steps. Every few feet
he rubbed his head against my thigh to get another scratch, his tail never staying
still even though I could tell he was stiff and limping. We made our way out of the
kennels and towards one of the small walking paths nearby – one that lead into a
little clearing just behind the offices a half-mile down, surrounded by trees and
dotted with wildflowers in the spring.

We used to play fetch in that clearing, years ago when he was still young. I’d pick
up any old stick off the ground and he’d sprint after it with all his might,
leaping up into the air to catch it before it even hit the ground, then bounding
back towards me across the grass, slobber flying. He used to tackle me in that
clearing, lay by my side if I still had time to spare after we’d finished our usual
walk.

It was where we’d been sitting nearly ten years ago, with his head propped up
against my chest and his eyes closed, that day I’d told him the whole story of who
I used to be, with only his soft ears and the humming bees nearby to hear it.

I sat with him there for over an hour, massaging his old legs as he stretched and
groaned. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t talk to him about anything at
all. I just sat, and I held him, and I pretended that I had nothing to say – that
everything important had already been said, and I was just a normal human being
taking a small break from the world. Just enjoying the feel of the soft sun on my
bare cheeks, the way it warmed Lugnut’s fur beneath my palms, and made him smell
earthy and rich like fresh wool.

He licked my hand every few minutes, as if he knew I needed a reminder not to

succumb to thinking about it all.

A few minutes in to the short walk back, Lugnut suddenly sat down on the small
trail. His back legs were shaking, and he looked up at me with wide eyes and
started to cry. The breath left my lungs. I knelt down and took his face in my
hands, kissing the top of his snout the way I always did at the end of the walk.
His tail was still wagging, soft little swipes through the grass and dirt.

“Tired you out a bit too much, didn’t I?” I asked him. My voice was rough. “Will
you forgive me?”

He leaned forward to lick my face. I scooped him up in my arms like he didn’t weigh
a thing, and immediately he curled into me and rested his head against my neck. I
was more relieved than I’d ever felt in my life when I didn’t run into anyone else
on the walk back – as if somehow letting Lugnut be seen having to be carried back
on his short walk was something too private, too fragile to be witnessed by anyone
else.

I’d planned to take my leave after setting him down near his hut – once I’d held up
some water for him and made sure he was staying cool in the shade. I had a long
work week coming up – now that I’d gotten Nick to switch my schedule back to the
way it was, giving one of Sherlock’s excuses about him wanting to wait for Greg to
arrive before going out more in the field. I needed to cook my meals for the week,
tidy up the cabin and haul more water. I needed to finish writing up some reports,
maybe go for a quick run, do a load of laundry.

Instead I sat next to Lugnut as he napped for a long time, unable even to think
about getting in my truck to drive away. I was still there when Molly came around
to do the evening feeding. She spotted me immediately, and handed the supplies to
one of the junior kennel Rangers to divvy out on their own.
I didn’t smile at her or say hello as she sat down next to me in the dirt, but I
knew that she knew she was the only person alive who was welcome to sit there. It
was the first time I’d seen her since that dinner at her house, and a wave of
relief washed over me when I realized I didn’t regret what I’d told her at all.

Lugnut snored and twitched in his sleep with his head in my lap. I nodded down
towards Molly’s flat stomach. “Everything all right in there?” I asked.

She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Only you could make a pregnancy sound like
something’s being burned in an oven,” she said.

My cheeks felt hot, and I started to say something different when she put her hand
on my leg. “All’s fine down there,” she said, resting her head back against the
fence behind us. “Getting a bit nervous about telling him.”

I hummed. “He’s here in a week, yes?”

“Yeah. Next Saturday.”

I traced my fingers along Lugnut’s ears. “I could make it easier for you,” I said.
“Just run out the morning of and decorate the whole train platform for him to see.
Bring out the whole parade of sled dogs. Huge banners saying ‘Welcome back, dad’
and then in parenthesis underneath say, ‘that’s you, Greg.’”

Molly laughed and put her hand over her mouth, “God, he’d probably shit himself
right there in front of the train.”

I grinned. “More like he’d find some other guy named Greg and walk over to
congratulate him. Give him one of his classic handshakes and tell him he’s ‘right
chuffed for ‘im to be a bloody dad’ even though they just met.”

We giggled for a bit, sharing a small, private smile as Lugnut whined at being
woken up. Molly sighed, and I could tell that she was about to say something she’d
been rehearsing in her head.

“Have you seen him much?” she asked in a quiet voice.

For a long moment I watched the other Ranger feed the dogs far down the line,
scolding them when they jumped up to try and snatch the food from her hands.

I sighed. “Nick rearranged my schedule thinking he was doing me a huge favor – made
it so I was driving him around instead of doing the usual patrols.”

Molly groaned. “God, he’s an idiot.”

“More blind than an idiot. He thought the only reason he hadn’t seen us together
was my busy work schedule. So, voila, a new schedule.”

Molly twisted her hands in her lap. “So. . . you’ve seen him, then?”

My throat suddenly felt too tight, and I had to force myself not just to lie and
tell her no. “Just once,” I said honestly. “I took him out early to drive to one of
his sites. Only took him thirty minutes before he was ready to come back, and I
haven’t taken him out since. Said he was gonna wait for Greg for the rest of his
trips.”

Molly huffed a small, harsh laugh. “So, in other words, it was a disaster.”
I smiled unexpectedly, suddenly fiercely glad that I could share any of this with
Molly, as if saying it out loud proved I hadn’t dreamed it all up and gone insane.
“It was a disaster,” I agreed. “Him waiting for Greg is just the story we both told
Nick to change the schedule back the way it was.” I mirrored her pose, resting my
head against the fence. I closed my eyes. “It’s like he’s not even the same person
now,” I shrugged. “Sure he’s probably thinking the same thing about me.”

Molly bumped her shoulder against mine. “You’re just the same as ever. Same old
handsome, mysterious Ranger, just add extra bags under your eyes and minus the
beard.”

I gave a little smile at her joke, but it quickly fell from my face. All I could
see in my mind was Sherlock sitting in the truck seat, drowning in his clothes with
pale, thin cheeks and red eyes, keeping his feet flat on the floor and saying
things like “please.”

I held Lugnut a bit closer. “He doesn’t seem . . . well,” I finally said

Molly nodded. “I agree.”

I turned quickly to look at her and frowned. She blushed under my gaze and cleared
her throat. “I, uh. . .” she cleared her throat again, “I saw him recently.
Yesterday, actually.”

She shifted to pull her legs into her chest in the dirt, speaking softly like she
was sorry I even had to hear the words. “He must have been over on the East side
for a meeting or something. I was coming over to take some of the dogs out to train
and saw him here – leaning on that fence back there and looking at Lugnut across
the yard.”

My heart was hammering in my chest. I wanted to hold Lugnut’s face in my hands and
demand he tell me whether he’d seen him – whether he’d talked to him at all – as if
Lugnut could tell me the story even better than Molly could. Instead I sat quietly,
deathly still, waiting for her to go on.

She did. “I wasn’t going to go up to him. I wasn’t sure if you . . . well, but he
looked sort of sad, really. Kinda hunched over the fence. So I asked him if he
wanted to go in and say hello to Lug, you know, like he used to do last summer.”
Her words were cautious, each one like a soft little apology. “But he . . . he said
no thanks.”

I could tell she wasn’t telling me everything. “Yeah?”

She twisted her mouth. “Well, he said no thanks. . . and that ‘Ranger Watson
probably wouldn’t appreciate me petting his dog without his permission.’ And then
he walked away before I could say anything else.”

I had to shut my eyes again, and all I could see was Lugnut licking Sherlock’s face
last summer, lying on top of him in the very same field where we had just been
sitting. All I could hear was Sherlock laughing, see him looking over at me.
Holding out his hand, saying, “ _Christ, John, save me from your beast of an
animal_ ,” even as his smile lit up his face beneath Lugnut’s tongue.

“I think he had his own dog when he was little,” I heard myself say in response. My
fingers buried themselves in Lugnut’s fur. “He wasn’t there when it died.”

When Molly left a few minutes later after sitting in a surprisingly easy silence,
she leaned back down after brushing the dust from her pants and kissed my forehead,
the same way I had done to her countless times before. Her eyes were serious and
sad. “I promise you, John,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to make
sure you’ll be there.” Her eyes glanced briefly at Lugnut still sleeping in my lap.
All I could do was nod with wet eyes after she’d already walked away.

\--

June bloomed unseasonably hot over the park that year.

Poor Interp was in over their heads dealing with hot and sweating visitors – people
wearing only the heavy sweaters they packed and not enough water to stay cool in
the hot metal busses on long park tours. I tried to stay as cool as possible in my
own truck during my shifts, rolling the windows down to make up for no AC and
stopping every thirty minutes to re-wet the washcloth I kept draped around my neck.

Greg arrived in those weeks. I waited for him to approach me eventually with an
awkward look on his face, achingly aware of everything that had transpired between
me and Sherlock and saying hello only out of some sort of misguided co-worker duty.

Or the alternative, one that kept me awake at night thinking about like a
nightmare, where Greg gripped me by the front of my shirt with a furious look in
his eyes. Where he yelled at me, “ _You promised me you’d watch after him, and now
he’s a bloody mess all because of you._ ” Where I didn’t have anything to say for
myself in response.

Instead he found me the afternoon of his second day back, sprinting towards me
where I was on my way to visit Lugnut in the kennels. He picked me up off the
ground in a bear hug before I could stop him.

“You bloody wanker!” he cried out. “You knew I was gonna be a fucking dad and
didn’t say anything!”

I laughed as he set me down, filled with warmth and relief at the glazed over look
in his wide eyes. “You only got here yesterday,” I said. “Not like I kept it a
secret for that long.”

He gripped my shoulders again with a ridiculous smile on his face. “Me!” he said,
giving me a good shake. “ _Me_ , a dad!”

I reached out to hold his shoulder. “Congratulations,” I said, hoping it sounded as

genuine as I felt. He quickly wiped his eyes. “Thanks, mate,” he said. “For that,
and for looking out for our Molly.”

“Who says I need to be looked out for?”

Molly appeared out of nowhere behind Greg, giving him a fake scowl. Greg wasn’t
even phased. He reached over and picked Molly up in his arms. “A fucking dad!” he
yelled out again, before leaning down to kiss her.

The kiss went on long enough for me to take a step away, staring over at the
kennels with my hands in my pockets, catching sight of Lugnut suddenly sniff me in
the air. His head popped out of his hut, his nose frantically sniffing at the sky
while his tail began to wag.

I started to walk over to him when Greg caught my arm. “Sorry bout that,” he said,
looking embarrassed.
I nodded over at Molly who was saying hello to one of the dogs. “You both deserve
it,” I said, smiling. “I’ve never seen her look so happy – even after her big
promotion.”

Greg smiled over at her too, his eyes still a bit wet. “Tell you what, mate, she
looked pretty damn close to that happy when she found out you were coming back for
this season. Thought maybe she was about to admit she’d been in love with you the
whole time.”

I laughed over the sudden rush of emotion in my chest. I rubbed my hand over my
mouth. “Yeah, well,” I said. “She doesn’t seem like the unrequited love type.”

Greg chuckled. “That, she’s not.”

He took a deep breath, and I knew it was coming before he even said it. “John,” he
said, and my gut churned with sudden anxiety. “I . . . don’t really know what
happened, but –”

I held up a gentle hand. “Greg, please,” I said. I swallowed hard. “You don’t have
to get into any of that. Or be involved.”

There was a stubborn look about his shoulders, determination in the way he stepped
forward to keep speaking. “Molly told me you were . . . well, you know, what
happened. And honestly, I should have guessed. I mean, you even told me, sort of,
that one day in the car, but . . . I guess I didn't think it was that -- that
serious, you know?" He huffed and twisted his mouth, "Christ, I sound like a right
bastard, but look. . . John, whatever he did to fuck it up, whatever he said to
you, just let me –”

“Please,” I said again. I knew I looked like I was begging. “It’s . . . we can just
let it be, alright?” I reached out half heartedly to touch his arm. “You shouldn’t
have to get involved. There’s nothing to even get involved with.”

He looked at me for a long moment with an odd expression, as if he was warring with
himself whether to let me get away with my blatant lie.

He let me get away with it. “Right,” he said, taking a step back. “Right, well, if
you ever want me to smack him upside the head . . .”

I forced myself to smile. “I know where to find you.” I gestured towards Molly. “Go
celebrate some more. I’ll go and say hi to Lugnut.”

The last look he gave me before walking away was one I hadn’t really gotten since I
was sixteen years old – the first time I ever tried to fully be John out in the
world, and the old lady at the corner store two towns over gave me the same look as
I asked her in a forcefully deep voice where she kept the pop.

It was pity – enough of it to make my blood run cold.

\--

The heat meant more sweating, and more sweating meant more showers. Ever since
moving to Denali, I’d gotten away with one every two or three days. Many of the
Rangers did – the weather during the summer was just mild enough that the usual
Visitor Center duty or Enforcement patrols wouldn’t leave you in that bad of shape.

I knew the other Rangers avoided showering out of an odd mixture of

environmentalism and laziness – not wanting to trek down from their bunks or cabins
to the shower houses, wait for the water to actually heat up, haul all your
toiletries and clothes through the outdoors with you.

I avoided showering for entirely different reasons.

I still remembered it like it was yesterday. Even after all those years, even after
trying every trick in the book to forget, flipping on the shower head still brought
a zip of fear down my spine, a burst of sudden nausea as the memory flashed through
my brain.

It happened my second week at Canyonlands, back when my chest still physically

ached and the incisions still bled. I’d been making it that whole time on sponge
baths alone, telling myself that it was only because I didn’t want to get the
recently infected scars wet. Then they took us out on a full day hike during that
second week of training, baking in the hot sun and trudging through dirt while we
went out to check on some of the more remote trail conditions.

I’d loved it – being out in the wide open land, the feel of the fresh, new uniform
on my limbs, the smell of the hot dirt and the sun baking through my bones. The NPS
name tag pinned to my shirt that read “John.” It was still the day I thought about
whenever a visitor asked, “So, what made you want to become a Ranger for so long?”

When we got back, every other Ranger ran straight to the shower house, already
pulling off their shirts and still laughing from the day. It was different times
back then – the girls had their normal stalls for the few of them working in the
park, but the younger men – the incoming GS-3’s and 4’s - had a big communal shower
space, smack in the center of camp.

I’d disappeared from the group and holed up in my bunk, hating the feel of the dirt
and sweat clinging to my skin. I hid inside my sleeping bag when everyone got back
from dinner, still fully dressed and hoping they couldn’t smell I hadn’t showered.
I pretended to be asleep, outright dead asleep, until the last voices slowly faded
away to snores, and the whole camp settled into the silence of the middle of the
night.

I crept silently through the dark, clutching my bundle of clean clothes in my arms,
letting the moonlight guide my way through the still unfamiliar camp. I kept the
lights off in the shower, feeling my way blindly towards the old, wooden benches
where I stripped off my clothes and pulled the dirty bandages from my chest.

The hot water felt like heaven. I groaned as it sluiced away the grime from my
skin, pounding away at my back, running through my buzzed hair. I stood under the
water until it started to run lukewarm. Happiness had burned through me like fresh
blood in my veins, and I’d smiled into my hands beneath the spray as I remembered
the hike.

And then the door had burst open, and the light flicked on.

It all happened in less than five full seconds. “Shit!” I heard the other Ranger
call out, startled that someone had been showering in the dark. I yelled and
instinctively covered my face with my hands, brain too startled to think of turning
away from full view of the door.

And then I heard, “What the fuck --?” before the door slammed shut again, and the
sound of footsteps quickly running away pounded through the walls.
For a moment I just stood there, body frozen under the now freezing water pouring
from the shower, and all I could hear was the sound of my own blood pumping in my
ears.

Then everything exploded.

I slammed off the water and ran to my clothes, slipping on the wet concrete hard
enough to fall straight onto my hip. I struggled to my legs, my entire body
shaking, and I yanked my clothes over my still soaking wet skin. Without even
thinking I ran from the bathroom, hoping and praying that whoever had seen me
wasn’t still outside, or on their way back with more people. I sprinted back to the
dorm building, clutching my dirty uniform in my hands. I didn’t trust it to try and
make my way back to my shared room and bunk. There was a small half-kitchen at the
far end of the hall, a sink that no one used and an old rickety table and chair. I
crept silently down the hall and slipped inside, shutting the door behind me and
triple checking that it was locked.

I sank down against the door to the cold floor in the dark. My heart was screaming
painfully where it pulsed behind my ribs, and my limbs shook out of control. I
could hear myself breathing, panting shallowly in my chest, and I covered my mouth
with my hands to try and muffle the sound.

And then, for the first time since I was ten-years-old, I started to cry. The
entire force of what had just happened hit me all at once, slapping me across the
face and punching the air from my chest. Full, fat, hot tears dripped down my face,
over the half-stubble that covered my cheeks. I tried to stay quiet, hoping the
gasping sobs escaping from my throat couldn’t be heard through the walls.

Desperate ideas flashed through my mind all at once: I could try to seek out who it
was who’d seen me and beg them to stay silent; I could suck it up and tell the head
Ranger before someone else told him and got me fired; I could take it all back,
reverse everything, grow out my hair and throw away the rest of my shots and change
the name tag pinned to my shirt.

Anything to keep the uniform I was still clutching in my hands. Anything to stay in
the Park Service, to stay a Ranger, to _stay_.

I stayed in that room all night, never falling asleep on the hard floor. The spot
on my hip where I’d fallen turned a deep, angry purple. I waited until I heard the
first stirrings of my fellow Rangers waking up, then I crept down the hallway and
back to my room, pretending that I had just come from a fresh shower that morning.
The other Rangers in my room didn’t say anything at all, just nodded at me – their
shy, silent roommate who never talked – before going back to joking each other on
their way to grab breakfast. I waited until they were all gone before changing into
a fresh uniform, moving my nametag to the clean shirt with shaking hands –
realizing that I hadn’t gotten a chance to fully wash my skin from the day before.

In the breakfast hall, most of the other new Rangers were crowded around one table.

“John, you gotta hear this!” one of my roommates called when I walked in late. I
forced myself to walk towards the group, feeling like a man facing down a loaded
gun. One of the other new Rangers, Robbie, was telling a story to the rapt crowd.

“. . .and then, now that the light is on, I see it’s not a dude showering in the
fucking dark at all. It was a fucking girl, using our bathroom!”

The whole group gasped and laughed. I wanted to sink into the ground and die,
waiting for him to point through the crowd straight at my face.
“You catch sight of her tits?” someone called out.

“Who was it?”

Robbie shook his head. “Couldn't see any tits, happened so fast. She covered her
face with her hands the second I walked in. Hair must’ve been up in some sort of
bun thing.”

Someone else spoke up, “But you must have seen . . .”

Robbie smirked. “Oh yeah, _full_ view of her pussy.”

Someone in the group whistled, and a few of them cheered. I thought I was going to
pass out.

“Come on, who do you think it was?”

“Yeah, come on, Rob, spill!”

He savored the moment, waiting until everyone was silent. “Honestly,” he said, with
that same smirk on his lips, “I don’t have a clue. But I’ll tell you that the hair
down there was ginger as all hell –"

“The hell’s going on over here?”

One of the older Rangers – George, I thought his name was - was pushing through the
small crowd. Robbie sat up straighter. “Just telling the boys here about a special
visitor to our bathroom late last night.”

George gave him a glare. “If you’ve got something to report, it comes to us, not
your whole goddamn audience in the middle of breakfast,” he practically commanded.

When Robbie rose to follow him away from the crowd, I waited for him to seek out my
face and call out my name. For him to say, “ _Oh, I’ve got something to report,
alright,_ ” then point between my legs.

But he didn’t. Robbie followed George back towards the table of head Rangers, and
the rest of the crowd of GS-3’s and 4’s slowly dispersed to eat their toast, and I
didn’t realize I’d been standing frozen until my roommate tapped my shoulder.

“What, John, you just see a ghost? Come on and eat,” he said.

For the next two years, until I worked my way up to GS-5 and got my own shared
cabin and shower, I only showered in the middle of the night and with my underwear
still on.

Midway through that warm June in Denali, after a full day of sweat-soaked patrols,
I stood under the hot spray and did my usual routine. Washed out my hair, did a
quick pass with a bar of soap under my arms, relived that entire vivid memory as I
splashed water between my legs.

I got dressed in my sweatpants and an old shirt sleeve shirt, already sweating
again once the fabric touched my damp skin. After a moment of indecision, I tied my
towel around my waist over my pants before heading out towards the sinks to brush
my teeth. Chris and Nathan were standing by the sink with their shirts off, Nathan
telling Chris a story of a visitor moose encounter from earlier that day while
Chris shaved.
He stopped mid-story when they saw me come out of the stall. “Hiya, John,” he said.
I smiled as they shifted over to make room for me at the sink. “Another moose
chase?” I asked.

Nathan smiled. “Oh, yeah. Visitor tried to take a goddamn photo right in its face
outside the Tent – took three of us just to calm the poor guy down afterwards.
Chase weaved in and out of practically every bus parked there in the lot.”

I chuckled as I started to brush my teeth, thinking they would go back to their own
conversation.

Nathan bumped my shoulder. “So, what’s the deal with you not driving our favorite
Brit around anymore? You win a bet this year to get out of it?”

My chest froze. I leaned over to spit and shrugged, mouth still half-full of
toothpaste. “Just different schedules this season, I guess,” I said, going back to
brushing my teeth.

Nathan looked over at Chris. “Man isn’t quite so uptight this year, you notice
that? Not got all of his fancy clothes and suits with him anymore.”

Chris laughed. “Always wanted to ask him if he fucking asked for his Ranger uniform
to be three sizes too small. Was wondering when those buttons on his shirt would
finally give out – Tony and I had a bet going.”

Nathan grinned. “Well, that’s how all of them dress, isn’t it? You know . . .
clothes all tight.”

Before I could stop myself, I asked around my toothbrush, “Who, the Brits?”

Chris gave me an odd look. “No, man, the gays.” When I froze, he went on, “Come on,
Watson, don’t tell me you didn’t have the suspicion before. The amount of hair
product he uses?”

“And that cologne, god.”

They both laughed together, as if it was the most casual joke in the world. I
forced myself to grin, too, waiting until I finished rinsing my mouth to speak.
“Must not have really thought about it, I guess,” I finally said, looking down at
my spit slowly running down the sink drain.

Chris smiled warmly at me. “Well, John, that’s because you’ve been living as a
hermit for so long.”

Nathan gently put his hand on my back. “Gotta get you out in the real world every
once in a while – see how us normal people live while you’re in your cave.”

It was an old Toklat joke – one that mainly started about six years ago when my
coworkers all realized I hadn’t seen a new movie in about a decade. It had never
bothered me before – I almost wore it as some private badge of honor whenever it
came up.

Now, though, the words seeped under my skin like sharp ice.

I forced myself to laugh along with the familiar joke as I made my way towards the
door. “Good luck with that one, guys” I said. “Molly’s been trying for years.”

They both gave me warm smiles as they waved me out the door, immediately continuing
their conversation about the moose once I left.
I didn’t realize I was shaking until I closed my cabin door behind me.

I couldn’t sleep. I spent the night pacing aimlessly around my cabin – roving from
the kitchen to the bedroom and back. I’d tried to read, tried to cook, tried to lie
on the couch and stare at the ceiling and think through old memories out in the
backcountry, or with Lugnut.

Instead I thought about how it had been three and a half weeks since I’d seen
Sherlock Holmes.

Past midnight I found myself sitting at the small kitchen table, holding a cup of
cold tea in my hands and staring down at the surface with bloodshot eyes, tracing
the grain of the old wood by the light of a candle I’d lit in the corner –
something Molly had given me a few years ago that she claimed was specially scented
to help you relax.

I wanted to relax. I wanted to forget about every word Chris and Nathan had said in
the bathroom. I wanted to fall into bed blissfully, not even aware of how another
body would fit by my side. I just wanted to sleep.

I startled out of my thoughts by a soft knock at the door.

An alarm flared in the back of my mind. Instantly I thought of a million different

possibilities: It was Nick saying Sherlock Holmes told him some secrets about last
summer; it was Chris or Nathan asking me why my laugh hadn’t been fully genuine at
their jokes; it was Hannah come to invite me to another social activity I was about
to miss; It was Molly, sweet Molly, telling me it had happened without me there.

I rose to stand on my socked feet. “Just a sec,” I called out. I rushed quietly
into my bedroom and opened the bedside drawer, knowing the way my sweatpants fit
around my thighs would make it painfully obvious if it wasn’t there. I took an
extra second to adjust everything before walking back towards the door, palm
already sweating as I reached to turn it open.

Sherlock Holmes was standing on my porch in the dim light of the stars. I froze and
stared at him, wildly wishing that time would freeze so I could look at him as long
as I needed – memorize every line of his face and shoulders to prove to myself that
he was really there.

The cold air from outside was seeping into my cabin, and still I couldn’t move. He
was wearing pajama bottoms and a worn Henley tee, with his old favorite dressing
gown wrapped tightly around his thin shoulders. He was shivering a bit in the cold.

“You can’t sleep,” he said quietly.

I shook my head. “No.”

He kept looking at my face, as if the rest of my body didn’t even exist. Far off in
the distance a wolf howl echoed over the hills.

“May I come in?” he finally asked.

In a flash I remembered a moment from nearly a year ago – when I had woken up to
Sherlock already in my cabin in the door to my room. He’d been fully dressed and
wild and taking up every speck of oxygen in the air, demanding that I wake up and
drive him as if he hadn’t just picked the lock on my door.

He hadn’t stood there shivering on the porch, asking politely to be let in.
I wanted to say no. Shut the door gently, go back into my kitchen, grab the bottle
of Scotch I’d only ever opened twice before, down a few gulps so I could fade away
into sleep.

Instead I moved back into the kitchen to let him pass. “Sure.”

He kicked off his shoes on the porch then shuffled inside on bare feet. I nodded at
the kitchen table for him to sit down, then moved on instinct towards the stove to
set water boiling. I couldn’t sit down and face him and breathe his same air – not
yet. I felt him waiting silently behind me as I forced myself to make tea, berating
myself for being a stupid, sentimental fool that I’d kept the leftover bags from
the box of tea he’d had shipped here from London midway through last summer.

I dropped a bag of herbal mint tea – another gift from Molly – into my own mug and
carried the two back to the table. He reached out immediately to warm his hands on
his mug when I placed it in front of him. I noticed his fingers were blue and
shaking, and I suddenly wondered how long he’d stood outside my door before
bringing himself to knock.

We both stared at our tea for a while, neither of us taking a sip.

“Sorry, don’t have any powdered milk for that,” I finally said, hating how loud and
grating my voice sounded in the silent cabin.

His mouth quirked at the corner even though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “At
least you still have this for me and not that horrible mint sludge.”

I breathed through my nose, but neither of us laughed.

Eventually he started sipping at the overly steeped tea in his hands. We sat there
for a long time while we both drank, neither of us breaking the silence or even
fidgeting in our seats. It was almost peaceful – the way the darkness flickered by
the light of the lone candle. I forbid myself from watching it paint warmth across
his face.

Finally, just when I thought that maybe he wouldn’t speak at all, Sherlock set his
half-empty cup down on the table and folded his hands. He stared down at his
fingers and twisted his mouth.

“John,” he said softly, as if he was too exhausted to speak at a normal volume. I

held my breath waiting to hear what he would say. He shifted in the chair, causing
the wood to creak, and then he reached down into the pocket of his pants beneath
his robe. He slowly placed a half-full plastic bag on the table between us, pushing
it towards my hands.

“I need . . .,” he paused and licked his dry lips, meeting my gaze for a moment
before looking back down at the bag. “I need you to take this,” he said. “Please.”

I realized all at once what was within the plastic bag. I reached out and moved
some of the contents around just to make sure. White powder and a syringe. Sterile
gloves and extra needles.

The oxygen in the air seemed to crumble – turning into black tar that pushed down
upon my limbs, turning the entire earth heavy and dark until I couldn’t see or hear
a thing.

I looked back up at him, but his gaze was still down at his hands. The drugs sat
between us like a screaming siren in the dark. He was still shivering.
“Sherlock,” I said gently, not having any idea how I was going to finish that
sentence. I sat up straighter in my chair and tried to meet his eyes. “Listen to
me, I can’t take this.” My voice sounded pathetic and weak in my own ears. “I’m a
government employee,” I went on. “If anyone were to find this . . . if there were a
search. . . I’d lose my job instantly. I’d be arrested.”

An odd tremor wracked through Sherlock’s limbs, causing him to twitch and his
fingernails to dig into the table. I thought he was going to continue staring
blankly at the table forever. But then he sat up straight and quickly cleared his
throat – the way he used to do before delivering some genius speech.

“Right, of course, you’re right,” he said. His voice was a bit too quick and high.
He reached out and took hold of the bag again, sliding it back towards him. “I
should have realized – would have realized, if I had just thought about it for a
moment. Stupid of me, really. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Something about the mad look in his eyes, the way his hands still shook, the odd
tone of his voice . . .

I leaned forward across the table and forced him to look at me. “Are you . . .” I
waited until he stopped trying to look away. “Sherlock, did you take some already?”

I could see his swallow moving down his throat. His grey eyes were shining and
glazed over in the light from the candle. “A few hours ago,” he finally whispered.

An emotion rushed through me, punching the air from my lungs. I ran my hand over my
forehead. “Fuck, Sherlock, seriously?” Anger burned in my chest – anger and a fresh
wave of something that felt a lot like guilt. “You’ve been clean for _years_. Fuck,
what did you –”

I resisted the sudden black urge to reach out and grab him by the front of his
robe. I shook my head and tried to speak over my choked voice. Fury burned in my
fingertips and underneath my tongue. “What the fuck were you thinking,” I
whispered. “What could have . . . honestly, what the hell possessed you to even –
how did you even get your hands on this? Are you sure this is even safe? Seriously,
what the fuck happened?”

He sat there silently while my words poisoned the air between us. Guilt slapped my
face as each word left my mouth, and still I couldn’t stop, couldn’t close my lips
against the anger in my gut. My chest was heaving when I finished, and I collapsed
back exhausted into the stiff wooden chair. Suddenly, more than anything, I wanted
to close my eyes and fall asleep.

His breathing was shallow while he still looked down at his hands. I wanted to
shake him and kiss him, yell at him and apologize to him all in the same moment.

He was silent for a long time. The minutes ticked by like hours on the clock above
the stove, loud like bombs dropping in the middle of the dark kitchen. I felt like
complete shit for just yelling at him – drowning him in anger when I should have
been wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, leading him to the couch so he could
sleep, holding his hand.

I was about to start apologizing when he finally took in a sharp breath to speak.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. His voice was thick and wet. “I didn’t . . . I
just needed to . . .” His eyes searched through the thin air, as if the right words
were hovering before his face, but moving too fast for him to read. Then he
silently reached his hand back out across the table, slowly reaching out his
fingers and giving me time to pull away.
I left my hand where it was. His cold, thin fingers wrapped gently around mine,
barely holding on and still shaking against my skin. We both looked at our joined
hands in the light from the candle. I clenched my jaw hard. It took everything in
me not to bring his palm up to my mouth – to kiss the lines of his hand, the pads
of his fingers. To hold it up to my own cheek so his fingers would become warm.

Instead I let him hold me for almost a full minute before I slowly pulled my hand
away, leaving his fingers clutching at the air on top of the table.

He sucked in a sudden breath and snatched his hand back. He blinked hard, and a
single tear fell down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he said quickly.

I had no idea whether he meant my cabin or Denali. Something told me he meant both.
I could feel him itching to leave, and suddenly my way forward became clear. I
reached out and grabbed the plastic bag before he could stuff it back into his
pocket.

“Let me take care of this,” I said. He looked at me for a long moment before slowly
nodding his head, sitting back in his chair and letting me pull the bag away. I put
it down in my lap where he couldn’t see before placing my hands back up on the
table.

His eyes traced the lines of my fingers. “You know,” he said, after another long
stretch of silence. His voice sounded too thin. “Some nights I still wake up and
reach for you beside me. I’m completely positive that you’ll be there. There isn’t
any doubt in my mind. And then . . . when the sheets are cold. . .” He paused to
lick his lips. “Sometimes it takes me a whole hour to realize you aren’t coming
back to bed.”

His words pierced me in my chest, leaving a deep and throbbing ache. My eyes
prickled with hot water before I quickly blinked it away. I wanted to tell him that
I reached for him beside me _every_ night, not just sometimes. That some days I got
so lost in my own head in my truck that I started talking to the passenger seat
before I remembered it was empty.

Then our words from that day last August echoed in my mind – hoarse and piercing
through the vast, empty valley from where we stood high up on the peak.

“ _So, what, you just looked around and picked the most broken Ranger you could
find?_ ” I’d yelled out. “ _Someone to fix as your summer project so you wouldn’t
get too bored between finding your fucking wolves?_ ”

And he’d looked at me with confused and frustrated eyes and screamed back, “ _Yes!
Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you alone?_ ”

His face now across the kitchen table in the flickering light of the dying candle
looked the same way it had just moments after those words – when he had rushed to
me and held out his hands as I was quickly backing away. “ _John, believe me, I
didn’t mean it like that._ ” he’d begged me. “ _You know that’s not at all what I
meant._ ”

I took a deep breath, knowing he was frozen in his chair waiting for me to answer –
to tell him that I still reached for him in the middle of the long nights, too. I
looked at him with heavy eyes. “It isn’t . . . we just aren’t like that anymore,
Sherlock,” I said with a forced calm. “We’ve both moved on –”
“Why?” he suddenly said. “Why do we both have to move on?”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but he went on in a rushing voice. “You aren’t
sleeping, you’re too thin, I’m both of those things and apparently back to doing
fucking cocaine. Neither of us is happier apart than we were together. It’s
completely illogical why we can’t be like that anymore.” He suddenly stood up with
a harsh scrape of the wooden chair and grabbed hold of his hair, pacing across the
kitchen. “I don’t understand this, John– I’m back. I’m _here_ , we’re both in the
same place. Neither of us is happy. So why won’t you . . . it doesn’t make any
sense that we’re not – why can’t we just _try_ \--”

“I never asked for any of this,” I said back, rising to my own feet. Pain churned
hotly in my throat until it almost felt like anger. “I didn’t ask for you to come
back. I _was_ moving on. I was coming back to my job, to my life, and I was fucking
fine until you made the decision for both of us that it was somehow okay for you to
show up here –”

“You were hiding away in the Grand Canyon all winter, not ‘doing fine’ –"

“Well, excuse me for not wanting to spend all winter alone in a cabin which I had
been planning to ask you to fucking move in to with me –”

“How can you say that now? How in the world is it fair for you to say that now when
you didn’t even tell me that before --?”

“Probably because you were too busy telling me your fucking genius plan where I
quit my job forever and moved all the way to fucking London!”

“But I came _back_!”

I blinked hard, and suddenly we were both panting and glaring across the kitchen.
His last words still echoed against the wooden walls, and I wondered how loud we’d
been screaming, and for how long.

His hands were shaking so badly that it made the rest of his arms and chest shake,
too. We stared at each other in the screaming silence for another few seconds
before he sucked in breath.

“I should never have come here,” he said again, all in a rush, and before I could
decide whether to stop him he was moving quickly towards the door, flinging open
the handle with his still-shaking hand and disappearing out into the darkness
without even putting on his shoes.

“Sherlock –” I tried to call out, but my voice came out as a breathless whisper. I
couldn’t watch him walk away. I quickly pulled the door shut and stepped back into
the center of the kitchen, staring blindly at my feet in the dark while I fought to
get my lungs to work again.

Out of the chaos in my brain, I suddenly remembered one thing with perfect clarity:
the drugs. I rushed over to the table, achingly relieved for something productive
to do with my hands. I scooped up the bag and brought it over to the sink, dumping
the white powder down the drain and washing it away with the leftover water in the
tea kettle. Like a robot I grabbed the rest of the contents in the bag and walked
quickly in my bedroom, leaving the light off as I flung open the closet door and
shoved them up onto the top shelf. I would deal with them tomorrow – figure out how
the hell to get rid of it all.

As I was pulling my hands away from the shelf, my fingers brushed something
unfamiliar and soft. I frowned, reaching back up to pull down whatever it was to
get a good look. The fabric felt luxurious in my hands – like expensive cashmere. I
started to walk over to the bedroom light to flick it on so I could see, but then I
caught a whiff of what was in my hands, and I suddenly remembered what it was.

It was his scarf – the deep blue one he’d brought on that first backpacking trip
last year. I’d made fun of him for bringing something so fancy out into the
backcountry where it could get lost. He’d instantly reached over and stuffed it
into my pack before I could stop him, telling me that now I would be the one to
blame if his favorite scarf went missing.

And all the rest of that summer, he’d never once asked for it back.

I desperately wanted to hold it up to my cheek and mouth – to breathe in the

leftover scent of him still hovering in the fabric. Instead I set it down on my bed
without another glance while I went about the rest of my routine – cleaning up the
tea in the kitchen, running out to the bathroom, preparing for the next day of
work, setting out my clothes.

A long time later, even though my alarm was due to go off in only two more hours, I
finally slid between my sheets with stinging, heavy eyes. I didn’t think about
anything at all as I bundled up the scarf in my hands.

And I didn’t breathe through my nose as I drifted off to sleep with the cashmere
pressed to my cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it help at all if I tell you that the next chapter is SO HAPPY? Seriously,
it's so happy. It's 1991 and it's bursting with rainbows and everyone is giddy and
smiling and Lugnut gets belly rubs. Thanks for trusting me with the angst in the
meantime.
>
> As always I'm truly grateful for the positive response this fic is getting! To
all of you who have reached out to share your love of this setting and characters,
I owe you such deep gratitude. I'm still enjoying the hell out of writing this fic,
and hopefully the next (super happy) 1991 chapter will be up very soon!
>
> Your comments are the fire fueling my muses with this fic, and your kudos are
like Lugnut's favorite dog treats suddenly raining down on him from the sky. Thank
you for reading!

8. Late June 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Hazel Dickens and Ginny Hawker sing "Old River" [HERE]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=GBIqqRvJWzQ&list=PLPMbOXH7TtSSP7T1xoR7TQW8TY62_qhSJ&index=7/).
>
> Sarah Jarosz: listen to "Green Lights" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=r1gPUlO70O8/). Try to watch that music video and *not* fall in love with Sarah. I
dare you.
>
> I know this chapter took a bit longer to get out than normal - I found it
surprisingly difficult to get back into "happy 1991" mode after all of the 1992
angst the last chapter. Thank you so much for your patience and enthusiasm! I hope
you enjoy :)
>
> **There is a super brief (literally one sentence) moment in this chapter that
contains a homophobic slur. It comes up when Sherlock mentions John's parents.
Additionally, this chapter contains more animal death from a distance.

Late June 1991

Nick found me one bright, clear morning in the head offices on the East side. I’d
been hunched over a desk for hours finishing off reports from the last month,
reminding myself with each scribbled signature why I never in my life wanted to be
promoted up the ladder any higher than I already was. Only a few hours inside and I
was already itching to get out – my skin claustrophobic and stiff and the back of
my neck aching for the bright sun.

A firm hand clapped to my shoulder from behind. “Jesus, Watson, I don’t think I’ve
seen you stay indoors this long in years – even when it poured rain a few years ago
half that season.”

I leaned back in the stiff wooden chair and groaned, rubbing my hands over my eyes
before stretching my arms behind my head. “And you wonder why I won’t let you
switch me to Interp?” I asked. “Stand inside at a desk and point to maps all day?”

Nick laughed up at the ceiling before coming around to perch himself up on the desk
with one hip. “Listen to me, anyone ever tries to suggest you do Interp, even just
one shift in the Tent, I’ll ask them how they’d like to deal with the hundreds of
complaint letters.” He held up his hands as if he was flipping through and reading
forms. “Ranger talked to the moose outside before answering our question. Ranger
said ‘I don’t know, just walk out there and figure it out’ when we asked him which
direction to hike. Ranger could not be found anywhere in the immediate vicinity of
the Visitor Center.”

I laughed and winked at him while I reached up to scratch at my beard over my jaw.
“Sounds about right to me,” I said. “Honestly don’t see the problem.”

He grinned and nodded down at the stack of forms on the desk. “Those all the
aftermath of that Alpine Hike the other day?”

I groaned and rubbed at my forehead. “These aren’t even half the forms I’ve had to
fill out,” I said, shaking my head, and Nick winced in sympathy.

It had happened three days before – one of the worst accidents the park had seen in
years. Young guy on the guided Ranger Alpine Hike outside Eielson had figured he
would try and impress the girl he was with, standing at the very edge of the
outcropping of boulders at the peak and leaning back to get a good photo. He’d
fallen, of course, almost twenty feet down, landing just a foot away from a soft
patch of moss and getting bashed on a cluster of gnarled brush and mid-size rocks
instead.

I’d gotten the radio call about it when Sherlock and I were nearby at Stony Dome –
spending more time making each other laugh with fake bear calls than actually
looking for signs of any recent wolf activity along the Road. It was the first time
Sherlock had ever been with me when I’d gotten a medical call. He’d gone instantly
into another mode, rushing back to the truck on my heels and staying perfectly
silent on the fast drive to Eielson, anticipating exactly what supplies I needed
him to grab from the truck when we got there before I even asked.

We’d jogged up most of the mile-long trail together, thighs aching towards the top
and both of us completely out of breath. It hadn’t even occurred to me to suggest
that Sherlock had no reason for following me up – no reason on earth to scramble
behind me up one thousand feet of elevation gain just to stand back and watch me
fix a broken leg.

But he’d followed me, and I didn’t try to stop him at all.

One of the Eielson Interp Rangers with EMT training was already crouched down and
tending to the man just below the peak. His leg was completely shattered – bone
sticking out and blood covering the steep slope. His girlfriend was still screaming
and sobbing at the top even though it had been almost thirty minutes since the
initial fall. Down at the base of the trail I could see more Rangers starting to
head up with heavier supplies, navigating the stretcher up the steep, switch-back
trail.

My mind had instantly switched over to my training, utterly focused on nothing

except the broken leg in front of me. There was clothing to cut away, blood to
staunch, fractures to set right and splint, a patient to calm. I only ever used my
training less than a handful of times each season, and yet every time, my body
flipped into gear as if I’d been doing it every day – as if every bone in my body
was singing to the tune of the chaos beneath my hands, the chaos that was cleared
away bit by bit as my fingers danced over the exposed muscle and bone.

I had been utterly absorbed.

And yet, I had also been keenly aware of Sherlock standing just behind me, handing
me what I needed from my medical bag before I even asked – wordlessly placing gauze
and medical tape and a splint in my outstretched hand. His eyes had burned at the
back of my neck, and the knowledge of his steady gaze made me shiver even under the
bright sun. I felt that every puff of breeze on the wind was really the breath from
his own mouth – that the sun baking down onto my back was really the warmth of his
own hands.

It had taken me only about fifteen minutes to get the patient stable enough for
transport, by which time the stretcher and extra supplies had made it up the steep
trail. I leaned over the poor guy who was trying not to cry, half-high on the pain
medication I’d slipped him and groaning in pain.

“You’ll be alright, bud,” I said. “Just some crutches for a few months, is all.
It’ll all be good as new.”

He’d tried to reach for my hand, words slurring while a jumbled ‘thanks’ came out
of his mouth. I moved to stand back and bumped smack into Sherlock leaning down
over my shoulder.

“And she’ll say yes when you ask her to marry you if you accept that promotion at
your job,” he said quickly. “She wants to know that you’ll be stable and provide
for the both of you, and to be able to afford the larger apartment in the center of
town.”

The main frowned and looked up at him, squinting against the glare of the sun. “How
--?”

I looked over my shoulder. “Sherlock, what the hell –”

“And she disapproves of your hair dyed that color – let it go back to natural and
her ‘yes’ is practically assured.”

The man’s eyes kept falling shut as the other Rangers hoisted the stretcher into
the air. “You’re my guardian angel,” he barely mumbled at Sherlock as they started
to hike down, the still crying girlfriend following close at their heels once they
rejoined with the main trail.
I nodded and raised a hand at the other Rangers as they started to head down,
knowing I wasn’t needed for any more help beyond that point. Visitors were still
gathered in a huge crowd up at the peak and along the trail, watching the scene
with wide, shocked eyes the way you’d watch a car on fire in the middle of the
road. I knew that they’d probably been fixated on every one of my movements for the
past half hour – soaking up every detail of the scene for the stories they would
tell back home. Even after my colleagues had started carrying the visitor back down
the trail, more than thirty pairs of eyes had been steadfastly fixed on me.

But I wasn’t looking back at any of them.

Sherlock was standing five feet in front of me, eyes fixed on my face. My gloved
hands were covered in blood. I reached up to wipe the sweat from my forehead with
my arm beneath my rolled-up uniform shirt, still kneeling in the grass with my
supplies scattered around me on the terrain. Everything felt like it was moving too
slowly, trudging through a foggy, thick mud, after the burst of focused action I’d
just had to perform.

I squinted up at Sherlock. “How the fuck did you know all that?” I asked him,
quietly so no one else could hear. “His proposal and his job? The new apartment?” I
knew I was failing at keeping the stupid grin off my face.

He stared at me without smiling back, and I could feel his eyes slowly tracking
down my throat towards my chest. He was panting, and something about the look in
his eyes made my stomach feel tight and hot.

“I just looked closely at what was in front of me,” he finally said in a low voice.
A single bead of sweat was dripping down the side of his neck, rolling away from
the damp curls nestled behind his ear. Part of his uniform shirt had become
untucked from his pants, and the tiniest sliver of bare skin on his hip was peeking
out just above his belt.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I wondered what it would feel like to press my nose
into the sweaty curls, to lap up that single bead of sweat with my tongue. How warm
his skin would be at that place over his hip if I were to press just the pad of my
thumb to his bare skin.

And kneeling there in the grass, in front of a whole crowd of people, I suddenly
ached between my legs. I was wet, and I could feel a bead of it dripping down into
my boxers.

We stared at each other for a long moment, neither of us saying a word. The entire
rest of the earth fell away as I looked back into his eyes – deep grey and heavy,
with a focus in them I’d seen directed at me only once before – that moment out in
the backcountry, after I’d shoved an extra compass in the pocket of his pants,
right before he’d moaned at the back of his throat, right before I’d felt the hard
length of him pressed up against me, right before I’d felt that forbidden shiver of
want up my own spine.

Fingers were snapping in front of my face. I blinked hard and shook my head. Nick
was leaning towards me across the desk with his hand in front of my eyes.

“Did you just go and die on me for thirty seconds, Watson?” he asked while
laughing.

I cleared my throat and shifted to sit up straight in my chair, eternally grateful

that my beard was probably covering most of the blush on my cheeks. There was a
fresh damp spot on my boxers between my legs, and I shifted again so I couldn’t
feel the wetness against my bare skin.

I forced myself to smile and gently shook my head. “Sorry, Nick. Damn paperwork
must have put me into a coma.”

Nick huffed. “Don’t blame ya.” He shifted back onto the desk, wrapping his fingers
around his knee. “Now, anyways, speaking of getting you back outside. . .” he
paused and pulled at his long beard while squinting up at the ceiling. “Got a bit
of a project for you,” he said.

I folded my hands in my lap and nodded up at him. “Go on.”

“See,” he tilted his head. “Our wolf team’s gotta check up on some collar data much
farther out from the Road than they’ve been looking – Lestrade tells me way back
into Unit 29 up to the base of Igloo at least, and then some potential knew
activity – pack territories changing, or something like that, he said– about a
three full day hike back into Unit 23 through Unit 9.”

I nodded slowly and frowned, not seeing his point yet. “Ok. . .”

“See now, Lestrade and the kids are checking out on that lead they got up near
Igloo. Take them about two and a half days, I reckon, if they make good time on the
way back out of the valley.”

My palms started to sweat. “Right. . .”

“And Holmes. . .” Nick sat up straighter from his perch on the desk and cleared his
throat. “Well, Watson, I’ll just tell it straight. Lestrade told me the beginning
of this summer that Holmes would do all his field-work himself. But now it looks
like Holmes has refused to go out into the backcountry to research the site in
twenty-three unless you go with him. Lestrade came and told it to me this morning
before my rounds.”

I waited for myself to feel irritated or annoyed – for weariness to wash over me at
the thought of having to tag along behind a researcher on a multi-day trek, or for
self-pity to rise up in my chest, the need to ask, “Why not someone else?”

Instead a bright burst of unexpected joy settled just under my lungs. I could feel
my fingers twitch. I wanted to leap up from the desk, drive back to Toklat, and
bang on Sherlock’s door asking him if we could just leave right now.

Nick was looking at me with a cautiously hopeful expression – clearly wondering if

the fact he’d rarely seen me and Sherlock apart the past month meant I’d be ok with
this sudden unexpected assignment.

I took a deep breath and nodded down at my hands. “Okay,” I said.

Nick leaned forward. “Really?”

I shrugged, hoping he couldn’t feel the excitement already buzzing through my

limbs. “Sure. I mean, bit unconventional for a researcher to drag an Enforcement
Ranger along with them for field work, but . . . if you have the manpower to spare
me for a few days, I wouldn’t say no to a quick trip out to those glaciers. Been
years since I’ve been back there in twenty-three.”

Nick’s face lit up. He reached out to grab me by the shoulder. “Man, Watson, you’re
a saint,” he said. “God knows why, but it seems you’re the only person in three
hundred miles who can even handle the guy.”
A weird mix of defensiveness and pride settled in my chest. I moved to stand up,
shuffling the completed reports from the desk into my hands. “Must have the special
touch for it,” I said down at the desk. “Got years of practice from dealing with
all them grizzlies – all of you wimps calling me to deal with them whenever they
wander too close to Toklat.”

Nick barked out a laugh with his hands on his hips. “Tell you what, Watson, that
Brit scares me more than any Denali grizzlies ever have. Man told me yesterday that
the fish I ate for dinner the night before had gone bad – no fucking clue how he
ever knew I ate fish in the first place. But, don’t you know it, last night I was
sick something awful for hours.”

I held back the huge smile threatening the corners of my lips and ran my hand over
the back of my neck as I followed Nick out of the office. “Yeah, he can say weird
shit like that sometimes,” is all I said after him.

Nick spoke over his shoulder as he turned to go down one of the other halls. “You
got next Monday through Thursday to make sure he doesn’t get killed out there,” he
said. “And go ahead and bring me a backcountry report while you’re at it –
something I can pass on to the Backcountry office to save them a patrol trip.”

I called back, “Got it,” and waited for the sound of Nick’s footsteps to disappear.
I stood still for a moment in the middle of the empty hallway. I stared at my feet
– my old work boots covered in a day’s worth of dirt.

Nick’s words echoed in my mind, “ _Holmes has refused to go out unless you go with
him_.” My fingers twitched by my side – remembering the feel of Sherlock’s hand
beneath my own, that evening almost a month back when we’d watched the caribou
travel over the Road, and we’d somehow said everything without saying anything at
all.

I made a quick detour once I got outside over to the kennels, knowing that Lugnut
would immediately notice the stupid grin lighting up my face.

\--

Two days later, I decided I was going to kill Sherlock Holmes myself before we ever
even made it out into the backcountry.

I leaned down over my kitchen table with my hands on the rough wood. Open topo maps
and pencils were scattered over the surface, and my floor and couch were littered
with all of my backpacking gear spread out to be packed.

I bent my head. “Sherlock, for the last fucking time, you need to bring _food_ ,” I
said. I heard him huff from where he was standing with his arms crossed in the door
to my room, leaning against the doorframe casually while he scowled over all my
supplies.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous to bring food when you’re already demanding on bringing
all of this nonsense,” he said. He flung his hand out towards the mess. “A sleeping
pad?” he cried. “A portable stove? Really? Honestly, and everyone makes you out to
be the ultimate ‘man of the land’.”

I groaned and turned away to set some water boiling on the stove. “That tundra
beneath the tent will freeze your ass off without that sleeping pad – so no whining
to me when you wake up in the mornings and your fucking ass is a block of ice.”

He huffed again.

“And if you wanna go three days out there without a single hot thing to eat or
drink, be my guest.” I got down a fresh scoop of coffee and started to crank the
handle on my grinder. “You saw what happened the last time you woke me up without
coffee,” I said over the sound of the grinding beans. “You really wanna be around
that person for four days straight out in the wilderness?”

Sherlock sighed and reached out to flick at my pair of shoe spikes with his socked
toe.

“This is the definition of unnecessary,” he said under his breath. “I’ve gone more
than four days before without having to eat – there’s absolutely no reason why I
should have to lug it around with me now –”

“Oh really, and that other time, you were also strenuously hiking for miles?”

He gave me a sharp look and put his hands on his hips. “No,” he said. “That other
time I was strenuously hiking for _kilometers_.”

I raised my eyebrows and turned back to the boiled water to make my coffee. “Jesus
Christ, I’m gonna kill you before the bears even get the chance,” I muttered.

I practically felt his answering glare behind me. “You’re hardly the first Ranger
to threaten with me with that, and I doubt you’ll be the last. And yet, here I am.
Fully intact.”

A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. “I’m not the first Ranger to
threaten to murder you, then?” I asked. I heaped a spoonful of sugar into the
second cup of coffee without even thinking about it, by then so used to making an
extra cup for him that sometimes, on my days off where I was alone in my cabin, I
still got down two mugs before realizing I only needed one.

He mumbled something under his breath, too low for me to hear it.

I turned and handed him his cup of sweet coffee, curling my toes in my socks when
his fingers brushed against mine for a second too long.

“What’d you say?” I asked.

He sighed up at the ceiling, a big dramatic yawn. “I _said_ you’re almost as

irritating as the Ranger who banned me from Yellowstone.”

I choked on my swallow of coffee and struggled to breathe as I coughed. “You’ve

been _banned_ from Yellowstone?”

He rolled his eyes. “Utterly ridiculous and unnecessary. Why have a park filled to
the brim with geysers and then _not_ allow anyone – a scientist, most of all – to
get close enough to take a sample for further testing –”

I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard – huge, breathless laughs that
squeezed in my gut and made water brim over in my eyes. I wiped my forearm over my
face and tried to pull myself together. The mental image of Sherlock Holmes being
scolded after trying to dash towards the geysers was threatening to make me lose it
all again.

When I did look up, Sherlock was staring at me out of the corner of his eye. His
eyes were bright, and the corner of his lip was twitching, and I realized all in a
rush that he had told that story just to make me laugh. That knowledge did
something to the air in the room as we both stood there holding our mugs and
staring down at the mess of all my gear – turning it private and muffled against
the world and prickling over my skin.

I finally looked away when the moment turned too heavy, moving back to the maps on
the table and leaning over them again. I spoke down at my hands. “You know, if all
of this really is too much for you – not your usual method of going out there – I
could tell Nick you decided to go on your own –”

“You’re coming with me,” he interrupted. He said the words casually to the wall of
my cabin and took a quick sip of coffee after. I wanted to put my foot down and ask
him a million questions – ask him _why_ , and why he always did field work alone in
the past, and why he didn’t move away from my hand while we watched the caribou,
and why he rode all day in my truck, and why _me_.

Instead I nodded. “Right. Okay.” I stared at him across the room. “If I’m coming
with you, then, you’re bringing food.”

His shoulders sagged as he sighed. “I’ll bring two days’ worth,” he said.

“Five days, in case our trip extends –”

“Fine, three.”

“Four.”

“Three and a half.”

“ _Four_ , Sherlock.”

“That weight in my pack could be used for eighty-four other potential things,
should I provide you with the list?”

“Is starvation one of the things on the list?”

“Three and a half plus one extra snack.”

“Four, or I swear I’m not going.”

He huffed and stomped his foot. “Of _course_ you’re going. Implying that you would
back out now after I’ve explicitly requested your presence over something as
ridiculous as the amount of food –”

“You wanna try me?” My words came out deep and rougher than I expected. The air
changed. An odd tension hovered between us across the room, and I thought I heard
the slightest intake of his breath as his arms twitched. Suddenly, out of nowhere,
I wanted to feel him let out that gasp of air against the skin of my own neck, in
the small shadow beneath my jaw.

I cleared my throat to ease the air, shifting to stand upright and crossing my arms
over my chest. I felt self-conscious - embarrassed – as if my hands had somehow
just smashed the warm light that had been between us and smothered it away.

I waited for what felt like hours – waiting for him to argue some more, or tell me
to go fuck myself for thinking it was okay to boss him around, or ask me why the
hell my voice had sounded like I was about to pin him to the ground. My palms were
sweating.
Finally he looked over at me. My fingers tingled in relief when I saw he wasn’t
angry. There was mild irritation in his eyes, and something like teasing, but more
than anything, there was that same odd softness I’d seen him look at me with
sometimes in my truck, at the end of a long day checking wolf sites and doing
patrols, where I would roll down the windows and push in a tape, and as I navigated
us through the endless stretches of tundra at dusk back to Toklat, I would feel his
eyes flickering to the side of my face more than the distant mountain peaks beyond.

“Looks like I don’t have a choice, then, do I?” he said softly, then added,
“Ranger.”

I nodded, even as a strange warmth wound up my spine. “Deal,” I said back, so

quietly I could barely hear myself, and he lifted his coffee in agreement before
taking another sip.

\--

We set off on the earliest camper bus heading East, hefting our huge packs into the
back before grabbing two spots on the worn leather seats. Sherlock sat just in
front of me on the nearly empty bus, pulling down the window a few inches so the
air rushed in and ruffled his hair.

It was just past six in the morning, and I’d been awoken right at five to the sound
of Sherlock loudly declaring, “Where’s my coffee?” at the foot of my bed in the
dark. I’d slept that night in a long sleeve shirt in case that exact situation
occurred. And then, even when I knew that Sherlock Holmes was standing at the foot
of my bed, I’d groaned at him, and cursed under my breath, and then slipped out
from between my sheets and padded into the kitchen in my shirt and boxers. And I’d
been fully aware that there was nothing between my legs that time, and my chest had
grown oddly warm at the fact that I hadn’t felt any fear.

Sherlock had stood behind me, silently watching me make his coffee without any
words at all. I’d dressed, and we’d gathered up our packs while hardly exchanging
more than two words. The walk out to the Road felt muffled and private, as we
passed by sleepy cabins and took soft steps on the crunching gravel. For the first
time in a very long time, as reached the Road to catch the bus, the sock in my
boxers hadn’t felt like it was rubbing my skin raw.

I’d planned to use the bus ride out to go over our preferred route again in my head
– plan for any unexpected complications on our path, triple check we had all of our
supplies, mentally plan where we might want to stop and camp each night.

Instead I watched the wind in his curls for the whole hour-long drive to Unit 9,
wondering idly in the back of my mind what those curls would feel like against my
fingers – wound softly in the space between my thumb and my palm, or trailed across
my cheek, or held gently between my lips.

We grabbed our packs when the beginnings of Unit 9 came into view and signaled the
bus driver to let us off near one of the less steep drainages down the face of the
slope. He nodded at us silently and waved as we stepped off. I’d ridden his early
morning bus headed East probably more than fifty times, and still to that day I
didn’t even know his name.

Sherlock and I didn’t talk at all besides giving our bear calls as we climbed down
the slope, forcing our packs through thick, dense brush and hacking away at
branches as we slid down the rough dirt and dried up moss. It took nearly half an
hour to get all the way to the bottom, by which time my thighs were already shaking
with exhaustion and my cheek was bleeding from a cut by a sharp branch.

Sherlock didn’t look any better than I did – his curls were branching all
directions and half-filled with leaves, and the whole left side of his body was
streaked with dirt after he’d lost his balance on a loose log and fallen sideways
into the deepest part of the drainage.

He waited for me at the bottom, out in a clear part of dry river rock where we
could easily scan for any wildlife. He shifted his pack higher on his shoulders and
sneered at the slope behind us, uselessly trying to brush the dirt and mud from his
clothes.

“Yes, excellent route, Ranger,” he called out as I walked over. “I love feeling
like I’ve been hiking for hours when it’s only been thirty minutes.”

I huffed and gestured to the thin line of the Road. “You see anywhere else that
looks less steep where we could have climbed down?”

“Well _you’re_ the one who insisted on us starting in this Unit. A few miles back
there were plenty of easy flat connections with the Road.”

I gaped at him and laughed. “The whole reason we’re even in Unit 9 is because
you’ve insisted on getting to 23, and this is the quickest way through!”

He huffed again and brushed more stray twigs from the arms of his jacket rather
than answer me. The early morning wind was still icy and sharp, and I shivered as
it sliced across the back of my neck.

Suddenly, standing there watching Sherlock try to set himself to rights, something
warm and soft came over me, protecting me from the cold air. Without thinking, I
reached out with my own hand and wound my fingers into his curls, slowly pulling
out a few of the leaves one by one.

His curls were softer than I had ever imagined back in the bus, trailing across my
fingers like a velvet, silken moss.

He froze, and I realized what I was doing with horrible thud in my chest. My eyes
grew wide, and fear burned in my gut. I moved to snatch my hand back, already
starting to mumble an apology, when Sherlock silently shook his head, and instead
leaned gently into my palm.

He held my gaze for a breathless moment. “Thank you,” he said. He nudged his head
against my fingers for me to continue getting the leaves, and, after holding my
breath for a few more seconds, I finally did, watching my rough fingers weave
through the dark strands and knowing that his eyes were on my face the whole time.

I nodded when I was finished, and we started to follow our planned route, walking
along the river bed as far back into the Unit as we could until wildlife or water
forced us to get to higher ground. Our steps sounded hesitant, as if neither one of
us wanted to actually take the lead. My fingers prickled where I had touched him,
and I fought against the urge to wipe my hand off on my pants.

After a few minutes of walking side by side, with only the sound of our boots
crunching against the dry rocks, Sherlock reached into his pocket and drew out a
handful of fabric. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he unfolded a blue
scarf, lifting his chin so he could fit it around his neck. I did a double take.
“Is that . . . did you bring a cashmere scarf on a backpacking trip?”

Sherlock shot me a glance out of the corner of his eye. “I brought my _only_ scarf
on a backpacking trip where, according to you, I’ll ‘freeze my ass off’.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Don’t come and yell at me when that thing gets
damaged or lost,” I said. I kept walking, but soon I realized that he had stopped
behind me. I turned and looked back over my shoulder, already aching a bit at the
weight of my pack on my back.

I raised my eyebrow at him. Sherlock gave me an odd look. “I’m not going to lose it
or ruin it,” he suddenly said, as if he’d just come to a grand conclusion he felt
the need to announce.

I frowned. “Okay. . .”

He quickly walked towards me, pulling the scarf off his neck in one movement.
Before I could stop him he reached for my pack, undoing one of the zippers and
shoving the scarf inside. “You’re going to keep it safe for me,” he said.

I tried to yank my pack away from his hands. “Wait a fucking second – now you’re
not even going to wear it?”

He closed up the zipper with a forceful yank and stepped back, immediately starting
to walk ahead again through the river rock. He looked back at me and gestured his
hands. “Well, seeing as how you were so _concerned_ over its welfare,” he said with
a little bow. “Now you can focus on more important things like making sure we don’t
get eaten by bears, or die of starvation with our four days’ worth of food.”

I jogged to catch up to him and shoved him aside. “You’re an asshole,” I said,
laughing.

The look he gave me as we fell into step together was one that I couldn’t bring
myself to look away from, even though it burned down my neck like warm water. It
looked like safety – the first full breath I took after I crossed the border out of
South Dakota. It looked like the first time I ever wrapped a strip of tight cotton
around my chest.

The first time I ever put on my uniform. The first time I was called “sir.”

It looked like two hands resting together on top of a truck roof, neither one
moving away long after the wind had grown cold.

\--

That first day passed by in one smooth blur.

I never would have thought in a million years that backpacking with someone else
could be so enjoyable – almost indistinguishable from being alone, except there was
someone to nod agreement when I pointed out a new route. Someone to call out “pair
of moose north-east,” before I’d even spotted them grazing through the tundra
myself.

It was like every other time that summer we’d headed off into the wilderness,
leaving the Road and my truck at our backs and walking until we couldn’t see
another soul in sight. Except that day, an odd thrum beat down the length of my
legs that we weren’t going to return to the truck by the end of the day. We weren’t
going to retrace our steps and leave the wilderness behind us. Weren’t going to
part ways in the gravel lot at Toklat right before I headed to my cabin to eat a
silent dinner alone – the same way my dinners had looked nearly every night for the
last twenty years, and yet that day, as we walked to the beat of each other’s
steps, I suddenly ached in my chest at the thought of looking up at my kitchen
table to an empty chair.

We barely talked during that day once we got in the rhythm of our hike. We followed
the riverbed back into the land for miles – occasionally having to cut new paths up
onto the plateaus on either side, bush-whacking or crossing thick tundra to avoid
river forks or wildlife. Sherlock would stop every hour or so to investigate some
site or another, but he never ran off, and every time he stood up from inspecting a
spot of ground, he’d give me that same soft look again when he nodded that he was
ready to keep going.

By the time the sun was hanging heavy in the sky, threatening to spill down the
slopes of the glaciers even though we still had a few hours of summer daylight
left, we’d covered almost ten miles back along the river fork. My feet were
starting to ache, and my shoulders felt raw beneath my pack. I cleared my throat as
I scanned for a good open place to camp.

“Should stop near here for the night,” I said to Sherlock’s back. “We can cross
into twenty-three tomorrow about mid-morning. Should make good time if we rest.”

He nodded silently and immediately dropped his pack to the ground where he stood.
It took us only half an hour to get the tent set up. Without any speaking at all,
Sherlock found the best spots for our bear can and our cook site while I unrolled
the sleeping pad and bags inside the tent. The tent was nestled at the bottom of a
steep green slope, protected from the wind with good visibility stretching the
other direction across the river bed. I changed into a warmer jacket and my extra
pair of shoes before joining Sherlock at the cook site, where he was aimlessly
whittling at a piece of wood with his arms around his knees.

I boiled water over my little stove and dropped some of my mint tea into two metal
cups before passing him one. He took a sip and immediately sprayed it out over the
tundra.

“Christ, did you just boil a clump of moss and call it tea?”

It was the first words he’d said to me in well over an hour. I laughed and shook my
head, getting out the oatmeal, granola, and peanut butter we would have for dinner.

“What, anything that’s not fucking loose leaf ‘bergamot earl grey’ too lowly for
your tastes?”

He huffed. “You make me out to sound like some rich, aristocratic snob,” he
muttered.

I looked at him. “Well, aren’t you?” When he frowned I quickly added, “Rich?”

I thought of his suit that first day – of that insane phone he’d been using, the
fact he’d gotten tapes shipped out to him so quickly, the delicate smell of his
cologne.

He shrugged and looked back out across the tundra, slowly warming under the setting
sun like a golden mist sea. “My family are rich,” he said softly. “I assure you,
there’s quite a difference.”

I felt like I’d just been offered the key to a room – one I’d stared at from afar
for weeks but never dared try to enter. I took a deep breath and tried to keep my
voice sounding casual. “So. . . you’re not close with them?”

He huffed out a single laugh and flashed me a quick look. “About as close with them
as I expect you are with your own parents,” he said.

Immediately the last words from my dad flashed through my mind, as clear as if they
were being screamed out through the deep valleys at our backs. “ _No daughter of
mine’ll be a faggot under my own roof while I’m still alive,_ ” he’d cursed, then
he’d shot his gun once up into the air as I sprinted down the two-mile long dirt
road towards town, the fresh buzz cut I’d given myself that morning rubbing raw
beneath my hat.

I wanted to tell Sherlock that I doubted his relationship with his parents was
anything like that, but instead I asked the question I’d been dying to ask since
day one.

“Why wolves?” I said. When he was silent, I went on. “I mean. . . you look like you
should be in some university tower somewhere, studying, I don’t know . . .
chemistry.” I traced the long line of his neck out of the corner of my eye. “How’d
you end up all the way in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska tracking wolves?”

He was silent for a long time. Long enough that we’d both started to eat bites of
oatmeal in the thickening evening air, the swirls of steam rising up to join the
gathering cool mist. I’d never felt so comfortable with another person’s silence
before – so relaxed just to sit back and wait instead of dreading whatever they
were about to say. Finally, he set down the tin bowl in his hands on a nearby rock
and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Wolves are interesting,” he said, so softly I had to slow my breathing to be able

to hear him. Then he smiled, “I _was_ studying chemistry at Cambridge,” he said.
“Everything you’re probably imagining, fancy suits and old wooden buildings and all
that.”

His grey eyes slowly scanned the distance as he talked, but I couldn’t look away
from the sharp line of his jaw. He spoke as if the words were unfamiliar on his
lips – carefully forming each sound, like little puffs of fragile air. He went on
carefully, “The week before I was set to graduate – I was graduating two years
early –”

I chuckled. “Of course you were.”

He bumped my arm and flashed me a fake glare. “Anyways,” he went on, “One week
before the end of term, I found myself . . . Well, I had a bit of a rough night.”
He clenched his jaw, blinking hard as if he was fighting with himself to keep
talking. I leaned closer to him in the cool grass, shoulders barely touching. He
nodded once, as if he’d just made some internal decision. “I woke up outdoors, in a
little area of woods near the campus. Middle of the night, it was freezing. I just
remember looking up at the stars through the branches of the trees.”

I frowned, suddenly unable to picture the man beside me passed out in the middle of
the woods in the dark. “Celebrated so hard that night you just drank yourself into
falling asleep outside?” I asked him, trying to lighten the mood.

He didn’t smile, and an odd tension crept into his voice. “Something like that,” he
said. Something pulled at my chest, an ache to know more, but I let it drop,
leaning in to him again and softly saying, “Then?”

He nodded. “Well, once I realized what was going on, I saw I’d woken up to
something licking my face, and then an enormous wolf laid down with me, right by my
side. Stayed there the whole night while I drifted in and out. It was probably the
only thing that kept me from freezing there in the dirt.”

I glanced at him. “Hold on, I _know_ you know there aren’t any wolves in England.”

The corner of his mouth twitched up, and his eyes glowed as he looked my way.
“Correct,” he said. “About three whole days later I realized it must have been
someone at the university’s enormous pet dog. It had even been wearing a collar,
but . . . I wasn’t with it enough to put it all together.”

I laughed and leaned back on my hands into the grass. “But you thought it was a
wolf,” I said.

He smiled. “I thought it was a wolf.” He cleared his throat. “Next morning I spent
hours in the library reading everything I could about them. Their nature and their
habitat – the way their packs move and hunt. They were _interesting_. I hadn’t been
interested in anything in . . years. So. . .” He shrugged and held up his hands. “I
packed up my stuff and left. Never even sat for my last week of exams.”

I gaped at him. “You just left?”

He hummed. “I begged around for a bit trying to get my foot in the research door.
Finally someone introduced me to Gavin –“

“ _Greg_.”

“George. He was in the middle of a PhD on wolf behavior – I told him my tracking
ideas and he was the first person not to tell me I was verifiably insane. Now here
we are.”

I whistled low under my teeth, trying to absorb all of the information. “Here we
are,” I repeated. I licked my lips. “So, your family . . .”

He smirked. “Absolutely furious I’d ‘tarnished the family name’. Practically

disowned me on the spot when I left. Cut me off from everything. My insufferable
older brother is the only member of the family who still insists on knowing my
whereabouts. Works in the government. Practically _is_ the government, actually.
It’s disgusting how much he loves holding the strings behind the scenes.”

“That fancy phone,” I said, realization dawning. “The quick packages.”

Sherlock scowled but tilted his head. “He does have his occasional uses.”

The wind was picking up, and I moved to start gathering up the supplies from our
dinner. “So, wolves still interest you all these years later?” I asked down at my
hands.

When he didn’t answer immediately, I paused and looked over at him. He was looking
straight at me – that same expression I’d seen on his face just after I’d tended to
the guy on the Alpine Hike.

He held my gaze. “For a long time they were the _only_ thing that was interesting,”
he said, and the tone of his voice tore the breath clear out of my lungs. I stared
back at him, feeling like I’d die if I looked away. His eyes were so clear – deep
blue and piercing grey. I suddenly wanted them to see my bare skin below my clothes
– to trace the lines of my ribs, and understand every inch of the scars along my
chest. I wanted him to look at me like I was just as interesting as a speck of wolf
fur hidden in the grass. I wanted him to _look_.

I looked away after a long moment, rubbing my hand over the back of my neck. “Lucky
us that you’re still interested,” I said lamely. “The research you guys are doing
would have taken another team years.”

He was still staring at me. When he spoke again, it was if I hadn’t said anything
at all. “Nobody’s ever asked me that,” he said. “About the wolves – but you asked
me why.”

I shrugged, still gathering up our things so I wouldn’t have to look up into his
eyes. “Guess no one’s ever put up with you long enough to start to wonder why,” I
said.

I felt his gaze burning down my spine as he watched me shove the last of our
supplies into my bag, slamming the bear can lid shut and brushing the dirt from my
legs. Finally, he simply hummed, then quickly stood to help me make sure the site
was clear. He walked so close to my side that our arms brushed together as we
trudged back towards the tent. I didn’t step away.

I yanked off my jeans and pulled on long underwear over my boxers once we were
inside the tent. I left in the sock. He dressed facing the other way, pulling on a
thick thermal sweater and socks. I got silently into my sleeping bag, taking time
to adjust my layers and the zipper so I would stay warm, then I scooted to the
side, giving him half the sleeping pad to use.

He looked down at the empty space, then reached down to pull his own bag closer to
the other side of the tent. I frowned as he scooted away.

“Got half the sleeping pad cleared for you,” I said, as if he hadn’t just looked
down and seen it.

He spoke over the rustling of his clothes as he crawled inside his bag. “Pointless.
We’re much better off if we each have enough room than if we’re smashed together.”

I watched him struggle to set his sleeping bag to rights. “You’re gonna freeze,” I
said. “That tundra’ll freeze your ass right through the bottom of the tent.”

He huffed as he settled down, facing the other direction. “I’m perfectly fine in my
layers. I will not freeze.” He said the word ‘freeze’ as if the word itself had
personally offended him.

I curled up in my sleeping bag, listening to the sounds of the earth settling just
outside the tent. “Suit yourself,” I said.

I didn’t fall asleep for a long time after that. I stayed wide awake, blinking
through the slowly gathering darkness until the summer sun finally set around
midnight. I stared at the long line of his back through the sleeping bag against
the tent. I watched him shiver, and I knew that he was also awake. The sound of our
breaths mixed together in the humid air of the tent.

And I wanted to reach across the foot and a half of space between us and grab onto
his arm. I wanted to pull him closer to my body so he would be warm. But I didn’t.

\--
 

I woke up early in the morning with the full dawn sun, stretching in my sleeping
bag and rubbing the exposed parts of my face that were freezing cold. I dressed
inside my bag, pulling back on my worn jeans and a thick jacket to stay warm.
Sherlock was dead asleep as I stepped over him and walked out of the tent. Only the
top of his forehead and his curls poked out from inside his sleeping bag.

The air outside was sharp and clear. I breathed in a deep lungful of the morning
mist, feeling it settle like heavy, clean water through my bones. The earth was
fragile and still – like a painting on thin silk that would tear and break if I
made too loud a noise. I smiled as I watched a young caribou bound across a hill
far off in the distance. Its little ears pierced the sky as its hooves danced
through the swirling fog. I watched him until he finally disappeared out of sight,
then I splashed some freezing water on my face and through my hair to wake up.

I was already crouching by our cook site and boiling water for our coffee when I
heard Sherlock’s footsteps shuffle up behind me. He plopped down with his sleeping
bag still wrapped around him and wordlessly held out a hand.

“Not ready yet,” I said, nodding down at the coffee. His hand stayed out. “Don’t
care,” he mumbled.

I shrugged and poured some of the hot water into a mug and placed it in his
outstretched hand. He gulped it down immediately, wincing as the hot water burned
down his throat.

I stared at him as he tossed the empty mug down into the grass and shivered in his
bag. “Your throat still intact after that?” I asked him.

He burrowed deeper into the bag. “I wouldn’t have needed it if you had picked a
place to camp that was actually warm,” he muttered.

I laughed up at the sky then began to pour my own cup of instant coffee. The rich
smell instantly filled the thick, foggy air. “I told you so,” I said as I held my
own cup up to my face and inhaled. “If you don’t wanna freeze your ass off tonight,
you can just share the sleeping pad like a normal person.”

He mumbled something I couldn’t make out as he continued to shiver by my side. His

curls were wild, poking out in every direction from the top of his head, and there
were lines under his eyes and on his cheeks from where the fabric of his sleeping
bag had creased his face.

I shook my head at him and laughed again, handing over my own cup of coffee so he
could take a sip. I suddenly had the feeling that I was the first human on earth to
see him like this – still sleep soft and ruffled, his mind not yet blazing sharp.

“I promise I won’t let you freeze tonight,” I told him gently. I watched him gulp
down the rest of my coffee even though I’d only gotten one sip.

He looked at me quickly as he handed back the empty cup. “I’ll hold you to that,
Ranger,” he said, and the gaze we shared went on for a moment too long.

The rest of that day passed much like the one before. We packed up camp quickly and
headed up one of the nearby slopes, trying to gain higher ground based on some
pawprints Sherlock had spotted late the previous day. Again, we barely talked, and
again, our footsteps fell into a rhythm beside each other. Sherlock stopped much
more frequently that day – getting out his magnifying glass and ruler as he crawled
across the ground and muttered to himself under his breath. I spent half the day
just watching him, sprawling in the nearby grass, lazily scanning the horizon for
any bears but mostly watching the curve of the back of his long neck.

That night, as we once again climbed inside the tent to sleep, there was an odd
tension buzzing in the claustrophobic air– one that hadn’t been there at all the
night before. I was achingly aware of his every move as he pulled on his warmer
clothes to sleep – the bend of his knees as he slipped on his socks and the way his
lean chest twisted as he adjusted his thick sweater over his arms. I tried not to
stare at him as I settled into my own sleeping bag, moving to the side so I only
took up half the sleeping pad beneath me. My breathing felt dangerously loud in my
ears, taking up the entirety of the small tent and filling it with the sound of my
lungs. I watched Sherlock carefully slip into his own bag, slowly, as if he was
trying to make the simple process take hours.

When his legs were fully inside, he stayed sitting upright in the tent. He looked
down at me, eyes flickering quickly over the empty space by my side. I felt that I
was about to make a decision that would rumble in the core of the earth – that
would cause the mountains outside to either rise to the heavens or crumble to ash.

I looked up at him, and I nodded.

He scooted close to my side, lying down so the full lengths of our bodies were
pressed together within our bags. For a long time, there was just silence. My body
trembled at the places where we touched, as if his skin was pure fire seeping
straight into my skin beneath my clothes. I could smell him – the mix of a day’s
worth of sweat and damp dirt, the earthy moss of the tundra that had baked under
the sun on the skin of his hands.

I was shocked when I felt myself start to drift off to sleep. I’d expected to lie
awake the entire night with my heart beating, terrified that somehow Sherlock’s
hand would slip inside my sleeping bag and _know_. That I would wake up to find him
gone, or wake up to learn I had clung to him in my sleep.

Just when I was almost pulled under to the soft lull of his breathing, Sherlock
spoke in a whisper, staring up at the tent ceiling.

“That night I told you about yesterday,” he said. “The night I woke up in the
woods. . .”

His quiet voice filled every inch of the tent, draping over my body like an extra
layer of warmth. He was silent for a long time, and I didn’t dare to move or speak.
He shifted closer to me, just barely, and I didn’t move away.

I heard him lick his lips. “I wasn’t drunk,” he said. “I’m a drug addict. I was
high on cocaine.”

The air shattered. I felt the shards of it piercing into my lungs, piece by piece.
I hoped that I hadn’t made a noise of pain at the sensation, that Sherlock didn’t
know that my throat was choking as I imagined him cold in the woods and alone. His
spine was ramrod straight beside me, and I could feel the tension in his muscles
like blocks of ice.

I forced myself to speak. “Are you still on it?” I asked, hoping my voice sounded
steady and clear.

“No,” he said quickly. “I’ve been clean for twelve years.”

Relief clenched in my chest, so fiercely that I felt my eyes prickle with water. I
didn’t know what to say. I scooted closer to him, until my toes to my chest were
pressed against his tense side. I let my cheek rest on the thick sweater covering
his shoulder. It rasped softly against my beard.

“You won’t be cold tonight,” I finally said. He exhaled a long sigh, and I felt the
tension immediately leave his body. He relaxed his spine, curling up his legs so he
fitted perfectly alongside me.

“I’ll hold you to that, Ranger,” he whispered back, right as I was on the cusp of
falling asleep. And later, through my dreams, as I floated endlessly on a vast warm
sea, I thought I heard more words whispered warmly against my ear – so clear it
felt impossible that they were only a dream and not real.

“ _Thank you,_ ” I heard, and I felt soft curls trail over every inch of my naked
skin.

\--

I woke up feeling heavy and warm. The sun was just starting to rise, pouring
through the thin walls of the tent and illuminating the specks of pollen floating
in the air. Condensation dripped thickly down the thin canvas sides, and a splash
of humid air fell softly onto my cheek.

And I realized, all at once, that Sherlock’s arm was wrapped tightly around my
waist. He was pressed up against my back, curled completely around my body. I felt
his puffs of warm breath against the back of my neck, and a lock of his curls
brushed against my ear, and his knees molded into the space behind my own through
the thick layers of our bags.

I waited and blinked for what felt like hours, terrified to move out of fear that
it was real but desperate to prove to myself that none of it was a dream. A bird
sang in the distance, greeting the morning air. I heard the soft pads of hooves
crunching through the tundra outside the tent – knowing from years of listening
that it was just a caribou and not a bear.

Sherlock shifted in his sleep, and his arm pulled me closer. I sucked in a breath
as it dawned on me that all of it was very, very real.

I waited for the rush of panic – for my muscles to tense up and my mind to scream
at me to run. For my hands to start shaking, and my breath to wheeze.

And instead all I wanted was to make the layers between us disappear. I wanted to
feel the hairs on his forearm brush against the skin of my stomach, and to feel how
his thighs would twitch against mine. I wanted him to taste my skin and kiss the
hair on my face in the morning cold.

I wanted, like I’d never wanted anything like that before in my life, and I also
knew, with an aching thud, that I would never, ever have it. That the moment his
hand traveled down the hair on my stomach, the moment he reached between my thighs,
that it would be over.

I knew that my clothes and sleeping bag were probably too thick for him to be able
to feel that there was too much empty space beneath my boxers, the same way I
couldn’t feel the line of his cock pressed into my lower back. I knew that when he
woke up he would probably whip his hand away – apologize and blame it all on the
cold, then move on with the day. Pretend that nothing happened, maybe cut our trip
a day short. Tell me it was all a misunderstanding, and that he may be gay, but not
for me. Not for a beat-up Ranger who lived in the middle of nowhere and kept his
thoughts to himself – who’d spent more nights in his life waking up next to his dog
than next to another human being.

I knew I just had that one chance, that one moment to wake up in his arms. A few
blissful minutes where I could pretend before it all disappeared into smoke.

So I took that chance, grabbing onto it fiercely with both hands.

I sighed through my nose, and I let myself press back against the warmth along his
front, relaxing into the line of his body until I imagined I could feel the muscles
of his chest against my back. I shifted my head until his lips were right behind my
ear, breathing hot air against the exposed skin on the side of my neck.

He was so warm. It felt like melting into a bed of soft grass – like getting home
from a long day of hiking and standing under the spray of a hot shower. It felt
like every bone in my body was correct, like the morning I’d woken up on a hard,
thin cot in the middle of New York City and seen myself in a mirror for the very
first time with a flat chest.

I shut my eyes tightly, and I tasted the air, and I just breathed.

He sucked in a quick breath behind me. His hand twitched on my waist, then quickly
lifted up into the air. He was awake.

I froze.

Everything I had planned to say – all of the apologies and the quick words – the
way I’d been planning to just sit up and brush it off, start rolling up my sleeping
bag while hoping he wouldn’t be too angry – suddenly, I couldn’t do any of it.

I waited, holding my breath and keeping every bone of my body straight and still.
There was an inch of space between our bodies where there hadn’t been before, and
the backs of my thighs felt empty and cold at the absence.

I waited, feeling dread pump through my veins like heavy blood. Then, like the
first breeze of spring through the window of my cabin in Talkeetna, he suddenly
sighed against my neck, and his arm wrapped once more around my waist, and he
pulled me back against him in one smooth motion.

My throat closed up. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on his heartbeat against
my back, imagining the soft thuds even though I couldn’t really feel them. We
stayed that way for a long time, huddled together in the pocket of warmth – long
after the sun had fully risen, and the dawn outside had slipped into day.

Right when I was finally about to break the silence and say we should get going,
his thumb brushed softly against the front of my thick shirt.

“You kept your promise, Ranger,” he whispered. His voice was rough and low.

My heart raced. “What was that?”

He pulled me even closer to himself, and I felt the press of his cold nose rubbing
against my neck. “I wasn’t cold at all,” he said, and he held me for one more
moment before slowly sliding his hand away.

“Should start if we want to reach all the research sites,” he said, and I ignored
the ache of disappointment in my chest as I nodded, sitting up without looking at
him to start getting ready to pack up the tent.

We didn’t speak again until I was pouring out our morning coffee, high up on a
bluff where we’d pitched our tent that night. I was looking out over the endless,
rolling tundra, watching the mist hover above the tops of the small trees, swirling
around the mountain peaks before fading into the purple air.

Sherlock came up beside me and I handed him his mug. He took a long sip, standing
close enough that our shoulders touched.

“I’ve seen a lot of your national parks,” he finally said, speaking out at the far
distance. He took another sip. “But this one is by far the most beautiful.”

I wanted to turn to him and press my cheek into the warm crook of his neck. Instead
I took my own sip of coffee, trying to hide the fact my fingers were shaking. “I
agree,” was all I said, but I felt like I was saying so much more.

That third day was different, and it was also entirely the same. It wasn’t awkward
or tense, and it wasn’t bright and new either. It was the same as every other time
I’d walked beside Sherlock Holmes through Denali, and yet every second of that day,
I also knew what his body felt like when he was asleep. I knew how his chest fitted
behind mine, and the exact weight of his arm across my waist.

I knew he hadn’t pulled away.

That third night, when we crawled into our tent after a full day of research near
the foot of the glaciers, there was a slow softness to his movements which I’d
never seen before. He settled down beside me before I was even fully in my sleeping
bag. The sound of his sigh washed over me like a dream.

And that night, I was the one who wrapped my arm around his waist. Who pressed my
cheek against his neck, and felt the warmth of his spine against my chest. We
didn’t zip up our sleeping bags, some silent agreement to lay them on top of us
like a large blanket instead. I actually felt his heartbeat against my palm through
his sweater. I felt his thighs twitch as they settled against mine. I held him, as
if the simple weight of my arm could keep the rest of the world away – as if the
press of my arm against the curves of his hip bone was the most intimate act any
man had ever performed.

And I wasn’t wearing the sock beneath my long underwear and my boxers. And I didn’t
move away when he eventually pressed his hips back against mine.

“You warm enough?” I finally asked him, needing to say something just to prove to
myself that it was real.

He nodded, making it so his curls brushed across my face. Then he reached up to

place his palm on the skin of my wrist across his stomach, pushing up the sleeve of
my shirt so he could touch the bare skin.

\--

When I woke up in the morning, he was gone.

I flung out my arm to double check that the space next to me was really empty. His
sleeping bag was freezing, and his shoes and socks were missing from where he’d
placed them the night before.

I swallowed hard over a dry throat. “Sherlock?” I called out. My voice was barely
audible, so I cleared it and tried again. “Sherlock? You outside?”

There was no answer. Not even a ruffle in the grass to let me know he was nearby. I
felt the area next to me again – it was far too cold for him having just gone near
the cook site to pee. I somehow couldn’t imagine that he would be up cooking
breakfast – as if the day before had established some sort of understanding that
that morning we were meant to wake up together again, with him in my arms.

But he was gone.

Panic shattered through my body. My skin went numb. I leapt up to my feet without
even thinking and yanked on my jeans before shoving my feet into my boots. I opened
the tent so quickly I nearly ripped the zipper. I scanned across the horizon once I
was outside, trying to see through the fog my breath was creating.

“Sherlock!” I called out again, and still no answer. He wasn’t by our bear can or
the cook site – nowhere in the vast horizon was there a hint of long legs or dark
curls. I cursed under my breath and started running in a random direction,
sprinting faster than I could remember doing in a long time. The wrongness of it
all settled like poison in my blood. My heart raced, faster than my lungs could
even keep up.

I ran up a nearby slope towards the bluff, scrambling up loose rocks to try and
reach the peak to get a better look. My tongue was numb and dry as I cupped my
hands around my mouth and called his name again. All I heard in response was the
echo of my own voice back. I wildly scanned the peaks and valleys of the glaciers
surrounding me, desperately hoping to catch a glimpse of him – praying with
clenched hands that he wasn’t lost somewhere or hurt – that he hadn’t decided to do
something stupid like start off without me or his pack. That he hadn’t woken up
with my arm around him, holding him close, and pressed back against my body, and
suddenly realized that I was all wrong. That he hadn’t really meant for those
nights to happen. That he needed to leave.

There was movement out of the corner of my eye, about a half-mile away down the
steep side of a bushy drainage. I nearly moaned out loud with relief. Sherlock was
crouching in the brush, slowly trying to climb his way up the loose rock. My body
relaxed in a great sigh. I could walk out to him and yell at him for going on a
stupid morning hike by himself. I could take his hand and lead him back to our camp
site and make him his coffee and everything would be right.

Then I saw what he was creeping towards.

An enormous male grizzly stood at the peak of the steep drainage, pawing at a lump
of fur on the ground and sniffing it with its nose. Even from that far away, I
could tell it was a dead wolf. And Sherlock was trying to climb directly towards
the grizzly who hadn’t yet realized he was just twenty feet away.

My heart leapt in my throat. I started sprinting wildly in his direction down the
slope, realizing in the back of my mind that I’d left my bear spray and all my
supplies behind. I tripped and fell hard on a thick, stiff branch, tumbling a few
feet down some gravel and tearing my jeans at the knee. I didn’t even realize I had
fully fallen until I was already back up on my feet and running, madly trying to
throw together a plan in my mind. Sherlock was still slowly making his way up the
slope, moving underneath the layer of brush while the bear started to tear apart
the carcass with its teeth. I could see the blood seeping into the tundra around
its feet.

When I was about two hundred feet away, I crawled up onto a boulder, trying to make
myself visible above the thick brush of the clearing. I couldn’t feel my body, and
my blood roared in my ears. Without thinking I cupped my hands around my mouth and
started to scream.

“I’m human!” I called out. I waved my arms above my head and jumped up and down.
“Hey bear! I’m human! Get out of here and leave it! Hey!”

At the sound of my voice, Sherlock immediately flinched and looked behind him. In
one single second he lost his footing on the slope, and I watched, frozen in place,
as he tumbled down the drainage, sliding down loose rock and getting whacked by the
bushes. The bear heard him fall, and started to run towards the slope, peering over
the edge to try and spot its new prey.

“Hey!” I screamed out even louder. My voice was wild - shrill and hoarse. “Hey
leave it, bear!” I yelled. “Leave it! Get on, scram!”

I started walking slowly towards it as I continued waving my arms above my head.

The bear looked at me, then looked back down the drainage to where Sherlock clung
desperately at the edge of a ledge, about fifteen feet up from the ground and
hanging on to the root of a thick branch.

“Leave it!” I screamed again. The bear rose up on its hind legs and looked at me
across the valley. I desperately grabbed a huge branch by my feet and waved it in
my arms, trying to make myself look as huge as possible.

“Hey bear! Hey!”

The bear dropped back to all fours and looked at me for another moment, then he
turned, sniffed once at the wolf, and started walking away from the steep ledge,
half-running away back across the open tundra. I kept yelling and waving my arms
until he was far out of sight. Even when I couldn’t see him, I waited another few
minutes, desperately hoping I wouldn’t see him start to wander back.

When the horizon stayed clear, I dropped the branch in my hands and started to run.
I was breathless. I barely even saw where I was sprinting as my feet carried me
towards Sherlock, where he was still trying to pull himself back up over the ledge,
legs and feet scrambling for purchase against the tumbling rock.

“Sherlock, hold on,” I called out as I neared him. I climbed up around a smoother
side of the slope, trying not to fall as I inched closer to where he was hanging. I
could barely breathe.

“Hang on, Sherlock, I’m here. I’m here.” I kept saying it, over and over, as if the
power of my words alone would keep his hands gripped tightly around the branch. I
realized in the back of my mind that my voice sounded much higher in my panic –
uncontrolled and raspy as I called out to him again and again. A voice I hadn’t
heard coming from my own mouth in nearly twenty years.

I didn’t have time to care about the fact my voice was practically giving me away.
I got myself good leverage above him on the slope, then I dug in my heels and
reached down to grab for his hands. I gripped his wrists and pulled harder than I
ever had in my life, grunting with the effort as I slowly pulled him back up. When
his feet finally got a good hold on the rock, he heaved himself up and over then
collapsed next to me on his chest. He was panting, and I could see that his hands
and arms were shaking hard.

“Come on, gotta move,” I said, hefting him to his feet. “Can’t stay here if that
bear comes back.”

I didn’t wait for his answer before pulling him along behind me by the wrist, not
slowing down even when he stumbled on the uneven ground. I kept hold of his hand,
yanking him and jogging away from the carcass as quickly as possible. I kept
waiting for him to argue with me as we ran back towards camp – tell me that he
needed to go back and study the site, or for me to leave him the hell alone, or for
him to tell me that my actions were unnecessary in the extreme.

He didn’t say any of those things. He kept following behind me, panting for breath
as I dragged him along the whole half-mile back to our tent. When we reached the
open clearing of our campsite, I flung his wrist away from my hand. An explosion of
panic and fury were flooding through my veins – that, and something that felt a lot
like sheer, breathless terror.

I turned to him where he stood with his hands on his knees and let loose. “What the
fuck were you thinking?” I cried out. My voice echoed harshly across the valley.
“Sneaking up on a bear with a carcass? A fucking grizzly bear that was about to
feed? Are you insane?”

I couldn’t stop screaming. The words poured out of me as I paced in front of him,
needing to stare at him to remember he was alive while also unable to look at him
for even one second. He was watching me the way a young caribou would watch a wolf
off in the distance, hunched over in his spine and with only a small cut on his
cheek to show what just happened.

My lungs screamed. “You could have _died_ , Sherlock! What would you have done if I
hadn’t woken up and noticed you were gone? What was your plan – did you even think
at all or did you just see a fucking wolf and run towards it? In all my years as a
Ranger I’ve never seen anyone do something so absolutely insane. What were you
_thinking_?”

I was panting for breath. He stood there the whole time not saying a word back,
hunching his shoulders while his eyes watched me pace back and forth. I wanted him
to argue with me. Wanted him to yell back and push me away – to tell me that I
shouldn’t have woken up with him in my arms, and that I was keeping him from his
research, and that he never wanted to go hiking with me again. I wanted him to
fight.

But he didn’t.

I stormed away from him, still hurling curses at him under my breath. I intended to
walk away. To leave him behind me while I packed up the tent and forced us to
leave. Instead I only took two steps away then pulled at my hair.

“God, you’re a _fucking_ idiot,” I moaned out. Then I turned around, rushed back to
him, took his face in my hands and kissed him.

His lips were so soft.

It was all I could think about, all I could notice, as my lips smashed against his
and our breaths mixed together. He tensed for a moment, holding his breath in his
lungs, then he instantly went pliant under my hands, his spine melting towards me.
It could have lasted three seconds, or it could have lasted three hours. His cheeks
were cold under my hands, and his jaw strong and firm. His mouth tasted like sleep
and coffee and mountain air. I moved my lips against his again, wanting to feel
them warm and wet beneath my own, and a small sound escaped his throat, something
like a sigh.

Then I realized what I was doing with a sickening jolt, one that slammed into my
chest and nearly knocked me over.

I flinched away and ripped my hands back from his face, walking backwards so
quickly I nearly tripped over my own feet. My mind was racing, and everything
before me looked foggy and blurred.
“God, I’m sorry,” I rushed out. I rubbed my hands over my mouth. “I’m so sorry. I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean to –”

He stood there blinking with his mouth half-open. His lips glistened from the
wetness from my own mouth. Then he shook his head and took a step towards me,
reaching out his hand.

I stepped back again. “Please, I’m so sorry. I didn’t –”

“It’s alright,” he said. His voice was breathless like air.

I nearly laughed. “It’s _not_ alright,” I said. My voice sounded frantic. “It’s not
– I didn’t mean to.” I tried to breathe and rubbed a hand over my eyes. “God, I
shouldn’t have done that. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have –”

“I said it’s alright,” he said again. He reached out, and this time his hand landed
on my arm. He gripped me softly. “It’s alright –”

“You don’t know,” I said, the words ripping from me before I could stop them. “You
don’t understand. I can’t . . . It’s _not_ alright.” I was gasping for breath. I
shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see his face. “I’m not . . . Sherlock, I’m not .
. . I’m not really –”

“John,” I heard. His hands were on my shoulders. It was the first time he had ever
said my real name, and the sound of it landed like water in the back of my throat.

“I’m not –” I tried again, but he shook me gently with his hands.

“John,” he said again, and his voice was calm and gentle. I opened my eyes when he
was silent, forcing myself to focus on his face. He was leaning down towards me,
looking into my eyes. There was a sadness in them, one that clenched in my gut.

There was also hope.

He moved one hand to my jaw, gently resting over my beard. He took a slow breath.
“John, I know,” he said softly.

Nothing made sense. I clenched my lips together and tried to stay standing. I shook
my head against his palm. I tried again to speak, one last attempt to stop
everything from falling apart. My voice was shaking. “But you don’t know. I’m not
really a –”

“You are.” He held my face with both hands. “John, I know. I _know_.”

I wanted to believe him more than anything I’d ever felt in my whole entire life.
More than I ever even wanted to get on that plane to New York. I wanted to believe
that he knew, that he _knew_ , and that he was still holding my face in his hands.

I wanted . . .

“Please,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. His eyes were full and pleading. He
licked his lips. “Please, John, kiss me again,” he said in a whisper.

I looked into his eyes for another long moment, trying to read everything in the
clear, pale blue. His eyes looked familiar, the way Lugnut’s did that first time he
ever squirmed in my arms. They looked like that first time I ever put the sock
between my legs, and I zipped up my jeans, and held my hand there, and felt like it
had been there all along.
I wanted to ask him how he knew, and why he knew, and when. I wanted to ask if he
understood what was hidden beneath my clothes, if he realized that nobody else had
ever known, and if he wanted to see my bare skin. I wanted to ask him everything.

But more than any of those things, I looked at him, and I believed him.

“Sherlock,” I whispered. His name tasted like clean water flowing over my lips. He
closed his eyes as I reached up shaking fingers to hold his jaw. He sighed, and I
leaned forward, up on to my toes, and I kissed him again.

That kiss was slow. I felt as each new part of my mouth touched his own, as my lips
traced the lines of his, and as his breath fanned across my tongue. His hands were
on my back, holding me close against him until I couldn’t feel any air at all
between our bodies.

I let the kiss take me.

It washed over my bones and made my muscles go loose. It settled in my chest

pressed against his so I could feel his heartbeat along my own. It moved my hand to
trace around the soft curve of his ear, stroking down his throat to feel his warm,
fluttering pulse. He breathed deeply against me, and I opened my lips to taste him.
It was the most intimate way I had ever touched another human being in my life.
Over forty years, and I had never really tasted another man’s mouth so gently with
my own. Had never really held him, or heard the flutter of his eyelashes, or felt
the line of his jaw. I had never really _kissed_.

Not like that.

He pressed another soft kiss to the corner of my mouth, humming as his lips stroked
gently across my beard. My lips were wet and cold in the air without the warmth of
his mouth. He moved his hand around from the line of my spine to my chest, placing
it right over where my heart was racing like mad.

We kept our foreheads together, sharing humid air as he spoke. “I really am an

idiot,” he whispered.

I stroked along his jaw with both my thumbs and gave a breathless laugh. “Why is
that?” I said back. My voice was unrecognizably low and calm.

He kissed my cheek again. “Two reasons. First, I didn’t follow the number one rule
of ‘listen to the Ranger’.”

I laughed and stroked my nose along his, holding him close by the back of his neck
as if I was afraid he would run away.

“Second,” he went on. “I’ve spent the last nine weeks convincing myself that you
were never, not in a thousand years, going to be interested in me,” he said.

Something fluttered in the back of my throat – a sudden rush of hot longing that I
might have lived my whole life without knowing the feel of Sherlock Holmes’ lips
against mine. I held him closer, pressing my cheek against his. I felt him swallow.

“I think I wanted to kiss you from the first second you climbed up into my truck,”
I said. The admission felt like clouds parting in the sky to reveal the sun.

I pressed my lips to his jaw, dragging them slowly towards his ear. “Sherlock,” I
whispered into his skin, simply because I _could_. He shivered beneath my hands and
said, “fuck,” under his breath. The sound of it settled under my skin like smooth
fire, licking up my spine and putting an ache between my legs. For the first time
in a long time, I didn’t clench my thighs together to try to stop it.

I still had a smile on my lips as I kissed him again, groaning a bit as he

immediately opened his mouth to let in my tongue. It rushed through my body – the
warmth of his breath, and the taste of his lips. The soft vibration as he moaned
against my mouth and let me press inside of him. Let me run my fingers through his
hair, and lick deeply into his mouth, and hold him by the hips so I could feel the
curve of his bones beneath my palms.

He _let_ me.

He let _me_.

After a long time, he finally pulled back to breathe. He was panting softly beneath
my hands, and his lips were full and wet. I wanted to lick them. His eyes were
closed, and I stroked his cheek with my thumb until they opened. They were bright
and clear, utterly fixed on my face in the middle of Denali.

I didn’t know what to say. For a moment my mind raced trying to think of what I
could possibly say to him - whether to thank him, or beg him to stay. To tell him
that he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen – that I would happily spend the
rest of my summers watching him study tiny wolf paw prints in dried mud. To ask him
if he realized he was the only human being alive who really knew. If he fully
understood that I had expected to go through my entire life alone – to never again
feel someone’s hands holding me when I came awake. If he knew what an impossible,
unthinkable reality it was to have the taste of his lips still hovering on my
tongue.

Then I realized, as I looked into his soft, calm face, that I didn’t have to say
anything at all, not like that. I ran my hand through his curls and roughed them up
a bit. “Got ten miles to hike today,” I said. “Should start now unless we want to
be racing against the sun.”

He smiled and gently rolled his eyes. “Ever the Ranger,” he said. He took my hand
and lifted it to his mouth, pressing his lips against my palm while he closed his
eyes in a brief kiss. He held on to my hand even after letting it fall, and I knew
there was one last thing I needed to say to him before we packed up the tent.

I gripped his fingers in mine. “Never, and I mean _never_ , go off on your own like
that again,” I told him.

He nodded with serious eyes, rubbing his thumb along the back of my hand. “John,”
he said quietly in the breeze, “I promise you.”

\--

Sherlock dropped to his knees and kissed the dirt when we arrived back at the Road
nearly nine hours later.

The whole hike back had been something like a dream, where I was floating across
the tundra with him close by my side – where I could reach out and touch his hand,
or feel his fingers run briefly through my hair.

Where I’d waited for him after crossing a flooded fork of the river and then pulled
him into my arms, soaking wet and kissing him there on the shore just because I
could. Where we hadn’t said anything important at all, and yet every time his hand
touched mine had felt like a deep promise – a secret that I knew wouldn’t stay
hidden out in the wilderness to wither and die.

I laughed at him as I plopped my pack down beside his along the Road, flinging
myself down to rest against it as we waited for the next West-headed bus. I rubbed
my hands over my tired face, scratching at my beard. I wanted a shower almost more
than I wanted a nice, hot meal.

“You miss civilization that badly?” I asked him as he kicked off his hiking boots
and loudly cracked his toes.

He pointed out at the Road. “You call this civilization?” he said. “Most people in
London you plopped right here would think they’d landed on some godforsaken,
desolate planet.”

I looked over at him, and suddenly my breath was taken away. I looked at his
matted, sweaty curls, and the flush in his cheeks, the way he was moving his neck
to crack it as he relaxed against his pack. I couldn’t stop the smile on my lips as
I looked at him.

He glared back. “What?” he huffed. “You going to spend the next hour defending the
wonders of your homeland to me?”

I grinned even wider and shook my head. “Just looking at you,” I said. I sat up to
reach over and take his face into my hands – kiss him again to prove to ourselves
that what had happened wasn’t being left behind out in the wilderness. But just
then an East-bound bus came barreling around the corner. An idea flashed into my
head – a desperate, sudden need. I raised my hand to flag it down, bending over to
lift my pack.

Sherlock frowned, shielding his eyes with his hand as he studied the bus. “Don’t
tell me you’re so head over heels for me that you’ve forgotten your East from
West.”

I held out a hand to yank him to his feet. “No, you self-centered ass. I changed my
mind. We’re gonna head East.”

When he didn’t move, I grabbed his arms and hauled him up to stand, shoving his
pack into his arms before heading towards the waiting bus.

“Care to enlighten me anytime soon?” Sherlock asked from behind me. He was
practically stomping his feet. I waited to answer until we were seated in the back
of the bus, after I’d given a quick overview of our trip to the driver, guy named
Gus, then settled our packs in the open space at the back.

I sat down by Sherlock where he was sitting with his arms crossed. He wouldn’t look
at me as he pouted staring out the window, and that warm, breathless feeling once
again fluttered behind my ribs. I briefly looked up to check that no one nearby was
looking our way, then reached over to place my hand on his thigh.

“Got someone I want you to meet,” I said.

Sherlock frowned. “I’ve met Molly.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t Molly.”

I thought of Lugnut lying down in his little hut in the shade, pining for his
dinner and waiting to sniff me in the air.
I patted Sherlock’s leg again. “It’s a surprise,” I said. I smiled out the window
as the tundra rushed past. I relaxed my neck against the seat. “But I think he’s
really gonna like you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note about backcountry camping:

> When camping in the backcountry, you need to utilize the triangle method of
setting up camp. This means you have three separate locations, all about 100 feet
from each other. One location is for your tent (ideally the most protected from the
wind). The second location is for your bear can. You use this to lock inside all of
your food and *anything* that has a scent from your packs (toiletries, chapstick,
sunscreen, any bug sprays, etc.). The third location is your cook site, where you
cook and eat your meals, brush your teeth, and use the bathroom. The triangle
method means that any wildlife that comes sniffing around (particularly bears) will
only find a bear can or an empty cook site, not you in your tent!
>
> Also, I think this is obvious, but what Sherlock did was INCREDIBLY stupid. You
should never get even within a few hundred yards of a wild grizzly bear. John's
reaction is roughly your main option to scare it away - get close, but not too
close, then alert the bear to your presence and try to make yourself look
intimidating / human to scare it away. I am TERRIFIED of bears. My bear call out in
Denali usually consisted of something along the lines of "holy shit get the fuck
away from me holy shit." John is obviously a bit calmer under pressure.
>
> Thank you SO DAMN MUCH for your love for this fic! Your love for Ranger John and
Sherlock, your love for their love story, your love for their happiness, and your
love for Denali. Sharing this story with you all really means a lot to me. And a
huge thank you to all of you who trusted me through the hard angst last chapter!
Your comments make Lugnut's tail go crazy and your kudos are like waking up to a
fresh Denali sunrise.
>
> Next time: we unfortunately head back to 1992 for another rough one (yep, *the*
rough one), but it ends on a hopeful note of healing for our boys. <3 And if you're
worried they aren't gonna have sex anytime soon, I'll give you a happy head's up
that you're only one more chapter away :)

9. July 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Emmylou Harris sing "Your Long Journey"

[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv1y4k5q_uo/).
>
> Other perfect arrangements of this classic song:
> Listen to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=eG_rArV84iY/).
> Listen to the 'original' by Doc Watson and Rosa Lee
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k8DDcYXNVY/).
> *Enjoy navigating through the mire of YouTube comments arguing whether Doc Watson
originally sang "long journey" or "lone journey."
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Little Song" [HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=W2R6uj52H58/).
> And another Sarah rec for this chapter: Listen to "Lost Dog"
[HERE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJd1yCMJbsE/).
>
>  
>
> ***Alright, y'all. It's that chapter. The one you knew was coming, and the one
I've tried to give a clear and ample heads up for. I appreciate more than I can say
that all of you are trusting me with this chapter - I know many of you have
understandably reached out to say you would normally stay *far away* from a fic
containing the death of a pet. I understand that with my whole heart and soul.
However, I truly believe this chapter is not just pointless sadness. I hope you can
trust me when I say I didn't put it in here just to rack up the angst.
>
> I'll say three important things about this chapter (minor spoilers) if you need
some more assurance:
> 1\. The dog is *not* in pain.
> 2\. John gets to be there with him.
> 3\. If you can believe it, the chapter ends on the most hopeful note we've seen
so far in 1992.
>
> That being said, I know this will still be a difficult read. Hell, it was
difficult for me to write. Please practice ample self care, and read in a time and
place where you'll feel steady and safe. Like I said, there is a *hopeful* end to
this chapter, and I promise that hope will continue, but it is a sad road to get
there. I am SO grateful for your trust and encouragement, and I wish you happy and
safe reading <3

July 1992

The nights grew dark and long.

They used to be my solace – for years I would look forward to my private little
room while I was out on hard patrols, or spending days out in the backcountry, or
running into Fairbanks those few times a year. I would daydream about the full
silence that met me whenever I opened the front door. The way my socked feet would
pad around the squeaky spots on the wood floor, and the way the smell of my coffee
filled the whole cabin, and the way that my bed caressed every part of my body in
the darkness, stripping away everything until it was just my skin against the
sheets, and every breath in the air was one I’d taken with my own lungs.

It was all the same reasons I loved my cabin back in Talkeetna. Why I went back to
it winter after punishing winter, even though Molly and the other Rangers all
practically begged me to take on a winter job. In those deepest parts of winter,
tucked away in my little corner of the woods, the nights would last sometimes
twenty hours long. The darkness would surround me, filling every corner until my
eyes only saw in black and grey. It would drape over my fingers and cling to my
body like heavy fog – turn my skin pale and my hair too long. It would hover just
outside the reach of my old gas lamp, which I’d keep turned low enough just to cast
a spot of light on the book in my hands.

I would chop wood in the dark, haul my water and prepare my food in the dark. I
built half that cabin in the dark, caressing every piece of rough wood with my bare
hands before hammering it into place, closing off my own haven from the rest of the
world.

Even when I was little, I loved the dark. I’d wait until my sister and parents were
asleep in our little trailer, then tiptoe out the front door slow enough that it
wouldn’t make a sound. I’d spend those summer nights sitting out in the dirt yard
on a sawed-off log, blinking in the darkness even though I couldn’t see a thing and
then staring up for hours at the wide black sky.

When I was older, and we moved to the crooked, sagging house two miles outside
town, my parents told my sister and I to fight it out over whether to share the
bedroom or not – and whoever didn’t get it would have to make do up in the attic.
And I surprised them all by immediately sprinting with my duffel bag up to the
attic before my sister could even start to bully me into taking it. My dad built me
a bed up there, hauling up the wood with me and showing me how to fit it all
together. I’d sat there watching his huge, rough hands against the wood for hours,
and he told me all about the screws and wrenches and nails he was using to build
it.

When the bed was done, and I’d thrown my thin mattress on top, he’d sat with me by
my side for a long time on that bed.

“ _You know, Ranger,_ ” he’d said, the nickname he always called me after I’d found
my sister’s lost cat one summer in the woods, “ _One day you’re gonna make a man
mighty glad to have you around. Getting awful good at helping me out around the
house with your tools._ ”

I’d burned with pride and prickled under my arms. I hunched my spine back so my big
t-shirt hung loose over my chest, making it so my growing nipples didn’t poke out
anymore beneath the fabric. And he’d reached out to ruffle my hair, rough and so it
stuck up in all directions, not softly like he always stroked through my sister’s.

“ _Yup_ ,” he’d said. “ _Gonna make a man mighty lucky to have ya around._ ”

Just over six years later, after he chased me down the driveway with his shotgun
while my mom screamed and cried that I’d ruined them all while collapsing onto the
front porch, for some reason that bed had stuck in my mind my whole sprint into
town. I’d wondered if they would keep it – whether my dad would ignore it for
decades and let it rot up in the attic, or whether he’d storm up and break it all
apart with his bare hands.

And as I’d run, and the strip of cotton around my chest had eventually come loose
and fallen off, I’d wondered if I would ever have a place like that attic on earth
again – where the darkness had welcomed me each night with open arms, and where the
darkness hadn’t seen my long hair or my delicate face. Where I’d first whispered
the name John between the thin sheets, and first placed the sock down into my
jeans. Where no one else on earth had ever breathed the same air, aside from that
one day when my dad had built my brand new bed with his own hands.

The Denali nights had never felt as suffocating as they did that summer. The
darkness only fully settled over the park for a few hours, but when it did, I’d
find myself lying awake and staring at the ceiling, sometimes still fully dressed
from the day before.

I couldn’t feel the sheets against my skin. If I did, they’d remind me of how it
felt to be pressed between them and his warm body. How they would rasp against my
back when he kissed down my stomach, when he looked up at me with heavy eyes as he
took the cock he’d given me into his mouth, humming around it and groaning as if
the plastic actually had a taste, gripping my hips and sucking me until I could
almost feel the press of his lips against my real skin, until I would grab his hair
and pant for breath and finally come, rubbing against the bottom of the cock
pumping into his mouth. My _own_ cock disappearing into his full, wet lips. And the
sheets would pool with damp sweat at the low of my back as I rolled my hips towards
him. As I made him take me, deeper, and deeper, and more, and he’d pull off panting
with his lips glistening wet and moan, “ _Fuck me, John. Come inside me. Come on._
”

And the darkness reminded me how he sought out the secret places on my body. How
he’d reach for me in the middle of the night and place his hand over my chest in
the darkness, stroking his thumb along my scars as if they were the most
fascinating things on the whole entire earth – as if he couldn’t possibly stand to
let the knowledge of them disappear into the dark. The darkness remembered how he’d
beg me to drag my beard across his skin. The sheets remembered the feel of his
hands clutching them tight as I draped myself on top of him and gripped handfuls of
his hair.

While I lay there in my bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting and praying for that
first hint of sunlight to finally appear, I’d remember, in those final minutes, the
way he would fall asleep on my chest. How he would wrap himself around me as if
he’d never let me go. How I’d press a kiss into his curls and hold him close across
his warm back. How he would trail his fingertips through the pathetically small
hairs on my chest as if they were something he actually wanted to feel, and he’d
smirk at me and say, “ _My Ranger, oh, my brave, strong Ranger,_ ” until I finally
cracked a smile and laughed.

And on those nights, staring up at the ceiling with half my bed empty, I wondered
if he was also waiting for the first hint of the sun. If he was eating enough, and
if he was making himself his own coffee or tea. I wondered if he was warm enough
against the thick, dark cold.

I knew he wasn’t using anymore, not since that one night just over three weeks ago
when he’d knocked softly at my door. I’d seen him a handful of times since then,
always randomly around Toklat or even passing by each other on long stretches of
the Road. It was the most I’d accidentally run into him around the park before,
even more than that last summer where I had searched for him around every corner
when he wasn’t sitting beside me in my truck or waking up in my own bed.

We’d nod when we saw each other. Nod and keep quickly walking away. Even through
the dark circles under his eyes and his thinning wrists, I could tell, deep in my
core, that the crook of his arm didn’t have any new marks. It was as if an odd
understanding had settled over us since that night – one that said we were both
broken, and unhappy, and fucked, but also one that said we were both going to keep
nodding and walking away, as if the nodding and the walking were as fixed in place
in the universe as the base of Denali itself. And there wasn’t any anger, or fear,
or sadness, there was just. . . nothing, just walking away, and every night when I
stared at the ceiling I couldn’t decide which would be worse.

Sherlock stuck around Greg a lot during those weeks. I’d see them from afar bending
over their maps in one of the offices, or hiking out to the Road to catch a bus, or
standing in front of their team’s cabin arguing over whether Sherlock had really
needed to tell Babs that her boyfriend back in London was undoubtedly cheating on
her with the neighbor.

I saw them on the East side one day when I’d taken my morning off to go visit Lug.
I’d tried to see him much more often since Sherlock Holmes nearly sprinted out my
cabin door – as if the reminder of what I used to do at night in my cabin – cook
Sherlock dinner, lounge on the couch with his feet in my lap, fall asleep by his
side – suddenly made it unbearable to spend any of my days off in that same space.

I was walking away from the kennels after sitting with old Lug for a few hours,
trailing my fingers through his fur and telling him about the moose fight I’d seen
the day before from my truck with the window rolled down. I scratched at my face
and smelled Lugnut’s fur on my fingers – I was letting my beard grow back in, and
my hands were constantly picking at it on my cheeks and jaw, as if they couldn’t
decide whether growing it back out to look more like myself outweighed the fact
that he used to love to kiss through the hair.

Then I saw him. Actually, Greg saw me. They were standing together near C-Camp on
the other side of the Road, looking like they were waiting for a ride back out
West. I could see the moment of indecision on Greg’s face as he looked me up and
down, then he took a step forward and held up his hand to wave me over. Dread
settled in my chest. I quickly glanced at Sherlock standing to Greg’s side,
expecting him to scowl at him, or scowl at me, or just walk away. Instead he was
standing with his arms gently crossed over his chest, slightly turning away and
staring at his feet on the ground.

The wrongness of him standing that way pulled at my limbs. I wanted to storm over
there and grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he straightened out his
spine. Tell him that he needed to get his ass back on a plane to London so he could
start living his real life – that he could do a million times better than me, that
he needed to go find someone he didn’t have to fix. Someone who was normal, and who
could live with him in the city, and who could fuck him with his own real body.

I also wanted to tell him that I could do a million times better than him – that in
the deepest, darkest parts of me that still replayed scenes from last summer over
and over, I wondered why I was ever stupid enough to let my guard down. Why I held
him in my arms and kissed him that first backcountry trip. Why I ever invited him
into my room, into the darkness, and stripped off my clothes. Why I thought any of
that was real, and not just a way to keep a genius from getting bored. Why I
sometimes kept the lights on.

I started walking towards them. I shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t

impulsively cover my mouth or scratch at my face. I didn’t want to look nervous at
something so simple as saying hello to two researchers across the Road. Well, a
researcher who asked me to throw away his drugs for him three weeks ago, and a good
friend.

Greg kept talking to Sherlock as I walked closer. I watched him reach his hand out
to gently hold Sherlock by the arm – something I noticed Greg often did with him
and that used to make my chest feel warm, a small flutter of relief that Sherlock
had had Greg beside him for all those years, and that they’d found each other long
before Sherlock ever stepped inside my truck. Even if they both claimed they’d only
ever spoken to each other about wolves.

I only took a few steps towards them when a familiar white van pulled up in the
Road and blocked my way. I saw Molly lean across the passenger seat towards Greg
and Sherlock to talk to them, motioning for them to get inside so she could give
them a ride. She hadn’t seen me. I stopped dead in my tracks on the other side of
the Road, desperately wanting to say hello to Molly but also dreading walking over.
I waited for another minute, awkwardly sticking my hands in my pockets so I
wouldn’t keep fiddling with the patches on my uniform shirt – a habit Molly had
been making fun of me for doing for years.

“ _God, John, you’re like a Girl Scout playing with her brand new Brownie patches,_
” she’d said once, laughing and slapping my hands away from where they’d been
picking at the Ranger patch on my uniform. We’d been caught in a seemingly endless
conversation with some visitors by the kennels, and thankfully Molly had taken over
and handled most of the conversation.

Her words had made a cold sweat instantly break out over my skin. I’d tried to
smile and wiped my sweating palms off on my pants.

“ _You alright, there_?” she’d asked, frowning at me. She’d reached out to take my
hand. “ _Aw, you know I was just joking,_ ” she’d said. “ _Didn’t mean to hurt your
feelings_.”

And I’d looked at her and tried to make my face look normal. I’d wrapped my arm
around her shoulders and ruffled her hair, same as always. “ _’Course you were
joking, kid,_ ” I’d said, even though my heart was racing in my chest. And we’d
gone on with the day – hadn’t ever brought it up again. And the worst part of it
all was that I knew she _had_ been just joking, and even that couldn’t stop the
panic from flooding through my veins when she laughed and called me “ _her_.”

I stood there with my hands in my pockets watching the side of the van. I could
hear the muffled tones of Molly and Greg’s voices, and only once heard Sherlock say
something that was just one syllable. Just when I figured Greg would inevitably let
Molly know I was there – when I thought they would all turn towards me, and Molly
would hold her hands out for a hug through the window, and I could give them all a
quick wave, I watched Greg and Sherlock climb up into the van. Without a glance
towards me, the van sped away, Molly laughing at something Greg was saying in the
passenger seat and the back windows tinted too much for me to see if Sherlock even
noticed I was still there.

I watched the van drive away until it disappeared in a small cloud of dust around
the next bend. The breeze blew against me, blowing some of the dust into my face
and nearly knocking off my hat. I knew I looked ridiculous – Ranger by himself just
standing half in the Road with his hands in his pockets, staring at the place where
a van had driven away more than a full minute ago. And yet, I couldn’t move.

Somehow, out of nowhere, I felt that every connection I’d ever had with another
human being was in that van – that everyone who truly knew me, who’d heard me say
real words as John and not Ranger Watson, had just driven away without taking me
with them, even though I’d been dreading walking over to say hello in the first
place.

Suddenly I desperately needed to go back and see Lugnut one more time. My hands
twitched to hold him, and I needed to feel his nose against my neck. I turned on my
heels and started darting off back into the trees, but I’d only taken two steps
when I heard someone calling out behind me.

“Hello! Do you work here?”

I shut my eyes and took a second to school my face so I wouldn’t look annoyed. I
turned and put on a smile, reaching up to push the brim of my hat higher up on my
head. “Sure thing. Can I help you?”

It took me almost half an hour to help the family that had flagged me down figure
out how to navigate the park busses before answering questions about bears to the
two small kids, answering the traditional question of “what made you want to become
a Ranger?” with the story of my Canyonlands hike, and then physically walking them
to the nearest bus stop by the kennels, which then added on another ten minutes of
pointing out each dog’s name from far away.

I looked down at my watch after they’d finally thanked me for the final time and
boarded the bus. The time I had been planning to spend with Lugnut before my later
shift was totally gone, and I knew I’d just barely make it back to Toklat if I
hopped in my truck right then.

And in that moment, I felt lonelier than I had in the last twenty years combined.
Standing alone by the empty bus stop with my closest friend in the world driving a
van away from me down the Road, and my dog waiting for me to come pet him even
though I didn’t have the time.

I swallowed hard over my unexpectedly wet throat and walked towards my truck,
hopping in quickly and revving the engine too hard as I pulled onto the Road. For a
whole hour back I thought of nothing at all – just the curves of the Road that I
could follow in my sleep, and the feeling of the sun-warmed steering wheel under my
hands.

And then, for the next hour, I thought of that morning when Sherlock had dragged us
both out of bed before the sun. I’d stood in just my boxers in my kitchen rubbing
my eyes to wake up, asking him why the hell he’d dragged me out of bed when he knew
I had a full day of patrols later on. And he’d looked at me and said, “You don’t
have any patrols later. I’ve got you the day off.” And he hadn’t explained to me
what the hell we were doing as he forced me to dress and lead me down to the truck.
He hadn’t said a word as he hopped in the driver’s seat before I could, then
started driving us East with my favorite tape already in the player.

And I thought, as I drove back West without Sherlock by my side, of how Sherlock
had smiled at me when he pulled us into the lot by the kennels. How he’d pulled a
leash out from his pocket as we walked towards Lugnut, who was leaping up into the
air and barking when he saw us both coming his way. Sherlock had secured the leash
while Lugnut licked his face and handed it to me, saying, “We’re going on a bit of
a field trip, Ranger.” And as I told him that he was technically stealing
government property by putting Lugnut in my truck, Sherlock hadn’t listened to a
word I’d said, and instead he’d driven us away and out of the park, speeding down
Highway 3 until a turn off a half-hour later, and all the while Lugnut had lounged
in my lap with his head hanging out the window in the wind, tongue flapping out.

We’d split a bag of jerky Sherlock had snuck into the truck and thrown a stick for
Lugnut to chase after in the open meadow nearby. And when Lugnut had gotten tired,
he’d plopped down to nap in the shade, and Sherlock had laid me down on top of the
Pendleton blanket on the grass, and he’d kissed me under the open sky until my body
was hot and shaking.

And I thought of how that had been the day when I’d put my whole idea together.
Lying there in the grass with Sherlock on my chest and Lugnut curled up by our feet
in the bright sun. I’d thought that maybe I could have all of that – really have
it. That I could ask Sherlock to stay with me, share my cabin for the winter, and I
could finally adopt Lugnut from the kennels the way I’d been meaning to do for
years, and we could eat jerky and play fetch for a hundred days a year instead of
just one.

As I pulled into Toklat and gave a wave to a bus of visitors, the last thing I
thought of was the key in my bedside drawer – the one that sat next to the rolled
up sock every night. The extra key to my cabin in Talkeetna that I’d had made, but
never given.

I did my afternoon and evening patrols that day without a problem, not even getting
a radio call as I sped up and down the Road and scanned the distance. When I made
it back to Toklat I felt exhaustion in my bones, even though I’d barely even walked
at all that day. I trudged away from the truck after I’d cleaned it for the night,
holding the back of my neck as I made my way towards my cabin. For the second time
that day, someone called out frantically behind me.

“John!”

I turned to see Greg jogging my way from one of the offices. A pulse of longing
flashed through me when I wondered if Sherlock was in there too. My body ached for
my cabin – for the darkness and the quiet and the single chair at the kitchen
table, where I could strip off my dirty clothes from my tired limbs and sit with
the lights off and breathe.

I nodded at him and ran a hand through my hair which was lying flat from my hat.
“Greg,” I said back.
He looked nervous. He slowed to a walk as he reached me and rubbed the back of his
neck with his hand. Before I could ask him how he was, he looked right into my eyes
and started speaking.

“Look, mate, I just gotta come right out and say it.”

I tensed, flinching a bit in fear at what he was about to say. He sighed deeply and
shook his head. “I feel like a right bastard for leaving you behind earlier back
East,” he said. “The second I let Molly drive away – you know she didn’t see you
there – God, I felt like the world’s biggest arsehole.”

I hummed and gave him a small smile, sticking my hands back in my pockets. “Aw,
Greg, no worries about that,” I said. “I knew you were just waiting for a ride.”

He didn’t smile back. “But I know you would have wanted to see Molly. To say
hello.”

I shrugged, blushing without really knowing why. “Can see her anytime,” I said. “I
didn’t think anything of it, really. You’re fine.”

I hoped he didn’t know how long I’d stood there watching the van drive away down
the Road. That he hadn’t looked in the rearview mirror, or that Sherlock hadn’t
deduced it and blurted it out.

He gave me a sad grin and exhaled a long breath through his nose. “Look, John,” he
said. He shrugged his shoulders once. “I really miss you this summer. Not seeing
you around the cabin or out East with Molly – I’ve been figuring out for weeks how
to tell you that without sounding a bit pathetic.”

A dull ache landed in my chest. I felt the sudden need to pull him into a hug.
Instead I hugged my arms around myself against the evening chill. “Not pathetic at
all,” I said. “I’ve been thinking of you guys, too.”

He had that look in his eyes which I’d seen him get before – where he was fighting
with himself to get up the courage to say something he knew I’d flinch away from.
Before I could start talking about anything else to stop him, he went on. “To be
honest, I’ll tell you things have been pretty good between me and Sherlock lately,”
He huffed out a laugh. “Actually, better than in the whole fifteen years I’ve known
him.”

I forced myself to nod. “Yeah, that’s good –”

“But it isn’t good,” he said. He shuffled his feet in the gravel and spoke out to
the dry river bed. “For me and Sherlock Holmes to go three weeks without getting in
a single argument – without him calling me an idiot or me calling him an utter twat
– it’s just, I mean that’s what we do. It’s how we’ve always worked. And I . . .
well, I’ve told you before, I trust him with my life. Think more highly of the
bastard than almost anyone else on the planet.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth,
still looking out at the mountains instead of at me. “But . . . this person who he
is now – who just goes along with whatever I say and shows up for every meeting – I
mean, sure it’s nice as a little break, and Max and Babs aren’t in tears every
other night, but it isn’t Sherlock Holmes.”

I thought of Sherlock’s fingers shaking as he’d pushed the drugs towards me across
the table. I couldn’t tell where Greg was heading with it all – whether he
understood how much his words twisted like a knife in my chest, or whether he was
going to demand an explanation, or whether he was going to blame me for turning
Sherlock Holmes into a man who always just agreed.
I just nodded down at my feet. Greg put his hand on my shoulder. “Christ, I’m
sorry, now I’ve just gone and made you think I’m about to blame you for it all.”

A surprised laugh burst out of me. “Just a bit,” I said.

His eyes looked sad. They made me want to turn and sprint away back to my cabin,
grab my things and run to go take a shower in the dark, just the way I used to back
when everything made sense. He cleared his throat and motioned with his head to
walk up towards the cabins. Our feet crunched through the gravel so loudly it felt
like the entire park could hear it.

“What I’m trying to say is,” he finally said. “He’d been having a good day, today.
Little more like his usual self. He even said I was the least qualified researcher
he’d ever met in his life – that a pile of wolf scat would be more knowledgeable
about its own chemical makeup than I was.” We both chuckled before Greg took a deep
breath and went on. “Earlier today . . . I just didn’t know what would make it
worse. Having you come over, or just . . . taking up Molly’s offer when it came. I
used to be able to read Sherlock like a book, but now I can’t.”

I kept my head down at my feet as we walked. It was silent for a long time as I
tried to think of what to say. Finally, I looked up at him as we reached the path
where we would part ways. “Like I said, I didn’t think anything of it,” I said. “No
big deal.” I took a step away towards my cabin and held up a hand. “I’m glad he’s
doing better,” I said as I walked away. Greg gave me an odd look, as if he was
about to step forward and keep talking.

“I’ll try and see you around more,” I said over my shoulder. He let me go.

That night I sat at my kitchen table for a long time, long after the rest of Toklat
had drifted off to sleep. I looked down at my folded hands on the table, tracing
the lines of decades’ worth of callouses and scars. He had once catalogued every
one of them in a notebook, drawing exact sketches as if he was a botanist studying
his samples. He’d asked me for the story behind each one, and for the ones I
couldn’t remember, he’d gone ahead and figured out where it was from.

He’d asked me about the little round burn mark in the middle of my palm. His
fingers had cradled my hand in the candlelight across my kitchen table. I’d looked
down at his smooth hand holding my own rough skin and said, “My mom smoked.” I
hadn’t needed to say anything more.

Now I looked at the burn mark in the heavy darkness, barely catching sight of it on
my skin in the moonlight through the curtains. My conversation with Greg sat oddly
in my gut, churning until I couldn’t remember what he’d actually said, and what I’d
imagined.

I thought of Sherlock pacing my kitchen and holding his curls. “ _Why do we have to
move on?_ ”

Suddenly an idea burned brightly in my chest. I wanted to walk over to his cabin
and bang hard on his door. Tell him that I was sorry, that I knew now that he
couldn’t have meant those words he said up on that mountain the way they came out –
that he couldn’t have pressed his lips to the cigarette burn on my palm and then
just a few weeks later told me I was only his way of not being bored.

Tell him that I was just as stupid as he always said every other human being was.

The uselessness of it all choked me. Before I could second guess myself, I shoved
my chair back from the table, grabbing my jacket and uselessly running fingers
through my hair. I needed to see him. To pull him out of his daze and straight into
my arms. Tell him I would forgive him even if he shot me in my own chest if only he
understood how much I needed him. That I wasn’t really John Watson to anyone on the
entire planet but him.

That I was too alone, and that I didn’t need to be.

I flung open my cabin door and started to walk towards his, frantically running
through everything I could possibly say in my mind as I walked. I was just about
halfway there when, through the moonlight, I saw his cabin door burst open.
Sherlock leaped out into the darkness with Greg hot on his heels.

“We have roughly thirty minutes to get there before that nearby grizzly gets to it
first,” Sherlock was calling as they ran. He was smiling, his eyes wild, as they
sprinted down towards the trucks. I watched Sherlock toss the keys effortlessly to
Greg before they hopped in one of the government vans and sped off into the night.
They hadn’t seen me.

For the second time that day, I stood there frozen watching taillights disappear
into the distance.

I kicked a nearby rock as hard as I could and cursed. It had been ridiculous. I
didn’t even know what I’d been thinking in the first place – that after a whole
year of hiding from him, of telling him “not now” and “not anymore,” that I could
somehow walk into his cabin and expect him to welcome me back with open arms.

I blinked hard at the sudden water in my eyes and walked back towards my cabin.

“You alright John?”

The soft voice startled me to my right. I peered through the darkness to see Hannah
coming out of the bathroom, holding her toiletries bag with a worried expression on
her face.

I clenched my hands and tried to smile. “What? Yeah, just. . stumbled for a
second.”

She took two steps closer. I could barely make out her face in the light of the
stars. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Was wondering how you were.”

I tried to think of the last time I had actually spoken to Hannah – something
beyond the countless small waves she sent me around camp. “Ah, good. Yeah, I’m
good.” I added just a second too late, “And you?”

She smiled warmly. “Oh, I’m great.” She looked around at the dark mountain slopes.
“God, it’s just gorgeous here, isn’t it? Like a movie.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and chuckled. “Feels a bit like a movie sometimes,
yeah.”

She leaned towards me, peering through the darkness at my face. “Oh, you’re growing
your beard back!” she said.

I impulsively reached up to scratch at my cheek. “Yeah. . . Molly’s clean-shaven

idea just wasn’t working for me,” I said. “Made it so all the bears finally
realized I was human.”

Hannah chuckled. I could smell her fruity body wash still clinging to her warm
skin. I couldn’t remember when she had moved so close to me, and she was tall
enough that I had to tilt my eyes up to meet her gaze.

“It looks nice on you,” she said in a low, smooth voice. “I like it.” I noticed her
hand moving, reaching up towards my face.

I understood what was happening all in one moment. I hastily stepped back, hands
automatically shaking. “Thank you,” I said too casually. “So do the bears, from
what I hear.”

She took another step towards me and tucked her hair behind her ear. “John –”

I put up my hand. “Hannah, look. . .” I tried to think of what to say.

Her eyes looked so sad, wilting like flower petals caught under too heavy rain. Her
mouth twitched in a forced smile. “I think you’re really great,” she said.

There was a soft moan building at the back of my throat. I rubbed my neck.
“Hannah,” I said again. “Look, I . . . it means a lot. It does. But, we don’t
really know each other at all.”

“I want to get to know you,” she said quickly. Her face was glowing and young. “I’d
like that, and maybe –”

“Hannah. . .”

She clutched her bundle of dirty clothes to her chest. “Is it because I’m too
young?” she asked.

The vastness of everything she was missing almost made me want to laugh. I wanted,
more than anything, to just crawl into my bed. To sleep off the utter shit of a day
I’d just had and wake up with a clear mind.

Wake up in a pair of warm, strong arms around my waist.

“I _am_ probably twice your age,” I said. “And I’m the most prickly son of a bitch
in the whole entire park.” I could see her sagging as she knew what I was about to
say. I swallowed hard. “You should . . . we can get to know each other a bit, sure,
but you should find –”

“No, it’s alright,” she said quickly. She nodded once then looked straight down at
her feet as she started walking away. “I’m so sorry,” she said again as she walked
past. “I . . . I had it wrong. I’m sorry.”

I watched her speed walk back to her cabin a few down from mine without saying
anything back. The sheer impossibility of the situation settled over me like a
strong gust of wind. My limbs ached. Standing there in the dark under the stars
outside my cabin, the reality that I’d fucked up every single interaction of the
day made my throat feel hot and tight. I wanted to run over to her and somehow
console her – tell her that she shouldn’t feel bad at all, because she’d never in a
million years win by hitting on a man in his forties who was gay. On a man like me.

I heard noises coming from her cabin – the muffled sound of her bunkmate coming out
to the kitchen to see what had happened. I heard voices, saw a light flicker on,
and the shadows of two people coming together through the curtains. And then I
heard the unmistakable sound of a stifled, wretched sob.

I couldn’t take it. I ran back into my cabin and shut the door behind me, making my
way through in the blinding dark until I was seated on my bed, still fully dressed
in my clothes and shoes. I sat there for a long time holding my face in my hands. I
seriously considered getting in my truck to go and see Lugnut – so I could hold him
and tell him all the ways I was apparently making everyone I knew feel
uncomfortable and sad. So I could feel him lick my face and nuzzle his nose against
my neck.

But I had work in the morning – an early patrol. I’d never make it back in time for
my shift if I drove East. By the time I fell asleep that night, still in my
clothes, the sun was already rising, and my alarm blared to wake me up after less
than two hours.

\--

I got the call exactly one week later.

I’d just come back from a grueling and long shift – one that made my eyes burn and
my tired muscles ache. I’d spent half the day going up and down the Alpine Hike to
deal with some stray wildlife that had gotten too close to the visitors, and by the
time I’d finished cleaning off the truck my body felt like it was screaming at the
joints.

Just as I was about to head up to my cabin, I looked over my shoulder and caught
sight of one of the best sunsets in weeks. The clear, open sky was streaked with
thick washes of purple and gold, pouring down the mountain slopes and brushing the
tops of the trees. The entire valley was suspended in warm, golden water,
fluttering gently in the haze from the heavy sun. I turned around and walked out to
the dry river bed alongside the camp, breathing in the scent of the slowly settling
earth and enjoying the soft press of the breeze on my neck. Everything was silent,
and everything was still.

I don’t know how long I stood there with my eyes half-closed when I heard a voice
behind me.

“Watson!” Nick called out. I looked back over my shoulder to see him standing with
one foot out of one of the small offices. “Watson!” he yelled again, waving me
towards him. I took one last good look at the sunset over Denali’s peak before
slowly heading towards the offices with my hands in my pockets. I was waiting for
Nick to tell me about some scheduling issue or another – that or a training that I
might have to cover if someone else was sick.

But the moment I saw his face more clearly I realized it wasn’t going to be about
schedules or training at all. He waited until I was within normal speaking distance
before gesturing back into the office.

“Phone for you,” he said in a flat voice. Panic startled to prickle under my arms
and down my sides. I forced myself to walk at a normal speed towards the phone,
picking it up slowly so my hand would be steady.

“Yeah?” I said into the receiver.

“John,” said Molly’s voice.

All at once, I knew.

The air rushed from my lungs, and I leaned forward to rest my weight on my hand
against the desk. “How long?” I whispered.
Her voice was clear and calm. “You should leave now,” she said. “You’ll make it,
but you should leave now.”

I slammed down the receiver without giving her back an answer and rushed past Nick,
who was standing awkwardly in the door. I couldn’t even hear the sound of the
gravel crunching under my feet. My legs were stiff and numb, like I was running
through thick mud.

“Don’t worry about getting back here,” Nick called behind me. “We’ll cover you
tomorrow!”

I ignored him. I couldn’t bare to think through the implications of what he’d just
said. I threw myself in the truck and started the engine, trying to breathe to keep
my hands steady enough to get the truck into gear.

Then my passenger door flung open.

I cursed as I jumped and looked over to my right. Sherlock Holmes was effortlessly
leaping up into the seat, dressed in his uniform pants and a too-big sweater with
his dressing gown haphazardly thrown over his frame.

I blinked hard to convince myself that he was real. “What are you –”

“I’m going with you,” he said. He looked at me quickly before staring straight
ahead. It was the first time I’d heard his voice so clearly since he said, “ _I
never should have come here,_ ” as he sprinted out my cabin door.

I surprised myself when I heard my mouth say, “Fine,” before peeling out of the
parking lot and onto the darkening Road.

We didn’t speak again that whole drive. I didn’t allow myself to think. I knew if I
started thinking about Lugnut wondering where I was that I wouldn’t be able to
safely navigate the sharp twists of the Road. I wanted to think I was irritated at
having Sherlock invite himself along – that I would rather be alone, or that he was
making me uncomfortable, or making everything worse. That I was too vulnerable
right then to have someone else witnessing the shake in my hands.

But instead I was only aware that I was achingly glad that my passenger seat wasn’t
empty - an unexpected flame of sharp relief that kept the tips of my fingers from
growing numb. His own fingers tapped an odd rhythm onto his thigh while we drove,
and even though he never once looked my way for the three hours, I knew that he was
watching my face in the reflection of his window.

My spine felt frozen in place by the time I finally pulled into the lot next to the
kennels. I shut off the engine and held the keys in my hands, and then, in a great
rush, everything hit me.

I couldn’t move.

I wanted to scream up to the sky for everything to just pause, for things to rewind
by five years, or even five hours. For me to have more time, and more time, and
more. I sat in the seat in the gathering dark and stared blankly at the wheel. I
didn’t want to get out of that truck and see what was happening with my own two
eyes. I didn’t want to see the look on Molly’s face. I didn’t want to move.

After a few seconds I heard Sherlock shift beside me. He reached over to gently
take the keys from my hands, careful so our fingers didn’t touch in the process.
“Let’s go, John,” he said in a very soft voice.

That snapped me out of it. I looked over at him, suddenly desperate to prove to
myself that he’d really just sat by my side for three hours along the Road. He
looked right back, waiting patiently for me to move. We stared at each other, and
he only blinked once.

The words rushed out of my mouth in a whisper before I could stop them. “Stay with
me,” I said.

He nodded with solemn eyes. “Of course.”

Molly was standing outside the main kennel office waving me her way. I was grateful
when she didn’t even bat an eye that Sherlock was walking right behind me. She
silently stepped aside so I could come into the room. The office was small and
filled mostly with feeding supplies.

When I hesitated, Molly said, “to the left,” and nodded into the other room. For
one brief moment I felt Sherlock’s hand on the low of my back, then I stepped
through the doorway into the quiet, dark warmth.

Three of the other kennel Rangers and the head vet were all inside, crowded around
a huge, soft dog bed on the floor. They looked up when I walked in, and the other
Rangers immediately got to their feet and started to leave. They didn’t look at me
as they walked by me. Didn’t try to reach out or say empty words.

Lugnut sniffed me in the air. I saw his little nose twitch before he tried to lift
up his head. Immediately when he saw me his tail began to wag, thumping into the
bed where he was sprawled out on his side.

I rushed to him and dropped to my knees before holding his face in my hands. “You
waited for me, old man,” I said. His tail wagged even harder. He was whimpering
under his breath, and he couldn’t lift up his head or his legs. I glanced up at the
vet who knew my question before I even asked.

“He’s not in pain,” she said. “We gave him some medication when Molly called you,
so he’d feel alright.”

I knew that Molly and Sherlock were still standing in the doorway. The vet got to
her feet and moved to the other side of the room, too.

I pretended none of them were there, and I lay down on the hard wooden floor beside
Lugnut’s body. He nuzzled towards me as much as he could, and I held him closer
with my hands. I could feel every thin bone of his ribs beneath my palm. His lungs
were heaving.

I pressed my cheek to his snout and whispered softly so only he could hear. “This
bed’s a lot nicer than that old pile of straw out in our hut, huh?” I said. I
kissed the top of his nose. “They’re really spoiling you today. Giving you the nice
bed, letting you be inside where it’s warm.”

He grunted in agreement, and his tongue weakly reached out to lick my face. “Did
they give you extra dinner today, old boy? Sneak you some treats?” I breathed in
the scent of his fur and tried to keep my voice steady. Somehow I knew that if I
lost control that it would hurt him – that he needed me to be the normal, calm John
so he wasn’t scared.

Everything else fell away. I lay with him on the floor for well over an hour.
Eventually I heard people shuffling out of the room, but when I looked back over my
shoulder, Sherlock was still there. He was sitting on the floor in the corner with
his head back against the wall. His eyes were closed, but I knew he knew exactly
where I was. And I knew that the simple fact of him being in the room was the only
thing keeping the hot lump out of my throat.

Lugnut eventually relaxed as I held him in my arms. I massaged his ears the way
that always made him groan, and softly rubbed his side, and kissed the top of his
nose. His pale blue eyes opened every once in a while to look into my face, and
when he did, I would talk to him, tell him about anything and nothing at all.

I told him, in the softest whisper, about the bed I built with my dad. The reason
why I showered in the dark for two years back at Canyonlands, and the first time I
ever saw a grizzly with my own eyes. I told him about falling off my horse in the
Grand Canyon, and how I’d lost all my water, and I told him how over the last ten
years, after all of my kennel visits, I never washed my hands so I could keep
smelling a bit of his fur.

And I knew that Sherlock could hear every word coming out of my mouth, and that he
was watching me lie on the hard floor like a child. And I didn’t care.

Lugnut started to twitch more in my arms, and the sounds in his throat became
louder. He kept trying to sit up, struggling against the weight of his own body,
and when his legs failed him, I held his face in my hands. “Can’t do that just yet,
old Lug,” I told him. I swallowed hard. “Soon you’ll feel alright, everything will
be better. But for now you gotta lay here with me, just for a bit.”

I heard Molly’s footsteps behind me, and I knew what she was about to say.

“John,” she said softly. “When you’re ready, it’s time.”

I buried my face in Lugnut’s neck and nodded. I could feel his heart racing, and
the breath wheezed in his lungs. I knew he was struggling, that even though he
wasn’t in full pain he still didn’t feel right. That every minute more that I lay
there with him was another minute where he was confused and trapped on his side.
The vet knelt down beside me with her equipment in her hand, and she didn’t say
anything about the fact that I was still clutching him in my arms.

“It’ll be about a minute, once you say ok. He won’t feel anything, just drift to
sleep.”

I took a deep, slow breath as I felt him shake beneath me.

“Ok,” I whispered.

Her movements were a blur. I felt and heard her giving him the meds, and I felt his
body grow heavier in my arms, and then her footsteps were fading away.

Lugnut’s eyes started to slowly drift closed. Desperate, secret words poured from
my lips as I stroked his face. “You’re my best friend,” I told him. “You knew that,
Lug, right? You knew you’re my best friend. The only one who knows it all.” I
kissed the top of his nose as he twitched more beneath me. His eyes looked into
mine for one more moment before rolling back.

His chest was still rising and falling. “You won’t be in pain now,” I whispered.
“You can play fetch as fast as you want, just like you used to. You can chase after
all the birds.”

I kissed him one last time as his chest went still. “You’re my best friend,” I said
into his fur. “My best old friend.”
I knew the moment he was gone. His limbs went heavy beneath my hands, and his head
thudded against mine. I blinked back the water in my eyes and held him for another
long moment, gulping down the scent of him while his skin was still warm beneath my
palms.

There was a soft hand on my shoulder, and Molly’s ponytail brushed against my
shirt. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t say anything at all. She
knelt beside me as I held Lugnut in my arms for a few more moments, trying to
memorize the exact sensation of his fur between my fingers – burning into my brain
the shape of his nose, and the lines of his ears.

I kissed his head one more time then rose to my feet. I didn’t look down at him,
feeling somehow that he would be ashamed for me to see him sprawled out limply on
the bed. It wasn’t Lugnut anymore.

Molly, sweet Molly, didn’t try to talk to me as I walked outside. She didn’t try to
hug me, or tell me it was alright, or ask if I was ok. Instead she held out a bag I
hadn’t noticed had been sitting against the wall.

“Some of his things,” she said. “His name plate and his ball – some other items
from his hut.”

I nodded once, but I couldn’t reach out to take the bag. My hands were shaking
where I kept them clenched at my sides. Wordlessly, Sherlock’s arm appeared in
front of me to take it from Molly’s hand. I couldn’t quite meet her gaze as I tried
to speak.

“Thank you,” I said. I’d meant to say more, but the words died on my tongue. She
leaned forward up onto her toes and pressed a kiss to my forehead, then she nodded
once at Sherlock before walking back into the office.

I stood there in the darkness for another long moment. My eyes fought with me to
turn and look down towards Lugnut’s hut – to see his old bed and the spot of shade
where he’d slept. But all of it would be empty, and so I didn’t look.

I felt Sherlock’s hand on the small of my back again. I let him gently guide me to
walk away from the kennel, back towards the truck without saying anything at all.
He took the keys from his pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat, carefully
placing the bag of Lugnut’s things on the back seat.

Part of me wanted to tell him that I was fine to drive, but as he started the
engine and pulled out onto the Road, I couldn’t find it in me to say anything, or
to move. We drove back West, leaving the kennels at our backs, and I distantly
wondered if I would ever go inside of them again.

For an hour, I thought of nothing. I stared out the window at the black blur of the
park at night and only focused on the breath flowing in and out of my lungs.

And then, in one flashing burst of panic in my chest, I suddenly wanted to scream
that Lugnut was probably scared now that I’d left. That maybe he was still in pain,
or looking for me, or alone back on that bed.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Stop the car,” I choked out. The panic rose up in my throat. Panic that he was
scared and alone, that he was in pain, that he was _gone_. Panic that I had already
forgotten the color of his eyes, or that the exact scent of his fur was forever
lost back in that room.
Sherlock immediately pulled over and cut the engine, leaving the headlights on so
we weren’t in the pitch dark. I burst out of the door and ran off the road, not
giving a shit that I was sprinting into open tundra without any supplies. I ran for
a few seconds and stumbled on the uneven ground until I reached a patch of flat
grass, barely illuminated by the light from the car.

And everything I had been holding back for the last three hours exploded in my
lungs all at once. The world blurred before me and tilted on its side. Before I
could stop them, huge, choking sobs started to vibrate in my chest before they
escaped out my mouth. I didn’t even recognize the sounds pouring from between my
lips – horrifying, wrecked cries as my brain repeated, “ _Gone, gone gone. . ._ ”

I covered my face with my hands and tried to breathe through it, but now that I had
started I couldn’t stop. I cried harder than I could ever remember crying – harder
than that night I’d spent on the floor of the little room in Canyonlands. I could
feel every part of my body shaking out of control, and I desperately gasped for air
as wet sounds choked my throat.

I knew he was behind me without even having to turn around. I could smell him in
the night breeze, and feel his soft warmth against the cold. My chest ached so
fiercely I thought I’d collapse into the dark grass. I don’t know why I started
speaking, but my voice suddenly moaned through my hands.

“He’s gone,” I choked out, as if Sherlock didn’t know. My voice was wild and high-
pitched. I gasped on another sob that squeezed the air from my lungs. My face was
wet.

I turned to look at Sherlock, half-illuminated in the ghostly light pouring from

the front of the truck. His dressing gown was blowing in the breeze, and I knew he
must be cold. I stared at him and didn’t even try to control my voice.

“He was the only living thing that knew my other name,” I said. I saw something in
Sherlock’s eyes crumple, and I took a stumbling step towards him, knowing my knees
were about to sink into the grass. “He was the only one who knew,” I choked out
again, and then I started falling, surrounded by the thick dark.

Warm hands caught me. Sherlock grabbed me by the arms right before my knees hit the
ground and pulled me against him instead. For a moment I wanted to push back and
fight. The urge to shove him away from me was almost overpowering, to yank myself
back and stand on my own two feet.

But his chest was soft against my cheek, and the familiar fabric of his dressing
gown soaked up the tears on my face. I sank into him, throwing all of my weight
into his arms. I didn’t want to stand anymore in the world. I didn’t want to
breathe air in a place where my best friend didn’t exist. The vast, empty blackness
of the tundra screamed back at me, more isolation standing there twenty feet from
the Road than I’d ever felt on even my most remote backcountry trips.

And still, he held me. I choked out words against his chest, ones that poured out
of me before I could even decide whether to say them.

“He didn’t know,” I said. Sherlock’s hands were firm against my back. “All those
years, I left him so alone. He didn’t know that I . . . what he meant.”

For the first time in a long time, Sherlock spoke. “He knew,” he whispered into my
hair. “John, he knew.”

“I should have moved back East,” I cried. “I should have adopted him – taken him
out of the kennels and seen him every day. And I just . . .” I forced myself to
speak over my closed throat. “I just left him there.”

I thought I felt something pressed softly into the top of my head – something like
a kiss, but I couldn’t be sure. I let myself cry into the front of Sherlock’s chest
for what felt like hours. I gripped handfuls of his robe in my hands as I melted
into his body.

“He was the only one who knew my other name,” I said again in a rough, weak voice,
as if that could somehow tell Sherlock everything – could explain to him the depth
of what I had just lost. That part of my own soul was lying lifeless back on a dog
bed in a dark office, waiting to be taken away where it would never see the
sunlight again.

I needed Sherlock to _know_.

By the time the sobs in my chest had quieted, my eyes were painful and red, and my
body was exhausted. I leaned away to try and pull myself together, but instead
Sherlock reached out to hold my cheek in his hand. He lifted the corner of his robe
and gently wiped my face, and I wanted to be irritated or embarrassed at being
treated like a child, but Sherlock’s fingertips were on my cheek, and they were
warm, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

He walked by my side back to the truck, climbing back in the driver’s seat and
waiting until I collapsed into my seat. He let me sit there and try to recover
through the rest of the long drive – didn’t try to ask me how I was feeling, or
whether I wanted to talk about it, or tell me Lugnut wasn’t in pain anymore. He
just drove, and the headlights illuminated empty stretches of the ghostly park, and
for one small moment, he reached over and put his hand on my knee. Just one moment.

Toklat was pitch dark and lifeless when we got back. Sherlock climbed down from the
truck and grabbed the bag from the back, then motioned for me with his head to
follow him up towards the cabins. We left the truck unwashed in the lot as we
walked away. I kept waiting for Sherlock to branch off as we walked. Multiple
places passed where he could have made for his own cabin. But he stayed by my side
all the way to my cabin door, opening it with my own keys even though I had no
memory of ever handing them over.

Again, I waited for him to set down the bag and leave – maybe turn on the light for
me, or pour a quick glass of water. I stood in the middle of the floor and waited
for the sound of his footsteps walking away.

And still, he stayed. I let him guide me with his hands barely touching my back
into my room. He sat me down on the bed. I was too exhausted to protest, feeling
like a ghost and a statue all at once. Everything in me was raw, torn out and
stripped down and then shoved back beneath my skin, as if I’d just released every
tear I could have used over the last forty years all in one single hour. I heard
him in the kitchen getting a glass of water. He kept all the lights off. He padded
back into the bedroom and handed me a glass. Even in the dark, I could see that the
front of his clothes were stained and wet from my tears.

I took the glass with a shaking hand. My voice was weary. “You don’t have to –”

“I do,” he said back in a calm voice. I didn’t argue.

I sat there in a daze as he continued roaming about the cabin. I thought I heard
him moving the bag from Molly onto the table, and I thought I heard him pouring
more water into the sink. When he finally came back in, I was still sitting in the
exact position he’d left me. Something cool and damp was suddenly pressed to my
forehead. I reached up to try to take the washcloth from his hands, but he gently
pushed my arm back down and kept pressing it to my face. He held it over my
burning, swollen eyes, then swiped across my cheeks, and held it around the back of
my neck. His fingers never touched my actual skin, but they were close. So close. I
leaned forward towards him where he knelt on the floor as he held the damp cloth
against the back of my neck.

My clothes started to feel like heavy mud on my skin. As if I’d said that out loud,
Sherlock suddenly rose to his feet. He opened my closet and pulled out fresh boxers
and my normal sleeping shirt, not even hesitating to try and find them in the dark.
He held them out to me silently, and I took them with grateful hands. Without any
thought at all, I stood and immediately started stripping off my clothes right in
front of him. Our eyes had both adjusted to the darkness, and he didn’t move away,
and still, I stripped down completely naked not two feet from his body. The cold
air shivered on my hot skin. He took my old clothes from me and tossed them over in
the corner – something I used to nag him about but now just made my chest feel too
tight.

When I sat back down on the bed in my clothes and held my face in my hands, he
still stood in the same place in the middle of the room. “John,” he said softly.
“It’s the day for your shot.”

My spine tensed. I wanted to look up and ask how the hell he even knew that – how
he could calmly stand in my bedroom after I’d just cried all over his shirt, how he
could stand there for the first time in almost a year, and how he could possibly
tell me that it was the day to take my shot.

Instead I just wearily nodded in my hands. “Yeah.”

His feet shifted on the hardwood. “You can wait until tomorrow, or I can bring it
to you now,” he said.

His voice was the only thing in the room that wasn’t numb. It wasn’t hesitant, or
sorry, or muffled. It was just _there_.

Suddenly the thought of going without it felt like my entire being would disappear
– that losing Lugnut and the shot in one single day would reduce me to my twenty-
year-old self when I woke up the next morning. That Lugnut would look down on me
from wherever he was and not even recognize me as the man who’d walked him his
whole life.

I looked up from my hands and squinted in the dark. “I’ll do it now,” I said.

Without a word Sherlock walked back to my closet, immediately finding the pouch in
the hidden place where I always kept it. He knelt by the bed and flipped on the
lamp, bathing the room in a flood of warm light. I blinked hard and stared blankly
as he got the shot out with steady hands. He effortlessly prepared everything
before he handed me the ready syringe. For one flashing moment I imagined his hands
holding a different syringe in his long, pale fingers, one that was reaching
towards the thin vein in his own arm.

I blinked hard against the thought and reached out to take it. My fingers shook. I
tried to steady them, hot shame flooding up my neck as he silently watched me
struggle to hold the shot steady. Agonizing seconds passed where my hand struggled
to get a grip, and then he reached up and covered my hand with his own. He pulled
it from my hands and held it in his own fingers, then reached up with his other
hand to push my boxers up on my thigh.

He looked up at me once, a silent, soft question. His eyes were open and clear.
I never wanted to look away. I nodded.

I watched as Sherlock pressed the shot into my thigh as if he’d done it ten million
times. I thought of the last and only other time he had done that – when he’d
reached up and cupped my jaw in his hands when he was done, and pressed wet kisses
to my mouth, and groaned against my lips. As if pressing testosterone into my body
with his own hands was somehow more erotic than all the sex we’d ever had.

He looked back into my eyes after setting everything aside, swiping his palm once
over the skin of my thigh before pulling my boxers back down. I could tell that he
knew I was thinking of that last time. He was thinking of it too.

I nodded in thanks and he stood back up, cleaning up and putting everything away
while I pulled back the covers and collapsed into my bed. I stared at the ceiling
as I heard him moving about my room, trying to ignore the thought in my mind that
it was probably the last time I’d ever hear his footsteps on my cabin floors. He
flicked back off the light, and I waited for him to say one more small thing and
then leave. For him to set a glass of water by my side, and gather up his things,
and close the front door softly behind him to go back to his own world.

He stood in the doorway of my room in the darkness for a long minute. I couldn’t
look his way.

His whisper broke the silence, and it wasn’t at all what I was waiting for him to
say.

“Would you like me to leave?” he asked me quietly. There wasn’t any hint of what he
was thinking in the way the soft words left his mouth.

I stared at the ceiling and held my breath. The silence that followed was heavy and
thick, pressing down on my chest until my lungs struggled rise. Neither of us
moved.

When I finally answered him, my voice was so thin it was unrecognizable as my own.
“No,” I whispered. Instantly the cold weight lifted off my limbs.

We didn’t say anything more. Sherlock quickly walked out into the living room and
grabbed the extra blanket off the couch. I lay frozen on my back under my sheets as
I listened to him pull his robe from his shoulders. He left on his shirt and his
pants, even his belt. He climbed onto my bed beside me on top of my sheets, staying
as close to the edge as possible and covering himself with the extra blanket from
the couch.

I held still as he settled his body into the mattress, afraid that if I relaxed I
would automatically roll towards him and cling to his chest.

For a long time, it was silent, and neither one of us moved. I could tell from his
breathing that he wasn’t anywhere close to asleep. I felt like I should be
whispering quiet things to him in the dark. How grateful I was that he hadn’t left
my side, how I had planned on walking to his door a few nights ago and begging him
back into my arms. How Lugnut may have been the only one to know my name, but
Sherlock was the only one who knew the taste of my bare skin.

But the words wouldn’t come. The silence was too fragile. Eventually I turned
towards him onto my side in the small bed, tracing the outline of his body in the
dark. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved in steady, even breaths. And I
thought of a night when I had stared at the line of his back in a cold tent, when I
had wondered if he was warm enough, and when the wind had moaned outside. And when
I’d wanted to bridge the gap between us and pull him back into my chest.

But I hadn’t touched him then, not yet. Not that night. And I didn’t touch him now.

I drifted off to a thick, tense sleep with my nose just inches from his shoulder.

I woke up once in the middle of the night. My sleep-fogged brain could still feel
Lugnut under my hands. He was twitching, and crying, and desperately searching for
me in the dark. No matter how hard I tried to hold him he always slipped through my
fingers. I cried out for him to hear me – for him to know that I was there. My
hands grasped wildly to get a hold on his soft fur.

And another pair of warm hands wrapped around my back. They held me as I moaned and
tried to call out Lugnut’s name. They pushed my hair back from my sweaty forehead
and wiped the wetness from my cheeks.

Finally I reached out and grabbed a handful of Lugnut’s fur. I clung to it

desperately while I shook in the dark. And his fur felt more like soft cotton than
it really did fur. But Lugnut knew that I was there now, and he was no longer in
pain, and he wasn’t alone.

And right at the moment when I slipped back into deep, dark sleep, I felt his cold
nose press to my forehead for a long moment. Only his little nose was warm, and it
felt a lot like lips.

\--

I woke up late in the morning with a headache screaming behind my eyes. My face
felt puffy and swollen in the hazy light. I stretched out tired, aching limbs
beneath the sheets and rubbed my hands over my face.

And instantly, I remembered.

There was a soft punch to my gut as I struggled to breathe. It all flashed through
my mind – the long drive out East, lying on the floor with Lugnut in my arms, that
last look in his eyes, and tears on my cheeks beneath the stars.

The soft prick of a needle into my thigh from Sherlock’s hands. Warm arms in the
dark, and curls near my face.

I threw out a hand towards the other side of my small bed, already grasping to get
a handful of clothes or skin or curls. The space beside me was empty. I sat up,
ignoring the throb in my head, and looked down at the perfectly straight outline of
a tall body on top of my sheets. The blanket he’d used was folded neatly on the
floor. I ran my hand over the empty bed, and the sheets were still slightly warm.

For a moment I wanted to call out and see if he was still there. Call him back to
my side and beg him to slip back under my sheets. To pretend for just one morning
that I still woke up with his curls against my cheek.

The cabin was completely silent, though. I knew he was gone.

I struggled to pull myself out of bed. There was a full glass of water sitting on
my bedside table and two little white pills. I left them there. I shuffled out in
the kitchen and shielded my eyes against the sunlight. It seemed impossible that
just last night I had stumbled in that same room with tears on my face – with the
memory of Lugnut’s heavy body still clinging to my hands, and sobs in my chest, and
Sherlock’s hand on the small of my back.

Everything in my kitchen was bright and clear, no trace at all of the fact I had
come back last night missing part of my soul. There was a mug of fresh smelling
coffee on the counter, covered with a small kitchen towel to keep it warm. I walked
towards it blindly and held it in my hands, shivering as the warmth made its way
through my bones. I took a small sip – it was thick and black, the way I always
made it for myself.

I wanted to ask the blank walls of my cabin how long ago Sherlock had left. Whether
he looked at me as I slept for a long time before walking away, or whether he took
his own sip of the coffee in my hands before covering it with the towel to keep it
warm and slipping out my door so I wouldn’t hear.

The rest of that day passed in a dreamlike daze.

I wandered aimlessly from the kitchen table to the couch and back. I spent more
than half of it sleeping, slipping back into empty, dreamless hours on the couch –
hours where Lugnut wasn’t dead, and Sherlock Holmes hadn’t slept five inches away
from my side.

Whenever I woke up, I’d gulp down another glass of water, holding the cool glass to
my forehead to try and remember I was awake. I stared at the ceiling and the walls
and my hands. I stayed all day in the boxers and t-shirt I’d slept in, never even
washing my face or combing down my hair. At one point, I started to reach into the
bag Molly had given me, but the second my fingers touched the rough wood of his
name plate, I pulled my hand out and collapsed back into a painful sleep on the
couch.

By the time the sun was starting to hang low in the sky, my skin felt itchy and
hot, and my cheeks were raw under my growing beard. My head still screamed at me,
and my empty stomach ached. It felt like days had passed since I woke up that
morning, and yet every time I woke up from another awful nap on the couch, my hand
still reached out for one foggy moment to try to feel Sherlock beside me before I
remembered.

The fourth or fifth time that happened, something switched in my mind. I clenched
my fist and heaved myself up from the couch, swaying on my feet as the blood rushed
from my head. I rummaged around in one of my kitchen drawers and pulled out the old
mirror I always hung up to shave. I forced myself to stare at my face in the
crooked glass. My eyes were red and swollen, and I looked like absolute shit – as
if I’d gone a hundred years without sleeping and even longer without a warm shower.

I heated some water on the stove and splashed it over my face and hair before
brushing my teeth over the sink. I walked on sore feet into my bedroom and pulled
on fresh jeans and a flannel over my exhausted limbs. The fabric rasped against my
too-sensitive skin, and it felt painful to lift my arms. I reached for my bedside
table to pull out the sock, but something unfamiliar prickled at the back of my
neck. Without thinking I stood up and walked quickly over to the closet instead. I
thrust my hand into the bundle of old clothes at the back of the closet floor until
my fingers clasped around something cold and firm.

I slowly pulled it out. It looked exactly the same as when Sherlock had first
handed it to me in the tent, looking at me with hopeful eyes as he curled my
shaking fingers around it.
“ _How . . .,_ ” I’d whispered. The flaccid looking thing in my palm, the _cock_ ,
had slowly begun to warm from the heat of my hands. I’d traced one of the veins on
the pale skin with my thumb.

“ _They make these now,_ ” Sherlock had said. “ _Obviously I didn’t just order off
the shelf. This has unique specifications. Made by the very best, and meant to
last. I gave them your . . ._ ” He cleared his throat. “ _Your . . measurements.
You just slip it inside and wear it in your pants, like you’ve been doing._ ”

And suddenly, hot shame had burned up my cheeks that I hadn’t even known that it
was possible – that there were other people like me walking around with cocks in
their pants, and I was a forty-year-old man with a pathetic, old sock making the
bulge in his boxers.

Sherlock’s hand had brushed the hair back from my face. “ _You couldn’t have
known,_ ” he said, knowing exactly what I was thinking. “ _Not living out here in
the middle of nowhere like you’re a bloody hermit in the Bible._ ”

And I’d laughed, then, the tension in my throat suddenly gone. I hadn’t really
thanked him, and Sherlock hadn’t asked if it was ok. And later that day, after we’d
packed up camp and kept hiking, Sherlock had come up behind me when we were stopped
for a break with our packs lying on the ground. He’d wrapped his arms firmly around
my waist and pressed his hand over the new bulge in my pants. He’d traced it with
his fingers and breathed hotly into my ear, and he’d cursed as I bucked my hips up
into his palm and reached back to grip his curls. And I’d whispered in a
dangerously rough voice, “ _Yeah, touch it. Come on, touch me._ ”

And he’d groaned back, “ _Fuck, you’re huge._ ”

I held it in my hand there in my sunny bedroom, letting my fingers slowly warm it

back up. After a long moment, I unzipped my jeans and slipped it down into my
boxers, fitting it up against my bare skin beneath my hair. It clung to my body the
way it always naturally had. The warm weight of it after I zipped up my jeans
burned low in my spine.

I glanced at my face one more time in the little mirror before I left. My eyes were
still red around the rims, but less puffy. My face no longer looked like I’d just
risen from the dead. The gravel exploded under my boots as I set off through camp.
I felt like the entire earth was hovering beneath my feet – as if every ray of
remaining sunlight was currently bouncing off my chest. I didn’t have time to be
nervous.

I walked right up to Sherlock’s cabin door and took a deep breath, ridiculously
relieved that I hadn’t run into anyone on the way there. My eyes had quickly gazed
at Hannah’s closed cabin door on my way over. But then I’d thought of Sherlock’s
hand on the small of my back last night as I entered the office, and I’d thought of
soft lips in my hair, and I’d kept walking.

I knocked just once before I could lose my nerve. The door opened an impossibly
short amount of time later. My hand was still hovering in the air in a closed fist.

“John,” he said instantly. He was fully dressed now in a clean button-up shirt and
jeans, and I could smell the hair product still clinging to his curls. His eyes
roved over me in one quick swoop, that way they always used to that made my toes
curl in my boots.

I let him look. “Sherlock,” I said back. My voice still sounded exhausted, but
nothing like the night before.
He didn’t ask me if I was alright, and I knew that he could read everything in the
lines on my face – the set of my shoulders and the curve of my spine. The little
specks of water still clinging to my hair and beneath my jaw.

I hadn’t planned on what I was even going to say, but the words poured effortlessly
from my lips without even a thought, suddenly clear in a way my words hadn’t felt
clear in a long time.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go out on a patrol this week,” I said. I refused
to shove my hands in my pockets or pick at the sleeves of my shirt. “If you needed
a ride,” I added.

He blinked hard twice, still staring at my face. Something flashed through his
eyes, too quick for me to catch, and then he gently leaned against his doorframe,
the way he used to what felt like decades ago.

He gave me a soft look. “Depends,” he said in a low voice. “Will it be boring?”

A small smile lit up my face, chasing away the last bits of painful tears still
hiding in the corners of my eyes. I rubbed a hand over my mouth. “I’ll try to make
sure it isn’t boring,” I said back.

He gazed at me through the golden evening air. The space between our bodies started
to hum. “I’ll hold you to that promise, Ranger,” he finally said.

My throat felt tight as I smiled back at him. I nodded my head as I began to step
back down from his porch.

“Deal,” I said. The answering smile in his eyes burst in my chest the same way it
felt the first time Lugnut had ever licked my face.

I knew as I walked away that he understood what I had come to say.

That “ _If you needed a ride_ ,” had meant “ _I’m sorry._ ”

And that “ _Deal,_ ” had really meant “ _I miss you, and thanks._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, we made it <3

>
> Bless little Lugnut, and I promise he isn't totally gone from the fic forever. If
you're wondering when this WIP will end, I think I can safely say we're about 2/3
of the way through!
>
> My deepest and most endless gratitude for trusting me with this chapter! I
appreciate your kind comments more than I can say. I know I've been favoring
writing more updates instead of responding to comments, but please be assured I
read and devour each and every one, and they are the driving force behind this
fic's fairly quick update schedule!
>
> Next time: It's 1991, and Sherlock and John have *finally* kissed. Now we get to
see just why this fic is rated *explicit* and not *gen* :)

10. July 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to "Pardon Me" by the Cox Family
[HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=PUfLmtLQ6d8&index=6&list=PLPMbOXH7TtSSP7T1xoR7TQW8TY62_qhSJ/)
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Early Morning Light"
[HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7JlNrkRFKs/)
>
> I'm deeply grateful to my two sensitivity readers, oxfordlunch and finnagain, who
kindly and graciously lent me their time and wisdom. As a cis woman writing about
the intimate experiences of a trans man, I wanted to make sure no biases or harmful
thinking were seeping in, and that John and Sherlock's first time together was
depicted in a healthy, positive, and clear way.
>
> oxfordlunch has been deeply supportive throughout this fic and provided me again
and again with critical information, particularly regarding John's process taking
his shot. You can find and support his writing on AO3
[here!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordlunch/works/)
>
> finnagain wrote what amounted to a PhD-level thesis on the events in this
chapter, John's thoughts and emotions, and John's specific interactions with
Sherlock, and I will be forever grateful. You can find and support their writing
and podfics [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnagain/pseuds/finnagain/
works)
>
> Lastly, huge thanks are owed to my medical beta, smirkdoctor, who graciously
offered to answer any medical-related questions I had, and then not only didn't run
away screaming when I sent her a novel-length email, but wrote me a textbook-level
response that went above and beyond my wildest dreams.
>
> There are a few previous scenes and moments in this fic that might be very
slightly changed based on the helpful feedback from the three smart people above,
in case you notice anything changes. Any remaining errors in this chapter, and the
fic as a whole, are entirely my own.
>
> Enjoy!

July 1991

There were some days, like that fifth bright blue day of July, when I thought that
maybe I’d gone and stolen someone else’s life.

I leaned back on my hands where I was sitting on a patch of warm moss, squinting in
the sun and watching Sherlock off in the distance comb over every inch of an old
kill site. The wildflowers wove a thick, fluttering carpet lying heavy across the
earth, making Sherlock look like he was emerging out of a red and purple sea –
bursting with foamy petals and warmed by the sun.

Every once in a while, my eyes scanned over the horizon for any signs of movement –
a lone, gentle caribou or a hawk flitting off into the sky. Far off in the
distance, on one of the rolling green hills, a pack of Dall sheep rambled across
the mossy stones like a handful of white pearls dropped to scatter and bounce down
the slope. The pollen drifting off the wildflowers filled my nose with hazy
perfume, and the clear, open sky sat like a ball of glass around the earth, pierced
by the tallest point of Denali’s shining white peak, and cradling the whole park in
a gentle, thin breeze. It was one of the most beautiful afternoons I could ever
remember seeing in ten years of living there, and the most beautiful thing about it
wasn’t even a part of the park at all.
Sherlock sat back on his heels and pulled the wide brim hat off his head, running a
hand through his flattened curls and wiping the sweat off his brow with his
forearm. I watched the thin linen of his shirt cling to his long, damp spine, tight
around his chest and wrinkled from a full day of hard hiking. My own feet were
aching and sore in my boots, and the skin on my arms and wrists was starting to
burn in the sun. Our jug of water in my pack had long grown flat and lukewarm, and
the mosquitos from the nearby glacier runoff were buzzing near my neck.

And I couldn’t think of any other time in my life where I had felt so calm – so
right in my own bones and settled into my feet. Where I didn’t fear grizzlies, or
sudden rain, or spine-chilling cold, and I wasn’t already aching for the dark
silence of my own cabin, and I didn’t even care if I never ate a warm meal or took
a hot shower again. I just sat there, leaning back on my hands which felt strong. I
gazed back at Sherlock without looking away when his eyes landed on me from where
he still knelt in the long, lazy grass.

He rose gracefully to his feet and walked my way, outlined by the sun with a halo
around his skin. I shielded my eyes with my hand from the sun as I looked up at him
standing over me, right before he sunk down to one of his knees, blocking the
bright rays with his curls. Without a word, he reached forward and placed his
fingertips on my forehead. He looked at me with steady eyes as he trailed his
fingers along my skin, following the lines etched into my brow and the wrinkles at
the corner of my eyes - carefully, and precisely, as if they were a map he needed
to intimately know.

Then he sunk his fingertips into the top of my hair. He stroked along my scalp,
sending shivering, tingling waterfalls down my neck and spine. I closed my eyes as
he brushed the hair back from my face, feeling each individual strand in his long
fingers – my hair which was soft and hot from the bright sun.

It was nothing like the way my dad’s fingers had roughed up my hair when I was
little – nothing like the way it had felt the last time anyone else had ever
touched my hair. Back when my hair was long and curled at the ends, and the fingers
weaving through them had had manure in the nail beds, and they’d twirled the
strands slowly before tucking them softly behind my ear, catching on a little
strand of hay stuck in the loose braid.

But Sherlock’s tanned fingers sank into my hair, for the first time in over twenty
years, and I didn’t want to turn my head away.

When I opened my eyes again, and my gaze focused back on his face, I nearly lost my
breath under the force of the look he was giving me. It was a look I’d seen about
once a day since we got back from our backcountry trip just over two weeks before,
after I’d watched him roll around on the ground with Lugnut for hours, pretending
to be mad about getting even more filthy in the mud while secretly smiling over at
me with his eyes. And after he’d stood up and brushed himself off, he’d glanced
left and right to make sure we were alone before taking my face in his hands and
kissing me on the mouth – somehow an answer and a promise all at once. And his
fingertips had smelled of Lugnut’s rich, grey fur.

The look he was giving me now as his fingers trailed through my hair was soft, and
earnest, and utterly still. He looked at me, and he knew that I knew that he _knew_
, and he refused, absolutely refused, to go and look away.

It was a look that was the answer to some of the questions flying around in my
head. Questions like why, even after we made it back to Toklat and real life,
Sherlock Holmes still reached over to place his hand on my thigh whenever we got in
my truck. Why he still waited for me leaning on his tree in the mornings, and sat
slumped against my side when we stopped to eat trail mix out in the tundra, and why
I always felt him full-body shiver whenever his lips met mine – those brief, few
moments during the past two weeks when we would stand close together, as the only
two people left on earth, and he would let me kiss him, just to remember the soft
taste of his mouth.

But I wanted to do more than kiss him.

As I sat there and looked up into his pale, grey eyes – eyes which were tracing
every line of my plain face – I wanted to put my hands on his shoulders, push him
onto his back in the soft grass, and cover him with my weight until his bones
melted beneath me.

I wanted to press my lips to the place on his throat where the line existed between
tanned skin and pale. I wanted to hear him panting, feel his hands gripping hard at
my back, and I wanted to grind down on him, rub myself on his body at the place
where he was hot and hard, and place his hands on my own bare skin, trailing
through the thick hair covering my thighs. I wanted to taste the sweat that dripped
down his spine to pool in his lower back, and taste the secret skin behind his
knees, and taste the hair under his arm.

I _wanted_ him, in a way I’d never wanted another human being before. In a way that
had me grasping my sheets in the darkness every night. Gasping as I imagined myself
surrounded by smooth skin – piercing eyes staring at my freckled, bare shoulders
and silk curls trailing across my chest. I wanted to know what it would be like to
feel nothing but his bare skin against mine, touching me in all the secret places I
kept hidden beneath my clothes – the crease between hip and thigh, the mole in the
small of my back, the thin crook of my elbow and the hollow of my throat.

My chest.

And every time we kissed, every time he took me in his arms out in the middle of
the park, or when I drew him closer to me in the shadows near my cabin before we
parted ways after a long day out on patrols, every single time I thought it would
be the day I asked for more. When I would sigh against his lips, and trace my
thumbs over his hipbones, and whisper, “Please, let me. Sherlock, just let
me . . .”

And every single time, he’d pull back right as the warmth started to thrum low in
my spine. He’d take a moment to catch his breath. And he’d say in a deep,
breathless voice, “Well, Ranger . . .,” except he’d never finish the sentence, no
matter how many times he started. He’d touch me one last time, somewhere innocent
like a palm on my upper arm, or a squeeze of my hand, and then we’d slowly drift
apart, putting space between us where before there had been none.

But I knew he wanted me, too.

The fire in his eyes when he’d open them after I kissed him – the sweet, heavy gaze
that he leveled at me whenever I watched him leaning back in the grass, or when I
shot him a glance side by side in my truck with one arm hanging out the window. The
way he watched every move of my fingers and hands as if he wasn’t smack in the
middle of a gorgeous national park.

Sherlock looked at me like that, and suddenly I was sixteen years old again, when
the fingers trailing through my long hair belonged to the boy who lived on the farm
two miles away. And that boy was saying, “ _You know, Ranger,_ ” because he’d heard
my dad call me that once, “ _I got a nice, soft mattress I hauled up into the barn
last summer – way up in the rafters._ ” And on that long ago fifth bright blue day
of July, I’d smiled and shifted the way I was lying on the grass, turning more onto
my side so my hips curved up, and I’d said, “ _You gonna show me?_ ”
Sherlock’s look reminded me of that perfect day right before the sixth bright blue
day of July, when I’d sat in the dark in my little attic, and my clothes from the
day before had been dumped in a heap on the floor. When I’d pulled a piece of straw
out of my hair, and then found the pair of my dad’s old jeans I’d stolen years ago
and stuffed under my mattress. When I’d willed myself to forget everything, and
felt the rough denim on my legs, and I’d placed a sock down into my pants for the
very first time.

And it was that look in Sherlock’s eyes, dripping in sunshine and fresh air, that
told me that one day, one day soon, I wasn’t going to let him pull back from our
kiss.

But he pressed his lips to my cheek that day sitting in the grass under the bright
sun, after running his fingertips through my warm hair. I didn’t allow myself to
flinch, reminding myself that Sherlock’s lips in my beard was world’s away from
that boy’s fingers twirling my hair.

We shared a private smile even though there was nobody around for miles to see,
sheltered beneath our eyelashes and kept hidden from the clouds.

“Well, Ranger,” he said.

I sat up and reached out to trace the delicate vein in his wrist with my thumb.
“You ready?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead he leaned down slowly and held my jaw in his hand,
pausing for a moment before I tilted my head up to reach his mouth. His lips were
dry and warmed from the sun. They felt like that first day of hopeful spring after
a long, dark winter when I was just a kid – when I would sprint between the metal
trailers before we moved to our real house, and kick off my thin shoes, and sink my
bare toes into the freshly warmed soil, shivering when they reached down far enough
into the earth to feel the cool, damp mud below.

I could still taste the coffee I’d given him that morning on his tongue – the
aftershave clinging to his cheeks by the corners of his lips and the salt from the
sweat he’d wiped from his brow. I could taste the soft hum that escaped from his
mouth – the one that told me that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to press him
back into the grass. I rubbed my palm up his wrist as he kissed me, relaxing into
the earth with the sun on my face.

And I let him pull back, like he always pulled back, and he didn’t kiss my cheek
that time before gesturing with his head to start the hike back to the Road. Maybe
I had flinched after all.

The sun was drooping low and heavy by the time we pulled into the Toklat lot. The
back of my neck and my arms felt prickly from a full day under the sun’s rays, and
my eyes felt warm as they blinked through the gathering dark.

I yawned and rubbed my face as we walked away from the freshly washed truck. “Later
than I thought we’d get back,” I said, for no reason other than to feel like I had
a reason for Sherlock to stick by my side.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes. “I estimate we would have been back
around thirty-eight minutes sooner had you not driven us back like a grandfather
and stopped for every miniscule rabbit that tried to cross the road.”

The laugh I tried to hold in still escaped in a puff of air. “Excuse me for
preserving the wildlife and getting us back in one piece,” I said, smirking at him
and shaking my head as we made our way through the trees.

He lifted his chin. “I’m simply alerting you how you can improve in the future.
Getting back this late means you’ll barely have time for that overdue load of
laundry you were planning to do before you settle down for your strict bedtime –
even though you’ll spend the next three hours staring at the ceiling anyway before
you actually fall asleep.”

I huffed as we made our way towards my cabin’s front steps. “I can tell you’re
dying for me to ask you how you knew all that,” I said. For some reason, I winked
at him. “So now I won’t ask.”

He frowned at me, but I could see a spark glowing in the corner of his eyes.
“You’ll never learn if you don’t ask,” he said casually as he leaned against the
wood post of my front porch.

I grinned and stood in front of him, angling us so we were mostly hidden in the
shade from the trees. It was the way our evenings ended every single day – when I
reached out and held him gently by the hip, and he kissed me goodbye, and we parted
ways with brief words spoken about what time to meet tomorrow morning. When I felt
like I was young and giddy and naïve, and something about it called to me in the
hidden space beneath my chest. When I remembered how I’d felt in the brimming, gold
moments right before I climbed up behind that boy into the hot, dusty barn.

And suddenly, the thought of eating dinner alone at my little table felt like being
cut off from the air – like the memory of the sun on my skin from that afternoon
would be torn away from me, leaving me naked and cold. I needed to keep the scent
of the pollen in my hair, the rasp of the grass against my ankles, and the dirt
around my fingernails. I needed to _stay_.

I traced his hipbone beneath his jeans with my thumb and leaned in close. “Stay
with me,” I said softly. I licked my lips and looked up hesitantly into his eyes,
knowing I was breaking our unspoken rule that he spent his evenings in his cabin
and I in mine – that this new thing between us existed out on patrols, and in the
park, and even in my truck, but not in the silent darkness of our private worlds.

Something flickered through his eyes. His fingers twitched in the small space
between us, reaching out and tracing along the edge of my belt. He spoke slowly.
“You want . . .”

“I don’t want to eat alone,” I said. The words felt foreign in my mouth, and all
the more familiar for it – like ghosts that had been hovering at the edge of my
tongue for decades and only now caught the breath in my lungs to find a voice.

I felt like I should feel vulnerable in the wake of those words, shrinking and
embarrassed that I was a grown man afraid to eat at a kitchen table for one. But
the look Sherlock was giving me was warm and strong, lifting my shoulders where
they wanted to slump away.

“I’ll stay,” he said, even softer than I had spoken.

Without another word I turned and unlocked my front door, casting a quick glance
over my shoulder that no one was watching him enter behind me. My ears latched on
to the sound of his socked feet on my wooden floors as he wandered inside. It was
hardly the first time he’d entered through that door – that morning he’d jolted me
away in my bed, and that day he’d huffed at me from across the room while we
planned our first trip – and yet, I felt that the air in my cabin was feeling his
warmth for the first time. That suddenly the bare wooden walls understood that I
had kissed him – that this was the man who made moan beneath my sheets, and stare
out the window each early morning with two cups of coffee in my hands, waiting
impatiently like a little kid for the new day to begin.

I clenched my jaw before I could say something stupid like, “make yourself at
home,” or, “feel free to sit.” Instead I walked straight into my kitchen and
started getting out a pot and pan for the stove, setting the water I kept in the
kettle to start boiling. I could sense him leaning against the doorframe to my
bedroom, standing calmly, limbs loose, like he could stand there all night.

“You care what you eat?” I asked over my shoulder.

I heard a clear, “Nope.”

It was the last words we said to each other for a long while. He watched me
silently make dinner for a bit from the doorway before moving to sprawl out along
my couch, picking up one of the Alaska trail guides I kept on the small table and
simultaneously flipping through a bird watcher’s journal, muttering under his
breath and frowning whenever he found something he deemed incorrect. I cooked up a
quick risotto from rice and some vegetables Molly had gotten for me when she went
into Fairbanks the week before. Something I would never in a million years make for
myself but which felt like something I desperately needed to do – to show him that
I wasn’t just eating canned beans in the dark every night while I waited to sit by
his side again in the morning.

Decades of cooking for one made my hands second-guess themselves as I pulled down
two bowls and cut two pads of butter instead of one. I didn’t let myself look back
at him as I stood there slowly stirring the rice over the stove, feeling like if I
did I would only see an empty couch – that I had somehow imagined the fact that
Sherlock Holmes was sprawled in my cabin in casual socked feet, with my books held
in his hands, while the smell of the dinner for two I was making filled every inch
of the close air.

I could hear him, though. Hear his fingers turn the pages, and his back shift
against the couch, and his toes crack as he stretched them. I could hear him
breathe.

I set both bowls down on the table before looking over at the couch. He was staring
straight at me with his curls in his eyes. I sat down and started eating like it
was no big deal at all as he gracefully rose and glided across the room. His eyes
flickered quickly over the table before he plopped down and immediately started
eating without saying thanks.

A few minutes in, he spoke with a full mouth. “You’d never make something like this
for yourself,” he said.

I shrugged down at my half-empty bowl and hoped he couldn’t see my cheeks turn
pink. “Guess not,” I said. I ate faster so I wouldn’t have to say more.

“But you’re capable of it.” He leaned forward with his fork in his hand. “You
didn’t even need to consult any sort of recipe, and you had every ingredient on
hand.”

I waited for a few minutes to answer him, and he never pressed me to go on. I
thought of long days spent peeling vegetables for my mom in the kitchen, or
stringing beans, and of those quiet moments over the stove when her voice would be
soft.

“ _You ain’t good at much, but you’re sure as hell better at all this cookin’ stuff
than your sister_ ,” she’d say to me as she wiped her sweat on the kitchen towel
and handed me the spoon to stir. I remembered the day I’d finally tried to make her
a batch of her famous scones, and she’d slapped my hand hard when she saw that one
of them was burnt, but then said that the rest tasted even better than when her own
momma used to make them.

Sherlock had kept eating methodically while I went silent. Finally, I finished off
my last bite and pushed my bowl away, swallowing down the buttery rice in my mouth
and taking a swig of old coffee from that morning sitting nearby. “Haven’t exactly
ever lived in a place where restaurants were close by, in case you haven’t
noticed,” I said, looking awkwardly at the outline of his hands against his bowl
and hating that I felt embarrassed over something as stupid as making dinner.
“Literally decades of cooking my own food,” I added.

He hummed and leveled me with a steady gaze, holding an uneaten bite aloft on his
fork. “Cooking for one,” he said, a bit too flat.

My eyes flickered to his, and I swallowed. “Yeah, cooking for one.”

I desperately tried to read what was in his gaze – something hesitant and soft,
something _wanting_ without wanting to want. Something unsure.

Before I could process it he swiftly stood, grabbing both our bowls and heading to
the kitchen. My gut clenched. I hoped against all hope he wasn’t about to insist he
do the dishes, or try to clear up the washing as a repayment for the dinner.
Somehow, the thought of that alone felt like it would erase the imprint of the
afternoon sun from my skin – that it would wipe off the ghosts of warmth still
clinging to my arms and leave them pale and cool, obliterating the memory of the
entire day. I waited for the sound of him pouring water in the sink, or the sponge
against the bowls.

Instead I heard him dump the dishes unceremoniously into the sink before he walked
away, flinging himself back onto the couch with one arm and leg hanging off.

My heart soared. I looked at him lying there with one arm over his eyes, fighting
the stupid smile on my lips.

“Do I have to invite you to come sit on your own sofa?” he mumbled.

I glanced at him to make sure he couldn’t see before I rolled my eyes. It was a
habit I couldn’t break – one I hadn’t even realized I did until the day Molly
looked at me oddly a few months into her first season, and she asked me, “ _Did you
grow up in a house with a million sisters?_ ” And when I frowned, and said, “ _Just
one,_ ” she blushed a bit and tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. “ _Oh,
sorry then,_ ” she’d said. “ _Just sometimes . . . well, you know how we all pick
up little habits from family when we’re young. Just certain little things – rolling
your eyes, or standing with one foot turned out. You know?_ ”

And I’d fought to stay standing as I forced a smile on my face. I’d wrapped an arm
around her shoulders, ignoring the sweat prickling on the back of my neck. “ _Is
that how come you chew with your mouth open, kid?_ ” I’d said. And it wasn’t until
later, much later that night, that I’d banged my head softly against one of the
cabinets in my kitchen, and thought that after all the careful years of controlling
my voice and my hands – all of the _decades_ \- that it was almost something as
stupid as rolling my eyes that gave me away.

I shook my head out of the memory and made my way to the bedroom. Sherlock was
still sprawled out on the couch with his eyes closed. “Gotta get out of these
sweaty clothes,” I said back, hoping that only a second had passed since he’d told
me to come sit down. I glanced at the doorframe where I could see his feet on the
couch. My finger twitched to shut the door against the light from the kitchen as I
changed.

I left it open.

I grabbed some flannel sleeping pants and an old pullover Molly had gotten me from
Kenai Fjords a couple years ago. The soft fabric inside was already starting to
pill and wear out, but I wore it nearly every cold night all the same, especially
back in Talkeetna, when the ice covered my bones.

A part of me felt that walking out completely naked would be less intimate than
letting Sherlock see me in these clothes – these clothes which I wore in the
darkness of my room, and the privacy between my sheets, and the long nights alone.
These clothes which no other human being had ever seen me in before. I wondered in
the back of my mind if he would take one look at me and understand that.

He barely looked up as I padded back out towards the couch. When I hesitated, he
sighed and lifted his legs straight into the air. I ducked under them to sit down
on the couch, wincing when he plopped the full weight of his legs back across my
lap. I sat there for a second with my arms awkwardly in the air.

And in that quick moment, I felt that the entire evening had suddenly paused. That
what I did next, whether I asked him to pick up his legs so I could shuffle off to
bed, or called him an annoying dick and pushed off his feet, or lowered my hands to
silently rub his sore ankles – that my choice would push whatever we had been doing
for the last two weeks into something _else_. That in the span of a few seconds, we
would either become colleagues who kissed each other goodbye or two men who woke up
naked and entwined in the same bed.

Sherlock’s breathing was slow and shallow. I could feel him pretending to study the
bird book held lazily aloft in his hand, while really his muscles were tense,
waiting for how I would respond.

And suddenly, sitting there staring down at Sherlock’s legs in my lap with my hands
in the air, I thought of a memory I hadn’t thought about in years.

It was my first winter at my freshly built cabin in Talkeetna. I’d fucked up

chopping the amount of firewood I’d need and ran out a measly three weeks into the
season, making me have to pack up a bag in the twilight dark and climb on my mobile
to cut through the walls of snow into town. I felt ashamed to buy firewood instead
of chopping it down with my own hands, but it was better than freezing to death
with nobody to find my body for four months.

By the time I got to Talkeetna I’d been cold to the bone, soaking wet and numb and
shivering across my skin. I’d crawled into the single bar in town and endured the
teasing by the woman there I’d only met once before on my official trek out to the
cabin for the start of season. Chena had taken one look at me with my blue lips and
frosted beard and set a few fingers of good, spiced whiskey down in front of me.

“ _So, you didn’t chop near enough firewood, huh?_ ” she’d said. “ _Rookie mistake.
I’ve seen every damn tough guy in this whole bar make it their first year._ ”

I hadn’t stopped her when she set another shot in front of me. Or another.

By the time the bar was full of the locals for their nightly drinks, my vision had
been swimming, and my clothes felt too hot.

And there had been a man, sitting across from me at the other side of the bar. And
I could feel his eyes tracing the worn lines of my hands.
He’d been tall and rough – huge weathered fingers and gentle lines around his deep
brown eyes. He’d looked at me and looked, nodded over his pint with just the barest
tilt of his head. And somehow, for some reason, I’d nodded right back. I’d slammed
another shot back and gotten to my feet, swaying a bit as I made it towards the
freezing alley out back.

I’d barely walked two feet when I felt a pair of warm hands grab the sides of my
belt in a loose grip. My spine had melted as the man turned me around and pushed me
back against the brick wall. I could barely make out his eyes in the dark.

“ _Say yes_ ,” he’d growled by my ear.

Fire had surged up my spine, warming bones which I feared would be stuck frozen
forever. “ __Yes,” I’d whispered, and he’d kissed me.

I could barely remember the details as I sat there still on the couch, blinking
with my hands hovering above Sherlock’s legs. I remembered the taste of stale beer
on the man’s tongue, and the thick, heavy warmth of his cock under my palm. I
remembered yanking open his belt and reaching into his pants, palming his bare skin
and jacking him with my fingers. I remembered the sound of his grunts, the wet
smears of his mouth along my neck. I remembered the hot spray of his come against
my wrist. How everything had been sharp and pulsing and bright – how my body had
plastered up against him just to feel every bit of his warmth, the heartbeat under
his thick shirt and the raw callouses of his hands. How I’d moaned, lost in the zip
of want up my spine. How I’d wanted to be the one pressing him back into the
bricks, shoving my own tongue down his throat until he tasted Chena’s whiskey.

And I remembered his fingers reaching for my own jeans – flicking open my belt and
pulling the zipper down. How he’d spit into his hand before starting to reach down
my pants. And everything had grown clear, like dangerously sharp ice cutting
through the whiskey fog.

I’d run.

Barreled back into the bar to slam my money on the counter and grab my coat, then
hurled myself onto my mobile and revved the engine in the pitch dark. The air had
filled with puffs of smoky white cloud. I’d ridden back through the woods towards
my cabin with numb hands, guided by starlight and praying I didn’t run across a
bear in my path. I hadn’t even bought any wood.

And as Sherlock stretched to crack his pale toes in my lap, I remembered how I’d
sat on my little bed in my one room cabin, shivering hard without a fire and
watching my breath fog in the dark. How I’d scrubbed my palms against my own skin
until I couldn’t feel the man’s hands still gripping me, and how I’d rested on my
side still fully dressed in my clothes.

And more than anything, I remembered how I’d suddenly longed for his touch – for
hands on my bare skin in the private silence of my cabin, holding me awake and
gripping me close through the long night. I’d wondered, in a way I’d never even
considered before, whether I could go back the next week and find that man again.
Whisper to him through a bourbon haze what he’d find beneath my clothes, and let
him ride behind me on my mobile, and follow me back home.

I’d wondered for hours, until the weakling sun rose for its daily peek above the
clouds. And then I’d gone out and chopped more firewood until my hands were
bleeding and sore beneath my gloves – too ruined for me to reach down into my own
pants and bring myself off later.
“You’re remembering something.”

I blinked hard and ripped my gaze out of the darkness of my Talkeetna cabin.
Sherlock was peering at me over the top of the book in his hands, looking as bored
as possible when I knew he was anything but.

“You’ve remembered three . . . maybe four separate memories tonight – and one
earlier this afternoon. Things you don’t normally think about,” he went on, when I
didn’t answer right away.

We shared a long look, broken by the harsh ticking of the clock above the stove.
Then I relaxed back into the couch, and rested my hands on his shins, pushing up
the stiff fabric of his jeans to rub at the soft hair on his bare calves.

“I was,” I said softly. I kneaded into his muscle. “I did.”

He hummed and closed his eyes, not asking for anything more. I let my hands trace
the tendons of his legs for a long, long time. Long past when the rest of the camp
had drifted off to bed. Long past when my own eyes started to burn with sleep.

And I wondered, right before I felt my eyes droop closed, whether I was happy he
hadn’t asked what I’d remembered, or whether I’d wanted him to ask for all of the
memories, word by word.

I woke up to the first rays of sunlight spilling through the thin curtains.

Something felt off in the way my neck was twisting against the pillow, and the way
my back sunk into the bed beneath the sheets. I rubbed my eyes open and blinked
through the pale light, and I realized I was lying on my couch with a blanket
tucked around my limbs. The warm smell of fresh coffee was coming from the mug on
the little table, still steaming and covered with a kitchen towel to keep warm.

And then I remembered, flashing through my mind like an old black and white film,
how the last thing my eyes had seen before drifting off to sleep had been strong
calves beneath my hands, and another pair of legs in my lap. I thought I
remembered, through the thickest grey fog of my sleep, how those same legs had slid
off me, and how hands with long fingers had pushed my shoulders down onto the
cushions, leaning against something warm and soft like a chest. How curls had
brushed against my cheek, and lips had pressed into my hair. How a body had sat
beside me through the long, black night, holding me through it until it slipped
away just before the dawn.

The couch cushions smelled like peppercorn and cedar.

I jumped up to my feet and picked up the warm mug in my hands, cradling it while I
stared out the window at the mist rising through the trees. We didn’t have plans to
meet at all that day. Sherlock was meeting with Greg, Max, and Babs to review their
latest finds, and I had the day-off again, one which I planned to spend out East.

I ignored the sudden, wild urge in my gut to burst into their meeting and kidnap
Sherlock to drag him along all day behind me.

I moved about my cabin on silent feet, as if making any noise would scare away
Sherlock’s presence still hanging about – like one loud bang or slam of the door
would erase the fact that he’d spent the night by my side, watching me dream.

By the time I pulled up into C-Camp hours later, I imagined I could remember every
second of Sherlock’s hands on my skin through the night. How he held me at two
o’clock, and three o’clock, and four. How he must have looked when he slipped out
of my grasp as the sun started to rise, and how he must have looked at my small
sleeping body on the couch, and how he must have tiptoed through my kitchen while
he made my coffee. All of it perfectly clear, as if I’d seen every moment with my
own two eyes.

Lugnut was asleep curled up on the roof of his hut when I approached. I saw his
nose twitch, catching my scent in the air, then he flopped over onto his back and
hung his head off the roof, panting at me upside down with his tongue hanging out.

I sunk my fingers into the fur on his belly and tickled him with my beard.
“Morning, old man,” I said. He yipped and gently pawed at my face before flipping
onto his side and tucking his head against my neck.

I knelt and gathered him up in my arms. “Something happened last night, old boy,” I
whispered into his fur. He squirmed and licked at my face. “Something I’ve been
wanting even longer than I realized.”

Lugnut rested his face between his paws and gazed at me with his huge, grey eyes,
ears twitching as they waited on the words from my mouth. And there, surrounded by
still-sleeping sled dogs in their kennels, and kennel Rangers preparing the feed,
and visitors flooding the Park Road, I told Lugnut all about how, for the first
time in my entire life, I hadn’t spent the long night alone in my own cabin.

Molly found me a while later during her lunchtime rounds. She plopped beside me in
the dirt where I was sitting against Lugnut’s hut with him draped across my lap.

After a minute of silence, she bumped my arm and spoke.

“So. . .” she said.

I glanced over at her and frowned. “So. . .?”

She shot me a look. “ _So_ , how come you look like you just won the Nenana Ice
Classic sitting in a kennel yard?”

When I frowned again, she rolled her eyes and smiled. “God, John, I know you love
Lugnut like your own kid but he’s never made you smile at nothing into thin air
before. For half a month now you look like you’ve been walking on clouds whenever I
see you.”

My cheeks burned pink, and I wiped a hand over my mouth. I gave a small, awkward
laugh. “Just having a good season, I guess.”

I knew that she knew I wasn’t telling her anything at all, but she let me get away
with it, the same way she always had. She looked at me for another long moment, her
soft eyes tracing the side of my face.

“It’s nice to see you happy,” she finally said in a soft voice. I didn’t look up
from my fingers massaging Lugnut’s ears in my lap.

“I’ve been happy,” I said, and I shuttered at the fake, flat sound of my voice.
“Dream job, dream kid,” I nudged her, “dream girl.”

She huffed and slumped back against Lugnut’s hut behind us. “Men are impossible,”
she said on a sigh. When I went to apologize she put her hand on my leg and smiled.
“No, keep your secrets,” she said, cutting me off. “Just, whatever it is,
whatever’s happening, keep doing it.” She squeezed my knee. “Unless it’s something
illegal, then find something else.”

I laughed, surprised, and finally looked up from Lugnut’s sleeping face. “Nothing
illegal, kid,” I said, and the dark, ironic part of my mind laughed at how much
those words felt like a lie.

She leaned against me and tucked her knees up to her chest. When she finally spoke
again, I could barely hear her over the sound of the other dogs barking for their
food. “You, more than anyone I know, John, deserve to look this happy,” she
whispered.

I burned at the back of my neck and cleared my throat. I tried for a joke, “Even
more than your Greg?”

She laughed. “Loads more than Greg,” she said. “I may love him, but that man’s had
his whole life handed to him on a silver platter. Barely even knows what it’s like
to feel sad, from what I can see.”

The words spilled out of me before I could stop them. “And you don’t think I’ve had
my own life handed over on a platter?”

The air froze. I heard Molly swallow slowly beside me. I wanted to take it back –
suck my words back out of the air and say something else instead, how Greg’s one of
the best men I’ve ever met, and how he makes Molly look like she’s the one walking
on clouds, and how Sherlock Holmes held me as I slept last night on my couch.

She sighed. “I know I don’t . . . know about a day of your life before we met,”
Molly said. She quickly looked at me. “And that’s fine,” she added. I made myself
meet her gaze, and her eyes were serious and deep. “But I can see enough to know
that you haven’t been handed any silver platters.”

My throat felt tight. I held on tightly to Lugnut’s fur with one hand as I reached
over and patted her leg with the other. I didn’t try to cover up the fact that my
voice was choked. “You know, kid,” I said, “I think you’re wiser than you look.”

She didn’t say anything more when she finally rose to go and finish her shift, just
reached down and ruffled my hair with her fingers, and for a split second, as she
walked away leaving my hair standing on end, my brain thought that maybe my dad’s
fingers had just ruffled my hair instead.

\--

When I got back late that night, all of Toklat was asleep. I drove slowly into the
lot to muffle the sound of my tires over the gravel, and I put off washing the car
until the next morning when I felt more awake. I’d spent the whole rest of the day
after talking with Molly making my necessary visits all around the East side -
checking in at the offices and saying hi to the colleagues I only saw a few times a
season.

My bones physically ached as I walked through the black trees towards my cabin –
sitting at the top of the slope like dark ghost calling my name. For a moment I
glanced over at Sherlock’s cabin across the way. A dim light was on downstairs in
the front room. I could just barely make out the silhouettes of Greg and Max bent
over a table, but nowhere else in the room could I catch a glimpse of curls. My
hand twitched to knock, but I made myself keep walking by.
The cold silence rushed against my face when I opened my cabin door, drowning my
body in a wave of fresh dark. I left the lights off as I padded into the kitchen,
flipping on the kettle to make a last cup of something warm before going to bed. I
leaned my hands against the counter and looked down through the black, wondering
why my heart was racing for no reason at all. Wondering why I wanted to hop on my
mobile, and drive back through the snow into Talkeetna, and find the man sitting at
the bar – and the man this time around would be tall and lean, with dark curls. And
he would call me John when he wrapped his hands around my waist, and he would
whisper, “ _I know_ ” as he palmed the front of my jeans, and he would sigh, and
hold me close, and shiver beneath my touch. He would go back home with me, through
the long, black night. He would touch me in my bed.

“How was your dog?”

I cursed and dropped the mug in my hands, wincing when the handle broke off and
shattered on the wood floor.

Soft footsteps walked up behind me as I bent to pick up the pieces in the dark.

“That mug wasn’t your favorite, anyway,” said Sherlock’s voice again behind me.
“You use it for that revolting mint tea you drink at night instead of your precious
morning coffee.”

I shook my head as I gathered the shards into my hands and dumped them in the
trash. I leaned back against the counter with my arms over my chest and tried to
make out the silhouette in front of me in the dark. “I want to be furious at you
for scaring the shit out of me,” I finally said. “Jesus, Sherlock, I could have
decked you.”

I could almost feel his shrug in the silence. “Could have, but you didn’t.”

I smiled behind my hand as I breathed in his scent. The water in the kettle was
growing cold again, and a secret part of me was hoping that Sherlock wouldn’t ask
to put the kettle back on – to get down two more different mugs and still make the
tea, as if he wasn’t here at all, as if the fact that I slept in his arms last
night didn’t change anything about the way my life worked.

Instead he took a step closer on hesitant feet. “John,” he said. Something in his
voice sent warnings up my spine.

I swallowed hard, slowly making sense of the lines of his face in the dark. “Yes?”

He sighed through his nose. “I missed you today,” he said, as if he was

disappointed about it.

My heart started beating, and I rubbed at my arm across my chest. “I’m sorry,” I
said, feeling like every moment he’d ever felt unhappiness was suddenly my fault
without really knowing why. “You know, you could have come with me –”

“No, you misunderstand me. I _missed_ you,” he said quickly. The dark grey lines of
his body took another step closer to me in the room, and I watched his hands reach
up to grab at his hair.

“I missed you from the second I walked out the door this morning and left you on
the couch, every minute I was listening to the inane babble of Geoffrey and Max
with their collar data, the entire afternoon while I stared at the clock waiting
for you to come back, every minute I sat in here in the dark waiting for you to
open the door.”
His voice was growing frantic, and I tried to reach out to him with my hand. “Well
you could have turned on a light,” I tried. When he didn’t laugh, I went on,
“Sherlock –”

“And the entire time I just wanted to be here, with you. On your boring couch in
your boring cabin with your boring dinners and your horrible, boring old jumper. Or
sit in your truck on your boring patrols, listen to your boring tapes, and drink
your boring water and hold your boring compass and bear spray while we hike.”

“Hold on –”

“I’ve never wanted to do anything _boring_ in my life, and yet here I am, when
there’s a whole park full of wolves out there waiting for me to track and find
them, and you’re more interesting than any of that – than any pawprint or kill site
or piece of wolf scat –”

“Well, thank God I’m more interesting than a piece of wolf scat –”

“—but you just _stand_ there and I want to study it. I’ve kissed you for nearly
three weeks at least twice a day, I know what your mouth tastes like, how your lips
move. I’ve catalogued all of it and it isn’t enough, I want more. I want thousands
of data points to study – thousands of repeat experiments on the way you hold the
steering wheel of your truck, how you pour your boring coffee into a mug. I’ve seen
every bloody animal in this whole park with you – even the most ridiculous little
bird – and I want to go and see them all again. I want to watch the caribou herd
move down the same slope at the same time in the same place every day, sitting on
the same roof of your boring old truck.”

“Sherlock –”

“I want to sit on your boring, uncomfortable couch all night and not close my eyes
for a second instead of sleep in my own bed beneath my own sheets –”

“Just wait a second –”

“—and I want to watch you pet your boring dog, and call him the same stupid names,
and drink your same boring coffee –”

I reached out to grab his arm. “Sherlock –"

“And I don’t understand _why_!”

I kissed him.

His mouth was still hanging half-open from his speech, and the breath was shaking
and panting in his lungs. He moaned when my lips met his in the dark, hands
reaching up to immediately cling to my back.

It was the same kiss I’d given him that bright afternoon in the backcountry –
different, more wild, than all of the kisses that had come after. It was desperate,
the way my breath traveled down into his lungs, and the way my face pressed against
his, and the way our noses bumped. It was wet, and messy, and nothing like the way
he’d kissed my cheek the day before under the bright blue sun. Nothing that made me
want to flinch.

It pulsed and thrummed. I took two steps forward and gently backed him against the
kitchen table, holding his soft face in my hands as I tasted his mouth. His hands
were clutching at the shirt on my back, and his curls brushed against my face. A
delicious warmth was starting to pool low in my gut– so much more overpowering than
the one I ever felt lying face down in my bed in the dark.

I licked across his mouth. “Sherlock,” I whispered. A rough sound escaped my own
throat as I leaned forward to kiss him again, and as I pressed myself against his
body from our shoulders to our hips.

He pulled back.

I could just make out the glistening on his wet lips in the dark, and his chest was
pushing against mine as he breathed. I could feel his heartbeat, mixing with my
own, where I held him between the table and my body.

I gazed up at him, somehow unbothered that I wasn’t gazing down. “Why do you pull
away?” I asked gently. I held the side of his face in my palm.

He frowned, and when he didn’t answer, something terrible clenched in my gut. My

skin turned to ice, and I took a half-step back. My voice shook. “Is it . . . is it
because of my –”

“Absolutely not,” he said quickly. He reached out and pulled me back closer to him.
He closed his eyes for a moment with his hand still on the low of my back. I could
feel the heat of his palm through my shirt. When he opened his eyes again, they
were stripped and clear – a version of him I’d only ever seen before out in the
middle of nowhere – eyes which I’d looked into just before we agreed to hold each
other in the tent.

“I’ve never done this before,” he said quietly.

I stroked up his side and felt each one of his ribs. “That’s alright,” I started to
say.

“I mean, I’ve never done this in this way,” he added. He reached out to place a
soft hand on my chest, right over the beat of my heart. “Like this,” he said. “With
. . . with someone who _means_ something.”

I understood immediately what he meant. I thought of lying in my dark cabin wishing

for hands on my skin – hands which would understand what they were about to find
beneath my clothes, and which had chosen to follow me home, and which would still
be there in the morning.

“I haven’t either,” I said. The words felt incredible, like pounds of weight lifted
off my chest.

“I don’t . . .” Sherlock paused and took a slow breath. He leaned forward to rest
his lips against my forehead. “If we do this,” he finally whispered into my skin,
“I can’t go back to how we were before. If we really do this.”

An odd calm settled on my shoulders like a breeze, warm, clean water dripping from
the place on my forehead where his lips touched my skin. “Me neither,” I said.

“I feel like I’m too old to be doing this for the first time,” he said, forcing out
the words like they physically hurt him.

I held him closer and lifted up my face so our noses touched. “I’m even older than
you, you dick,” I whispered, and the sound of his laugh filled the whole room with
light.

“You have a point there, Ranger,” he said, and then he met my gaze, and then he
kissed me.

My whole body sang. I felt his kiss at the tips of my fingers, and along the soles
of my feet. I felt it beneath the tightly cinched scars on my chest, and in the
hair under my arms, and behind both of my ears. The only sound on earth was the
sound of his lips sliding against mine – the wet, warm sounds each time our mouths
brushed, and the hot pants from our lungs, and the tiniest little sighs as our hips
pressed closer together.

His fingers danced up each bone in my spine and traced the back of my neck. The
shivers cascaded down my back, causing a fat, wet drop to slide from between my
legs, pooling on the fabric of my boxers beneath my jeans. I didn’t twist away from
the damp spot as it grew.

He moaned softly when I gripped a handful of his curls between my fingers, and he
moaned again when my hand traveled down past his waist, tracing over the hot, hard
length of his erection in his jeans as I panted into his mouth. I felt him grow
harder beneath my touch, pressing like steel into my palm.

“Stay with me,” I breathed against his lips.

He rolled his head back on his neck and arched his chest against mine. “Yes,” he
whispered.

He went boneless as I guided him through the darkness into my bedroom. He didn’t
try to stop me as my steady fingers went straight for the buttons on his shirt,
flicking open each one and kissing the new inches of bare skin. The hairs on his
chest tickled my lips and rasped against my beard. He shivered as the cold air met
with the wet streaks I left on his skin. He helped me shrug the shirt from his
shoulders and tossed it into the black corner. My hands roved over the warm muscles
of his stomach and chest, grasping at his shoulder blades and along his lean sides.

“God, Sherlock,” I whispered. His skin was searing hot, nearly burning my palms. I
listened to him gasp as I licked across his collarbone and tasted his throat. He
laughed under his breath when my beard tickled his sensitive skin, and I brushed it
harder across his shoulders until I could feel it leave a mark.

I felt his hands at my neck, fingertips hovering over the top button of my flannel
shirt.

He paused. With shockingly steady fingers I reached up to hold his hands in mine. I
gently guided them towards the cold, little button. “Please,” I whispered.

I couldn’t fully see his face in the dark, but I heard the soft release of his
sigh. His long fingers quickly opened each of my shirt buttons, revealing the
undershirt I had on beneath. He kissed me as he did it, deep, rough kisses instead
of tiny sips of air against my lips, as if he’d keel over and suffocate if he
wasn’t tasting all of my mouth at once. I shrugged my shirt to the ground, and,
before I could think twice about it, I grabbed the bottom of the tank top and
pulled it up over my head, shivering a bit when it rustled to the floor.

And for the second time in my entire life, I was bare in front of another human
being.

And for the first time in my entire life, I was bare in front of another human
being with a flat chest.

He didn’t hesitate. The second my shirt hit the ground with a soft thud, he grabbed
me around my back and pulled me against his bare skin, shivering when the muscles
of our stomachs collided. He chased my mouth with his lips, and pressed his
erection into my hip, and all I could feel was the heat of his skin on mine – the
intimate brush of the soft hairs on his body, and the way his chest molded against
me. The way fire zipped down my spine when I felt our nipples touch, and the dry,
rasping sound of our bodies moving together.

He was trembling. I heard the click and rasp of his belt, and suddenly his jeans
were falling in a heap to the floor and being kicked away by his foot. His
underwear followed. I sucked in a breath when the bare skin of his penis pressed
against my lower belly, aching and rock hard where it rubbed against my skin.

I looked down, even though I could barely see anything in the dark. “Look at you,”
I whispered. My voice was unrecognizably low. “Fuck, look at you.” He moaned when
my hands roved over the bare skin of his back, drifting down over his full ass to
grab onto his thighs. I wanted to hold all of him at once – memorize every inch of
skin, every dip of bone, and every hair. I wanted to cover every part of him with
my lips and my tongue, taste the shivers on his skin, and know the length of each
bone.

“John,” he whispered. It was the first thing he’d said since, “yes.” His voice
sounded wrecked and breathless in his throat. I kissed him again, and his lips
lingered on mine for a long while. He held the back of my neck, fingers threaded
through the ends of my hair, as he tasted me, again and again, so softly I could
feel the quiver of his lips. And those ones were somehow the loudest kisses of all.

He rubbed his cheek against mine and ran his palms up my arms. I suddenly wanted to
feel the whole weight of his body on mine – to hold every piece of him in my arms,
safe and strong. I gently walked back until my knees hit the edge of my small bed.
I faced him. I could hear him panting in the silence. Slowly, methodically, I
reached for my own belt. My fingers didn’t shake as I undid the buckle, and pulled
down the zipper, and pushed them down to the cold floor.

And suddenly, I was standing just inches before him with only my underwear covering
my skin, painted by the darkness and hidden within the walls. I was wearing one of
my pairs of boxers where I’d sewn a pocket into the front, keeping my bulge safe
and close against my real skin. I resisted the urge to reach down and adjust it, or
to cover the whole thing with my hand. I swallowed hard against the urge to feel
ashamed.

I was no longer up in that barn with my hair down to my waist.

I was no longer on my stomach in my empty room on cold sheets.

I was not afraid.

“I can see you,” he suddenly whispered, and even though there was no possible way
he could see me in the dim light, I understood what he meant. I understood
everything he meant.

I kept looking at him as I slowly sat down on my bed. I reached out for him, and he
immediately stepped closer, his legs on either side of my knees. I traced his bare
thighs with my hands. “You’re fucking gorgeous,” I said, finally saying words I had
been meaning to say for weeks.

And suddenly, Sherlock was climbing onto the bed and straddling me with his legs.
He sank down onto me, and his erection pressed into my lower belly. I clutched at
his sides and back with my hands as he arched his hips, dragging the pre-come
leaking out the tip of his penis across my stomach.
“Look at you,” I said again, as if it was the only sentence I knew how to say. I
grabbed at his thighs and his ass as he scooted closer to rub himself against me.
My own thighs were trembling not to thrust upwards towards his body – the crease of
his bare ass hovering just above my crotch which I desperately wanted to sink
myself into, to feel the tight heat of him as I pressed closer into his body.

I reached up and grabbed his hair and kissed him instead. He made a desperate sound
in his throat as my tongue pushed into his mouth. His hands gripped helplessly at
my shoulders while I moaned against his lips. I felt that maybe I could go on like
that for eternity – with Sherlock Holmes naked in my lap, and his cock against my
skin. With his hungry moans and breathless sighs filling the close air of my cabin
while I licked into his mouth and traced his tongue with my own.

And then, before I even realized what was happening, Sherlock’s hips moved _down_.

He rolled hard against me as his ass sank into my lap. I bucked my own hips up
without thinking, and my bulge pressed up into the warm space between his buttocks,
desperate to come into contact with some part of his bare skin.

And through the fabric of my boxers and the thin, rolled sock, my aching, swollen
skin suddenly brushed up against his tight hole.

I gasped. A sudden pulse of heat shot down my thighs. I was throbbing in my groin,
and my underwear felt soaked through and wet. Sherlock cursed under his breath
above me, leaning down to press his cheek to mine as he rolled his hips again,
sinking even lower across my thighs. I leaned back to angle my lap so I could
thrust, and again, my own body pressed up into the warmth of his ass.

“Fuck,” I heard myself groan. I knew he could feel me through the layers of fabric,
wet and erect and fucking up against his body. I gripped his hair. “Oh god. . .”

I frantically licked and bit at his neck as he clutched my shoulders and moaned.
His cock was rock hard where it still pressed into my stomach. He pulled back to
breathe from my frantic kisses. “Christ, you’re hard,” he whispered in a rough
voice. He moaned and rolled his head on his neck. “God, you feel . . . I can
feel. . . _fuck_.”

I ached beneath the sock, and the damp spot grew wetter. The feeling of it covered
over the mild blush spreading across my chest as I continued to thrust against him.
It somehow felt like the most intimate thing I’d ever done – the most naked and
vulnerable I’d ever been – to press the soft bulge into his skin, and know that he
was feeling my real, erect body underneath. My real body which was hard from
thrusting up into the perfect crease of his ass. For him to realize how desperately
I wanted it to be real – for him to really feel it inside my underwear, and know
that it was me.

For him to feel fucked.

And still, he rocked himself above me in a rhythm with my own hips, and still he
panted and whispered, “ _Christ, you’re hard._ ”

I couldn’t hold him up for much longer. My breath trembled in my lungs. I held him
by the shoulders and gently pushed him off to the side before gliding his back onto
the bed. The old wooden floorboards creaked softly under our weight. I covered his
body with my own, and my ears tingled at the sound of both of us sighing at the new
touch. It felt like lying down upon the fresh, warm earth, sinking into the
mountains to help hold the heavens up in the sky. It felt like the first time my
Ranger uniform had covered my fresh, new chest, or the first time I backpacked
alone my first season in Denali, when I’d woken up with the dawn, and gazed out of
the tent flap over the sage mist, and silently shed a tear that _this_ was my new
home.

It felt like the day I sat beside my sister in the flat summer air of our trailer
home, back when we were young, and still played together with dolls, and put braids
in each other’s hair. Back before she grew older and tattled to our parents that
I’d cut the hair off all my dolls to make them boys with the kitchen scissors. It
felt like when our toes mingled together in the warm, fresh dirt, and I’d told her
how I wasn’t really her sister at all. And she hadn’t blinked an eye, or even given
me an odd look. She’d just said, “ _You may be my brother, or whatever, but I’m
still older than you, so I get first pick._ ” And I’d told her that she could have
her choice of Jell-O flavor the whole rest of that summer, and that I’d eat the one
she didn’t want.

It felt exactly like that, as I let my full weight rest on top of Sherlock’s warm
skin. I kissed him deeply and pressed him down into the mattress, settling my body
on top of him until his full cock pressed between my legs.

“God, John,” he said under his breath. “Fuck, you feel . . .” He didn’t finish the
sentence, just moaned as I gripped a handful of his hair.

I tasted his tongue and rolled my hips slowly on top of him, pressing my bulge
along the full length of his erection. I dragged myself across him, from the base
of his cock to the tip. He cursed and grabbed my ribs, arching his back and his
hips up against me. His cock was still full and leaking.

I was trembling in my thighs, aching harder than I ever had before in my life. I
could feel myself throbbing, thick and swollen and wet within my boxers. I wanted
to be surrounded by him, to feel the wetness from his soft, open mouth. I wanted to
press him into my sheets, and also be trapped between his body and the bed.

The thick darkness amplified the sounds coming from his mouth – the gentle brush of
his skin against mine. I could hear him panting, and feel the hot breath from
between his lips fan across my throat. I kissed him again, and his lips were
swollen beneath mine. I continued grinding myself on top of him, pressing one of my
legs between his so the place where I was hard would press closer to his cock. I
leaned down to drag my lips slowly along his throat. He gasped out loud when I
dragged my beard across his skin, covering his shoulders before moving down to his
bare chest. I caught a peaked, hard nipple between my lips and sucked, lapping it
with my tongue until his hands grabbed my back and shook out of control.

“Fuck,” he breathed by my ear. His fingers gripped at my hair. “Touch me,” he

begged. His voice was high and shaking. “John, touch me –”

The air left his lungs in a moan that rattled through my chest as I reached down
and grabbed him hard in my hand. He twitched against my fingers, and I shivered at
the warm, heavy weight of his cock in my palm. He held the back of my neck and kept
my face close to his, lips brushing as we both breathed, and I stroked him with my
hand. I found a quick rhythm to the roll of his hips, to the beat of his breath
across my tongue. He held me there as I swiped my thumb over his wet slit, and
dragged my fingers through his thick black hair around his cock, and rubbed my palm
over his tight balls. Nothing existed in the world except the small space between
our bodies – no light, or other sounds, or sensations beside the feel of his hard
cock pulsing in my hand.

I kissed him as his breathing sped up to feel him pant into my mouth. “Come on,” I
whispered across his tongue. My hand sped up as he fucked up into my fist. He was
shaking, wild sounds escaping from the back of his throat. “Come on,” I said again.
I bit his bottom lip as I gave him one long, slow stroke, “That’s it. . . that’s it
. . . feel me on you. . how tight. . . _come_ on –”

His wide, grey eyes shone for a moment in the dark, latching fiercely onto mine for
an eternal second before he threw back his head on his neck and came. Hot semen
covered my hand and my wrist, and a long, desperate moan escaped his throat while
his hips pressed up harder into my hand. I watched him, breathless, as he came
apart beneath me, frozen with the knowledge that something as simple as my hand on
his skin had caused something so beautiful to happen – that I was witness to
Sherlock Holmes at his most naked and stripped down, lying cradled in my bedsheets,
and begging for my hands to feel his skin.

I brushed his sweat damp curls back from his forehead and kissed him beneath his
hair as he panted to catch his breath. Then I reached down over the bed and grabbed
the first shirt I could find to wipe off his belly and the come on my hand and
wrist. I collapsed next to him and quickly pulled him into my arms, tucking his
head onto my chest while he gripped me with his arm.

For a long while, we just lay there. Our heartbeats gradually slowed until they
were in sync. I could feel the warm press of his lungs against my side, and the
slick of the sweat between our bare skin, and the heavy weight of his thigh draped
over my leg. I played with his curls with my fingers, forbidding myself from
thinking about anything other than how lovely he felt – the solid, warm weight of
him, and the smell of his sweat and come filling the darkness of my unsuspecting
little room.

He sighed deeply against my chest and pulled me closer with his arms. I could feel
his limbs growing heavy, drifting off to a calm sleep.

Then he sat up suddenly and turned to stare down at me in the bed. His hand hovered
over the middle of my chest. “John, did you . . .?”

He didn’t finish the question, and I didn’t need him to. I squirmed a bit on the
bed, and I waited until I knew my voice would sound normal.

“It’s alright,” I said. Because it _was_ alright. Because Sherlock had just
orgasmed in my arms, in my bed, and he’d let me rub the place between my own legs
against his chest, and over his erection, and he’d told me I was hard, and looked
me in the eyes, and unbuttoned my shirt.

He was silent for a long moment, and my fingers tingled, body fully awake. Finally,
he leaned down and brushed his thumb across my beard and cheek. “Do you want to?”
he asked.

The softness of his voice made my chest suddenly clench in an odd pain.

Yes, of course I wanted to.

I wanted to let him feel me come in his arms. I wanted to be hot and hard against
his palm, be inside of him, feel him clench around me as he came. I wanted to look
down at his huge hand and see him holding our cocks together, side by side. I
wanted him to suck me, to choke on me, to beg me to take him on his back. I wanted
to look fiercely into his eyes for an eternal second before I let myself go. I
wanted to be stripped and naked and seen by only his eyes, even in the dark.

I wanted to _come_ , and not by rutting against my own sheets while I imagined
invisible voices beneath me.

I was still swollen and pulsing between my legs inside my boxers, clenching my
thighs just barely together to try and hold it at bay.
I let my thighs relax, and I took a deep breath. What I was about to say felt more
terrifying than the first time I’d tried to introduce myself as John, way back in
South Dakota to the woman behind the desk at the work office, the day before I’d
left it all and headed for the ranching job near Wounded Knee, and she’d taken one
strange look at me with my fresh buzzcut and my cap pulled down too low, and she’d
said, “ _But ain’t you the Watson’s younger daughter?_ ”

I swallowed hard over the sudden fear in my chest and sought Sherlock’s grey eyes
in the dark, waiting until I could be sure he saw me looking. My palms sweat.

“Yes,” I said softly. I swallowed again. “I want to.”

I waited for the embarrassment to overtake me – that I was a grown man, in my own
bed, and I was asking to come the same way a little kid would ask for more supper.
But before it could rush in and choke up my throat, Sherlock’s lips were on mine,
moving soft and slow.

He kissed me for a long time. Until my body arched up into his, and my hands clung
to his warm spine, and all I could feel was his heartbeat echoing into my own
chest. And as his kisses grew rougher, and deeper, and wetter, his fingertips
danced along my sides, and up my arms, until I was shivering across my bare skin.

His lips moved slowly down the side of my neck, tasting the skin and sucking it
between his lips. My hand reached up to hold the back of his neck closer to my
panting chest. “Sherlock –” I tried to say, but I could barely hear my own voice.
He hummed and moved lower, slowly, meticulously tracing every line of my
collarbones with his tongue. I gasped when the cool air brushed against my wet
skin. I could feel my nipples pearling, and my hips gently rolled up into his. He
trailed his soft fingers through the hair on my chest.

He kissed my body for what felt like hours. He tasted every inch of my stomach and
ribs, and blew hot air across my skin. It felt like being covered in the first rays
of spring – that morning every year when I would wake up in my cabin in Talkeetna
and the faintest rays of dawn would be pushing their way through the grey clouds. I
shivered beneath his mouth, the same way I always shivered that first time my feet
crunched down into the Denali gravel.

It was freeing – letting myself be seen in the pitch black of the dark – letting
myself be touched by his careful hands.

It was intoxicating, until it wasn’t.

I gasped when his full, hot lips closed around one of my nipples. My spine tensed.
I could barely feel the wetness from his tongue – or the soft brush of his lips. He
felt me hesitate, and he paused to look up, mouth hovering above my skin.

“You know I can’t really feel that,” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t filled with the
longing I suddenly felt.

He frowned. I hated myself that I’d wiped the blissful look from his face, wishing
I could travel in time to five seconds ago and take it all back.

He looked quickly down at my chest, and I saw his eyes briefly trace the scars
etched in my skin. I could practically hear his mind whirring, trying to figure out
exactly how it was done.

“Just . . . after that,” I said, hating that I felt the need to fill the silence.
“I can’t really feel . . . there.”
His eyes were piercing and clear when he looked back up at me through the dark. His
thumb rested just to the side of my left nipple, which was still slightly peaked in
the air. “I didn’t know,” he said softly. There was a hint of disappointment in his
voice.

I reached up and ran my fingers through the messy curls on his head. I smiled,
trying to smooth the frown between his eyes. “Even _you_ are allowed to not know
everything under the sun,” I said.

I grinned, but he didn’t smile back. He barely even blinked. “I should have known,”
he said. “I should have figured it out. I was too . . .” He bit his lip while he
searched for a word, and a sudden wave of affection overcame me.

“Distracted?” I whispered.

A small flame lit in his eyes. “Yes,” he said back. His voice was rough and low.

I stroked his cheek with my thumb, and I felt the tension in my spine flow away.
Just when I was about to pull him back up to my mouth, he spoke again, looking
straight up into my face.

“Do you want me to kiss you there?” he asked.

The question stole the breath from my lungs. I swallowed a few times, trying to
figure out what my mind was trying to say. I thought of the last time anyone had
kissed me there, back when there was skin to hold on to, and there had been straws
of hay stuck in my hair, and the hands on me had smelled like fresh dirt from the
fields.

I thought of sitting in my attic afterwards wearing my dad’s jeans over my thin

legs. I thought of staring at my pile of clothing and thinking in the dark, “
_never again._ ”

I thought of Sherlock’s fingers in my hair the day before, tracing my face.

“Yes,” I finally said in a low whisper. “I want –”

I couldn’t finish what I was saying before his warm, wet lips kissed softly over my
nipple. He moaned when he moved his tongue over the skin. I closed my eyes and
breathed, one deep, slow breath. He swirled around it with his tongue and sucked
while tracing the other one with his fingers. I pressed my chest up into his mouth,
searching the wet heat, imagining I could almost feel the zip of want down my
spine. I listened to the wet sounds of his lips as he licked and sucked, and a part
of me could _feel_ it, thrumming with delicious warmth in my chest – the same part
of me that could feel it whenever I cupped myself through my jeans.

He kissed it one last time before moving his lips lower, kissing right over my scar
as if it wasn’t even there – he didn’t trace it, didn’t avoid it, just covered it
with lips before moving down to my ribs, dragging his mouth through the hair on my
stomach as he stroked up my sides.

My skin sang under his mouth, until I was shaking and aching in the place where I
was hard. My soft sighs felt muffled and safe in the room, mixing perfectly with
the sound of his wet lips instead of alone and vulnerable in the thin air. I felt
his warm hands working their way down towards my legs, thumbs tracing over my bones
and along the waistband of my underwear.

I wanted to feel him.

Something wild overtook me. Before he could press down and feel between my legs
with his hand, I reached beneath my boxers and slowly pulled the sock out of its
pouch. Some of the thin cotton was wet.

It felt like the longest two seconds of my life. I waited for him to ask if I was
sure, or to tell me I didn’t need to – for him to look at me with concerned eyes
and hesitate before touching my real skin.

Instead he kissed my mouth before I’d even dropped the sock down onto the floor,
and without any pause at all, the heel of his palm rubbed across the small place
where I was swollen and hard. He traced it with his fingertips through the thin
cotton of my boxers, as if there was something there to actually stroke, as if I
could barely fit beneath the wide space of his palm.

He sighed into my mouth as I arched up into his hand. I ignored the wet sounds
coming from between my legs, telling myself I was leaking, dripping to be inside
him. Warm waves of pleasure thrummed down my thighs as he stroked his fingers over
me. My toes curled.

I wanted to be embarrassed at how quickly I was bucking up against his palm, but I
couldn’t feel that way, not when he was stroking me and moaning into my ear, and
not when he wasn’t pulling back from the soaking wet spot lower on my boxers, and
not when he was panting, groaning, “Fuck, John, you’re hard. Come in my hand . . .
fuck my hand. . . _Christ_ you’re fucking hard. . .”

I gasped against his lips as the warmth pooled low between my thighs, and he
stroked me one more time with his fingers, long and slow, and I clutched a handful
of his curls, and I came beneath his hand.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I heard him whisper – felt him breathe into my mouth. “Fuck,
John, come on me.”

An embarrassingly high whimper escaped from my throat as my orgasm rushed through

me, pressing myself harder up into his warm palm as I pulsed against his hands,
leaking onto my boxers. I held on to his bare skin on top of me like an anchor, the
only thing keeping me tethered to earth instead of rocketing off into the dark sky.
I knew I was squeezing him hard enough to bruise, and he didn’t pull away.

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until the last of it fizzled out
through my fingertips, and I released all the tense air in my lungs as he rubbed
his hand in a soft circle one last time between my legs. I twitched underneath his
touch, feeling suddenly that even the fabric of my underwear was too sensitive
against my skin. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d come like that in my life –
where it had consumed me, and frozen my lungs, and gone on like wave after warm
wave through my shaking limbs.

I collapsed against the pillow. I wanted to reach up and rub my hands over my face,
but I felt somehow that I needed to keep my face open and clear – that if I stopped
him from looking now, we would never be this way again.

He looked down at me for a long, soft moment, one hand carding through my hair and
the other resting on my ribs. I could smell myself on his fingers which were
weaving across my scalp. Finally, through my warm haze, I realized he was waiting
for an answer to an unspoken question.

I shifted my tired body to the side and reached down to grab the kicked-down sheet.

“Sleep here,” I said.

He collapsed beside me immediately, placing his head on my chest the way he had
done before. Our skin felt too hot beneath the thick sheet, but he didn’t pull
away, and I pressed my lips to the damp place just under his hair.

I knew, just like I’d known that first week in Denali that Lugnut would become my
dog, that I didn’t have to thank him at all for what he’d just done – that it was
the least necessary thing on earth, like thanking the oxygen up in the sky just for
being there to breathe.

He was heavy on top of me. His curls tickled my cheek. I wondered in the back of my
mind if my beard had left pink marks on his pale skin.

“I’ll be here in the morning,” he rumbled softly against my chest. I heard it for
what it was – the heads up and the warning, the understanding if I got up right
then and put a t-shirt back on, or if I asked him to leave before the dawn painted
my room with light.

I didn’t reach for a t-shirt. I wrapped my arms tighter around his back. “Good,” I
said. Just as sleep was starting to pull me under, I suddenly needed to make sure
I’d been perfectly clear.

“Don’t leave before the sun comes up,” I whispered into his hair. “Not until I’m
awake.”

I felt his lips form a smile against my chest. He settled closer against me,
throwing a heavy leg over one of my own. “I always listen to what my Ranger tells
me to do,” he mumbled, and I felt him drift off to sleep just as the last word was
leaving his kiss-swollen lips.

\--

He was still there in the morning.

I watched him for a long time after I woke up beside him, with his curls plastered
against my cheek and half his limbs sprawled across me. The sheet was kicked down
around both of our waists. He was lying on his stomach, and his breath tickled my
shoulder. I could barely see the tips of his eyelashes beneath a mop of sleep-soft
curls. The morning light streamed through the small bedroom window and painted gold
across the sheets, illuminating the tiny dust mites swirling in the air and blowing
warmth across his skin. It shone over the dark freckles scattered low across his
back, and it frizzed around his hair like a golden halo through the grey. It
illuminated my bare chest.

I didn’t reach down to pull up the sheet.

I thought of nothing but the feel of his lungs rising and falling on the mattress
as I watched him sleep. For long stretches of time I just closed my eyes and
listened, amazed that something as simple as someone else’s breathing could sound
so revolutionary – so impossibly real.

He twitched his nose for a minute before fluttering his eyes open. I watched with a
soft look on my face as he reached up to shove the curls out of his eyes – eyes
which locked on to me a moment later and widened in quick surprise. I saw the
thoughts flit across his face – that this wasn’t his bed, and that he wasn’t alone,
and that we’d fallen asleep right after having sex.

And then, before I could even clear my throat to whisper a good morning, he rolled
over immediately and took my face in his hand. He kissed me, sleep-muffled breath
and all, and his lips were dry and chapped from the long night of sleep. His mouth
gently caressed mine, tongue just barely seeping out to wet his lips before he
kissed me again, tender and soft. It was nothing like the kisses we’d shared the
night before. Nothing like the kisses out in the backcountry, or at the end of the
day hidden by my truck.

It was bare. It was sleep-slow and velvet and soft. It was entirely new – the new
reality of waking up together naked beneath the same sheets. His thumb stroked my
cheek, and I let myself reach out to trace the curve of his sharp hip. The muscles
in my body were beautifully sore, and I could feel an ache behind my shoulder where
his hand had gripped me the night before.

His eyes when he finally opened them again looked like the twilight sun hitting the
glaciers – where everything that was steel and grey was suddenly filled with a
glowing light, and the ice reflected the rich moss, mixed with the luster of the
rising stars.

And instead of a soft good morning, or a, “last night was good,” Sherlock licked
his lips and spoke in a deep rumble across my pillow. “Your job is unbearably
hateful.”

I laughed before I could stop myself – a light and breathless little sound. I
shifted closer to him and sighed when he reached out to stroke the hair on my
chest. “Why is that?” I asked him.

He tried to frown, but the softness on his face still shone through. “Because
you’ve got to spend the day stopping idiots from getting eaten by bears, despite
the hundreds of colorful signs warning everyone of the dangers of bear safety, when
instead you should be spending your day in bed with me.”

I laughed again, and for the first time in years, I let myself freely roll my eyes.
I reached out to place a warm hand on his arm. “And what would the great Sherlock
Holmes want to do in a boring bed all day?” I asked.

He shot me a look. “Have more sex, of course,” he said quickly. “Because I think
you’d agree that we were wildly successful. In between rounds you can tell me about
your hopes and dreams for the future if you want to fill the time in a more
stereotypical way –”

He stopped talking to glare at me when I slapped his arm. I rolled over fake-
groaning further onto my side and rubbed my face with my hand. “God, you’re
impossible,” I said. “You always like this with people still in bed first thing in
the morning?”

When he was silent, I pulled my hand away, and I realized what he was going to say
just by the look in his eyes. “You wouldn’t have anyone else to ask that question
to,” he said softly.

I leaned across and pulled his face closer with my hand so I could kiss him. It was
the best answer I could give. He softly hummed beneath my mouth.

I stroked his face with my thumb as I looked into his eyes, licking my lips over
the taste of his kiss. “I’ll be late for my shift,” I said, and instead of arguing,
he nodded.
I kissed him again, and he reached up to hold my wrist where I touched his face.
“I’ll pick you up in the afternoon if you want to re-visit the site near Stony,” I
said. “I’ll be done with patrols by then. We can stay and watch the caribou after.”

He blew a stray curl away that had landed in his eyes. “And if I watch your boring
caribou with you later, you’ll let me sleep here again?” he said. I could hear the
faintest bit of hesitation hiding in his voice.

I gazed at him, willing him to understand everything I was about to say. “Deal,”
was all I said, but I knew that he heard so much more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fans self* We made it! I promise there is plenty more sex to come with these
two, both in 1991 and 1992 :)
>
> I am deeply, deeply grateful for all of you reading this fic! You have sent me
incredibly kind feedback, personal stories, and travel aspirations. You have cried
with me over Lugnut, squee'd over hot Rangers, and shared your love of Ranger John
and Researcher Sherlock. You've kudos'd, and rec'd, and made art, and left
comments, and I'm happily blown away :)
>
> I'll admit, I'm pretty anxious / interested to hear if you all enjoyed this
chapter! I know it's been a long lead up to their first time, so I would LOVE to
hear any comments you have <3
>
> Thank you thank you thank you.
>
> Next time: We're back to 1992, where Sherlock is taking John up on his renewed
offer to go out on a patrol. I wonder how it will go?

11. July 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass (sort of): Listen to "Wildflowers" by the Wailin' Jenny's [HERE.]
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz91iizX6_A/)
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Jacqueline" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=XMyJu2ZVfkY/)
>  
>
> I hope you enjoy this chapter! 1992 is getting more and more hopeful. . .
>
> ***Brief heads up: mentions in this chapter of drug overdose and (very brief)
suicidal thoughts. If you'd like to skip, you'll see it coming right after Sherlock
brings up Greg in the canoe, towards the very end. (I promise that will make sense
in context)
>
> Thank you so much for reading and enjoy! :)

July 1992

They gave me a whole week off.

I wanted to decline it when Nick first told me with his arms crossed over his chest
in the dim light of the evening office. I’d gone straight there after walking away
from Sherlock’s cabin door, wanting to make sure that my schedule was in place for
me to be able to take him out on a patrol.

When I knocked softly and entered, Nick looked like he was seeing a ghost.

“Watson,” he said, and it sounded more like a question.

I nodded briefly and walked straight to the wall of schedules, praying that he
could read my body language to go on with business as usual.

He didn’t.

“You won’t, uh. . . won’t find anything up there for yourself, if that’s what
you’re looking for,” he said, still awkwardly sitting half-turned to me in his
chair. “Gave you the week off.”

I stopped myself just in time from saying something stupid, like, “ _But I told
Sherlock I’d take him on a patrol, and I never thought he would want to do that
with me again, and I don’t know if he’ll still want to do it if a whole week goes
by._ ”

Instead I tried to act too casual in the too small room. “Aw, don’t need to do
that,” I said. “I mean, I . . . well, you know, it’s a good thought and all.
Appreciate it. But I’ll be fine. Rather just get back to work, you know?”

I expected him to bow out and simply hand over the schedule, but instead Nick moved
to sit half-perched on his desk and fully face me, crossing his arms over his chest
with a long breath.

“See, we knew you’d say that,” he said, almost smiling.

“We --?”

“Me and Hooper.”

I swallowed thickly. “Oh, did she –”

“Called me first thing this morning saying something along the lines of ‘John
Watson is, under no circumstances, allowed to hop back in his truck and go on
patrols for a whole week. And when he fights you on it, you tell him I’m ordering
him to go out on a damn hike or something instead’.” Nick chuckled under his
breath. “Believe she added something along the lines of ‘and tell him to shave and
do laundry so he doesn’t look like a hermit living out in the woods. He’ll scare
away all the wildlife’.”

I laughed suddenly, for the first time in what felt like a hundred years. I thought
of Molly rising first thing in the morning to make sure she called Nick before he
wrote the week’s schedule, with the memory of me lying on the floor holding
Lugnut’s body probably still burned fresh in her mind. I rubbed at my face – the
slowly filling out hairs on my jaw.

“Well, if Molly demands it . . .” I gave a small shrug.

Nick nodded and winked at me and said, “Good man,” as I gave a small wave and
walked back out, fighting the urge not to just walk right back up to Sherlock’s
cabin and tell him that they gave me the whole week off, for the first time in over
a decade, and I couldn’t take him out on a patrol if we waited that long, and maybe
we should just skip it and pretend I’d never asked him at all.

The whole week off sat heavy in my gut. It felt too extravagant – something you’d
give someone who just lost a relative, or whose kid was in a car accident. Not some
greying bachelor who just lost not-even-his elderly dog. The few other Rangers and
staff milling around Toklat that evening gave me long looks as I walked past back
up to my cabin, nobody calling out to say anything but nobody ignoring me either.
Their eyes were knowing and sad – as if they themselves had been beside me in the
room when Lugnut’s little eyes rolled back.

The week off and the looks – it made me feel like there was a Park-wide secret
about me that everyone knew but myself. That even though I barely talked about him,
and walked him on my own, that everyone somehow knew, the entire world knew, that
he wasn’t just some dog to me. Not even close.

It made me feel naked. It wasn’t like my love for old Lug had ever been some
secret, but suddenly I felt like my need for him had been stripped and exposed from
my own naked skin – that I was being paraded around in front of the Park with a
visible, bleeding heart, and everyone suddenly understood that that sled dog who
passed away the other night was the only living thing on earth who knew about my
unknown past.

They looked at me, and tried to catch my eye, but I couldn’t look back.

I didn’t turn the lights on when I got back to my cabin. Just felt around in the
dark and drank a mug of weak mint tea before falling into bed, painfully aware that
every little ounce of joy I’d felt on Sherlock’s porch was slipping away out
through my fingertips – disappearing into the dark.

I didn’t touch the bag of Lugnut’s things on my kitchen table for two more days. I
spent those days mostly milling around in my cabin – catching up on reading I told
myself I was going to finish way earlier in the season without really seeing a
goddamn word on the pages, and doing some cleaning I’d been putting off for years.
I took one full afternoon and drove back out to Cantwell for groceries, leaving the
windows down the whole drive and wearing my old King Salmon hat.

I slowed down a bit on the drive back to the Park when I passed the turnoff from
the Highway where we’d brought Lugnut last summer – when I had still been sweating
in my seat that we were going to get caught and Sherlock had been relishing the
single cigarette I’d let him smoke out the window during the drive. I wanted to go
back down that road and find the little clearing again – see if the sun still hit
the long grass in the same way. If I could find the outlines of two bodies and a
dog still etched in the soft ground, a permanent reminder of our once existence in
the earth.

The old pick-up truck behind me honked loudly twice before speeding up to zoom
around me across the opposite lane. I blinked out of the memory and watched the
taillights speed away and disappear into a cloud of dust, leaving me far behind.

I drove clear past the turnoff without stopping to pull off. I fought with myself
the whole drive back to the Park Entrance not to look back in my rearview mirror,
as if the turnoff would always be just a half-mile behind me, hidden among the
bursting green trees and begging me to come check and see if it was still there –
if it had even existed in the first place.

That night I sat at my kitchen table and held Lugnut’s name plate in my hand for a
long, long time. The black paint was peeling on the surface of the sanded wood, and
I could just barely make out the thin lines of glittering silver paint outlining
each letter. I traced one of the letters with my thumb.

Molly had painted it for me way back in her first season. She’d been given the task
of assigning the dogs to their walkers for the summer, and nobody had thought to
clue her in that Lugnut always went to me, no matter what the random drawing said.
So when I’d showed up at the end of the first week of work to walk him, and Lugnut
and his leash had been gone, I hadn’t had a clue as to how I was supposed to track
down the poor new girl who’d sat next to me at the staff meeting and somehow demand
that she ignore the rules and switch him back to me.

I’d spent a whole week walking one of the other dogs, Cache, and visiting Lugnut
whenever I could during my spare time. Then I’d arrived one early pre-dawn morning
with Cache’s leash in hand to find Molly waiting for me, freezing in a too-thin
jacket near Cache’s hut. She’d apologized ten times in a row before I could even
say good morning, and said she hadn’t known as she pulled at her hair and blushed
deep red, and then she’d handed me a brand new name plate for Lugnut’s hut to
replace the old one which was splintered and faded.

“Oh, you didn’t have to –”

“I did,” she’d said. Then she’d given me a hard look and stomped her foot once in
the cold gravel. “So, now that I’ve done my part and apologized over it all, you
tell me this. Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” she’d demanded, faint blush on
her cheeks long gone.

I’d rubbed at my neck and fiddled with Cache’s leash in my hand. “Well, I
didn’t . . .”

“You were just gonna go the whole entire season letting somebody else walk your
dog? And you weren’t going to tell me to just switch it back?”

“He’s not _my_ dog. And I guess I would have eventually –”

“—and you were just gonna let me walk around all season as the ‘new kid who took
John’s dog away from him’?”

“No one would have thought that –”

“I mean, hell, I thought you and I were becoming friends, and you couldn’t even
tell me –”

“We _are_ becoming friends, it’s not that, I just –"

“You wanna get a beer?”

I’d stopped and stared at her in the freezing morning air. “It’s six o’clock in the
morning,” I’d said.

She’d rolled her eyes without even really moving them beneath her lashes. “
_Tonight_ do you wanna get a beer? At the Spike?”

I’d stood there dumb like I’d just been asked to move into Lugnut’s hut. Her simple
little question had run through my head like the most complex thing I’d ever heard.

“I don’t . . . well, I don’t really –”

“Don’t really what? Drink beer? Have friends? Exist?”

And for some reason, I’d burst out laughing, echoing towards the crystal sharp
mountain peaks in the morning fog. I’d traced one of the letters on the new
nameplate with my thumb, and said, feeling foolish and happy, that I would meet her
at eight.
That night, four beers in at a rickety table in the corner of the bar, with Molly’s
knees pressed against mine in a way that felt all kinds of right and not a hint of
wrong, she’d laughed with sparkling eyes and said I was the most mysterious person
she’d ever met – that she felt that I was the imaginary best friend she’d always
wanted when she was a little girl and never had. And I’d laughed and reached out to
touch her thin wrist, and held back the wild, reckless, tipsy part of me that
wanted to blurt out, “ _You know we could have braided each other’s hair if we were
friends when we were little?_ ” and instead said, “I wish you all the luck in the
world to try and figure me out then, kid.”

Lugnut’s name plate now looked almost as faded as the old one had, splintered at
the corners and bleached by the sun. I wanted to do something ridiculous like sniff
the wood deep into my lungs, or sneak out my tongue to try and taste his fur hidden
in the old grains. Then I thought of Sherlock, ass up in the air with his face two
inches from a clump of fur, holding a clod of dirt in his hands and licking some of
it into his mouth. And instead of making me laugh or groan like I had nearly every
day last summer, the memory of it only made the nameplate feel two hundred pounds
heavier in my hands.

That night I dug an old beer out of the back of my fridge, and cracked it open on
my countertop in the shimmering evening dark. I heard Molly’s laugh from all those
years ago in my head as I drank – her high, tinkling voice that first real night of
our friendship.

I heard her voice on the phone, saying “ _John_ ” and “ _You should leave now._ ”

I finished the beer too fast. I shut my bedroom door, climbed into my bed, and
tucked my sheets around my skin before that one beer could turn into two. The
darkness choked my skin – thick and shrouding like the bottom of a black glacier
sea. And I remembered, just before my red eyes finally drifted off to a fitful
sleep, how my bed had felt so different, so much larger and warm, when his body had
been on the other side, breathing in tandem with my own lungs.

\--

I woke up the next morning to a soft knocking on my bedroom door. For a long minute
I buried my face in my pillow and tried to convince myself that none of it was real
- that I was still dreaming, and that when I fully woke up my cabin would be empty
and silent.

I reminded myself, for what felt like the hundredth time, I couldn’t leap up and
get dressed to go visit Lugnut for my day off, because the fact I had a day off in
the first place was a reminder that he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t be lying
there on top of his little hut, sniffing me in the air. He wouldn’t exist for me to
hold in my arms, or hear him bark as he chased after the birds. He wouldn’t groan
and pant as I rubbed his face in my hands. He wouldn’t hear my voice – wouldn’t
know all that I needed to tell him, or that he was the only one I ever told.

The knocking kept coming, a bit more loudly now.

“John?” I heard through the door.

The sound knocked the breath from my lungs. I barely turned my head so my mouth
wasn’t pressed against my pillow. “Yeah?” I said softly, unsure if he could even
hear me. I was terrified to move – as if I was in a deep dream, and any movement
would rip me awake from sleep, back to a reality where Sherlock Holmes would never
be outside my bedroom door again.

There was a shift on the other side of my door, though, as real as anything on
earth. Then I heard what sounded like a body sliding down to sit on the creaking
wood floor. I waited for Sherlock to keep talking for what felt like a long time –
longer than it seemed he’d ever waited to speak before.

Finally, I heard him clear his throat, and the wood of the door creaked as his back
pressed against it.

“Are you awake?” I heard him ask.

I knew that he knew full well I was awake. I couldn’t answer. The tone of his voice
sounded just like it had after our first ever real night together, when he’d turned
to me in the morning light and mumbled, “ _Your job is unbearably hateful._ ”

“You’re probably not answering because you know that I know you’re awake,” he went
on.

I smiled into my pillow, even though my eyes were sad at the corners. I suddenly
felt that I needed to sleep for two hundred more years – that the weariness I’d
felt lying on the cold floor next to Lugnut would take centuries to recover from.
That I’d never move again.

“John,” he said again, even softer than before.

I shut my eyes.

“John, I find I have a lot to say,” he said. “Would you like me to tell it to you?”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Alright,” I whispered. He probably

couldn’t even hear it.

I heard a deep breath from the other side of the door, then:

“Well, first of all they’ve given you the whole week off, which you’ve reluctantly
agreed to only out of some misguided attempt to make Molly pleased, even though you
initially wanted to refuse since you’d much rather get on with your job than sit in
your cabin and stare at the blank walls – mind you, I don’t blame you for that. One
week is embarrassingly extravagant. Makes you seem like a widower or like you’ve
never come to terms with death. And this now leaves you to wonder if I’ll even
still want to go out on a patrol with you if more than a week has passed, the
answer to which I’ve broken into your cabin yet again – and you really need to
consider your appalling levels of security – to tell you that, yes, I will still
accompany you on a patrol no matter how many weeks have passed, but also that I’m
incredibly impatient, and there’s a brand new kill site out near Unit 4 which
Garrett refuses to take me to, stating he has something ridiculous to do like drive
Molly to Fairbanks instead, and if you don’t take me to it today I’ll end up having
to hitchhike on one of the busses like some common visitor, by which time all of
the actually interesting information will have been trampled on by unsuspecting
tourists wearing yellow visors with disposable cameras, and we’ll never know which
wolf pack passed through that Unit, and which direction they went, and the entire
conceptual ecosystem I’ve spent the last year and a half building would be missing
a giant puzzle piece, and it would be entirely your fault.”

I lay frozen in my bed as his voice washed over me like a wave, fighting away the
last wisps of heavy darkness still clinging to my skin. He sounded haughty, and
arrogant, and far too confident that early in the morning. He was bursting and loud
– filling up every inch of space in my little cabin, until the only air I could
breathe smelled like his skin, and felt like his hands. He was so _sure_. So alive.

He was also sitting down on the cold wooden floor leaning up against my closed
door, knocking softly to wake me up, and with a hint of nerves in the back of his
voice. I suddenly wondered what his face really looked like on the other side of
the door – if he had his eyes closed or open, if he looked as confident and bold as
he sounded, or if he was soft, waiting and hoping that I would answer him back.
Hoping, just like I was hoping, just to stand in the same room as each other.

I sat up and rubbed my face with my hands. I cleared my throat from morning
roughness. “So, what I’m hearing is, the entire Park will go up in flames unless I
drive you to this site today, huh?”

I felt the warmth of his smile through the door. His relief.

“Obviously,” he said. I heard him rise quickly from the ground. “You’ve been
itching for an excuse to leave this cabin for days. You even went _grocery_
shopping two and a half weeks before you were even close to running out of your
supplies. You’re worried you’ll run into people around camp who will embarrass
themselves trying to ask if you’re alright, however I can assure you that if you
walk down to your truck with me nobody will come within five feet, since I took the
opportunity of enlightening everyone at a staff meeting yesterday that Jess and
Nathan have struck up a secret affair. We’ll be perfectly left alone.” He waited a
beat, then added, awkwardly as if talking to a visitor. “And I hear the weather
will be . . . splendid.”

I laughed, realizing belatedly that I had already risen out of bed and half-dressed
without even noticing my movements. I slipped the real-looking cock into the pocket
in my underwear for the first time in almost a week, and shivered at the press of
the cold surface up close to my skin.

“Alright, alright,” I said. I shrugged into my flannel and started work on the
buttons. “Calm your horses, I’ll be out in a minute. Just need to make some –”

“I already made your coffee,” he said. The door flung open right at the exact
moment I finished doing up my top button, as if he could sense through the door
precisely the moment I was fully dressed. Our eyes locked immediately across my
small room, causing everything to stand still.

My swallow sounded like the entire Toklat river smashing against Denali’s rocky
slope. For one blinding, fierce moment, I thought that I was going to walk forward
and grab Sherlock by his shoulders – pull his body against mine and kiss him
breathlessly in my arms. I thought I was going to throw him down on my bed and
cover him with my skin, hold him down whispering, “ _Please stay. God, please don’t
leave._ ”

He let me stare at him. Finally, after what felt like an hour, I looked away,
reaching into my closet to grab my jacket off its hook.

“I feel like I’m having déjà vu,” I said quietly, half-looking at the floor as I
pushed my arms into the sleeves. “You bursting into my room first thing in the
morning, breaking in and demanding me awake to drive you God knows where.”

I looked up at him hesitantly after I spoke, knowing that I had just thrown out the
biggest offering in my life – that we had never talked about ‘before,’ not out
loud, not like that.

His eyes were knowing. I knew that he was remembering that very same morning – well
over a year ago when he had woken me up in the darkness, and when I had yanked up
the sheet to cover myself before walking out into the kitchen without anything in
my boxers at all.

And, at the same time, I knew that neither of us were thinking about anything that
came after – not the countless, endless mornings later during that summer when
Sherlock woke up in my bed, wrapped in my arms. When his voice in my room was still
the thing waking me from sleep. When he pulled me on top of him, muscles sleep-
heavy, and traced the lines of my back with his fingertips while we had slow, quiet
sex.

No, we were just thinking of that one, single morning. The “ _Wake up, Ranger!_ ”
and the “ _Drive yourself_ ” and the “ _Please, will you take me?_ ”

I smiled at him, the barest curve of my lips. He smiled back.

“At least this time I knocked,” he said as I walked past him out into the kitchen.

I huffed and shook my head gently as I picked up the mug waiting for me on the
counter. My whole body tingled at the first sip of the thick, black coffee. I kept
my back to him as I spoke, feeling like I was about to step off a high cliff
straight into the endless clouds.

“That’s good,” I said, a bit under my breath. “Giving me a heads up so I can

preserve my modesty.”

My heart hammered waiting for his response. For him to ignore me, or say “ _that’s
all over now,_ ” or laugh. For him to declare, in that sharp way of his, “ _That’s
the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, John. I’ve seen you naked, you know._ ”

For him to step closer.

He stayed right where he was, but I heard the little chuckle in the puff of air out
his nose. “Of course, Ranger,” he said softly. I heard him gathering up my bag with
supplies so we could get ready to go. “You know I value decency above all else.”

I turned to laugh at him when suddenly the mug in my hands was ripped clear out of
my fingers. Sherlock downed the last few gulps of my coffee then set the empty mug
down on the counter with a wince, wiping his hand over his mouth.

“Christ, that’s still revolting,” he said, before shouldering my bag and flinging
open the door.

I followed him, feeling like I was floating through an old dream – one I’d had as a
child, and adored, and thought I’d lost the day I became an adult. “So finishing a
man’s coffee for him, that’s decent, too?”

He didn’t look back as we crunched across the gravel. “Obviously. You were taking
far too long.”

I felt myself rolling my eyes as I jogged to catch up. “Well, did you bring the –”

“I brought the extra bear spray and compass, yes.”

“And the –”

“Enough water for 3 bloody days, yes.”

“And your –”
“Christ John.” He slowed his steps to look at me over his shoulder. “What else on
earth do you think I’ve possibly forgotten?”

I smirked at him, half-wanting to leap up and fly clear into the sky. “Was just
going to ask you if you remembered to bring your fucking common sense,” I said,
glancing at him sideways out of the corner of my eye.

He groaned and shook his head. “Oh, for god’s sake, that’s horrible –”

“Oh, John!”

We both stopped in our tracks as Hannah and Jess appeared from around the next
bend. The giddiness I’d been feeling all morning instantly left my limbs, leaving
my insides dry and crackling under my skin.

The look on Hannah’s face reminded me of everything I had forgotten – that I was
just a Ranger who lived alone, that I’d spent the last week half-asleep in my
cabin. That I wasn’t really _with_ Sherlock Holmes, not anymore.

That Lugnut was gone.

I felt Sherlock tense beside me. He took a half-step closer to me in the gravel –
close enough that I could feel the heat from his body through the sleeves of our
shirts.

“Hannah, Jess,” I said, trying to smile.

They came closer. I caught the harsh look Jess shot at Sherlock before turning back
to me with pity. Hannah reached out her arms as she walked closer. She looked
scared, as if she was afraid I’d push her away after what happened the other night.
It made my stomach churn, to see her looking at me like a nervous little pup,
afraid of seeing a bear for the first time.

“We were so, so sorry to hear about what happened,” she said. Her voice was
drooping. “We’ve all been so worried – all of us in the camp. Oh, John.”

Before I could say anything her arms were wrapped snugly around me. I stumbled back
a step, still frozen, before I awkwardly placed a hand on her arm.

“I’m so sorry,” she said into my neck. I could feel the way my beard was scratching
against her soft skin, and smell the puff of fruity soap that was nestled in her
hair.

I tried to make myself relax and patted her arm again. “It’s alright,” I said. My
voice sounded too flat. I started to slowly pull back, enough that she felt it and
finally pulled away. She stood close, not even glancing at Sherlock, and looked at
me with large eyes.

“Are you alright?” she asked. Her voice was thin.

I took a half step back and scratched at my jaw. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing alright,” I
said. I added a bit too late, “Thank you.”

She smiled at me with sad eyes and bit her lip. “If there’s anything we can –”

“Yes, yes, he’ll alert you immediately if you can be of assistance. Your physical
display of affection has already gone a long way in lifting his spirits. Now if
you’ll excuse us.”
Sherlock wrapped his hand firmly around my shoulder and started walking as he
spoke, leading us away and down to the truck with long steps. I paused and turned
back to Hannah and Jess standing confused in the trees, internally chuckling at the
glare Jess was shooting at the back of Sherlock’s head as he strode on ahead of me.

“Sorry about that,” I said, nodding back over my shoulder. “He’s just excited to go
see a kill site.”

Jess crossed her arms over her chest and stepped closer to Hannah. “Apparently.”

My spine sagged watching Hannah stand there looking all alone in the gravel. I took
a step back towards them and reached out a hand for her arm. “Thank you,” I said
softly. “I do appreciate it.”

She smiled at me, and started moving in for another hug before I stepped away.
“Have a good day off, girls,” I said over my shoulder. I jogged down the rest of
the sloping path towards the lot, awkwardly waving once at Nick and Chris who were
standing in the doorway of one of the offices, looking at me like I was a ghost
walking through the center of camp.

By the time I flung open the truck door and sank into the seat, I felt that I’d
just run through a whole enemy army and come out alive, then hated myself for
feeling that way after something as simple as receiving kind words from coworkers.

Sherlock huffed his silent irritation at me taking so long and looked out the
window, tapping his foot to get going. The sight of it made me smile in a way I
rarely did anymore those days.

“Unit 4?” I asked to confirm as we pulled out towards the Road. He hummed his yes.

Ten minutes in, I started to settle in to the comforting rhythm of the drive – the
familiar hugging curves of the Road, and the weight of both our bodies in the
truck, and the smell of him carried on the breeze through both our windows rolled
down. The way that same wind rustled through the soft curls of his hair. Then he
spoke for the first time, looking straight ahead at the Road.

“So, getting popular with the young ladies now, are we?”

I muttered under my breath and shook my head. “She was just being nice.”

Sherlock hummed. “Yes, I would definitely characterize that full body hug, with her
head on your shoulder, as ‘nice’.”

I smirked and dropped one of my hands out the window to feel the steady breeze.
“I’m not rising to your bait,” I said calmly.

Sherlock went on as if I hadn’t even spoken. “And in any case, that poor young
woman has just demonstrated an appalling sense of taste.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, fighting the smile on my lips. “What – because I’m too much of
a loner? Because I’m way too old for her?”

Sherlock tilted his head and held his palms together below his mouth. “Well, those
are both obviously true. I could spend this entire drive giving you a whole list of
reasons why you’d be a horrible fit in personality for most people on this planet.”

“Oh gee, thanks –”

“But what I was specifically referring to is the fact that your young Hannah has
chosen to place her affections on the one Ranger in this entire Park who is almost
_religiously_ homosexual.”

I barked out a laugh as the fresh wind blew the hair back from my face. “Oh, and
you’re excluding yourself from that poll?”

He turned to me and smirked. “Obviously. I’m not a Ranger this year, am I? Just a
common man.”

“Right,” I said, smiling back. “A common man who by all accounts is even gayer than
I am.”

He settled back into his seat, folding his feet up onto the dashboard. The wind
whistled through his curls. “Well, if a Ranger says that, it must be true,” he said
slowly, seriously, as if he was pondering a great new truth of the age. He gave me
one more soft look with a hint of smile on his lips before closing his eyes against
the sunny breeze.

After another half-hour of driving the truck had grown hot from the bright sun.
Sherlock leaned forward to pull off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his
shirt on his forearms. I stared out of the corner of my eye at the stretches of
smooth skin – less tan this season since Sherlock had spent more time indoors with
Greg and the team.

A sudden thought struck me – something I desperately needed to know. Out of

nowhere, all I could hear over the sound of the truck tires on the dirt road was
the sound of the little bag crinkling as I emptied the white powder down into the
sink. I thought of the look in his eyes that night at my kitchen table as he pushed
them towards me, filled with shame, and not even able to meet my gaze.

Something blared in my mind for me to keep silent – that I shouldn’t speak about
those things, or remind him of them. That I shouldn’t act like we were on a level
of intimacy where we could talk about drugs while driving in a car.

But then something else flashed through my mind – the feeling of his lips pressed
to my forehead in the middle of the night, cutting through the sobs in my chest and
reminding me I wasn’t alone in the dark – reminding me that I hadn’t died, too,
back on the floor of the kennel office. And I knew, just like the first day I
realized my name was John Watson, that these words had to be said out loud. That
they couldn’t stay silent.

I looked over at him, waiting until he met my gaze before I glanced down at his
arm. “Are you alright?” I asked softly.

He knew immediately what I meant. I waited for him to be angry, but instead he
reached over and calmly started rolling up the sleeve even more.

I shot out my hand to stop him, resting it on top of his shirt covering the inside
of his elbow. “You don’t need to show me anything,” I said. “Just, are you
alright?”

His arm slowly relaxed beneath my hand. We drove around a handful of hairpin turns
before he finally answered.

“I’m alright, John,” he said, voice soft. Then he reached over and placed his hand
on top of mine, pressing my fingers down gently into the crook of his arm. “I’m
alright,” he said again.
He kept his hand there for a long time. Long enough that I could feel the pulse of
his heart through his fingers, and that the place between us grew warm and damp
from the heat of our skin.

I knew that ‘coworkers’ didn’t do that – didn’t hold each other’s hands on the most
vulnerable, secret parts of each other’s bodies. That coworkers didn’t know the
sounds the other one made in the moment they had an orgasm, or know intimately the
taste of each other’s tongues at two in the morning. Coworkers didn’t joke in a car
about being gay, or hold each other as they wept in the middle of the night, or
fling open a truck door and demand to go along with the other person who’s about to
watch their beloved dog die.

Coworkers didn’t know the reason why I never took the annual Polar Bear Plunge with
all the staff at the lone pool in McKinley Park.

His hand didn’t shake or try to pull away. It rested on me, a steady weight, for
miles and miles, until he slowly trailed his fingers off the back of my own only
when I had to downshift to wait for a passing bus.

“Here,” Sherlock said a few miles later without any warning. I huffed as I slammed
on the brakes and pulled over to a convenient look-out point.

“You ever gonna learn to give me a bit of head’s up before we stop?” I asked as I
put the truck in park.

Sherlock shrugged and jumped down from the truck. “Complete waste of words,” he
said. “You always stop where I need you to regardless.”

I yanked my pack from the back of the truck and started following him blindly off
into the tundra, not even realizing until we were a ways out from the Road that our
footsteps were perfectly in sync. Without looking back he silently held out his
hand just behind him, flexing his fingers until I placed his extra bear spray and
compass in his palm.

“I’m about to run off,” he said. He shoved the spray and compass down in his
pocket.

I wiped my hand over my mouth to hide my stupid grin. “Right,” I said back. I
nodded out at the vast horizon. “Just give me the whistle.”

I couldn’t believe it had been a whole year since I’d said those words. They felt
so comfortable on my tongue – familiar and clear as if I’d just spoken them the day
before. As if the last week had been spent following Sherlock through the
boundless, clear hills, and not lying alone in my room missing everything in the
entire world with a deep, sharp ache, and yet also not even wanting to sit up from
my own couch.

I realized belatedly that Sherlock had stopped walking. He was looking at me from a
few feet away, soft hands in his pockets and the breeze blowing through his hair. I
suddenly knew he understood every thought I was having – that I was a sleeping man
walking, and that I had also never been more alive.

And I understood that he was feeling all those same things, too. That he also felt
that he had just said, “ _I’m about to run off,_ ” only the day before.

We smiled at each other. I felt it crinkling in the corners of my eyes. I tilted my

head towards the horizon. “Go on, then,” I said. “Find your animal carcass or your
pile of scat or whatever. I’ll find you.”
He waited another moment, and the air between us thrummed. I could smell him on the
breeze - could almost physically feel the perfect, clear outline of the mountains
at his back.

“I know you will, John,” he said softly, then he turned towards the horizon and
sniffed the breeze for a moment before taking north-east at a jog, curls flying
wild in the wind and his legs tearing through the thick brush.

I watched him go until his head disappeared over a rocky hill. From far off I heard
his bear call, “ _You’d be an absolute idiot to try and come after me!_ ” and the
sound of it tingled in the blood in my veins. I followed slowly in his direction
after another moment, placing my feet in his fresh footprints in the soft moss.

As I hiked, I thought about the last time we had been together in that Unit, back
when the reason my limbs were sore and aching had been because of the quick,
pounding sex we’d had in my bed that morning.

We’d been walking along, side by side, with our pants getting torn and muddied by
the thick brush. And Sherlock had turned to me when we finally made it up the steep
drainage slope to a flat hill. He’d been panting and a bit breathless, with a flush
over his warm cheeks. It had taken my breath away. And he’d laughed at the loose
leaves and twigs clinging to my hair, and joked, “ _Oh, my Ranger,_ ” before he
reached up to pluck them away.

My insides had frozen.

Suddenly I hadn’t been standing in the middle of Denali with Sherlock’s fingers in
my hair. I’d been back in a barn, with dust in my eyes, and there were short, gruff
fingers picking hay out of the knots in my hair with rough tugs. And a voice was
saying, “ _Jeez, Ranger, what the hell got into you? Did it really hurt that bad?
Did you not think I was any good?_ ”

Sherlock had noticed my body go still, and quickly pulled his hand away. “ _John_?”
he’d asked, looking worried, and slightly afraid.

And I’d wanted, oh, I’d wanted, to tell him so much in that moment.

I’d wanted to tell him that his careful eyes on my face were the only points of
light reminding me that I wasn’t back in that barn – like glittering stars shining
through the wooden slats in the roof – or breaking through the thick clouds above
the few alleyways where, over the years, I’d wrapped my hand around another man’s
cock shoved deep in his pants. How his hands on my body were the only hands which
had ever felt my full skin, and the only fingers on earth which I would want to
pluck the leaves and straw once again from my hair.

I’d wanted to ask him if he understood how I wanted to pull away from him less and
less – how every time he touched me it erased another pair of hands which had
touched me _before_.

But I hadn’t told him any of that, not that day, standing there in the beautiful,
full sun with the rays lighting up the faint freckles on his face. I hadn’t wanted
to ruin the fragile moment – as if my memories were heavy, mud-covered rocks which
would rip through the thin silk of his eyes in the soft breeze.

Instead I’d nodded out at the horizon line behind him and said, “ _Sorry, thought I
saw something._ ” As I’d leaned up to kiss him I was sure he could taste the lie in
my mouth, but he hadn’t asked me for the truth, and I hadn’t offered to tell him.

I realized, following a year later with my feet pressing into his footprints, that
I should have told him everything – that day, and the day he shaved me, and the
night we rested in that tent on top of the Muldrow in the high, punishing winds.

I should have told him everything Lugnut knew and more, and the fresh regret ached
the way the stitches had in my chest all those decades ago – sharp and debilitating
like little knives piercing my lungs.

I heard his whistle, then, cutting through the clear sky like a hawk slicing a path
through the clouds. I picked up my pace to follow it, and came up over a cresting
hill to find Sherlock waiting for me at the edge of a small pool. The mosquitos
swarmed around his curls in the unmoving sun, and the mossy fingers of the tundra
dipped down gently into the cool water like lips cupping around a crisp, clear
drink, lazily sucking it down while the wildflowers bent under the weight of the
sun’s rays.

It was like stepping into a photograph from the summer before, where Sherlock was
smiling at me with warm eyes, and Denali’s mighty peaks echoed our small voices,
and I still had the taste of his semen in my mouth from the night before. I half
expected, walking up to join him by the water’s edge, that he would step forward,
and take my face in his hands, and kiss me beneath the clouds.

He didn’t. He waited until I had reached his side before thrusting his hand into my
pack for the canteen of water, not bothering to stop the thick droplets that
spilled down his chin and throat. He wiped his forearm over his mouth when he was
done, and his lips glistened.

“You’re out of shape,” he said calmly, hands on his hips as he surveyed the edges
of the pool.

For some reason, his words soothed a bit of the regret still ripping through my
lungs. The teasing felt comfortable – something I could rely on and know. It wasn’t
the breathless tension of walking towards him and wondering whether I would throw
caution to the wind and pull him back into my arms.

I dropped my pack onto the ground and massaged the back of my neck with my hands.
“Oh, yeah? And you know this how?”

He didn’t hesitate. “A year ago it would have taken you approximately twelve
minutes to hike that distance between us, even accounting for your obsessive need
to pause and survey the horizon line every two minutes, as if this place is teeming
with millions of bears instead of just hundreds. It just took you fourteen and a
half minutes, your breathing is elevated, you’re perspiring under your arms even
though the weather is only eighteen degrees –”

“Oh, is it, now? It’s snowing?”

“ _Fine_ , sixty-five degrees _Fahrenheit_ , since you can’t even do a simple

conversion, and, furthermore, if you’d let me finish, I estimate you’ve lost
approximately six pounds in muscle mass over the last month and a half, primarily
due to stress and a complete lack of leaving your cabin outside of patrols,
contrary to the start of the season when you were at the fittest you’d been in
years since you were obsessively hiking at all hours of the day so as not to
accidentally run into me back in Toklat and have to have an awkward conversation.
Honestly, John, do you think I’m an idiot? That rock over there on the ground could
probably come up with five more reasons as to why you’re out of shape, and you need
me to spell it all out for you like it’s all some great surprise.”

I couldn’t respond, I was laughing too hard. I took a moment to try and wipe my
eyes, catching my breath while he waited beside me with his hands on his hips.
I looked at him, and broke out into a fresh laugh all over again. “How many minutes
during this hike did you spend planning that speech?” I finally got out.

My heart burst when his mouth quirked up into a smile. “Only six or seven,” he
said, grinning, and before I realized what I was doing, I reached out to place my
hand on his upper arm, rubbing along his flannel shirt. “You’re insane,” I said
softly, still holding in a laugh.

His eyes sparkled as they gazed down at me, illuminated like crystals of ice in the
sun.

“I know,” he said. He didn’t let me look away. “You’ve told me that many times
before, Ranger.”

The rest of the day passed inside a strange, muffled dream.

I walked in Sherlock’s footsteps, but my feet never really touched the ground. His
voice spoke to me, and yet he always sounded far away, as if his words were
traveling from Denali’s peak down into the wildflowers – bursting across the
surface of the pools or rustling through the distant trees. We stayed at the site
for another hour or so, and I sat back, without even really feeling the moss
beneath my palms, and watched Sherlock look and touch and taste everything in
sight, feeling like every second that passed was one stolen from a year before.

We walked back to the Road side by side. He made me laugh, again, with an overly-
ridiculous bear call. And back in my truck, with his feet propped up on the
dashboard, he fiddled around in the glovebox with his long, steady fingers until he
came across an old tape – not my favorite bluegrass, but one he knew I enjoyed. He
popped it in without even looking, and the mandolin flooded the air in the truck.

I was glad he hadn’t picked my favorite – the Jimmy Martin tape that we used to
listen to with his hand resting on my thigh. It would have reminded me we weren’t
going to kiss when we got out of the truck.

He washed the truck by my side back in the Toklat lot, glaring at the two other
Rangers who started to make their way towards me with pitying looks in their eyes.
I kept my back turned as if I didn’t even notice.

A twisted part of me never wanted to hear anyone else’s voice ever again – that I
could even take the “I’m sorry’s,” or the “Oh, John’s,” or the pity, but only if
they came from Sherlock’s own lips.

I looked at him for a long moment across the bed of the washed truck before we
parted. He looked right back. My hands and forearms were still dripping with water,
and the evening air was starting to grow crisp and cool, carrying a breeze from the
high-altitude snow still clinging to Denali’s slopes.

Looking at him, I felt that I was balancing on the smallest rock in the middle of a
rushing river – that one single word could tilt me forward into his warm arms, or
back on my ass to be drowned in the icy current. The fear sparked in my chest, and
it mixed with a longing so sudden and sharp, I thought that maybe I would plead
with Sherlock out loud just to make it go away.

I stood there, and I balanced, and I didn’t know which words to say to push me into
his arms, so I only nodded, and said, “Sherlock,” too low under my breath for him
to really hear.
Something flashed quickly through his eyes – the same look I’d seen when he’d tried
to reach across my kitchen table to hold my hand, right before I’d pulled away.

“John,” he said back.

I could see him starting to close off. Something desperate flared up in my mind,
tingling in my frozen fingers.

“My shifts start again in two days,” I said quickly – voice a bit too rushed and
high. “I’ll be driving through Polychrome.”

He swallowed hard. I could see the cold wind racing shivers across his exposed
skin. “I believe Griffin has some collar data to collaborate in Polychrome,” he
said simply.

I nearly fell to my knees. I tore my hand away from where it had been gripping the
metal bed of the truck and took a step back up towards the cabins. “Right,” I said.
I couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “Maybe I’ll ask him.”

Something sagged in the line of his shoulders. He put his hands in his pockets as
the wind blew a curl into his eyes – eyes which looked full and deep enough to hold
every drop of water from the mighty Toklat.

“Okay,” he said back, only after I’d already turned around to leave. I knew he
watched me the whole way back up to my cabin door.

\--

I coughed with my hand over my mouth, trying not to choke on the piece of pepper.

“Shit, Molly,” I said in a broken voice. “You put eighteen jalapenos into this
chili?”

She blushed across from me at her kitchen table and rested her chin on her drawn up
knee. “Ah, sorry about that,” she said. She handed me a glass of water when I still
kept coughing, and I took it with a grateful nod.

“Greg likes it this way,” she went on, holding back a laugh. “I guess I’ve gotten
used to it.”

I wiped my forearm over the thin sheen of sweat that had broken out on my brow.
“Pretty sure that could kill half the Rangers who work in this Park,” I said. “Even
some of my old coworkers from back in the Southwest – and those guys used to dare
each other to eat raw peppers for fun.”

She laughed and started to rise up from the table. “Don’t be such a baby,” she
scolded. “But I’m pretty sure I have some of last batch still frozen, if you want
–”

I held up a hand. “’S fine, now that I know to expect fire. It’s still delicious.”

She grinned, a bit proud of herself, and leaned back in her old wooden chair. She
rubbed a hand over the small curve of her new belly, barely visible underneath one
of Greg’s oversized knit sweaters.
I glanced down at her stomach and said my usual line. “Everything all right in
there?”

She rolled her eyes and rested her head against the back of her chair. “Yes – it
hasn’t burned the house down yet,” she smirked.

I took another careful bite of chili, enjoying the burn of heat down my throat to
ward off the cold night. “And you’ve thought of a name?”

She groaned. “God, no. What a nightmare – the lists and the books – everyone
telling you their perfect suggestion –“

“Well, I could solve all of that for you,” I cut in.

She shot me a look. “Oh, let me guess. Name it after you? You and billions of other
John’s?” She smiled at me warmly and jammed her toe against my shin under the
table. “Honestly, it’s like your parents _wanted_ to get you mixed up with half the
other men alive.”

I smiled immediately, ignoring the familiar burst of shame that always burned in
the back of my throat whenever anyone made that joke – shame at my teenage self
who’d whispered “John” and thought it was perfect. Molly didn’t even notice my
small pause.

“Obviously not John,” I said, feigning serious. “You don’t know if it’s a boy or
girl yet, right?”

She shook her head. “We’re waiting till it’s born.”

I nodded. “Right, then. You gotta pick a name you both agree on that could go
either way. Simplify the process so you don’t have to decide on two different
names.”

She sat up, suddenly interested, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. I took another bite of chili to make her wait. “Gotta name the kid
after someone who really means something – a name they’ll be proud to have, no
matter who they are.”

“Like . . .?”

“Well, you know, something really meaningful and classic. Like Lugnut.”

It was the first time either of us had said the name all evening, and to my relief,
Molly didn’t hesitate, but threw back her head and laughed. “Fuck you,” she finally
said. “I thought you were actually being serious!”

I didn’t break into a smile. “Lugnut Lestrade,” I said, voice steady. “Got a nice
ring to it.”

I ducked the cloth napkin Molly threw at my face. I grinned and winked at her when
she finally looked up at me, eyes shining as she tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Well then, Mister Names Expert,” she said, taking a long sip of mint tea. “If you
could go back a whole century to when you were born and have a do-over, what would
you choose?”

My chest clenched, but I knew my face hadn’t shown it. It was one of those
impossible things about Molly Hooper – one of the things that drew me to her like a
firefly to the light – how none of her words, no matter what she said, ever filled
me with fear.

I paused, acting like I was thinking. The back of my mind repeated the answer “
_I’d choose John_ ” on a loop in my head.

“Don’t know about that,” I finally said. I scratched at my beard. “My dad’s name
was Theodore – went by Teddy. Grandpa’s name was Theodore, too. Guess I wouldn’t
have minded being another one if they hadn’t went with John.”

Molly’s eyes brightened. She sat up straighter in her seat. “And he . . . you were
close with him? Your dad?” she asked. Her voice was focused, quietly thrumming with
curiosity. In the six years of our friendship I’d never even said the words mom or
dad.

I stared down at my hands tracing one of the grains in the wooden table.

I thought of the shotgun in his hand as I sprinted away. I also thought of him
sanding the wood for my bed in the stuffy attic.

“Yes,” I finally said. I looked up from my hands. “I was, in a way.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then gazed over my shoulder, staring into
space. “Theodore,” she said softly. A grin lit up her lips. “Theo for short.” She
played with a long lock of her hair with her fingers. “Greg would like that.”

She smiled then, resting her head sideways in her palm. “Sort of throws your
strategy out the window, though,” she said. “Won’t work at all if it’s a girl.”

I smiled back at her, even as a long-forgotten ache suddenly panged in my chest. I

was grateful that the dim firelight hid the embarrassing water that was suddenly
pooling in my eyes.

“Yeah, it doesn’t really work for a girl,” I agreed.

Later that night, as I nursed a beer and Molly eyed it longingly from the other end
of the couch, she curled her knees up to her chest and played with the loose
strands on her wool socks. “Greg’s been talking about London,” she said out of the
comfortable silence.

I raised my eyebrows. “For the winters?”

She shook her head down at her feet. “Forever.”

My palms started to sweat. I turned so I was facing her on the couch, setting my
beer down onto the wooden floor. The sound of the glass hitting the wood was
impossibly loud.

“And what do you say?” I said. “If he’s talking about London, what are you talking
about?”

She looked at me quickly, something like gratefulness in her eyes. The tense line
of her spine softened. “That’s the problem, I guess. Everything he says makes
sense. More resources, better schools for the kid, his whole career is centered
there – all of his research with the university. Could afford a nice little house.
No harsh weather. No dangerous bears. All the access of a big city.”

She sounded like she was reading each thing off a flat, prepared list. The silence
in the cabin roared.

“But it isn’t Denali,” I said softly.

She looked at me with wet eyes before smiling at herself and shaking her head. “It
isn’t Denali.”

“Does he know it isn’t Denali?” I asked, knowing she would understand what I meant.

“We haven’t really talked about it,” she said. “He just . . . every time we talk
about the kid, it’s in the context of London, you know? It took me weeks to realize
he was even doing it. I was nodding along until he mentioned how it would be nice
to take a vacation back here when the kid’s older – show them where ‘mum and dad
first met’ and all that. And then I realized . . .”

She stopped and sighed, and went back to picking at her socks. The crackling fire
filled the silence, lulling like a dream.

“Sherlock wanted me to move to London with him,” I suddenly said.

I froze, stunned at my own words. I’d meant to keep talking about Molly – to
console her, or try and give advice, or say literally anything other than part of
what happened last year at the end of August.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “God, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, this isn’t
about –”

“He asked you to do that?”

I realized Molly had turned her entire body towards me. The sadness in her eyes was
gone – talking about leaving Denali with Greg – and in its place was a fierce focus
directed solely on me.

She looked less sad, and it felt good.

I took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over my face. “Well, no, he didn’t,” I said.
“He didn’t really ask. He just . . . decided.”

Molly hummed. “That’s why . . .”

I kept my eyes closed. “Yeah, that’s why.” I took another deep breath. “Well, part
of why.”

“You loved him,” she said, her voice not a question.

Suddenly her voice was the only thing tethering me to the world – the only thin
little rope keeping me bound to her couch instead of flying back to the side of
that horrible mountain, where I’d stood with a cold sweat dripping down my spine.

The mountain where Sherlock had said, “ _You’re being irrational, John. You don’t
need to live here out in the middle of nowhere anymore. That isn’t who you really
are. You’re_ better _than this._ ”

And I had said, “ _How the fuck do you know who I really am? That this isn’t me?_ ”

And he’d spat back, “ _Because you’ve just been hiding away from the real world out
here! Keeping yourself hidden away so you won’t have to get close to another human
being!_ ”
And I had shoved my finger in his chest, and wildly grunted out, “ _You of all
fucking people, Sherlock Holmes, do not get to make me feel ashamed. Not you. Not
you of all people. I will not be fucking ashamed of who I am, of how --_ ”

And he’d cut in, wide-eyed and exasperated, “ _Of course this isn’t about being
ashamed, this is about finally_ living _. Being a part of the real world!_ ”

And then, later, “ _What, so you just looked around and picked the most broken
Ranger you could find_?”

And, “ _Yes! Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you
alone?_ ”

I swallowed hard and opened my eyes to the ceiling of Molly’s cabin, fluttering in
the firelight like a rolling, gold sea.

I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I answered. I nodded once up at the wood beams. “I
did. But I never . . . I never told him.”

“If he asked you now, would you go?”

I blinked and looked over at Molly, soft and beautiful and curled up in the warm
light. Her eyes looked deep and black, like the tip of Lugnut’s little nose.

“He wouldn’t ask me now,” I said, hating how harsh and sad my voice sounded. How
hopeless.

“But if he did,” she said, not deterred. “If he asked you now, would you go?”

And I suddenly thought, in that moment, of what had happened earlier on that same
day in late August.

The moment had always been eclipsed in my memory by our fight just a few hours
later. But now, sitting quietly on Molly’s soft couch, I remembered waking up too-
warm in the sleeping bag with Sherlock curled up in my arms. My thighs had still
been sore from fucking him the night before – when he had sunk down on top of me
with his curls brushing the top of the tent, and I’d entered him with the erect
cock I was wearing instead of just my fingers, since the lunatic had thought to
shove that secretly into his bag for our backpacking trip instead of saving room
for extra supplies.

I’d woken with him in my arms, and stretched my cramped legs in the warm sleeping
bag, and I’d reached down with one hand into the pocket of my jeans and wrapped my
fingers around the little key there, warm from the heat of my thigh. And I’d
thought through all the things I could possibly say before handing him the piece of
metal in my palm. How I would tell him that he was better than the darkness in my
little attic, and more beautiful than Denali’s clear peak in the melting sun. How I
wanted him to stay, stay in my life, and keep sleeping between my sheets, and make
my cabin in Talkeetna smell of only peppercorn and cedar. And sex.

How I wanted him to be with me. And I with him.

And I remembered, sitting there with Molly’s quiet, even breaths by my side, how
Sherlock had woken up and stroked his warm palm up my side underneath my layers,
and how he had pulled me on top of him, and groaned, and kissed me until I couldn’t
breathe.

How I’d left the key in my pocket, thinking, _Later. I’ll do it later._
I wanted to turn to Molly and ask her if she thought everything would have been
different if I’d pulled back from our feverish kiss in the tent, and reached down
into my pocket, and pressed the key to his lips and said, “ _Wait, here. Yes.
Please._ ”

“I love Denali,” I said instead, staring straight ahead at the wooden walls.
“It’s . . . it’s the only place I’ve ever had in my entire life that’s really been
home.” I glanced at Molly. “You get that.”

She nodded seriously. “I do.”

I kept looking at her, tracing the sweet lines of her soft eyebrows – the strong
curve of her neck. I didn’t know if she knew it, but the sight of her face was an
integral part of my Denali, too. That the thought of her going off to London felt
like being told I’d have to cut off a limb.

I leaned back into the couch and took a few long, quiet breaths. “But if he asked
me. . .”

I paused, fighting down the embarrassment that I felt like a confused teenager –
some lovelorn, naïve kid instead of a grown man. And then the words poured from my
lips before I could stop to reconsider any of them, or even doubt how pathetic they
sounded.

“God, if he asked me now,” I went on in a rush. “If he just strode in and said
‘pack your bags, Ranger, we’re going to London,’ I’d be on the first fucking plane.
I wouldn’t . . . Shit, you know, he was _it_. I never told him that, but he was.”

My voice was getting choked, and I stopped to swallow hard before I could go on.
“He was it, kid, and I . . . I just threw it all away. So yeah – I would follow
him. You know what, I’m forty-two years old. Too fucking old to make the same
mistake twice. I would follow him anywhere.” I shrugged my shoulders, which felt
weighted down with lead, and shook my head helplessly at the wall. “He won’t ask
again, but I would. And I . . . Molly, I don’t want to be alone. I have you, I
know. But he . . . Fuck, I’ve been alone.”

Molly was silent for a long time. We both sat on the couch, staring out at the
walls – looking at old wood, but instead seeing London in our minds – the
skyscrapers blocking out Denali’s highest ridges, and the Thames winding through
apartment blocks instead of the Toklat among cabins.

Finally, just as the fire started to die down, Molly spoke. “I don’t think you
threw it all away,” she said softly.

I gave a harsh laugh. “You weren’t there,” I said dully. My voice sounded
exhausted. “You don’t know what I said to him. What _he_ said.”

“I know he came with you last week,” Molly cut in urgently. “Anybody could see he
just threw on the clothes closest to him when he saw you were leaving. He sees you.
He somehow knew why you were getting in your truck to drive out here.”

I heard her, but I couldn’t answer yet. The silence of Molly’s cabin after her
words roared in my ears. The crackle of the wood burning low in the fireplace
sounded like fireworks bursting across a dark, foggy sky.

I nodded, staring down at my hands – hands which I’d never been able to stop
thinking looked too small. “He slept with me that night,” I said. When Molly sucked
in a breath, I quickly added, “Just slept. Next to me in my bed. I asked him to. He
–”
I stopped myself just in time from saying, “ _He remembered to give me my shot. He
remembered the dosage – where I keep the pouch._ ”

She didn’t ask what I was about to say. She nodded slowly, idly making a small
braid in her long hair. “I don’t think you threw it all away,” she said again.

My throat suddenly ached. I blinked hard and shifted up against the couch. I wanted
so desperately to agree with her. I wanted to go see Lugnut, and put him in my
truck, and take Sherlock far away from here, back to that clearing on the way to
Talkeetna where the three of us napped in the warm grass. I wanted to press the
little brass key into his palm, kiss his fingertips and tell him the truth behind
how I got that cigarette burn in the middle of my hand – how my mom had caught me
when I was twelve trying to pee standing up hidden behind our trailer in the dusty
yard.

“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my hands once roughly over my face. “This was supposed to
be about you, kid – you and Greg and London.”

Molly gave me a small grin. “If my biggest problem in life is deciding whether or
not to live with my family in a beautiful park, or a beautiful city, I’d say we
don’t really need to be talking about me at all,” she said.

“That _is_ worth talking about,” I told her. I reached out to smooth down her hair.
“You’re always worth talking about.”

Her eyes twinkled in the firelight. “Well everybody knows _that_ ,” she said,
chuckling. “But what you apparently don’t know is that it’s painfully obvious that
Sherlock Holmes misses you like crazy.”

When I tried to groan or interrupt her, she held on to my arm. “Seriously, John.
You don’t see him when you’re not around. You’re all he talks about, ‘John says
this,’ or ‘John thinks that,’ – either that or he’s staring out the window looking
like a lost dog.”

I took a long breath and forced myself to meet her gaze. I could see that look on
Sherlock’s face in my mind as if he was standing right in front of me in her cabin.

“Honestly, I feel like I look the same way,” I finally said.

She nodded once. “You do. You both look like the most goddamn depressing things
I’ve ever seen.” She reached out with warm eyes and put her hand on my shoulder.
“That’s how I know you didn’t throw anything away at all, you moron.”

And all of a sudden, her simple words broke me from my fog. I laughed, chest
feeling open and light, and shifted closer to her on the small couch.

And something else happened – something more than the lines of regret softening on
my face.

For the first time in weeks – in months – since Sherlock walked up behind me on the
river rock, I finally allowed that tiny little flame of hope behind my lungs to
keep burning, letting it grow without trying to snuff it out.

The flame felt warm – warm and alive.

When I looked back over at Molly, the air in the room felt fresh and clear. I knew
she could see everything in my face – that I didn’t need to say anything more about
Sherlock Holmes.
“So,” I said instead, pausing and clearing my throat. “Lugnut Lestrade?”

Molly raised her eyebrows. “What makes you think it won’t be Lugnut Hooper? You may
be ancient but I never took you to be that old fashioned, John Watson.”

I laughed and put my arm around her as she stroked her fingers across her stomach.
“Not gonna let Greg make you Ranger Lestrade, then?” I said into her hair.

“Hell no,” she agreed. “I’d have to change the nametags on all my uniforms – fill
out all this damn paperwork. Nothing could be worth that.”

I smiled and shook my head as she leaned against me. Both of us were fully aware
that it was the most physically affectionate we’d ever been, and I had a feeling
that both of us were equally as aware that sitting together like that felt as
necessary as breathing.

I held her, and I only felt the flame in my chest, soothing over the ache.

A few quiet minutes later, I started to doze off on the couch. The last thing I
heard before my eyes drooped shut was Molly’s voice, whispered down at her small
belly beneath Greg’s old sweater.

“Theo,” I heard her whisper, and then I drifted off to sleep.

\--

The next morning, right before I left for my early shift, I slid open the drawer of
my little bedside table and looked down at it in the silent, dim light.

The sock was in there, limp and hidden in the shadowy corner. I gripped myself to
adjust the cock Sherlock had given me inside my uniform pants, taking an extra
second to stroke my fingers slowly along the length.

A memory, hazy and drifting apart at the edges, passed through my mind like a
drifting fog – when I’d been driving last year, and Sherlock had slipped his
fingers between my legs. When he’d flicked open my belt and zipper, while I told
him he was insane, and he palmed me through my boxers, right in the middle of the
goddamn Park Road, breathing hard while he stroked me until I started to buck up
into his palm.

When I’d pulled over when there weren’t any busses in sight and actually _come_ ,
watching Sherlock’s long fingers stroke and pump the cock beneath my boxers and
imagining I was growing harder, filling out long and thick into his hand.

I wasn’t looking for the sock in my bedside table drawer, though. I moved it aside
and kneeled down onto the cold wood floor to get a better look. Even in the dim
light, my eyes quickly found the glint of brass tucked away in the back of the
drawer.

I looked at it, but I didn’t touch it.

A part of me was shocked to see it was even still there – as if it could have up
and walked away over the past year, sometime between now and when I’d first thrown
it into the drawer after leaving Sherlock out in the tundra, with curses under my
breath and what felt like fire and ice in my veins. With a tear sliding down my
cheek that got lost in my beard.

Molly’s words echoed in my mind. “ _You didn’t throw anything away,_ ” and I felt
that the flame behind my lungs was still there, growing even brighter after my
long, sleepless night.

It felt good, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t want the flame to leave. I
wanted it to burn me, slowly. Not quick and bright and hot like it had last year –
all consuming and blinding and shutting out everything but the fierce light.

I wanted it to be crackling – the long, steady flame of a fire keeping warm through
the impenetrable night. I wanted it to slowly warm my bones from inside them,
hunkering down against my muscle, instead of burning my hands.

I wanted to be warm.

I looked at the key for another moment before pushing the drawer closed. My knees
cracked loudly when I stood.

I didn’t stop to think about how everything was suddenly different.

Without hesitating, I threw on my Ranger hat and grabbed my bag, then headed out
across the sunlit gravel towards my truck to start my patrol. I didn’t think about
anything the whole day out in the Park. As I drove, and surveyed the horizon lines
I’d long since memorized like the skin of my own hand, and responded to a few radio
calls to bring in backpackers whose tents could be seen from the Road.

And when I came back and washed my truck after the long day, back and neck aching
with sunburn on my cheeks, I dumped my bag and my gun in my cabin, then walked
straight up to Sherlock’s porch.

His door swung open before I could even knock.

Sherlock stood there looking at me with wide eyes. My raised hand fell awkwardly
back to my side. I hadn’t seen him in nearly five days, not since I took him out to
Unit 4 at the end of my week off. We’d barely even seen each other around camp, or
along the Road.

The flame spread through my chest the way the melting snow seeps gracefully off
Denali’s sides, warmed by the gentle sun and rushing down to sink softly into the
moss.

“Come with me,” I said to him.

Sherlock nodded.

He grabbed his jacket from where it hung next to the door and stepped out to follow
me immediately without saying a word. I didn’t tell him what we were doing or where
we were going as we hopped up in unison back into the truck. I was still in my full
uniform, and my stomach was aching for a warm, late lunch, and yet that flame kept
growing, sighing beneath my ribs as I put the truck in gear and pulled back out
towards the Road.

Sherlock folded his feet up onto the dashboard and rolled down the window a few
inches until the wind blew through his hair. My eyes kept glancing to him on my
right, where he stared out at the endless green with soft, calm eyes. Our thighs
were achingly close on the bench seat, closer than they’d been for any moment that
whole season. I could almost feel the heat from his skin seeping through the fabric
of his jeans – the pulsing, fluttering beat of his heart that matched the warmth
beneath my own skin.

“We’re going to Wonder Lake,” he eventually said, just after we passed the busses
of people still unloading at Eielson for the afternoon Ranger hikes.

I smirked. “Don’t expect me to be that impressed,” I said back. “Not like you have
that many places to pick from when I didn’t tell you to bring your hiking boots.”

He quietly laughed next to me, and the sound of it stole the breath from my lungs.
“Got a point there, Ranger,” he said. “You may have grown mildly more intelligent
over the last year.”

I could feel myself smiling. “Yeah, well, gotta give the Park some reason to keep
me around,” I said.

He looked at me, then, with his deep grey eyes. My cheeks burned as he studied my
face – the extra lines and wrinkles that hadn’t been there the year before. His
body shifted on the seat, barely half an inch closer to my own, but we still didn’t
touch.

“We always meant to take that canoe out onto the lake last year, but never found
the time,” he said softly.

I kept my eyes on the twists of the Road. “What do you think we’re doing right
now?”

He just hummed, and he didn’t say anything more the whole rest of the drive out to
Wonder – just made a little noise of acknowledgement half an hour later when we
rounded a curve and discovered a gigantic moose ambling leisurely by the side of
the Road.

We parked near the Wonder Lake campsites tucked into the twisting trees and made
the short hike over to the hidden dock to untie the canoe. I’d only ever taken the
staff canoe out once before – way back in my second season just so the other
Rangers would stop pressuring me to go.

There was something about Wonder that always made me uneasy – like it was too
fragile to be out in, or that being out on the crystal still water left you too
exposed beneath the watching sky. As if the lake would crumple into thin glass
shards and swallow you up whole if you dared step out upon the water and cause a
ripple.

Sherlock held the canoe steady as I stepped into the front. It was evening, but the
sun was still hanging full and clear in the sky, painting the water’s surface with
a reflection of the purple and grey peaks surrounding her edges – as if we were
about to sail out into the open sky itself, paddling over the tops of trees with
only the birds between us and heaven.

“You’re thinking some romantic dribble about how _gorgeous_ this all is,” Sherlock
said behind me as we started to paddle out towards the center of the lake.

I huffed over the gentle sound of our wooden oars slicing through the soft water,
spilling pearled droplets back into the rippling reflection of the trees and sky.

“Anyone but you would be thinking the same thing,” I said, speaking straight ahead
towards the front of the canoe. He didn’t respond.

We rowed in perfect sync through the still, glass sea, and chills rose on my arms
as the sun started to drop towards the tops of the peaks. The breeze carried wisps
of snow-touched gold across the surface of the water, smelling of the brisk
mountains and the rich, damp moss. The snow clinging to the tops of the distant
mountain peaks started to glitter in the sinking sun, and the trees shook and
rustled together like the earth exhaling breath after breath, settling as we glided
out into her waiting, cupped hands, leaving behind the dry land and traveling
through the wet reflection of the melting orange sky.

I could hear Sherlock’s breathing behind me, steady and even with his strokes. I
desperately wanted to ask him what he was thinking as we paddled – whether he
wanted to speak, or stay silent. Whether he wished we were out chasing wolves
across the hills.

Whether he wished he could see my face the same way I wished I could see his.

The flame thrummed again at the back of my spine, right at the place where his
exhaled breath was hitting my skin.

Finally, I set my paddle down into the side of the canoe, letting us drift
aimlessly in the fragile center of the lake.

Everything was silent, and everything was still.

For a long time, nearly fifteen minutes, we sat without saying a single word. I
thought about trying to explain to him the new flame in my chest – the one that had
flared to life last night in Molly’s cabin, and which hadn’t been snuffed out by
the long night, even though my bed had been cold and empty without him by my side.

But I couldn’t find any of the right words, and then I heard Sherlock swallow
behind me.

“John,” he said.

I closed my eyes and shivered. His voice sounded boundless and huge across the
water, as if nothing else on earth existed except the wooden canoe beneath our
feet.

I couldn’t say anything back. I had never heard his voice sound like that before –
like a fragile layer of glass that could shatter under the weight of the smallest
leaf. I watched two caribou amble up the slope at the far side of the lake,
brushing their noses through the dew in the long grass.

I let out a long breath like a sigh, and as I did, he kept speaking. “There’s . . .
some things I need to say. Things I should have said . . . long ago. Right when I
first saw you again in April.” He paused, and I heard his breath shake in his
mouth. “But, I was . . . afraid to say them.”

I tilted my head towards my shoulder, staring down at the belly of the canoe
sinking into the lake. I reached out to stroke two of my fingertips across the cool
water. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

I could feel him staring at the back of my neck. For a long time, I thought that
maybe he wouldn’t say anything more at all – just leave us tilting, balancing on
the thin, liquid glass, not knowing whether the earth would swallow us up or fling
us off into the sky.

Then he cleared his throat. His voice shook. “Thirteen years ago – the last time I
did cocaine before . . . before the other night, I never told you about what
happened.”
I shook my head and whispered, “You didn’t.”

He took a long breath. “I also never told you that I used to fancy myself head over
heels in love with Gregory Lestrade.”

I gasped a surprised puff of air. “You forgot to mention that,” I said.

I felt him smile behind me. “Must have slipped my mind.”

I waited for him to go on, desperate and aching to hear the words from his lips –
as if they were the only things reminding me that I was alive, and not just another
part of the lake, sinking into the deep.

When he spoke again, the brief warmth that had been in his voice was gone.

“I told him, thirteen years ago,” he said, nearly whispering. “We’d been working
together a few years by then. And I thought . . . I thought I had it all worked
out, you know. That I was . . . and that he was . . . and so I tried. To tell him.”
He sighed, sounding angry at himself. “And of course, because he’s Greg Lestrade,
he let me down in the most infuriatingly gallant way possible – all about ‘I’ll
find the one,’ and ‘someone else will see you’re a good man,’ and. . it all
shattered me. It . . . I thought I – well I didn’t want to --” He huffed a sharp
breath out of his nose. “I thought I’d just lost everything.”

Something in the tone of his voice suddenly made sense in my mind. “You overdosed,”
I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded. A warbler sang its sweet song
overhead as its wings beat through the thick evening air.

“I waited until he was away on holiday before I did it,” he went on, skipping over
the actual words. “I remember being furious when I woke up. Tried to rip out all
the tubes, and the nurses were there, trying to hold my hands back, asking me if I
knew who I was, or where I was, or how many days it had been.”

“How many days had it been?” I asked him softly.

“Six.”

My heart was racing. “And Greg –”

“Didn’t know. Still doesn’t. He knew about the drugs – made a hard and fast rule
that I wasn’t allowed in the labs with him if I was high. He was irritatingly good
at being able to see through me when I was. He thinks I went on my own holiday for
that week – found myself while I was ‘traveling the Irish coast,’ and that that’s
what made me quit. Said he was proud of me for quitting, and ‘no hard feelings’
about what I told him before – that his lips were sealed. Neither of us have spoken
about it since.”

My lips felt numb as I spoke. “Who does know about it then? That you almost died?”

His quiet answer seemed to echo through the endless valleys. “You.”

My chest ached. “Jesus, Sherlock –”

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said quickly. Before I could say anything else, he
kept talking, words pouring out of him as if they would spill into the lake and
cause it to overflow up over the rocky mud shores. “John, I . . . you have to
understand that you are a storm. You are a hurricane. You . . . caught me up and
flung me into the sky, higher than I’d ever been before – all the times when I was
young and stupid and with Greg, all the times I was high – the days spent tracking
wolves through every boring new wilderness . . . you lifted my feet higher off the
ground than any of that. Until I couldn’t see the tops of the trees. And it was . .
. terrifying. Gloriously terrifying.”

My mind reeled, desperately trying to keep up. “Hold on, but –”

“I couldn’t lose you,” he kept going, as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “Christ,
John, do you even understand? You can’t see yourself – the way you . . . you
_illuminate_ it all. Each day ticked by, and I flew higher and higher, and you
kissed me. You . . . you fucked me – held me in the middle of the night until I . .
. and my plane ticket back to London was just sitting there, the whole time. The
day I would leave you behind here and have to fall, and crash back to earth. And it
was going to kill me – the fall.”

He was panting – I could hear the way his lungs sucked in the air. His voice was
wet. “Everything I said to you that day. John, everything I said . . . everything I
did, with London, with your job. I’ve never been so sorry for anything in my life.
I’ve never wished . . . wished so desperately that I hadn’t woken up in hospital
thirteen years ago. That I had just stayed . . . And it was all because I wanted
_you_ to stay – to stay with me, so my feet wouldn’t touch the ground. And all I
did was make you think I was ashamed of you, and insult you, and drive you away so
immediately you couldn’t even . . . couldn’t even hike by my side back to the Road.
And I can’t tell you how much I regret –”

“Sherlock,” I said softly. He immediately stopped. I could hear him struggling for
air, and a soft moan escaped the back of his throat. The canoe rocked gently over
the water, and I gripped the sides of it so I wouldn’t fall into the depths and
drown.

“Sherlock,” I said again, barely able to speak. “There are . . . so many things I
should have said to you last year. That we both should have said.”

“John,” he whispered. “Please, _please_ forgive me, for –”

“Of course I forgive you,” I said. The flame burst into fiery life at the base of
my throat. My eyes stung. “Sherlock, I have . . .” My throat closed up, and I knew
that if I kept speaking he would know I was crying. I went on. “I have missed you.
You don’t understand how it was before. How alone . . . I’ve spent every night
hating myself for leaving you behind that day. For not just taking a moment -- ”

“I deserved it. I deserved everything you did –”

“You didn’t deserve it. I’m so sorry –”

“I didn’t understand at the time. Last year, in the moment, I didn’t realize what
this all meant –"

“Neither did I.”

“But you need to see. . . and I know it’s not like that, not anymore, you’ve said,
but John, you were – you have to understand that you were –"

“I have a key,” I suddenly said. He went absolutely silent. The growing wind kissed
the surface of the lake in the fresh stillness, slapping water against the canoe’s
sides to cover over the sound of our breaths.

“I had it made last year,” I went on, barely speaking above a whisper. “After that
afternoon where we took Lugnut outside the park – to the little clearing?”
He swallowed hard, and I could hear the slight smile in his voice. “I remember.”

“It’s brass. Hanging on a little ribbon. Opens the one door to my cabin near
Talkeetna.” I clenched my hands into fists to steady my fingers, and took a deep
breath. I was about to say everything – to risk being burned, to go up in flames. I
was about to fall off the little rock in the middle of the rushing river.

“I can’t bring myself to throw it away,” I whispered.

The canoe rocked as Sherlock immediately leaned forward. I could feel the puffs of
his breath on the back of my neck. “Please don’t throw it away,” he said quickly,
urgently. His hand gripping the side of the canoe was achingly close to my own.
“Please, John, not yet.”

I closed my eyes, and I moved my hand so that my fingers just barely brushed
against his. He pressed back against my skin. “I won’t throw it away,” I said
softly. I wrapped one of my fingers around his. “Not yet.”

I sighed when his warm palm suddenly caressed the back of my neck. He stroked his
thumb down towards the top of my spine beneath the collar of my shirt. I leaned
back against his hand, afraid that if I opened my eyes it would all dissolve into a
dream.

“You went with me,” I said after a long moment.

His fingers still rubbed the skin of my neck. “I couldn’t let you go alone.”

I took a deep breath over my racing heart, and I smelled the mud and ice of the
vast lake – the cedar on the inside of his wrists, and the wildflowers wilting in
the breeze.

“You were the first person to ever truly call me handsome,” I said. “Instead of
beautiful. That night that you shaved me. . . That’s one of the things I should
have said to you last year.”

Air escaped through his nose, and I felt him shift forward in the narrow canoe. My
body quivered at the sound of his voice so close to my ear. “You are the most
interesting person on the entire face of the earth,” he said. “The most fascinating
combination of thoughts and feelings – the most intricately woven puzzle.”

Our fingers slid together on the side of the rough, wood canoe. He held my hand.
“That’s one of the things I should have said to you last year, too.”

And as his thumb stroked the back of my hand in the soft breeze, I looked down at
our woven fingers, and a wolf howled in the distance, sending goosebumps up my
spine. I felt him shiver pressed up behind me.

“I never wanted to throw that key away,” I whispered to him, and the flame in me
suddenly burned as safe and warm as Lugnut’s fur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're getting so close! So close! Thank you so much for reading. I am truly
blown away by the love you all share for Ranger Watson and good ol' scientist
Sherlock.
>
> To all of you who have shared with me how you are enjoying this story, how this
story has moved you, or brought you happiness / joy / comfort, or helped you to
learn, you have no idea what all of that means to me. I've been prioritizing
writing new chapters instead of responding to every comment personally, but please
know that I read every single one, and adore them, and read them over and over and
over. They are what keep me going as I write each week! You are all so appreciated!
:) And thank you especially for the seriously kind words from so many of you
regarding their intimate scene together last chapter. All the thanks, once again,
goes to my betas and readers.
>
> *One quick thing I'd like to mention, just in case: Sherlock's line teasing John
for being 'religiously homosexual' does not offend John (or Sherlock), and makes
them laugh in the moment. It's actually something a close friend once said to me,
that I've remembered fondly ever since. However, I acknowledge everyone's sense and
type of humor is different. While I've written that line as Sherlock's joke to
John, I in no way mean for it to represent my own views as the author, or for it to
cause anyone to feel harmed.
>
> Next week: we're back in 1991, and things are getting hot(ter). Enjoy watching
these two idiots fall head over heels, and have lots more sex.
>
> *Next chapter might unfortunately be a bit of a longer wait. . . my time I would
normally spend writing this week will actually be used up going on a trip to see
Sarah Jarosz in concert. And then, the week after, I'll be at 221B Con! If you're
going to con and would like to say hi, please please please do. I've never been
before and am seriously stoked! Just look for the young person wandering around
shyly with super short hair and a badge that says "SinceWhen_John" :) Hope to see
you there! The next chapter will be up as soon as I can!
>
> Y'all are great. Take care of yourselves.

12. Late July - August 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to "Lay Me Down" by Loretta Lynn featuring Willie Nelson
[HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfZxnILzN4c/)
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Still Life" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=uh2h63fed_A/)
>
>  
>
> Thank you SO much for all of your patience! The writing of this chapter got
interrupted by two tiny personal trips and 221b Con, so thanks for hanging in there
for the longest wait yet. I've added an 'end chapter' to this fic - you can see
we're very quickly nearing the happy end!
>
> *A quick note: John has some thoughts in this chapter (and throughout this entire
fic, as you've seen) about his body that are not very healthy. I just wanted to add
in a little reminder that John's thoughts about himself obviously do not reflect my
thoughts as the author, or in any way show how a trans person should feel, or
describe what is actually true. He's come a long way, but he's still got a long way
to go. Thanks for coming along for the ride of his healing and self-love process.
>
> That being said, please enjoy :)

Late July - August 1991

 
Sherlock didn’t spend another night in his own cabin the whole rest of the summer.

He moved into my own space without me even realizing. One day, I was pulling him
towards me and kissing him in the dark, and the next day, half his clothes were
taking up all my hangers, with my extra shirts and pants tossed down into a pile on
the closet floor, and his dark, curled hairs were strewn across my white pillow and
sheets – a black forest of life and heat and sex plastered gently across white
clouds. His dusty boots joined mine by the front door to wait out the cold nights.

I would unlock my front door after a long day of hiking or work, and he would be
right on my heels. I’d cook dinner, and he was by my side. I’d look up from my
kitchen table to see him perched across from me, staring blankly into thin air with
murmured words on his lips, or scribbling down notes while ignoring his food, or
giving me a hidden look he’d think I couldn’t see.

I’d slip between my sheets at the end of the weary day, muscles glorious and
aching, and his naked skin would brush alongside my own, warm in a way that made me
shiver uncontrollably through my body, and he would pull me on top of him with a
low moan in his throat. I would lie with him, with his steady fingers tracing up my
spine, and he would hold my bones together. He would beg me to kiss him – to cover
him with my weight down into the thin mattress, and he would pant my name in a way
I’d never thought my name could even sound, low and desperate deep down in his
strong chest – a precious whisper that only existed in the sweating air beneath my
sheets.

Just like that, he started living with me. And I never wanted to ask him to slow
down, or to leave me some space, or to stop.

I never wanted to tell him that it was absolutely incomprehensible, in a way that
set my teeth on edge and prickled the back of my neck, how there was another human
being who wanted to come home just to see me in pajamas with stubble on my cheeks –
no uniform or gun or badge pinned to my shirt – just me, quiet and stepping back
into the darkness, until he reached out to run his palm up the hair on my arms in
the silence, and drew me into the soft light he always managed to cast with the
glow of his skin.

He wanted to come home to that, to the me that was stripped down to just skin and
muscle and bone, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him why, for fear that when he
finally thought about it he wouldn’t be able to say.

Max and Babs didn’t notice. They spent so much of their time hiding away from
Sherlock, brushing past with nervous gazes locked down on their own feet, that they
never even realized that he was walking towards the shower house from the direction
of my cabin and not from his own. They saw me walking around camp and gave their
usual cheerful, young smiles. They told me about new wolf sightings, or random
gossip from around the camp, and they never once stopped and asked me if I’d ever
had Sherlock Holmes’ cock in my mouth.

Nick and Chris and Nathan and Hannah and Jess never noticed either. For all they
knew, I woke up each morning and still, for some reason, met that lunatic Sherlock
Holmes down by his truck, and I spared them all the chore of having to drive
Sherlock around the Park. And maybe, when Sherlock Holmes followed quiet old me
back up to my cabin, maybe we were just sharing a meal, or making plans for the
next day. Maybe we were just arguing, or I couldn’t figure out how to force the man
to leave me alone.

It didn’t occur to them in a million years that the very same quiet old me was
grasping Sherlock Holmes’ naked back in the dark, holding his body close on a thin,
shaking mattress as I rubbed the hard, aching place on myself against Sherlock’s
erect penis through a layer of underwear, toes curling and sweat prickling as I
came with my open lips against Sherlock’s neck.

Greg noticed, though. He noticed – because how could he not?

There wasn’t any way on earth that he would be able to miss the fact that his up-
at-all-hours, restless, sharp-tongued roommate he’d known for over ten years had
suddenly disappeared from their shared cabin ninety percent of the time. That
Sherlock slipped back into their cabin to grab something he forgot in the early
hours of the evening before slinking back to my rooms, or that Sherlock’s hair
smelled like my own shampoo, or that every meal Sherlock ate came from my own
kitchen.

That Sherlock wore the collar of his Ranger shirt buttoned up high, no longer open
and glaring at his bared chest, because he needed to hide the marks I’d left there
with my beard and mouth.

About two weeks after I woke up for the first time with Sherlock Holmes in my bed,
Greg found me along the side of the Park Road. My body was drenched in sweat and
mud from a hard patrol hike out down a ravine where there’d been reports of camping
supplies left out abandoned in the backcountry. I was glaring against the harsh sun
and squinting into the dust, waiting for one of the blessed green busses to come
into sight so I could hitch a ride back to Toklat, when the familiar wheels of one
of the government vans sped around the corner.

For a moment, my heart skipped an embarrassingly large beat in my chest. I thought

it was Sherlock – somehow divined exactly where I was stranded waiting for a ride,
come to rescue me and surprise me until I’d make him pull over the van so I could
crash my lips to his own before we even got home.

It wasn’t Sherlock behind the wheel, though. The sun flashed brilliantly off the
hood of the van as I waved it down, still happy to see Greg’s smile through the
dust-covered windshield.

“No hitchhikers on government land,” Greg said in his best Ranger voice after he
rolled down the window.

“Har har,” I said, already climbing up into the passenger seat. “Besides,” I went
on, taking a moment to gulp down some lukewarm water out of my pack, “There’s a
whole lot of Athabaskans who’d sure like to argue with you that this place is
official government land.”

Greg chuckled as he sped off nearly too fast down one of the hairpin turns, barely
skirting along the edge of the Road where it dropped off down a steep drainage into
Polychrome Pass. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Make the new guy feel inadequate for not
knowing the political intricacies of this place.”

I smirked out the rolled down window. “You’re hardly new, you moron. Not when it’s
almost August. Most visitors who spend more than six minutes in the Visitor Center
out East could tell you the whole story of the Athabaskans and the park land,” I
said.

Greg groaned. “Christ, did I hallucinate and really pick up Sherlock in my car
instead?”

“If I was Sherlock, I’d have called you way more inventive things than a moron, and
also given you the entire park history without you asking for it the whole drive
back.”
Greg smiled and tilted his head, and I looked sideways out the window to hide the
faint flush on my cheeks from talking about Sherlock so openly.

“Got a point there, Watson,” he said, sounding relieved.

We were silent for a few miles – lulled into a sleepy, twilight calm by the heavy
sun against the windshield, and the steady hum of dirt kicking up under the tires
into the crisp, blue air.

Then, “Noticed Sherlock’s been out and about at all hours of the night.”

Something odd flared up in my gut – the desire to fling open the car door, hurl my
body from the seat, and tumble down willingly into the pass among the sharp
brambles.

I rubbed my hand over my mouth. My conversation with Greg from all those weeks ago
by the campfire replayed suddenly in my mind. His firm grip on my arm, pulling me
back from running away. The clarity in his brown eyes. “ _I go both ways
myself. . ._ ”

I took a long breath, feeling the rumble of the van spread up through my chest.
“He’s, uh. . .” I sat up straighter. “He’s been staying with me,” I said.

I waited for the silence to feel tense and strained. For Greg to gasp out loud, or
start asking a million questions, or look at me like I was insane. For him to look
at me like I should stay the hell away.

Instead it passed with hardly any feeling at all. I closed my eyes in the quick
silence, willing myself not to think of how my eyes had welled up only that morning
when I’d woken up with my cheek in Sherlock’s curls – ashamed that something so
trivial had caused my chest to tighten with sudden emotion.

Greg shot me a quick look, then spoke out over his hands lightly gripping the
wheel. “He’s a different man with you,” he finally said. His voice sounded like he
wasn’t fully satisfied with the choice of words he just said.

My palms started to sweat, and I swiped them once quickly on the thighs of my dirt-
covered pants. “Is that a good thing?” I asked, so quietly I knew he could barely
hear me over the sound of the car.

“It’s fucking good,” Greg said immediately. I thought I heard his voice choking.
“It’s bloody brilliant.”

I suddenly felt like I was running back down my long driveway with my dad’s shotgun
at my back, sprinting with nails in my throat and my baseball cap rubbing painfully
on my freshly shorn hair.

And in my newly concocted memory, Greg was standing there at the edge of the hot,
dusty drive. Waiting for me like a mirage, and holding out a hand, calling, “
_John_.” And my younger self in the memory clung desperately to the sound of
another person calling me that name for the first time, and he kept saying, “
_John. John, listen to me. You know it’ll all be damn well alright?_ ”

“That’s good,” I said suddenly, with no clue as to how much time had passed. My
voice sounded like a question.

And before I could feel embarrassed over what a stupid thing that had been to say,
Greg huffed a great laugh and shot me another quick glance over his broad shoulder.
“Of course it’s good. Else I wouldn’t of told you that, you great idiot,” he said,
smiling.

I found I couldn’t say anything back, and a relieved calm passed over my body when
I realized that Greg wasn’t expecting me to. I sat back in the seat and flexed my
tired ankles in my boots, and I left the window down so I could smell the cooling
tundra all the way back to camp.

\--

It was Sherlock’s idea to go on that fucking backcountry trip in the first place.

He came up behind me one late night when I was throwing together a boring dinner
and put his chin on my shoulder, wrapping his huge palms up over the rises of my
chest.

“We’re going out to Unit 13 for four days in the morning,” he said.

I laughed at him and kept cooking without even pausing my hands. “Oh, right, sure.
Let’s hike across a glacier for three days without any preparation, on ten hours’
notice. Without securing any time off. Sounds fucking great.”

I could practically hear his frown. “Well, it does sound great because I’m bloody
suggesting it. I’ve already requested your days off weeks ago. And we’ll leave at
six to get an early start, so technically this is seven hours’ notice, if you know
how to properly count.”

I kept stirring the pot of stew. “Should I count out loud how many times I want to
say ‘no’ to you right now?”

“John. . .”

“There’s no fucking way we’re leaving on a trip like that without any prep,” I cut
in. I shook my head, bumping back into the side of his face still resting on my
shoulder. “Can you even hear how stupid that sounds?”

“But –”

“For one thing, the temperatures are a good ten degrees colder along the top of the
Muldrow, and I know for certain you don’t have warm enough clothes to sustain that
kind of wind –”

“Then I’ll just –”

“And I barely have enough fuel left for my stove to get us through one night of a
normal trip – in non-freezing weather, so how in hell you expect us to be able to
–”

“Christ, John, you act like you’ve never been cold in your entire life –”

“—to _survive_ without somebody finding our bodies in a sad tent the next morning.
Honestly, Sherlock, why the fuck am I hearing about this only now if you requested
time off weeks ago?”

Sherlock’s hands moved down to trace the soft lines of my stomach. He didn’t
answer. He lifted his thumb up under my thin t-shirt and slowly dragged the pad of
his finger along the trail of hair leading down into my sweatpants.

“John. . .”

I cursed under my breath. I dropped the spoon from my unsteady hand back into the
pot and unwillingly leaned back a little into his arms.

I felt the press of his warm, dry lips into the side of my straining neck. They
rasped against my stubble as they slowly ached along the bottom of my clenched jaw.

“John,” he said again, in a voice so deep it sounded like it was coming from the
core of the earth itself – as if the base of rocky Denali was suddenly rumbling in
full force against the fragile bones of my unsuspecting shoulder.

I shivered when his hand pressed against the low of my belly, sneaking thin
fingertips under the waistband of my sweats. He trailed them, the barest touch,
through the soft patch of my thick hair – too light to even touch the skin, and
still pulling away when my body arched up to meet the pressure of his palm.

“That’s not fair,” I breathed out. I reached back with a desperate hand and grabbed
the back of his neck when I felt his warm erection press against my lower back.

“Come to the Muldrow with me,” he crooned into my ear. He rubbed himself, thick and
heavy, through the fabric of his pants into my own pulsing hot skin. My entire
spine contracted – a ripple of anticipating pleasure that thrummed in my blood and
made the low of my gut fill with aching warmth.

“Sherlock,” I said, breathless. I gripped his neck harder beneath my palm, letting
his pulse brush against my fingers. “Come on, this isn’t –”

“Don’t you want to come with me,” he whispered. He stepped forward so that I was
pressed between his body and the counter. His erection was like steel against the
small of my back, making my skin hot and damp with a thin sheen of sweat beneath my
undershirt, wrinkled from the long day. His fingers still rested gently in the hair
between my legs and at the top of my thighs, teasing the sensitive skin there and
not letting me press back against his palm. My legs shook.

I opened my mouth to respond, and then immediately lost my breath when his lips
pressed against the skin of my neck. He sucked me into his mouth, and bit down
lightly until a small moan escaped from my throat.

“The Muldrow, John,” he rasped, letting his lips brush against my neck as he spoke.
My whole body shivered. I closed my eyes when his hand slipped out from inside my
boxers, and then cupped the bulge between my legs – pressing the sock up against my
body and rubbing it with his palm. I’d forgotten I hadn’t taken it out of my
underwear yet from the day.

“Come on,” he whispered in a deep moan. “Come with me . . .”

I looked down at the outline of his palm cupping me through my sweats – watching
his huge hand rove over the bulge as he breathed into my skin, as if I was filling
out hard and wanting into his waiting hand, as if I was tenting my pants, and
leaking onto the tips of his fingers. As if I was hard as steel in his stroking
palm.

I shut my eyes and swallowed hard as he continued to palm me and breathe roughly
against my neck.
“Yes . . .” I finally whispered back, not caring how high my voice sounded. “Okay,
yes –"

Immediately his hands left my body, and suddenly I was stepping back into
completely empty space.

“Good, I knew you’d see reason,” he said in a normal voice behind me, already
moving to start shoving supplies into our packs sitting in the corner.

I turned around and tried to catch my breath, a laugh already burning in my chest.
“You fucking dick,” I said, trying not to smile. “I take it back –“

“You said yes. Can’t take it back now, not when I’ve already started packing.”

I shook my head at him, reaching down to adjust the sock in my boxers, and ignoring
the burning in my cheeks even though he could perfectly well see it beneath my
beard. Ignoring that I was wet.

“You know, most people would consider seducing someone to go on some sort of death
mission trip with you a pretty fucked up thing to do–"

I stopped when he looked up at me from where he was crouched on the floor with a
beautiful smile twitching the corner of his lips. His eyes shone – like the first
stars breaking through the thick clouds and fog of twilight to lead me back to the
Road after a long day’s hike – the promise of a warm meal and thick blankets and
water. The promise of home.

My laugh finally broke out when my eyes met his. His smile grew brighter, and I
gave up trying to look mad and shook my head. He smirked.

“You owe me the rest of that later, then” I finally said in a rough voice. I let my
eyes slowly trace down his body to the erection still thick and full between his
legs, pressing out against his pants. It seemed to twitch and grow fuller under my
hot gaze.

He swallowed hard, and I watched his eyes widen as he quickly looked up and down my
own body – my plain, soft body covered in a thin t-shirt and sweats, and he was
looking at me like he was starving, like he wanted to devour me while I devoured
him. A bear come upon a fresh caribou waiting to be taken. I was making him _hard_.

“Deal, Ranger,” he said, breathless even though he tried to look normal.

We left the next goddamn morning at six.

I looked out through the dirty glass of the early morning camper bus window as we
wound along the Road, ever aware of Sherlock’s thigh pressing against mine. His
eyes were closed, trying to get in a last hour’s worth of rest before we made it
out to thirteen.

I was wide awake – restless and anxious to get off the bus and get going. We never
did end up finishing the deal Sherlock had started the night before. He’d packed
like a whirlwind, running between our cabins and the extra shed of supplies near
the camp offices all night while I sat hunched over my kitchen table with my maps
and planned our route.

I’d surprised myself when Sherlock had looked up at me from leaning over our two
packs to ask if I wanted to come and go through all the supplies. I’d just shaken
my head and said that I trusted him, suddenly aware that I literally trusted him
with my life. The look of soft surprise on his face had made my throat feel warm
and dry.

Sherlock had kept prepping until just after one in the morning, when I’d suddenly
looked up from sharpening my knife at the sound of something collapsing onto the
bed. I’d finished packing up and turning off the lights in the cabin, and walked
into the darkened, moonlit bedroom to the sight of Sherlock passed out on his
stomach across the bed, still fully dressed with his arms thrown up above his head
– chest slowly heaving in an already deep sleep.

I’d looked at him for a long time, a heavy smile on my lips – one that somehow felt
weary, as if my face was tired from holding so much quiet joy. Like the muscles in
my cheeks weren’t strong enough to sustain it, and it was draining me of my energy,
leaving me sagging under a huge, unknown weight.

I’d watched him sleep in the darkness, listening to the soft whisper of the
rustling trees outside the window. Then I’d slowly rolled him onto his back and
stripped off his shirt and shoes and jeans while he snored under his breath. I
heaved him under the sheets and moved his sleep-heavy limbs so I could settle in
beside him, still in my shirt and sweats. And just as I’d moved to wrap my arm
around his waist, he’d woken up, and automatically reached for me in the dark, and
found my face with his palm before pressing a soft kiss to my mouth – just the
barest brush of tired lips – before falling back to sleep immediately on my
shoulder.

I’d held him for what felt like hours, wondering if it was possible to feel so many
things at once. There’d been happiness – that weightless, terrifying awe that came
whenever I stopped in my tracks and realized I was actually allowed to kiss and
hold this man. That reckless, pumping adrenaline that burned in my veins when I
realized I was flying high up in the clouds, and I had no idea if or how I would
ever land.

And there had also been sadness – a bone weary, aching, sharp stab of sadness, that
I had let myself grow older for four long decades, and never knew the simple,
young, innocent feeling of falling asleep with someone else in my arms – the
infinitesimally small miracle of my sheets smelling like sweat and sex and _him_.
The wasted years of loneliness in a bed built for one.

I’d thought of Sherlock’s plane ticket back to London at the end of the summer.

Eventually I’d fallen asleep with a horrifying tightness in my throat – one that
couldn’t decide whether it was bursting with elation or breathless with desperate
longing. And his skin had grown warm under my palms as I held him close through the
night, wary of a quiet fear scratching gently at my cabin walls.

Now, staring out the window at the young, clear sun bursting against the sides of
Denali’s peaks, I felt Sherlock nudge me in the side just as the beginnings of
thirteen came into view.

“Should get off here if we don’t want to deal with a steep drainage,” he said
quickly, already starting to stand. “I’d rather walk this extra stretch than fall
down the bloody cliff like last time.”

I huffed and hefted up my pack as Sherlock whistled for the driver to stop. “It’s
hilarious how you somehow manage to incorrectly remember the start of our last big
trip as ‘falling down a bloody cliff’,” I said as I nodded at the driver and
followed Sherlock down the bus stairs. “Pretty sure I would remember something as
dramatic as that.”
Sherlock started off into the tundra without even looking back, shielding his eyes
from the dust cloud as the bus sped away. “Good god, you can be tediously literal,”
he said.

“Says the man who corrects me every single fucking time I overexaggerate a time
estimate,” I called up to him. I heard his laugh carry back to me on the soft
morning breeze, shivering across my skin.

Just as I caught up to him I heard him muttering under his breath, shaking his head
with a soft look out at the rolling tundra bathed in purple light. “John Watson,
you are never boring,” he said lowly, with an expression on his face that looked
like he’d never thought such a thing could even be possible to say.

I pretended I hadn’t heard him, but walked close enough to his side that our hands
brushed once, and I felt his fingers twitch against my skin.

That day passed quickly. It felt like we’d hardly hiked any miles at all when
Sherlock shielded his eyes from the heavy sun with his hand and scanned the distant
line of the Muldrow, coming closer with every step.

“Should camp here for the night,” he said under his breath. “Hike up any farther
along the slope and we’ll have to camp unprotected in the high winds. Better to
stay here in the valley and leave the shelter of this brush in the morning.”

I didn’t realize I was standing there smiling at him until he frowned and scrunched
up his nose. “What?”

A warm blush fluttered up my throat. I looked away, pulling my pack off my

shoulders and starting to pull out our supplies. “Nothing,” I said down at my
hands. “Just. . funny watching you be responsible for once out in the wilderness.
Not actively trying to get yourself killed.”

When he chuckled, I laughed, too, as we knelt side by side to unroll our tent and
set up our small camp. And I tried not to wonder about whether his laugh sounded
the same when he was at home in London.

That night, after cleaning up our cook site from a simple dinner of oatmeal and
dried fruit, we sat together in the opening of the tent and looked out at the grey
outline of the glacier fading into the oncoming dark. I stretched out my legs in
front of me on the firm, cool grass, and leaned back on one elbow, tingling in my
skin every time our bodies touched through the gathering mist. We were silent, as
we’d been mostly silent for that whole day, aside from discussing the best route
together, and calling out for bears. For a little while, Sherlock had told me about
some of his past wolf research in other parks over the years– which was less about
tracking the wolves themselves and more about Sherlock managing to get himself in
trouble with what felt like half the Park Rangers in the entire United States.

I rested my cheek against his arm where he sat next to me, with his long legs
wrapped up tight against his chest. The wind blew through the long grasses in a
whispered kiss, sending an eagle soaring up into the sky close enough that we could
hear its wings flap against the cooling air. We both sucked in a quiet breath when
a pair of antlers peaked up over the ridge of the Muldrow, now swirling in silver
mist, and we watched frozen, holding our breath, as four caribou climbed up
gracefully over the top, shivering against the earth and pouring strength into the
cloudy breeze. We sat spellbound as the caribou clomped through the wet earth,
glistening with misty dew and warmed by the last fading rays of the sleeping sun.
The male caribou’s antlers cut pathways through the thick fog, and the female
behind him brushed her soft nose along a bed of purple wildflowers nested in moss.

We watched them amble slowly across the thick ice, hooves cracking against the
hissing sheets of frozen water, and the sound of their hooves and snorted breaths
mixed with the whispered crackle of the ice sheets shifting below the mighty
surface of the Muldrow, grinding against the solid earth and fracturing the foggy
silence.

“I have a confession to make, John,” Sherlock whispered, not taking his eyes off
the caribou in the distance.

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

I felt him shiver beside me. “I haven’t searched for a single sign of wolf activity
this entire day. Not even a paw print.”

I frowned and looked up at him – at his curls in a frizzy halo against the last
billows of warm light from the setting sun, blowing gently across his long
eyelashes in the breeze. “Why is that?” I asked him. I shuddered a bit at the sound
of my own whisper – fainter and more fragile than his own deep rumble.

He glanced at me quickly. “You,” he said simply. His eyes traced along the curved
backs of the caribou winding across the ice. “You distracted me endlessly – with
your hands, and your face, and your sweat. It was endlessly annoying not to be able
to banish you from my head.”

He smirked down at me, then, and I could see a softer look hiding farther back in
his eyes – one that looked like that same feeling that churned constantly in my
lungs, wariness mixed with hope, and joy with despair.

Waking up with him in my arms, and his plane ticket to London at the end of the
season.

I shook my head and smiled back out at the rolling sheets of blue-green ice. “I’m
glad you’re out here with me, too,” I said, answering what I thought was his
unspoken question, and I felt him relax beside me.

Just then, a lone wolf howled in the distance, blinding through the dark fog and
spilling down the slopes of the Muldrow into the trees. A chorus joined it, sending
shivers down my spine. The caribou jolted up from their lazy graze and followed the
sound of it with their ears, then turned and started clomping away down the mossy
slopes of the glacier, rustling the brush with their legs and causing a cloud of
mist to rise up from their hooves.

I felt icy cold when they finally disappeared off into the trees and fog – so cold
that it felt like I’d never even been warm in my whole life. Not even Sherlock’s
arm by my cheek could make me feel anything more than the oppressive, heavy
coldness of the black ice. A great shiver passed through me, numbing my lips, and I
somehow knew that it wasn’t entirely due to the cold wind in the air.

Later that night, I woke up once right when the earth was at its darkest point,
buried deep in my sleeping bag with Sherlock’s arms clinging around my stomach. The
air outside was whispering against the walls of the tent, and far away a bird sang,
echoing through the black sky. I was sharply aware of the sensation of my breath
fogging in the cold air, growing humid in the warmth between our two bodies huddled
together.

I realized, through the haze of my dreams, that I had no memory of ever climbing
into the bag or falling asleep. I just remembered starting to shake in the cold as
we stared at the place where the caribou had just disappeared over the horizon. And
I remembered Sherlock’s arm settling firmly around my back, pulling me close into
the heat of his side so that all the emerging stars could see.

The next night, night two of our trip, was not nearly as peaceful.

We halted our hike after a brutal eight hours – hours that had involved
backtracking over three miles when we realized that the side of the glacier we were
ascending was separated from the way back by a gigantic crack in the ice, hissing
at us with steam and gurgling beneath the weight of our unwelcome feet. We’d had to
change routes again twice to avoid some male grizzlies out in the distance, and
then a third time when the melting ice and snow had created a bog out of the
tundra, sucking our hiking boots and shins down into the thick muck until we were
soaking wet, and covered in mud, and nearly shaking we were so sore.

“Fucking knew it was a bad idea to do this,” I said as we struggled to pitch the
tent against the thrashing wind on the exposed rock and ice.

Sherlock just irritatingly shrugged. “What, are you going to complain about being a
little damp, Ranger?”

I huffed and hefted up the bear can to trudge it over to our cook site. “I’m taking
back what I said earlier about you not actively trying to get killed. I’m pretty
sure being soaking wet on the top of a fucking glacier counts as the stupidest
thing you’ve ever done. And that’s saying a lot.”

I didn’t hear his reply as I walked away. My stomping footsteps echoed loudly in my
ears. I shivered uncontrollably while I cooked us some of the leftover oatmeal over
my little stove, cupping my palms around the gas so the flame wouldn’t go out in
the wind. It howled through the thick blanket of deep green trees covering the
rolling earth below us, swaying threateningly against the bottom of the sheets of
grey ice and moss-covered rock surging up beneath our feet.

It should have been beautiful – the vast, unmoored swaths of grey and green and
black, melting down the peaks and evaporating into the dense evening fog. It should
have taken my breath away, and made me want to gasp out loud at the terrifying
glory of nature, or rolled a tear down my cheek at the incomprehensible strength of
the place I called home.

Instead, I was furious. It lit a warm anger deep in my chest to keep me from
freezing solid.

I was furious at Sherlock for convincing us to go on this trip so unprepared, and

at the sky itself for blocking out the sun, and at the groaning glacier beneath my
feet for having the audacity to exist. I was furious at myself for ever letting
myself be convinced into going along with his idea – that one pathetic touch from
his hands could apparently make me do anything, like I was too starving for touch
to see reason, or to hold my own against the force of his will.

Furious at myself for continuing to kiss him even though he was never going to
stay.

I jumped, startled, when something warm wrapped around my shoulders from behind
where I sat hunched in front of the stove. The harsh, biting wind was instantly
blocked from my back, and I looked down to see that Sherlock’s pale hands were
wrapping his emergency blanket around my chest.
My throat closed up with shame for being angry. I shut my stinging eyes and leaned
back against him, letting him press his cheek against mine. My beard brushed
against his smooth skin.

He held me for a long time as the black wind howled across the tundra, smashing the
foggy clouds against the thick pockets of trees. The breath coming out of his nose
warmed the skin on my face.

“We’ll be alright,” he eventually whispered, so softly I could barely hear him over
the restless earth. And while I knew that he meant we’d be alright there, that
night - that we wouldn’t freeze, and our supplies would be enough, and it would all
end up being a story to laugh at after – I also knew in that moment that I
desperately, hopelessly, foolishly wished that he was referring to our lives
instead. This singular, combined life I now carried with me in my chest, knitting
both of us together in the same way the highest peaks joined effortlessly with the
sky, so different from the separate life I’d carried with me up until that point.
Forty years of a lone wolf howling for a sight of the moon, and now that the fog
had lifted, and he’d finally glimpsed its milky face, he just wanted to be told
that it would be alright. That he’d see it again.

We huddled side by side in our sleeping bags later that night in the tent, unmoving
and listening to the howling storm just outside. We’d zipped our bags together to
make one large blanket to hold us both, and the vinyl on the bags rustled endlessly
as we both shivered to get warm. Neither one of us spoke.

Eventually, Sherlock turned onto his side and nestled against my chest. My hands
flew to his back to hold him, as if he would disappear into smoke if I didn’t hold
him down fast enough. He breathed a deep sigh as my heartbeat pressed against his
cheek, and I lay there, completely frozen, as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

I held him, and breathed in his scent, and just as the pitch of the wind reached a
desperate moan across the ice, I suddenly wanted to wake him and whisper to him
about one night, long ago, when I was twenty-nine years old and working in Death
Valley. When I’d gone out on a camping trip with one of the other Rangers, James.

James – whose red hair had burned like fire beneath the hot sun, and whose tanned
skin shone like bronze woven across the laugh lines by his deep eyes. Whose face
had lit up every time I’d walked into a room.

I wanted to wake Sherlock up, and whisper to him in the dark about another night,
long ago, when I’d lain in a tent and watched the outline of a back slowly breathe
just in front of me, with empty space between our bodies that felt icy cold in the
thin desert air. That night, when I’d wondered if I could reach out and draw James
into myself – whether he would sigh and light up like he always did whenever he saw
we were working a patrol together, or whether he would melt into the strong lines
of my arms. Whether he would notice that my body didn’t quite feel the way it
should against his. Whether he would whisper my name.

Whether he would admit that he wanted men; that he wanted me.

I wanted to tell Sherlock, so fiercely that it felt like my heart was exploding,
about how, lying there with James, I had suddenly felt like the only person alive
on the whole earth. That I would wander and wander and wander for years, and never
come across another human soul. Or that I was a ghost, doomed and cursed to haunt
the air everyone breathed, and yet no one would ever see me. No one would ever know
I had been there.

I wanted to tell Sherlock these ridiculous things, and about how I had woken up the
next morning with James pressed close against my side, with his cheek on my neck,
and I had let my shaking palm stroke up the side of his arm. How he had opened his
eyes blearily and then sat up with a jolt, then pushed fully away from me in the
terrifying silence; he’d cleared his throat and started to roll up his bag like
nothing had ever happened. As if we had simply slept.

And Sherlock would have listened to me, lying there at what felt like the edge of
the earth being torn away, tumbling into the storm, if I told him about how James
left the Park Service a little over a year later. I’d walked into the offices after
taking my month vacation off, and one of the Interp Rangers, who was just a fuzzy
face now in my memory, had looked at me and casually said that James had quit and
run off to go and move clear over to Baltimore. And when I’d stood there blankly
and asked her why he left, with a sickening twist in my gut, she’d leaned across
the desk and whispered that the rumor was that he’d left to go and live with a man
– some guy he met out in the Park while he was working a shift. How she’d heard it
from Karen, who’d heard it from Phil and Jeff, who’d heard it from James himself.

I wanted to whisper to Sherlock in the dark how I had covered my face with my hands
later that night back in my small room. How I’d wondered why James’ face had lit up
whenever I walked through an open door for all those years, and whether he had ever
understood that I was gay. Why he hadn’t shared that he was, too.

Wondered whether he had simply never been interested in me – that just because we
both wanted men didn’t mean he wanted to wake up in my specific arms.

Or whether he had looked at me, truly _looked_ at me, and seen that I wasn’t enough
of a man for him to ever want to run away to Baltimore with me, instead. If he’d
seen that I wasn’t what he really wanted – not under my clothes.

If he’d known that I would have dropped everything just to go with him.

I didn’t tell Sherlock any of that, though, hiding away from the storm within the
frail walls of the tent. I let him sleep, for long enough that I started to drift
away into my own dreams beside him. But then he stirred next to me, and slowly
rolled his hips, and I sucked in a rough breath when I felt the warm line of his
erection pressed against the outside of my thigh.

I forgot James Sholto had ever even existed as Sherlock wordlessly pulled me on top
of him in the dark. As he started to pant and grabbed the back of my ass while I
trailed my cold lips along the smooth line of his throat. I waited until my
fingertips were warmed from the friction in the sleeping bags before I reached down
to shove my hand up under his layers of shirts. I rubbed over his lean stomach and
across the hairs on his chest, aching deep in my gut as my fingertips created
shivers on his bare skin. Our breath was hot and wet against each other’s lips, and
our kiss tore at me roughly in a way it never had before. I thought I was drowning
in the air – that the desperate, needy sounds filling the claustrophobic air of the
tent couldn’t possibly be coming from my own open mouth or his.

I grabbed his hair and tugged, and he arched his spine in a way that pressed his
growing erection into the shaking skin of my thigh, and he groaned so deeply I felt
the vibrations against my own chest.

Then I was lost.

He was hard for me, hard as steel, clutching me closer to him like he needed to
feel every inch of my body at once. I was the one making him desperately pant, his
moans echoing out across the vast, longing wilderness, and I was the one causing
him to leak into his pants from the tip of his thick penis, and I was the one
putting those wild moans into his throat.
He was _hard_ for me, dirty and tired and covered in sweat after a full day of
hiking, and he still wanted me to wrap him in my arms, and he wanted to taste my
skin.

I realized that he’d been whispering, groaning into my ear. “Fuck me,” he panted.
“Christ, John, fuck me.”

The intimacy of those words against my ear in the darkness made a wild flame flare
up inside me. Heat surged up my spine, curling my toes and prickling my scalp. A
gasp choked out of me as I kissed and bit frantically up his neck. I wanted, more
than anything, to suddenly press myself into his body. To open him up for me, and
feel his heat, and fill him with myself. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted him to be
fucked.

Then I remembered. I couldn’t believe I had even forgotten.

I shut my eyes as my spine went still. “I can’t fuck you –” I started to say. My
chest spasmed painfully at having to say the words.

He grabbed my face roughly and kissed me before I could finish, scratching his
fingernails against my beard. “Fuck me,” he whispered again, then he reached down
as I hovered frozen above his body, and he flung open his jeans and shoved them
down his legs, struggling to kick them off his shins and leaving then still pooled
around one of his feet.

He looked up into my eyes, and I wanted to look away. I knew I looked ridiculous,
frozen and eyes blown wide with fear. Fear and desire.

My face fell. I wanted to cover my groin with my hands. “Sherlock . . .” I

whispered. My voice sounded like I was in pain. It sounded like the same voice that
used to come out of my mouth twenty long years ago.

A quick sadness flashed through his eyes, one I could see clearly through the dark,
and it destroyed me in my chest. For one aching moment, I thought it was sadness
because I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I couldn’t be that for him – someone
who held him down and pressed into his body and made him feel filled with hot
desire and want. Someone whose body could be joined with his the way he was asking
me to. Begging me to.

But then he put his hand on my cheek, and he leaned up to kiss me with his wet
mouth, holding on to my lips as if they were the source of all his oxygen on the
earth, and then I understood - that the sadness in his eyes hadn’t been because of
me, but _for_ me, and I couldn’t decide which one would be worse.

He pulled back from the kiss, leaving me still frozen in the air above him, then he
reached for my hand, and drew it up to his mouth.

“Did you think I was joking?” he said in a low, rough voice. Before I could say
anything, he sucked three of my fingers into his mouth, coating them slowly with
his tongue while the air left my lungs. I watched my fingers disappear between his
lips, my skin highlighted by the storming moonlight seeping through the tent walls.
I was burning at the wet sounds coming from his mouth as he sucked on my skin and
tasted my fingers on his tongue and throat. It was the most obscene thing I had
ever seen – his soft, full lips stretched wide around my own skin, and his eyes
boring into mine like pure fire. I kept staring into those eyes, holding my breath,
as he pulled my fingers from his mouth and brought my hand down between our still
bodies, pushing my fingers gently against the crease of his ass.
My mouth dropped open. “What –”

“Fuck me,” he moaned. He tilted back his head and closed his eyes as he guided my
wet fingers deeper, inching closer to his hole. I gasped when my fingertip finally
brushed against it.

Never, in all the times so far that July when we’d held each other and had sex, had
I gone anywhere near that part of him. I’d sucked his cock, and he’d jacked me off
through my boxers, and we’d rolled and rutted together on the sheets, sometimes
without even wanting to come, just so we could feel, but I’d never tried to touch
him there. Never even asked. And there he was, lying on his back in a tent where
the wind pounded against the thin sides, and howled and moaned across the tundra,
and he was flushed red, whispering, “fuck me,” with my wet fingertips pressed up
against the entrance to his body. He was begging me.

I had to be sure. “With . . .?” I asked. I touched the hot skin of his hole with
just my fingertip, making him gasp and his whole body shiver.

“Yes,” he breathed.

I didn’t want to blink. If I did, the entire world around me would disappear. I’d
open my eyes and be alone out on the ice, with the black sky wailing above me and
nothing but cold stone under my hands, cutting shards into my knees. I would be
naked and alone, lost at the edge of the crumbling earth. I would be exposed.

My eyes blinked, though, shocked at what I was about to do, and when I opened them
again, Sherlock was still lying there beneath me, panting and warm and gazing up
into my face with desire.

He wanted me to fuck him. He believed that I _could_ fuck him. He was still hard
for me. Wanting.

I looked at him for another moment before glancing down at the moonlit ghost of my
hand reaching towards his bare skin. His cock was erect and flushed in the foggy
darkness, bobbing up towards his belly which heaved with his breaths at the places
where I had rucked up his shirts with my hands.

The wind howled outside, crashing through the trees. The earth shook. My fingers
had dried slightly from the wetness in his mouth, so I leaned down and spat onto my
hand, coating my fingers in spit. He made a choked sound in the back of his throat,
then I gazed at him, searching desperately for his grey eyes in the terrifying
dark, and the entire trembling earth beneath us groaned, and I pressed into his
body with my finger in one long movement, until I was buried inside his heat.

“God,” he whispered. His tight skin clenched around my finger as his body shook. I
gasped for breath as I let my finger slowly pump in and out of him, sighing
together at the slide of my wet skin against his – at the heat of him tightening
around me, letting me press into his willing body. He grabbed harshly onto the back
of my neck and pulled my face close, panting across my own open lips while sweat
beaded at his forehead.

“Fuck me,” he whispered again, blending into the sound of the wind.

I pressed another finger against the hot skin of his hole, groaning as he whimpered
and I guided it inside. “Yeah, God –”

“Fuck me. . .” he moaned again. His eyes were desperate, and his body arched up
towards mine when my fingers sunk deep into his heat. “Please. . . God,
_please_ \--”
My lungs shook, and hot tightness pooled at the tops of my thighs. “Fuck, I’m . . .
I’m in you. . . God---"

The storm escalated outside as I pumped my two fingers into his body, shoving him
again and again into the hard tent floor. I felt like I was hurting him, and he
cried out each time I thrust deeper into his ass. He clung to my back through the
thick layer of my flannel, breathing out my name. The thin walls rattled and
screamed around us, and rain pelted into the harsh earth, dripping through the mesh
at the top of the tent and onto my back, and the fog and clouds burst and whipped
across the bent trees.

And along with it, I could feel our own movements becoming more and more desperate.
Before I realized what was happening, we were tearing at each other in the tangle
of ripped off clothes and unzipped sleeping bags, gasping at the heat of each
other’s sweat-slicked skin in the hot, damp air. I bit his neck, so hard that I
thought I might break skin, and he cried out so loudly I thought the entire Park
could hear his voice. He arched and twisted below me as I fucked deeper into his
ass. His cock dripped onto his stomach, searing hot and hard as steel. My own body
was wet and aching beneath my clothes. I could feel it dripping down the inside of
my thigh.

“John,” he moaned. It shot through the haze and the heat like a bursting star.
“Christ, you feel. . .”

“Fuck. . . fuck, yes --”

“You feel. . .” My fingers twisted deep inside them, and his entire body jerked. He
clung to me and threw back his head. “Christ. . . _Ah_ \---"

“Come on. . .”

Our groans and grunts and stifled gasps mixed with the raging storm beyond the thin
walls, roaring in my ears and bashing against my spine turned up towards the
crumbling heavens. Thunder boomed in the distance, slapping against the mountain
sides and causing the ground to tremble.

Suddenly, Sherlock grabbed my ass through my jeans with both huge hands and pulled
me down on top of him, so I was settled over one of his legs and hip. The part of
me that was swollen and hard pressed against his body, surging and crackling with
the sudden friction, and I gripped a handful of his curls and trembled, rubbing my
body against his, while my fingers made wild, wet sounds pumping into his ass, and
he clutched hard enough at my back for his nails to cut marks through my shirt,
while his other hand pumped desperately at his own swollen cock.

We were fucking, hard, and outside the end of the world was exploding away into the
thick, black sky. The air itself was frantic as it sparked between our rough
bodies, burning pure fire along my spine, and the wild air in my lungs throbbed and
pulsed until I thought I’d pass out before I took another breath. Until the only
air I could breathe was coming from Sherlock’s own wet mouth.

When we both came, the cry that erupted from our lungs exploded into the storming
sky and blasted through the hot air of the tent. It roared in my ears in a
desperate rumble, causing me to clutch and grasp at him below me out of some wild,
primal need – one which sat thickly in my blood and sparked through my veins.

Afterwards, we shared one silent, stunned look, frozen in each other’s gazes,
before I collapsed into his arms. He held me, bringing his soft hand to the back of
my head and panting for breath, while the world gradually softened back to the two
of us lying gently on the cold ground, the only two people alive on the face of the
earth.

The wind quieted, and I could hear the thrum of his beating heart. I pressed my
cheek to his chest, and let him hold me, for once not caring that I was small
enough to fit securely into the line of his arms, as if he would swallow me into
himself, or make my bones disappear.

Somewhere deep inside me, in the same secret place where I had first uttered the
name “John,” I realized I was afraid – afraid because I had just fucked this man
fast and hard against the ground as if nothing else on earth existed, and because I
had bit his swollen lips and cried out desperately against his skin. Because I had
come with the sweat from his neck smeared across my cheek.

Because he had a plane ticket back in Toklat, counting down the short days until I
would somehow have to say goodbye.

We didn’t say anything as we lay there together, listening to the wide-open earth
gradually settle beyond the walls of the tent. The battered moss draped across the
tundra and sighed, and the ice softened beneath our heat. Sherlock’s fingers
stroked once through my hair, and I didn’t turn my head away. I wanted to ask if I
had hurt him - if his cries had been pleasure or pain, but even thinking of saying
the words made my gut start to churn.

Eventually, Sherlock shifted so he could reach down to pull back up his jeans and
adjust his clothes. I scooted away from him and righted the sleeping bags on the
ground, wiping my hand off on a shirt and burrowing down into the heat inside the
bags. When he finally relaxed back down by my side, for one eternal moment, neither
one of us moved. Our breaths shook in the too-quiet air, vibrating and nervous,
like the eerie calm before the storm.

Finally, after what felt like years balancing on the edge of a crumbling cliff,
Sherlock’s now-cold hand found mine beneath the heavy layers. I grasped onto his
fingers so tightly I could feel his bones crack.

“I’ve wanted you to do that to me since we first met,” he whispered. “To a. . .

shameful degree. The thought plagued me for weeks.”

My throat closed up. For a second, I thought maybe I’d died and become a ghost –
that I was imagining another life, by another me, in another place, where I was a
man who got to have sex with a man like Sherlock Holmes. Where I was wanted in that
way. Where I was touched beneath my clothes.

I took a deep breath and lightly squeezed his hand. We both stared up at the velvet
fields of clouds through the mesh ceiling, calm and bright against the black sky
after the rain.

“And when did you . . .” I swallowed over my kiss-swollen lips, then ran my other
hand across my beard and mouth. “When did you know I was . . . that I –”

“Also since we first met,” he said softly.

I couldn’t say anything back. My body prickled under the realization – that he had
looked at me, and he had known, and he had still wanted. . .

He curled into my arms, then, making himself small so he could rest his head on my
chest. His arm wrapped tightly around my waist. I could feel, in the grip of his
fingers against my side, a quiet desperation, something untamed and flushed with
longing – the same emotion that was currently thrumming through my veins and in the
back of my throat.

I wrapped my arm around his back and brushed softly over the dips of his spine. I
wanted to tell him that he made me feel like I was twenty years old – like nothing
of the past two decades had even happened to me, and like I was fresh, and young,
and desiring, and strong. Like I could fuck someone like that all night and then do
it again in the bright, new morning.

I didn’t say anything, though, as his heavy weight settled against my body. I
turned my head so I could press a kiss to his forehead, and he grinned and breathed
out through his nose when my beard tickled across his skin. And the waning storm
moaned one last time as we both drifted off to sleep, warmed by the heat of our own
bodies in the tent, and kept separate from the rest of the world by the thin,
fragile walls.

I woke up the next morning feeling creased and sore. The freezing air stung my nose
and cheeks so sharply it brought water to my sleep-swollen eyes. The birdsong
floated to us through the thin tent walls on the morning mist, winding through our
fogging breaths and prickling in my ears.

It felt like we were on a brand-new earth – that the storming, frightening,

desperate world from the night before had been plowed over and banished, blanketed
forever in this clear, bright new. It seemed impossible that the snarling wind and
gasping moans had ever existed in the same place where we now woke silently with
the still dawn.

Sherlock shifted beside me, and I knew he was awake. His warm fingers found the
bare skin of my forearm beneath the sleeping bag.

“Should head back as early as we can,” he mumbled in a rough voice. “Food’s not
going to last for another night out here – neither is the weather. I got all the
tracking information I needed over yesterday.”

His calm words seemed to soar up into the air and pour cool water over the warm
magic that had been hovering over the earth. Suddenly everything seemed too flat,
and too plain.

I groaned and stretched to try and wake up my limbs. “Right,” I said. My mouth
tasted horrible, and I could feel a bruise forming at the base of my neck from his
lips and teeth the night before. We didn’t say anything more as we slowly crawled
around each other in the too-small tent, yanking on layers of clothes to fight
against the sharp cold and rolling up our sleeping bags, cursing when we tried to
stand on our feet and tangled our heads against the top of the tent.

A weak, unfamiliar part of myself wanted to reach for his hands and pull his
clothes and sleeping bag away from him – to throw them back down on the floor of
the tent and say, “ _Let’s stay here. We don’t have to leave yet. We have hours.
Just stay._ ”

Just when I was about to step out to deal with taking down the tent, Sherlock put a
hand on my arm. “Wait a moment,” he said. I frowned at him and sat down slowly in
the cleared tent, grimacing when a sharp angle of rock jutted into my thigh through
the tent floor. Sherlock looked at me quickly then reached into his pack beside
him, rummaging in a small side pocket before pulling out something wrapped in what
I recognized as one of Greg’s t-shirts.

“Think I need a wardrobe change?” I asked nervously. I’d never seen him look at me
that way before – hesitant and hopeful and determined like he was facing a war.

He smirked quickly at the joke, then reached out for my hand and placed something
soft in my palm. He wrapped my fingers around it, and for one second, everything
froze. He hesitated, as if he could simply remove the little gift from my hand and
pretend it had never been there. As if he could still turn back.

Then he gently pulled away the t-shirt, and I realized that I was holding a cock.

I gasped under my breath and stared at it, unmoving. I could hear the beat of my
own heart like a ticking clock out in the middle of the wilderness.

My mouth was too dry. “How. . .” I started to say.

“They make these now,” he cut in, voice earnest. He was avoiding my eyes, staring
down too at the flaccid, pale cock flopped in my hand.

“Obviously I didn’t just order off the shelf,” he went on. “This has unique
specifications. Made by the very best, and meant to last. I gave them your . . .”
He cleared his throat and looked up at me quickly with pink cheeks. “Your . .
measurements. You just slip it inside and wear it in your pants, like you’ve been
doing.”

I struggled to breathe. It felt like the entire earth could see into the walls of
the tent – see me holding this naked, intimate thing which should be a part of my
solid body instead of sitting in my palm. Hot shame crept up my neck and onto my
face as I thought of the old sock I’d left rolled up back in my bedside table. The
cold, fake skin slowly warmed as it sat in my palm, and I traced one of the little
raised veins with my thumb.

I wanted to sink into the ground and die of embarrassment – of piercing, breathless
shame that I hadn’t known this existed. That I had been walking around for decades
as if I was still a teenager in my little attic, wearing my father’s old jeans and
with my long hair shoved up under an old baseball cap I’d stolen. That I told
everyone I was a man, but I didn’t know enough to know that I could have had a cock
in my boxers all this time.

My eyes stung, and my fingers shook.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said softly, reading my thoughts. He reached out and
placed his fingers on my outstretched wrist, pushing my hand holding the cock back
towards my chest. There was a soft relief in his eyes when he saw I didn’t push him
back away.

“Not living out here in the middle of nowhere like you’re a bloody hermit in the
Bible,” he said. “It’s a miracle you even know what year it is, let alone that
hyper-realistic penises exist.”

And suddenly, sitting there in an empty tent in the middle of Denali, with a naked
cock in my hand, and Sherlock Holmes telling me he’d given my imaginary
measurements to an anonymous person over the phone, and reminding me how lost I am
in the world, I started to laugh.

I laughed, because I had just fucked him with my hand the night before while an
actual cock sat in his bag a foot away, and because the penis in my hand would
never grow erect, and because he had looked at me all those months ago in a gravel
parking lot, and saw everything about myself, and still wanted to ride in my truck
out to Toklat.
His low, breathy rumble joined with mine, and we both shattered the thick tension
that had been in the air with the sound of our quiet laughs. They were hesitant,
and thin, but still, the soft smile on my face was there, replacing the exhausting
sadness that had been there just moments before.

Eventually I cleared my throat and lifted up my hand still holding the cock.
“Right, well . . .” I started. I didn’t know what else to say. The air grew stale.

Suddenly the thought of putting it into my pants felt incredibly vulnerable, even
in front of only Sherlock out in the middle of nowhere, as if the second I unzipped
my jeans and fussed around to slip the cock into the pocket of my boxers, Sherlock
would look down, and gasp, as if he hadn’t noticed there was something missing
before. As if the whole earth would laugh at me, a middle-aged, greying Ranger, who
needed to figure out how to put a toy into his pants for the first time.

I didn’t have to make a dumb excuse for him to leave. He read the thoughts on my
face, and immediately started to heave himself up to his feet to stand, crouching
in the too-small tent. I looked up at him just as he was stepping out, and the
entire earth stopped as we shared a silent look.

I knew I should say thank you – tell him that I appreciated it more than I could
say, or ask him whether he understood that he had just handed me a part of my own
self – my own soul. That the fact that he had held this new part of me in his own
hands first was the only thing convincing me that this was really real – that it
could be a part of my being, and not just some useless thing shoved down in my
boxers for only me to see.

I couldn’t say anything, though, as the air crystalized around us into sharp focus.
It burned in his eyes like swaths of cool, grey ice, warmed by the oncoming sun to
melt the steel into soft water. I nodded, once, as if that somehow made up for me
not having any words to say, and then he looked at me for one last breathtaking
moment before he stepped out of the tent and walked off to go clear up the rest of
camp.

The sound of his footsteps crushing into the soft tundra tingled in my ears for
another minute as he strode away, receding as if he was walking off the final edge
of the earth, leaving me alone forever in the tiny air of a small tent. I stared
down at the cock in my palm for another long moment, heart racing with sudden fear.
Then I forced myself to sit up on my knees and undid the zip of my jeans with a
shaking hand. The slide of the metal was deafening, as if the entire glacier below
me was shattering into frozen shards.

It took me what felt like long, sweating hours to finally adjust it correctly
within my boxers – the little pouch there that I always forced myself to forget was
there. The one I always sewed myself, and every time I sewed it, I heard my
mother’s voice in my head, sharp as she slapped at my clumsy fingers holding a
needle: “ _You’re never gonna learn to sew for shit,_ ” she’d say to me, taking
another long drag of her cigarette, _”But if you’re hoping to convince some man to
finally marry you and get you out of my house, you gonna learn to sew at least a
goddamn pocket and a hem._ ”

When I finally got it adjusted correctly against my skin, I zipped back up my jeans
and re-did my belt. For a long moment, I couldn’t look down at my thighs. I stared
straight ahead at the walls of the tent, blowing softly in the breeze coming
through with a whisper after the storm.

I felt, even though it made my face burn for being a fool, that the moment I looked
down and saw it there would mark a divisive line in my life – that I would forever
understand the years of my existence as before-the-cock and after, and that once I
looked down at the new bulge, I could never go back to the way it was before. That
this would rip me permanently, forever severed, from the teenager who sprinted away
down the long drive, and who swallowed hard before walking into a tiny, run down
surgery room with a backpack full of cash, and who sat in that dark little attic
and shaved off his hair, watching the long strands pool in tangles on the rough
wood floor until they looked like a pile of straw.

I looked down.

The outline of the new bulge in my pants fit perfectly between my thighs, barely
brushing up against the denim to make itself known. I twisted my hips once, and
watched it move with the lines of my body. I cupped it with my palm, and felt
solid, soft skin. The full weight of a cock – of _my_ cock – beneath my hand.

A single, breathless tear slid down my cheek, and I let it fall onto the flannel
shirt covering my chest. A strange, warm pleasure tingled through my whole body,
starting from the tops of my thighs and flooding me with something that felt a lot
like relief. I slowly ran my fingertips across the beard on my face, the hard line
of my jaw, and the flat plane of my chest – a physical reminder that I was John
Watson – that that man belonged to me. His body, and his voice, and his name, and
his cock. That he was mine.

I wiped my eyes quickly on my forearm before more tears came. I could hear Sherlock
moving around closer to the tent, packing up the last of our bear can and cook site
and checking the ground for any trace. My unshed tears stained the sleeve of my
shirt. I remembered, all of a sudden, and for the first time in my life, words from
my sister as I stood up to move outside the tent and join him.

I was nine or ten, and we’d been chasing each other out in one of fields, when I’d
tripped on some scrap metal and fallen hard onto my arm. I remembered standing
there, holding back tears, and then finally crying as blood started to pour down my
thin arm from the fresh scrape.

We’d been playing one of my favorite games: brother and sister.

And my sister, my big sister, had rolled her eyes at me as I cried over the blood
on my stinging arm. She’d told me to shut it before our parents heard, and when I
didn’t stop, she’d said, “ _You can’t be a brother of mine if you cry, you know.
Girls can cry, but boys can’t. Looks like you’s just a girl after all._ ”

Later that afternoon, we stopped for a quick break just after we came in sight of
the distant Park Road. I dropped my heavy pack to the ground and rolled my
shoulders under the bright sun, which was full and clear after the evening’s storm.
I walked up to a small outcropping of rocks overlooking a valley and let the soft
breeze blow against my face.

I didn’t hear Sherlock coming up behind me at all, until suddenly his arms were
wrapping tightly low around my waist. I stopped myself just in time from pulling
away, reminding myself, as I’d had to do hundreds of times, that Sherlock wanted to
touch me like that, and that I was allowed to be touched.

I watched, absolutely frozen, as his hand dipped down below the waistband of my
jeans. His breath was hot against my neck as his long fingers traced the outline of
the bulge in my pants. My lungs shook. He palmed me, roughly, and groaned as the
weight of it pressed back into his hand. I imagined myself filling out beneath my
jeans, bulging hot and swollen into his hand, so his fingers could stroke along my
length. I reached back suddenly to grip the back of his head and his curls, and
wild words poured from my lips as his breathing sped up against the side of my warm
neck.

“Yeah, come on,” I whispered, staring down at the sight of his hand gripping my
full cock. I leaned back into his arms, and let my voice drop rough and low. “Touch
it,” I breathed. He moaned into my ear as his fingers continued to rub and stroke
me. “God . . .”

I closed my eyes and pressed out into his touch, telling myself I could feel his
fingertips still caressing my cock. “Come on, touch me,” I said. “God, Sherlock –”

“Fuck, you’re huge,” he rasped against my ear. I could feel his chest shaking
against my back. I knew that I was exposed before the wide-open sky – standing in
the middle of Denali with a cock in my pants, and Sherlock Holmes’ hand cupping me
through my jeans. The knowledge that every cloud and mountain peak in the distance
could see me, John Watson, on the first day of my new and separate life.

And I _was_ huge – visible beneath his huge hand, pushing out into his palm,
filling the space in my jeans . . .

Sherlock turned me suddenly in his arms, grabbed onto my face, and kissed me. I
pressed our hips together, so he could feel me against his own penis. Our soft
cocks rubbed together, causing us both to sigh against each other’s lips. I knew
that we could be seen from the Road where we stood, as two specks in each other’s
arms, outlined by an endless swath of clear blue sky. I tasted our morning’s
instant coffee on his tongue, and the dirt and sweat on his cheeks. I imagined I
tasted my own mouth and skin from the night before, and my fingertips tingled at
the memory of his lips closing around them to suck.

His hand wound down in between our bodies and touched me again. Our wet lips
brushed together as his palm rubbed and cradled the new part of my body, sighing as
he traced the length of it with his fingers through my jeans.

It felt like hours later when we finally pulled away, both panting and holding on
to each other’s skin with desperate hands. I cupped his face in my palms, running
my thumbs along the stubble covering his sharp jaw.

He grinned down at me, crinkling in the corners of his eyes. “You going to write me
up for being visible from the Road?” he asked.

I tried to fight my smile. “You know that’s only for sleeping in view of the Road,”
I said. “We’re standing, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The soft look in Sherlock’s eyes suddenly burned over with something new. “We won’t
be standing for long,” he said roughly, and it was the only warning he gave before
I was being pushed down to the ground, my back smashing into the bed of soft moss
beneath us, and I gasped as Sherlock covered me with his long, lean body and kissed
me so deeply I wanted the entire world to see.

\--

“You want a little ribbon for it or something, so it doesn’t get lost again?”

I looked up quickly from where I’d been leaning over a table of carved wooden
sculptures and cast bronze.
I couldn’t remember what the man had asked me, and guessed by answering, “Yeah, uh,
sure.”

He chuckled and searched in a drawer to find something to thread through the little
hold in the brass key.

“So,” he said down to his hands. “Who’s the lucky lady going to be getting her
hands on this key? Another one of you Rangers?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to smile. “No, no lucky lady,” I said, as
if I was making fun of myself. “Just lost the old one for a few days, like I said.
Figured I should have a copy made to keep somewhere safe so I’m not locked out at
the end of the season when I’m trying to get home.”

The old man – the only locksmith anywhere from Talkeetna and Trapper Creek all the
way up to Healy – gave me a look like he didn’t believe a single word, then stooped
to bend over the counter to hand me the key.

“Didn’t think they let you leave the Park during the season,” he said. “Like you
all just disappear to go play with the bears when you’re not working.”

I laughed under my breath and pocketed the key, keeping my hand closed around it in
my pocket. “Ah, well, Cantwell isn’t much of a drive from the Entrance. They gave
me a special pass to leave. Gave me a moose chaperone and everything.”

He chuckled and wheezed as he put his tools away into an old wooden drawer. Dust
fell in sheets onto the splintered floor, and I could hear the sound of a hundred
other brass keys rattling together as he pushed the drawer shut.

“Well, see you on your way back down to your place for the winter,” he said. “You
can owe me a beer.”

I nodded and raised my hand before walking back out into the bright sunlight. I
waited, peering through the window, until he turned around to tinker back on his
work bench, then slipped some cash under the door since I knew he wouldn’t have
taken it from me in person.

I shoved my cap back onto my head and climbed into my truck, piercingly aware the
entire time of the extra little weight that now sat in my pocket. A cloud of
Lugnut’s fur wafted up from the leather seat as I started driving back up Highway 3
with the windows rolled down. It was just the day before that we’d taken him
outside the Park on Sherlock’s little field trip – a whole afternoon rolling around
in the fresh grass of the clearing, where nobody knew where we were, and the earth
welcomed us with warm beds of flowers, and the breeze carried only the scent of the
three of us, like we were the only three beings alive.

And it was lying there under the sun, with Lugnut and Sherlock flanking me on
either side, that I had realized, for the very first time, that my life would
extend beyond the day Sherlock drove away from the Park to go get on a plane. That
I would continue living the next day, and the next day, and the next. That I would
keep visiting Lugnut on my days off, and taking him for his walks, and ending out
the Season until I drove back down to Talkeetna to hunker down for the long winter.

I would keep living, and Sherlock wouldn’t just disappear into a mist on the other
side of the world, and I’d suddenly known that I didn’t want to spend a single
second of those days without him.

The whole drive back, with Sherlock in the passenger seat and Lugnut awkwardly
curled up trying to sleep on his lap, I’d stared at the curves of the Road and
thought about Sherlock Holmes waking up beside me in my cabin. How his eyes would
illuminate the long, dark nights, and his hands would warm my skin from the cold,
and my sheets would smell like peppercorn and cedar instead of ice and dust. How
his laugh would burst through the thick air like a warm breeze, and how his bare
feet would sound on the hardwood floor, and how his hands would look wrapped around
a book by the fire.

I’d thought of ol’ Lugnut curled up on the floor asleep, warming his little nose by
the flames with my fingers in his fur.

So that next day, my day off, I’d woken with the sun and told Sherlock I got called
in to do some paperwork out East. I’d driven out to Cantwell before I could lose my
nerve, hoping and praying that the locksmith was still there (and still alive) and
hovering around town killing time with some bad coffee until he finally hobbled out
to his porch and turned the ‘closed’ sign to ‘open.’

Now, as I drove back towards the Park Entrance, settling in for the few hours of my
drive, that key felt like it weighed a hundred pounds in my pocket – as if it was
burning clear through to the skin of my thigh. I foolishly wanted to take it out
and hold it in my hand, clenched in my tight fist, so it wouldn’t get lost or
disappear. I wanted to hold it between my lips – this new wild, untamed hope that
Sherlock would go with me back to Talkeetna – and then press it to his own mouth, a
promise that when I woke up each dark, cold morning, he would be there.

Without even meaning to, I turned off the Park Road right inside the Entrance and
found myself pulling to a stop outside the kennels. I leaped down and jogged
towards the long line of little huts, eyes fixed on the one at the end of the row,
with a wet black nose peeking out from inside.

“Alright, old boy?” I said as I walked up closer. The nose immediately flew up into
the air as I sunk down to my knees in front of the hut, and soon I was tackled by a
huge ball of warm fur, pushing me down into the ground and licking madly at my
face.

I held on to him with a fierce grip as he wiggled across my stomach. “Surprised to

see me two days in a row, huh?” I asked. “You get in any trouble for escaping
yesterday? They give you any demerits? Take away your gold stars?”

He yipped and licked at me with his tail pounding madly into the dirt, and I
laughed under him, breathless already at the sharp memory of the day before, where
he had tackled me in the same way on top of fresh, clear grass, and bounded across
the open tundra, and barked up at the sun. Where Sherlock had curled up by Lugnut’s
side when he thought I’d been asleep in a nap, and rubbed his belly for nearly an
hour, and whispered things I couldn’t hear into his soft ears.

Finally he settled down, and I guided him to sit across my lap as I leaned back
against the hut. His little heart was racing, and I could see that even that much
action had tired him out way more than it used to. I scratched his head as he
panted to keep cool.

I was just reaching into my pocket to pull out the key to show him when Molly’s
bright voice bounded across the kennel yard.

“There you are!” she called out, as if she’d been looking for me all day.

I ignored the odd stab of disappointment that flooded through my chest as I moved
my hand away from my pocket, and instead reached up to shield my eyes from the sun
as I grinned at her. She had a serious look on her face.
“Uh-oh, am I in trouble?” I asked, half-joking.

She gave me a sharp look. “Actually yes, Ranger Watson,” she said. She stopped in
front of me standing tall with her hands on her hips. “You went on a bit of a field
trip yesterday,” she spoke down at me. She glared at Lugnut and pointed down at his
face. “And you, sir, you went along with him!”

I tried to look abashed, but I could also see the slight grin hiding in the corners
of her mouth. I raised up a hand. “Guilty as charged,” I said. I raised up Lugnut’s
paw. “He’s guilty, too.”

She huffed and rolled her eyes, then scowled down at Lugnut who’d rolled over onto
his back begging for a belly rub. She looked off into the distant trees for a
moment and took a long breath. “Honestly, John, what the hell possessed you to
steal a sled dog from a park? I mean, honestly.”

And it suddenly dawned on me, sitting there, that she had absolutely no idea that
Sherlock had been involved. That Greg hadn’t told her a word of our conversation
the other day. She didn’t know that Sherlock had woken up beside me in my bed, and
dragged me out East, and slipped Lugnut’s lead off the metal pole next to his hut,
and drove us all straight out of the Park in my truck.

It shocked me how desperately I wanted to tell her in that moment. I wanted to

stand up, and look her in the eye, and tell her that Sherlock would be the spark of
life lighting up my cabin all winter. That I liked men, and that I liked that
specific man, and that I currently had a brass key burning a hole in my pocket.
That Sherlock had held Lugnut out there in the open field before kissing me in the
soft grass below the wide open sky.

But a flood of fear rushed through my chest just before the words could leave my
lips. I closed my mouth against the sudden words and cleared my throat instead. “I
really am sorry, kid,” I said once I knew I wouldn’t blurt out that I’d had sex
with Sherlock Holmes. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Something just came over me, I
guess. Needed to get out of the Park for a few hours, and I decided to take him
with me.”

I hefted up Lugnut and held his face next to mine. He licked at my cheek. “You
know, he just looks so sad,” I said, grinning a little. “So lonely. He needed to
get out of the Park. He told me himself.”

She mumbled under her breath before plopping down to sit next to me in the dirt.
“You men are all the same,” she said, shaking her head and twisting a strand of her
hair around her finger. “Just do whatever you want without thinking of any of the
consequences. Like, you know, how I had to make up a story for Dan on the goddamn
spot about why and how our oldest sled dog was suddenly MIA.”

Shame burned through my cheeks. “Shit, Molls, I should have thought . . . God, I’m
sorry. I shouldn’t have –”

“I know, I know, you’re sorry,” she said. She gave me a soft look, then reached
over to scratch Lugnut’s ear. “Honestly, I was kind of happy for you when I figured
it out. It’s refreshing to know you can actually be spontaneous and break a rule –
not just a robot who’ll fall apart if he doesn’t follow his minute-to-minute
routine.”

I laughed, even as I tried to look offended, then shifted a bit in the dirt until
my shoulder rested against hers. We were both silent for a moment, watching Lugnut
slowly drift off to a happy sleep with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
For one more second, as if I was balancing at the top of Denali’s peak, I wanted to
turn to Molly and tell her what had happened the day before – the real story. How
soft Sherlock’s lips were against my own mouth, and how I’d wanted to kiss him from
the first moment he stepped up in my truck, and how he was currently waiting for me
back in my cabin – in _our_ cabin – thinking I’d just spent the day filling out
paperwork on the East Side instead of getting a little brass key tied to a ribbon.

I looked at her and reached over to smooth down her brown hair. “So,” I said. My
heart beat in my chest. “That’s the only exciting new thing about me. Tell me about
all your romances with Greg.”

I smiled at the blush that spread over her cheeks, even as my chest unexpectedly
ached, and she sat there for a few minutes telling me all about their last trip
into Fairbanks, and their upcoming backpacking weekend out into Unit thirty-three.

I waited until she was long gone from the kennels, with no other Rangers in sight,
before I finally reached back into my pocket and pulled out the key, letting out an
embarrassing sigh when I confirmed it was still there. Lugnut’s ears perked up,
thinking it was a treat. I held the key in my palm in front of his nose while he
sniffed it, and he pawed at my hand and fingers gently with his claws.

“I know, it’s not really necessary,” I told him as he tried to lick at the brass.
“Feel sort of ridiculous, actually. Not like he needs his own key. Not like he’s
actually even said yes yet, you know.”

Lug started to whimper under his breath when I wouldn’t let him take the whole key
into his mouth. I rubbed my thumb along his nose. “I just . . . I need something to
actually give to him, old boy. You know, it’s . . . This feels big.”

I nearly cringed at myself. A middle-aged man figuring out how to ask someone to
live with him for the very first time. It made me feel stupid and naïve, too young
to know anything of the world, and too young to deserve the likes of a man like
Sherlock choosing to survive the long winter hours by my side.

Lugnut looked up at me with his wide, grey eyes as if I was the sun itself, and his
ears twitched forward. I bent to press my forehead to his snout. “This feels really
big,” I whispered again, and he nuzzled his face against mine.

\--

The key was still in my bedside drawer two weeks later.

I’d planned to shove it in there the second I got home, knowing Sherlock would
instantly find it if I kept it in my pocket, and that he never opened the bedside
drawer to keep my privacy about the sock.

He’d been pouting on the couch with his legs up against the wall when I got back,
demanding to know why paperwork had taken me almost the entire day and deducing
what too-slow speed I drove on the Park Road to get back so late. My fingers had
lingered over my pocket, tracing the outline of the key where I stood behind his
shoulder so he couldn’t see.

Then he’d looked back up at me with wide, soft eyes and asked if I wanted to go for
a walk down the riverbed, because he was bored, and because he had some new
theories he wanted to test by explaining out loud. I couldn’t bring myself to say
anything other than, “Of course.”

So I’d leaned down to kiss him, and then quickly walked into the bedroom to get a
heavier coat. I’d slipped the key into the bedside drawer, opening it softly and
slowly so he wouldn’t hear, and I’d told myself that the next day, or maybe the
next, I would pull it back out and ask him if he wouldn’t get on his plane at the
end of the summer.

Two weeks later, it was starting to gather dust next to the sock.

I had the words all planned out in my head, or so I thought. Exactly how I would
sit him down, and look him in the eye, and somehow tell him that I finally realized
that my life would continue beyond August, and that the sun and stars and clouds
would never look the same if he wasn’t looking up at them by my side.

That I needed to keep loving him, even though those very words shot wild fear down
my throat. Even though I didn’t even know if they were true.

But the days passed by, and we kept arguing over the kitchen table, and driving
down the Road in my truck, and chasing wolf tracks across the tundra, and waking up
side by side. We kept talking about nothing instead of the fact that Sherlock was
still planning on going home at the end of the summer. We kept teasing each other
and calling each other idiots instead of talking about the fact that I had a key to
my cabin hidden in a drawer.

We didn’t have sex, though. Not really. Not like that frantic, breathless hour
writhing on top of the Muldrow in the storm three weeks before.

Each day that passed since I first put the brass key in my pocket, something held
me back more and more from touching his skin. I’d think of that day two weeks ago
out in the field, how soft his lips had been against my own, and how the sun had
warmed his hair, and then I’d think of the way I’d roughly shoved him down into the
ground on top of the glacier. The way I’d bruised his delicate skin. And the hot
shame that overtook me made me not even want to look at his naked body. As if the
gaze of my eyes alone would hurt him again. As if I couldn’t even be trusted with a
simple kiss on his neck.

The fact that we now fell asleep each night after just a few kisses sat heavily
between us, thick enough to slice. It was a cold, foggy haze that settled like lead
on my limbs, halting me back from clutching him to me the second we climbed beneath
the smooth sheets.

If I was honest with myself, the memory of our sex that night in the tent
frightened me. It scared me how desperately I’d wanted to press into his body, and
how wildly I’d grabbed him, and how I’d come harder than I ever had in my life with
my fingers up his ass and his whispered groans of “ _fuck me_ ” vibrating in my
ears. How I’d left bite marks on his neck.

It felt like too strong of an emotion, too enormous of a desire, to be contained

safely within my small, plain body. I felt ashamed – that the moon and stars had
seen Sherlock Holmes being fucked by me, of all people, instead of a man who was
glorious and tall and strong, who had a thick cock between his legs, and a rough,
rumbling voice. I felt like I’d revealed too much, been stripped too naked, when I
bit the skin of his neck between my teeth, and then begged him to come with me
buried deep inside him.

When I’d come out of the tent the next morning with the remnants of a tear on my
cheek, and the new cock in my pants, and I knew Sherlock could see that I’d
crouched in the tent and cried.

And it felt like Sherlock Holmes would never say ‘yes’ to staying the winter with
that person. That he would want the man who’d softly held him out in the wildflower
field, and not the wild, grunting animal who’d pushed his back down against the
ice.

And I didn’t think that I could be just one without the other.

He would look at me oddly, sometimes, when he started to kiss me in our cabin, or

out in the wilderness, and I would go along for a minute before slowly pulling
away. He’d notice me clench my fists instead of caressing his arms and back.

I wondered what that odd look in his eyes meant, every time he let me step back
from his arms or scoot away an inch in our bed to go to sleep. I wondered if he was
sad, or angry, or hurt. I wondered if he was asking himself why I’d let him press
me down into the grass on that day out with Lugnut in the clearing, and jack
himself off against my own cock, and kiss me beneath the sun, and why we hadn’t
done the same thing since the moment we set foot back in the Park later that day.

I wondered if he still wanted to touch me there. I wondered if he was frightened by

what had happened on the glacier, too.

If he knew about the key in my bedside table holding me back, like a golden shackle
around my feet, whispering in my ear that I’d go and ruin my own dream before it
even began.

And then, everything changed, the end of that first week of August.

We came back exhausted from a full day spent out East. There’d been reports by
visitors of wolves suspiciously close to the train depot and the Visitor Center,
and Sherlock had spent the day with his nose two inches from the soil while I tried
to fend off curious visitors, and keep him from calling anyone a moron for stepping
on the tiny piece of wolf fur he was trying to study on the trodden ground.

It had been a long and grueling ten hour day of being ‘Ranger Watson’, with one
particularly tense hour spent with my hand on my gun as a family got far too close
to a mother bear when they ventured off the roadside trail, startling her into
fiercely protecting her hidden cubs.

It was everything I sometimes hated about being a Ranger – the paperwork, and the
crowd control, and the questions, and the noise. And the entire time as we wound
through the sea of people and busses, I’d been dangerously aware of Sherlock’s body
by my side – making sure I didn’t look at him too much, or track the curve of his
back with my eyes, or speak to him in a way that sounded far too familiar. Making
sure nobody could look at us and tell that we woke up in the same bed.

It felt even more exhausting than all those years back in Canyonlands when I’d
waited, week after week, for Robbie to recognize the naked body he’d seen in the
shower house as my own.

Sherlock was oddly restless the whole drive back to Toklat in the truck. He placed
his hand on my thigh, higher up than he would normally rest his palm, and for miles
I tried to ignore the low sizzle of heat caused by his fingers.

I daydreamed as I drove, following the curves of the Road by muscle memory alone. I
let myself imagine, for a few precious minutes, what it would be like if I let that
frightening part of me be unleashed again. I imagined stopping my truck off the
side of the Road in the dirt, and climbing on top of Sherlock’s body on the bench
front seat, and shoving him down wildly against the hot leather. I imagined what
sounds he would make if I kissed him deeply and wound his legs up around my lower
back. If I tasted his long neck, and pulled my fingers through his thick curls,
shoved his hand down into my own pants so he could hold my cock in his hand. If I
ripped his shirt open so hard the buttons tore off and flew.

I daydreamed, with a heat rising up in my cheeks, what the marks my beard left on
his bare chest would look like in the clear light of day. If his moans would sound
louder within the small truck, and if we would rock it on its wheels, and if
someone would drive by and see my hand pressed up against the steaming glass. If
Sherlock would beg me to fuck him, or scratch and bruise across my back. How his
dripping sweat would taste as it dripped down over his bare nipples.

“Everyone should be banned from this Park except for Rangers,” he suddenly said in
the silence. I jumped, startled, and felt sweat prickling under my arms, as if he
had somehow known I was thinking of practically attacking him in the front seat.

But I looked over, and his face was entirely calm – mildly irritated as he went on
about his frustrations from the day.

“Utterly tedious having to deal with them when there is actual research to be done.
Trampling all over my data like brainless idiots instead of letting me do my work.”

I chuckled under my breath and shook my head, inwardly ashamed that I had been
thinking of fucking him across the truck seat while meanwhile he was sitting there
innocently pondering his research.

I reached over to pat his leg. “Some people would actually say that the Park is
_meant_ for those ‘brainless idiots’ to come and visit it,” I said, holding back a
laugh.

“Oh don’t tell me you actually believe that nonsense,” he said. He clenched a fist
in front of his mouth. “It’s about preserving the land and wildlife, a place set
aside for serious study, not being a bloody photo-op for retirees from some
dreadful place like South Dakota.”

“Watch yourself,” I said. “A few years from now and _I’ll_ be one of those retirees
from South Dakota.”

He fluttered his fingers dismissively in the air. “You know what I mean.”

I looked over at him, where he was huffing like a pouting child in the truck seat,
with his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms crossed around them. The sight of
him brought a soft, fond smile to my lips. I swallowed hard and reached over to
brush a single curl behind his ear.

“We’ll go back later this week on a weekday,” I said. “Early in the morning – won’t
be nearly as many people.”

I saw a quick relieved smile grace his mouth from the reflection in the truck
window. “You hate it too,” he said a few minutes later. “The crowds and the people.
Having to be a Ranger like that.”

I nodded out at the winding Road, squinting as the sun rays glared over a distant
peak and covered the dirt and tundra in a fog of gold. “Yeah,” was all I said back.
“Sometimes.”

We were silent the rest of the drive back to camp. Eventually his fingers found my
thigh once more, and he traced up and down the seam of my uniform pants. It made my
legs start to vibrate with a low, deep warmth, one which grew and grew as each mile
passed, until I was breathing hard in my chest by the time we finally pulled into
the gravel lot.
He followed so closely on my heels up to the cabin that I thought he might trip.
The second I closed the cabin door behind us, his hands were on my sides, and his
wet lips on my mouth.

I gasped at the kiss, deep and rough as it stole my air. Sherlock’s tongue licked
wildly into my stunned mouth.

“Christ,” he breathed. He walked me backwards towards the bedroom. “You have no

idea . . . watching you like that all day . . . the way you just . . . your voice,
and your gun --”

I clung to his shoulders so I wouldn’t fall, already moaning desperately against

his lips. I could feel that flame within me starting to spark – that wild, untamed
thing that had consumed me on top of the Muldrow that storming night. The one I had
avoided for over two long weeks.

I started to ache in my pants. He hadn’t kissed me like that since that day with
Lugnut outside the Park.

“What’s this ---?” I tried to ask. The breath left my lungs as his lips found my
throat, and he sucked, tasting me, while his hands gripped the muscles in my back.
I arched my chest against his, and a high sound escaped my throat.

He growled in my ear. “I want you,” he moaned. “Fuck, I want you. John, you’ve no
idea. . .” he panted against my lips in another deep, crushing kiss. His fingertips
scratched roughly at my beard. “I need . . . Christ, John, please –”

His voice had grown high and desperate as he begged “ _please_ ” against my mouth.
Already his erection was tenting the front of his pants, pressed thickly into the
bottom of my stomach where our bodies were shoved together. His words cascaded down
my spine in warm fire – the eroticism of his voice, the hard grip of his hands on
my skin, the untamed desire that blazed in his eyes. It was everything that had
terrified me three weeks ago, and I wanted it, so badly I nearly cried out and sunk
to my knees.

I wanted him, in a way that consumed my entire chest with fire – an avalanche of
rough need that pulsed freshly in my blood.

I realized that he had loosened his grip around my back. He was looking down at me,
waiting, with wet and open lips.

He was waiting for me to tell him yes. Or no.

My eyes suddenly grew embarrassingly wet at the corners, and I reached up to hold
his face in my hands. The cabin seemed unnaturally silent now that he wasn’t
panting into my mouth, or walking us roughly across the floor.

I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to speak. “I’m sorry,” I said.

I blinked hard, shocked at myself.

It hadn’t been at all what I was going to say. I had meant to tell him ‘yes.’ To
tell him that the whole drive back I was imagining fucking him in the front seat of
my truck like a teenager, and that I wanted him too, desperately to my core. That
this was how it was clearly supposed to be – our hands on each other’s skin – and
that the sight of him in his tightly buttoned up shirt sent a pulsing ache down my
spine.

Instead I sighed and rubbed my thumb across his cheek. “I’m sorry,” I whispered
again. Before he could say anything back, I made myself keep going. My voice was
choked. “I was . . . I was too rough with you before. When we were in the tent. I
don’t . . . know what came over me. Why I hurt you, but –”

“Did you think I didn’t want that?” he asked.

My breath froze in my lungs as his eyes widened with understanding. “Is that what
all of this has been about the past few weeks?” he asked softly. He lightly touched
my cheek with his palm. “You . . . not wanting to . . did you think I didn’t enjoy
it?”

My face burned. I wanted to open my lips and tell him in the silence that he was
only partially right – that I had a key burning a hold in my bedside drawer, and
that I wanted him to say yes to living with the man who’d softly held him beneath
the sun. That I wanted a dream where nothing terrified me anymore.

Where I didn’t terrify myself.

“I don’t know,” I finally whispered.

His eyes looked soft and sad. He leaned down slowly to kiss my mouth, slowly enough
that I had time to pull away. I let him kiss me, sighing under his lips with
something that felt like relief.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, with his cheek pressed to my own. I could
feel his heart racing in his chest. “My own reason I’ve been . . . hesitating.”

I pulled back to look into his blue-grey eyes. They looked uncertain and soft.

“What is it?” I asked him. My whisper sounded far too loud in the silence.

He looked at me for another moment before stepping away. I stared, heart thudding,
as he reached high up in my closet, moving something aside on the very top shelf
before he pulled something down with his hands. He took a small breath before
turning to face me, and I gasped when I realized he was holding out an erect cock
towards my chest, the same material and color as the flaccid one currently in my
pants, draped with black leather straps.

We both stared at it, unmoving. I imagined I could hear my blood pulse through my
veins. I didn’t reach up to touch it.

“What –” I started to whisper.

“You can say no, obviously,” he said in a rush. His voice was slightly shaking, as
were his hands. “I ordered this after . . . after that day outside the Park. In the
clearing. It was so . . .that day was . . . and you were so . . .” he paused and
huffed, frustrated at himself. “I – I want this, John. If you want this, I want
this. I want . . . you. In me. I haven’t known the last two weeks how to tell you,
how to show you that I’d bought it, and then we were so distant, and I’ve hated it,
absolutely hated not . . . being with you. You holding me, and your body, and then
today, you . . . Christ, I couldn’t stop looking at you. Wanting you. So. . . I’m
telling you now.”

He paused for breath and looked up into my eyes, waiting for me to meet his gaze.
“I want you like this,” he said in the barest whisper.

My mouth was hanging open. I lifted my hand to gently touch the cock, tracing a
fingertip along the base of it and across part of the lush leather. I’d never seen
anything like it before in my life, never even _known_. . . I swallowed hard
against the familiar shame that started to creep up again in my throat.

“You want me to . . . with this?” I finally asked.

I heard his breath shiver on his tongue. He swallowed. “Yes.” When I didn’t
respond, he went on, “very badly.”

I finally reached up with both hands to take it from his, cradling it close to my
chest as if it would break apart. I spoke down to the raised veins and flushed head
of the fake cock. “I’ve never done something like that, before,” I said in a low
voice. “What happened on the glacier. I . . . the more I thought about it I didn’t
know if you had . . . I didn’t know what happened –”

“I trust you,” he said. He put a hand on my arm. “I don’t know what this is either,
but . . . I want it.” His mouth twisted, as if he was afraid of his next words. “I
want you,” he said again.

That’s what did it.

The air in my lungs left in one long, shaky sigh. “Ok,” I breathed. I stepped back
and squared my shoulders, trying to look normal holding an erect penis cradled in
my hands.

I glanced up at where he was standing frozen in the middle of the floor, eyes
bright and nervous, with a flame hiding behind the soft blue.

“Let me just . . .” I said, gesturing to my hands.

He shook his head as if coming out of a daze and quickly nodded. “Right. I’ll
just–”

He turned away from me quickly and started unbuttoning his shirt. I could hear him
panting from across the room, trying to control his breathing.

My own lungs felt like they were being squeezed through ice. I could barely control
the shaking in my hands as I set the cock down on my bedside table and started
undoing my belt, slowly stripping off the layers of my uniform piece by piece.

I was floating through a dream. It couldn’t be possible that I was unbuttoning my

old familiar uniform shirt, unpinning the old nametag on my chest, and pulling down
the zipper of my pants. It couldn’t possibly be real that I was about to look down
and see a penis jutting out from between my hips, and that I would somehow watch it
disappear into Sherlock’s body.

And I knew, as I slowly guided my pants down my legs, that I should probably feel
embarrassed that I needed to have Sherlock buy me these missing parts of myself –
these parts I didn’t even know I could have until he showed me. I knew I should be
flinching away from that same terror within myself – that I would lose control, and
lose all sense of myself, and come back to reality panting and desperate as I
shoved him against the ground, while a storm screamed against the cabin walls.

Instead, as I stood fully naked in my room, and felt the first wisps of the cool
leather straps glide up my bare legs, I only felt hard. I had never taken off my
boxers in front of Sherlock before. I could see, looking down through the patch of
my thick hair, that already I was swollen at the thought of what I was apparently
about to do. Wetness pulsed between my legs, and my small erection grew.

I shivered when the straps finally sat around my hips and below my ass. The base of
the cock pressed up against my own skin, shooting heat up my spine and flooding my
gut with want. I tightened the straps with shaking fingers, making sure it wouldn’t
move around unnaturally against my skin.

Then I touched it.

I moaned beneath my breath as I watched my own hand close around the cock, almost
too huge to fit in my palm, flushed and bobbing out in the air. I stroked it slowly
from the root to the tip, trailing my fingertips over the soft veins and trembling
when I pressed the cock back against where I was aching and hard, rubbing it
against myself until the pleasure pulsed hotly through my limbs.

I was going to be inside him.

I could hear that he was finished undressing behind me. Slowly, with a racing heart
and numb legs, I turned around, grasping the base of the cock with my hand.

He gasped when he saw me, and his eyes pooled black.

“John. . .” he rumbled. My nipples pearled. The sound of his voice made my face
flush with sweat. His erection grew thicker as his eyes slowly traced up to my
chest and back down again, staring at the cock jutting out from my hand.

I pumped it a few times as he watched me, unblinking, getting used to the feel of a
heavy penis against my palm.

“Christ. . .” he breathed. His chest flushed pink.

I spoke before I could stop myself, even though I knew my voice would shake. “Look
at me,” I said.

He whimpered in his throat, and his eyes didn’t leave the cock. “John. . .”

I moaned as I stroked it again, arching into the pressure of it against my swollen

skin. “What do you want?” I whispered. I could barely breathe.

Before I could react, he was rushing towards me across the room. His hands grabbed
my shoulders and walked me back two steps until my back slammed against the wall,
then he sunk to his knees at my feet and grabbed on to my thighs. The cock sat
heavily just inches from his lips. He licked them, and then looked up at me with
half-lidded eyes. I imagined I could feel the hot exhale of his breath against the
tip of my new cock, bobbing near his open mouth.

His palms traced up the hair on my legs. “Let me suck you,” he said in a rough
voice. “Please . . .”

My eyes slammed shut as my head hit back against the wall. “Fuck,” I whispered. My
shaking hands grabbed weakly onto his shoulders. Suddenly I felt the press of his
nose and cheek in the dip of my thigh, breathing in deeply against my pubic hair
with a rough moan in his throat. For a second, I wanted to quickly pull back. He
had never seen me there, not naked and bare where I kept myself covered with my
boxers. He had never truly seen the real lines of my body between my legs – the way
that it looked.

Then I realized that the base of the cock was covering everything except for my
hair. That all he could see was an erect penis hovering near his open mouth,
waiting to be sucked.

I looked back down at him over the heaving form of my chest, and I gave him an
almost invisible nod.
Then I watched as the impossible happened. As his open, wet lips moved towards my
erect cock, and his eyes gazed up at my face, and I slowly, heavily, disappeared
into his mouth.

His lips stretched wide around me, and he immediately closed his eyes and moaned.
My hand flew to the back of his neck, cradling the skin.

“Fuck,” I moaned. “Fuck, _fuck_. . .”

He groaned and grasped the base of the cock, pumping it between his lips. When he
pulled back, he left a glistening wet trail from his mouth. I struggled to stay
standing without collapsing to the floor as he licked slowly at the tip of the
cock, surrounding it with his wet tongue. Then he took me down in his mouth all the
way to the base, until his nose brushed against my hair, and I felt the hot exhale
of his breath.

My fist clenched around a handful of curls. “Oh my god,” I breathed. I held his
head down over my cock, arching my back so I pressed deeper into his mouth, sliding
farther down his throat. The friction pulsed like fire against my aching skin,
rubbing me off from the pressure of his tongue. “Oh my god.”

He moaned, and I felt the barest hint of vibrations from his warm lips. “
_Oh_. . .”

I was lost.

He sucked me down over and over, grasping hard onto my thighs and guiding my cock
between his lips. His saliva dripped over his stretched lips and down his chin, and
I looked down breathlessly at the sight of his head bobbing over my penis. He
moaned at the taste of me, gasping when I pumped into the back of his throat. My
thighs shook with the effort of not losing control and wildly fucking into his
mouth.

Tears stung in my eyes.

It should have been humiliating – nearly crying like that during the first blow job
of my life. But I wanted to look up to the heavens and let the tears fall. I wanted
to cry out that I was finally alive, at forty years old, that I could _feel_ , and
that I was erect. That I had an _erection_ between Sherlock’s wet lips.

That I was John Watson, every part of John Watson, with Sherlock Holmes on his
knees.

I heard a wild whimper escape Sherlock’s throat, and I focused my eyes through the
heat and haze to see his elbow pumping down by his waist. Realization slammed into
my chest and knocked the breath from my lungs. He was masturbating, with his eyes
closed in bliss and my cock in his mouth. With spit dripping down his chin, and my
hand making his head bob in a steady rhythm so I could feel every press of the cock
on my skin.

“Oh god, you’re . . .” I tried to say. “Fuck, come on.” My face burned, and I shut
my eyes.

“Suck it,” I whispered. “God, fuck, _suck it. . ._ ”

He groaned loudly in response and sucked me deeper down his warm throat. The
fingers of his other hand raked through my pubic hair before bruising at my waist.
The sounds of our wild breaths and the wet suck of his lips filled every inch of
the cabin, naked and obscene. Suddenly, with piercing clarity, as the heat pooled
between my hips, I realized that I was going to come with my cock down his throat.

“Wait wait wait,” I gasped out. I pushed his shoulders quickly back from my body,
guiding his lips off the cock until just the wet tip sat heavily on his tongue. I
sucked down a deep breath, trying to calm the sudden thrumming between my legs.

He looked up at me with huge, black eyes. His fingers caressed his own penis, which
was thick and dripping from the tip.

“Fuck, I was gonna come,” I said breathlessly. I closed my eyes and chuckled under
my breath. I heard him kiss the tip of the cock before leaning back on his heels,
panting hard.

“I fail to see the problem,” he said in a rough, cracking voice. I looked down
again just as he was wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes
glinted.

I laughed again, feeling like I could soar up through the ceiling and straight into
the sky. Giddiness surged in my chest.

“I’m not young anymore,” I said. I reached out to smooth the curls back from his
sweaty forehead. He leaned into the touch. “Can’t go twice in one night.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off. “Besides, I want to. . .” I looked
quickly at the bed, and a rushed sigh left his chest.

“Yes,” he moaned. Suddenly he was up on his feet before me. He grabbed my shoulders
and pulled me in for a wet kiss. I told myself that his mouth tasted of me, that I
was tasting the liquid from my own penis instead of the faint plastic-like taste
left on his tongue from the cock. I told myself that I had leaked down his warm
throat.

We stumbled over each other as I started to walk him back towards the bed. My cock
bobbed as I walked, still shiny from his wet mouth.

“John,” he whispered, right as the backs of his knees hit the mattress.

And there was something in his voice, something secret and golden, that made me
realize that everything was clear – that I knew who I was, and what this was, and
what to do.

He trusted me.

I pushed him roughly down onto the bed and covered him with my body. His warm hands
clutched instantly at my back, tight enough that I couldn’t have pulled away if I
tried. I licked up his neck and listened to him gasp and moan before sitting back
on my heels, staring down at his flushed and panting chest – the sheen of sweat
covering the lean lines of his stomach.

I stared down at his ass, the warm crease hidden between his strong thighs and
beneath his rock-hard cock.

Something small and cold was thrust against my chest. I looked down at a tube of
lube clutched roughly in his hand.

I blinked at it, even as I took it from him. “How did you –?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.” He flicked open the lid with his thumb. “Come on.”

I didn’t ask anything more.

My lungs ached as I covered my fingers and warmed them with the lube, then finally
pressed them into the same warm heat of his body from three weeks ago. I sighed as
the heat of him rushed across my skin. He pulled his long legs up to his chest as I
stretched my fingers into his hole and shivered at the tightness inside of him. He
clenched around me and rocked himself down deeper onto my fingers.

“Come on,” he said again.

I laughed. “Be patient –”

He reached down, grabbed my hand, and pumped my fingers hard into his ass. “John,”
he moaned.

I shook my head at him, pretending to be exasperated even as hot desire flooded

through my thighs.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. My fingers slid wetly out of his dripping, open
hole, leaving him stretched and waiting for me. He squirmed on his back and reached
down to grab my side with his sweating palm. He pulled me closer to his body, until
I was nested in the V of his open thighs.

He grabbed the lube and poured more into his palm, then he sat up on one elbow and
reached forward to stroke his hand down my cock. He pumped it slowly until the
entire thing was wet, and I looked down breathless at the sight of his hand slowly
jacking me off. I looked thick and heavy and huge in his palm.

“Watch,” he said roughly under his breath. He rubbed his thumb over the slit before
pumping my cock again with his hand. Wet sounds filled the room.

“Look at yourself,” he whispered. “Look at my hand on your cock.”

And that word, “ _cock_ ” in his low and desperate voice, made me shut my eyes, and
an embarrassing noise escape my throat. I grabbed his wrist to stop him, suddenly
certain I would come.

“Wait,” I breathed.

He chuckled under his breath, and I opened my eyes again to see him staring up at
me with a fondness so clear that it ached. His long eyelashes fanned out over his
piercing grey eyes, and those eyes were currently tracing the lines of my old face,
with a soft smile on his lips, as if he couldn’t get enough of the sight.

I couldn’t stare back into the force of it, and I had to look away.

“Have mercy,” I finally said back quietly, half-joking, and he hummed. He gave me
one last slow stroke up my cock before wiping his palm off on the bedsheets at his
side. He fell back on the pillows, and his curls spilled across the white sheets.

I breathed roughly, readying myself, and I grabbed the base of the cock. I moved
forward on my knees, scooting across the sheets.

Then I froze.

I looked back up into his eyes, with the tip of the cock just an inch from his
hole. Foolish words poured from my lips before I could stop them.
“Do we need a. . .” I started to ask. “Are you, you know . . . are you good --?”

I looked at him with what I knew was desperation on my face. Because I knew that I
wasn’t actually about to press my real body inside of him, and that it was all just
pretend, and that I didn’t need to ask.

But I wanted . . .God, I wanted to believe that it was real. I needed to believe
that it was my real body, and that none of it was fake, and that I _needed_ to ask
him before I pressed inside . . .

He understood immediately what I was trying to say. “I’m clean,” he said. “Don’t
need to use a condom.” His palm rubbed slowly up my side, feeling the lines of my
ribs, before trailing across the hair over my chest. “You can feel me,” he said,
more softly. “I’m clean.”

I nodded and exhaled. “Right. Ok,” I whispered. I looked down at the cock still
grasped in my hand, and I scooted forward again to try and line it up with his
body. The angle was wrong. I nearly cried out in frustration.

I knew I was flushed red with embarrassment as I looked back up at him, beautiful
and panting back on the soft sheets. “I can’t really. . . the angle isn’t right,” I
admitted.

I expected him to huff and turn onto his hands and knees, but instead he grabbed
the pillow under his head and shoved it beneath his hips so they were raised
towards mine.

He looked at me with open, earnest eyes. His cock was still hard.

“John,” he said softly, when I still didn’t move. He took hold of my hand and
brought it down to his mouth. He kissed the center of my palm, right over the
cigarette burn etched into my skin from decades ago. All I could hear was the press
of his lips against my skin, and the sound of my unsteady breath.

“Feel me,” he whispered, so softly on his still-swollen lips.

I nodded. In one swift movement, I looked down again at the cock pointing towards
his hole. I guided it with a steady hand to his stretched entrance, tracing the rim
once around with the tip.

And then I pressed inside his body, until my hips touched his.

He groaned deeply as I carefully slid into his body, and we both froze the moment I
was buried all the way inside him. My lips hovered over his, and our wide eyes
latched on to each other’s gazes. There was a fizzle in the air, something
crackling between our joined skin. His palms slowly traced up my spine, and I
cupped his face in my hand, keeping myself fully buried inside him. The base of the
cock pressed back against my own skin, and I shivered at the imaginary thought of
the wet heat of his body against my sensitive, hard cock.

I gazed at him, and I watched the soft flicker of his grey eyes – shimmering the
way the twilight fog reflected off the crystal surface of Wonder Lake each night.
The way the fireflies could dance, carrying flecks of stars on their wings.

We were frozen, and I suddenly wanted to ask him if he understood that he was the
most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. That it physically ached in my chest each time
he somehow let me touch him with my hands.
I wanted to travel through time, and sprint across the world, and find myself that
night I spent weeping alone in the little kitchen at Canyonlands after the shower,
thinking that everything I loved on earth was about to be torn clear out of my
clutching hands. I wanted to gather that small boy into my arms on the cold floor,
and stroke his golden hair, and tell him that one day he would have a gorgeous man
stretched out beneath him, kissing his palm and asking to feel his body inside
himself. That one day he would be seen, naked and unashamed, and he would have a
cock between his legs, and someone would want to taste that cock with their own
lips.

I wanted to tell that terrified boy that I loved him. And I wanted Sherlock to know
that I hadn’t been able to love that boy at all until the day Sherlock took my face
in his hands and said, “ _You are. I know. I know. Kiss me again._ ”

Sherlock kissed me before I could say any of those things. His lips were wet and
desperate against my own, moaning across my tongue. I held him, and shivered as our
chests brushed together, and then I lifted myself up onto shaking arms, and stared
down at the place where my body joined with his. I ignored the black straps
crisscrossed over my skin, and ignored the empty space where the base of the cock
was pulling slightly away from my groin.

And I watched, holding my breath, as I slowly pulled my wet cock out of his body. I
hovered with the tip barely tracing around his rim, then disappeared back into his
ass, pressing deep inside of him with myself, stretching him open and filling him
with me.

“Oh my god,” I whispered. I couldn’t look away from the sight of my cock pumping in
and out of him, fucking into his stretched open body and sinking into his hole.

He gasped for breath below me.

“I’m fucking you. . .” I groaned. The words roared in my ears. “Jesus, I’m in you
–"

I heard a whimper, and I tore my eyes away to see Sherlock throwing his head back
on the sheets, gripping fistfuls of the fabric as a bead of sweat dripped down from
his curls. He was shaking, and he wrapped his long legs around my lower back and
pulled me closer into his body, shoving me deeper inside him.

“Fuck,” he breathed. He reached up and gripped the back of my neck with his hand.
His wild eyes locked onto mine as I sunk into him again, causing his breath to
hitch. “Christ. . . John –”

“God, you’re tight,” I groaned. My hips slapped against his as I pumped into him
hard. Every press into his body rubbed the base of the cock against my own skin,
thrumming with pleasure at the place where I was erect. I watched his tight, full
balls shake with each thrust I pushed into his body, and his cock was leaking fat
drops of clear liquid onto his belly. I fucked him faster, and he held onto me with
desperate hands.

He lifted his head from the sheets to peer down over his chest towards his ass. His
eyes grew wide as I thrust into him again. “You’re fucking huge,” he moaned. He
pulled my head down and to the side to lick up my neck, and then gasped as I yanked
a handful of his curls. Sweat dripped down my spine, pooling at the place where the
leather strap cut across the low of my back.

He could barely speak as I pounded into him, growing more and more wild at the heat
of his skin beneath mine. He bore down to fuck himself deeper on my cock, crying
out with each thrust as the bed started to knock and shake against the walls.
“John,” he panted. “Christ. . .more –”

“ _Fuck_ ,” I groaned. I slammed my cock into him again and again, gasping at the
wet slap of my skin against his. My body was flooding with heat, building and
building at the place where I rubbed against the cock buried deep in his ass. “God,
yeah. . . Oh my god. . .You’re so . . . shit—”

“Fuck me,” he begged. His voice was high and desperate.

And suddenly, I realized that my fantasy had come true. All the long, lonely nights
where I’d lain on my stomach in my bed, rolling my thighs so I was rubbing off
against the empty, quiet sheets, telling myself I was pounding into the ass of
another man below me, and that he was begging me, panting, filled tight with my own
cock. . .

Sherlock’s nails scratched deep into my back. “John I’m . . . Christ, you’re –”

“Yeah,” I moaned into his ear. I gripped his curls and angled my hips so I was
pumping deeper into his ass, harder than ever before. His body shook beneath me,
and his entire spine jolted as I reached the deepest place inside him.

“Take me,” I whispered, burning with my own daring. “Come on, take me –”

“Harder. . . Christ –”

I was gonna come. “Sherlock, you’re . . . Yes. . . _oh_. . .”

“Fuck, John. I’m going to –”

Suddenly a hot burst of liquid streamed across my chest. I looked down and saw that
Sherlock was coming, without either one of us even touching his aching cock. He
threw back his head on his neck and cried out, half groan and half wail, and the
sight of him, stretched pale and lean beneath my body, fucked into coming by just
the thrust of my own cock, sent my orgasm exploding through my body, hard enough
that I felt myself dripping down my thigh and straight onto his own skin.

I buried my face in his neck as my entire body pulsed and shook, and I trembled at
the wet pool of his come in the hot space between our skin. I told myself I was
spilling into his tight body, that his hot, clenching ass was being filled by my
own semen. That it would come spilling out of his ass, dripping out his stretched
hole.

I clutched him to me and breathed in his skin until the last pulses of warmth
fizzled through my fingertips and thighs. I gasped for breath, and started to move
to pull myself out of him so I could collapse beside him on the sheets, when
suddenly his huge hands were gripping my jaw, and pulling me down for a wet, open
kiss. I moaned gratefully into his mouth – the warm taste of his tongue, and the
soft caress of his lips. I was still buried inside him, even though I couldn’t feel
it, and even though I wasn’t growing soft inside his skin. I was unnaturally hard,
and his cock was limp and soft between our bodies, and still, he was holding me
down on top of him so he could plant kisses on my mouth and softly sigh across my
tongue.

It made my throat suddenly feel too hot and tight.

I smoothed the wet curls back from his forehead and kissed him one last time on the
corner of his mouth. His lips were swollen and warm – wet from my own tongue. I
dragged my cheek against his own, and pressed my lips to the sliver of skin below
his ear. He sighed beneath me, and it sent cooling shivers across my skin.

I couldn’t look down when I slowly pulled out of his body. If I saw myself still
hard and erect, even though my orgasm had already washed through my body, I’d only
be reminded that none of it had been real – that I hadn’t really felt the tight
heat of Sherlock’s ass against my skin, and my semen wouldn’t drip down out of his
hole, and it wasn’t my own skin that had thrust into his open body.

So I didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on his face as I sat back on my heels and
loosened the straps around my waist, pretending that nothing my hands were doing
was even real. I didn’t look as I collapsed onto my back on the mattress beside
him, and lifted my thighs so I could pull the thing down off my body. It thudded
obscenely when it dropped to the wood floor.

I didn’t look down to see myself naked without the cock bobbing out from my skin. I
couldn’t bear to see how small I would look – how empty the space would seem.

Suddenly I needed to cover myself again, as if every star in the sky could see me
naked through the cabin roof. The desperation burned in my blood so sharply that
for a moment I couldn’t see clearly before my eyes. I moved to get up from the bed
and search around on the floor for my boxers, when Sherlock’s arm was being thrust
in front of my face, and I realized he was silently holding my boxers for me to put
on.

Again, my throat tightened, and I didn’t even thank him as I grabbed them quickly
from his hand. I stared at the ceiling as I guided them up and over my legs,
desperate for this part to be over, so I could lie down beside him as if I’d simply
pulled out of his body and then fallen into his arms, without having to pull
leather straps off my legs, or cover forgotten parts of my own skin.

But his hand was in front of my face again, this time holding the normal, flaccid
cock in his palm. It looked small and naked, nearly pathetic in his steady hand. I
sucked in a breath and looked down at his face. He lifted his eyebrows in a silent
question.

“ _You are_ ,” he had said to me, with my bearded face in his hands.

Our fingertips brushed when I took the cock from his hand, and somehow it felt like
the most intimate thing we’d ever done – as if that touch of our fingers was sex in
itself, a desperate promise and an answer called out in the middle of making love.

I slipped it back inside my boxers, and adjusted myself, before I finally let
myself relax onto my back. The sheets beneath me were damp with sweat, and I could
smell the musk of his semen in the air.

I took a deep breath, wondering what the hell I could possibly say, when Sherlock
turned onto his side and rolled into my arms without a word. He draped his leg over
my own and wrapped his arm tightly around my stomach, and then he pressed his thigh
into the soft penis that was now cradled against my skin.

I could feel his own flaccid cock where it pressed warmly into my hip. I suddenly
realized that he had wanted to feel both of our soft cocks pressed between our
bodies as we slept, and a new wave of emotion overwhelmed me in my chest. I wrapped
my arms around him and pulled him close into my body, tucking my chin over his wild
head of curls.

I wanted to tell him “ _thank you_ ”, just two fragile words whispered slowly into
the dark. But I stopped them just before they passed through my lips. Normal men
didn’t thank each other for having sex before they went to bed, I told myself. And
I knew my voice would choke up embarrassingly on the words.

Instead I pressed a long kiss into his warm curls. He hummed softly against my
chest as his palm stroked once up my side. His body was growing heavier, drifting
away into sleep.

I thought of the brass key.

“Sherlock,” I whispered. A few seconds later he hummed under his breath. I could
barely hear the sound of it over the combined breathing of our lungs.

I ran my fingers through his soft hair and took a few long minutes to gather
courage. I thought of the afternoon I’d crouched out in the woods with my dad,
holding a gun up to my eleven-year-old shoulder for the very first time.

“ _Now, Ranger,_ ” he’d said, whispering roughly into my ear. “ _Takes courage to
aim and fire your first shot. But you’re gonna do it, you hear me?_ ”

I’d trembled with nerves and excitement where we crouched in the brush, and I
closed one eye to aim the gun at the target he’d painted on the far away trunk.

“ _Steady now,_ ” he’d said, with his hand hovering over my shoulder.

I’d taken a deep breath, and remembered his instructions, and fired.

“ _Hot damn, Ranger!_ ” he’d yelled, bursting up and knocking me over with his
arms. “ _Look at that! Gonna be bagging your first buck before you’re old enough to
drive. Ain’t no other girls up here ever fired a perfect first shot!_ ”

And I’d burned with pride as I peered through the trees at the perfect bullet hole
blasted in the center of the painted trunk.

“ _That’s courage now, Ranger,_ ” he’d said again, smiling at me.

I remembered the way he’d lifted his hand from my shoulder when we came back in
view of the house, and the way he’d quickly taken the gun from my hands. “ _Now
don’t be telling your momma I taught you to shoot, you hear?_ ” he’d said. “ _Less
you want the shit kicked out of you, not a word._ ”

I blinked my eyes open to the familiar ceiling of my cabin. Sherlock’s breath was
warm against my throat, and his curls tickled my cheek.

“Sherlock,” I said again into the silence. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

But when he didn’t answer, and his naked body melted heavily into mine, I realized
that he’d been asleep long before I’d gotten myself to open my mouth.

My eyes glanced over to the bedside table in the dark, imagining the exact shape
and feel of the key hidden in the back.

“Another day,” I muttered under my breath into his curls.

And he snored against my chest, with his thigh pressing into my soft cock, when I
eventually closed my eyes to the world, and quietly whispered, “Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fans self*

>
> Please enjoy the fact that I wrote the entirety of that last scene sitting at my
parents' kitchen table while I was visiting them for a weekend. I was sweating and
angling my computer screen away while my mom baked me cookies.
>
> As always, I am truly humbled by the love being shown for this story. What
started out as "ooh park rangers!" has grown into something far bigger than myself.
To all of you who expressed appreciation for John's story over the course of Con
weekend, I am grateful beyond words. Your comments and recs and kudos and art have
me constantly walking around in a state of total awe, and it is 100% because of
this community we all share that I keep feeling inspired to sit down and let John
tell more of his story.
>
> Also just a heads up that I did not have any fabulous betas / readers for this
chapter, so any inaccuracies are completely my own. I tried my best to apply the
wisdom they shared with me previously to these latest chapters, as well as delve
into the research from my medical beta (and my own experiences) to make sure John's
first strap on experience read as accurately as possible. If anything jumps out at
you, though, you know how to contact me! It's all in my profile.
>
> I can't wait to hear from you all, because your comments make me feel like Lugnut
in the middle of one of John's famous belly rubs! Be well, and go outdoors, and
stay hydrated, and I'll see you next chapter :)
>
> Next time: It's 1992, and Sherlock and John are dealing with the emotional
aftermath of their canoe ride. Can one more hike finally bring them the healing
they need? And what special little surprise will Sherlock find out in the vast
tundra? WILL THEY KISS?! Stay tuned.

13. August 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Chris Thile and Aoife O'Donovan sing "Here and Heaven"
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxzgkFlgIYg/).
>
> Not even really bluegrass but it's still a great song for this chapter so who
cares: Listen to "Standing On the Moon" by Lera Lynn
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eze74encNRE/).
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Build Me Up From Bones"
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow9pht81SWY/).
>
> *Now, that Sarah song is THE SONG of this fic for me. I've been waiting and
waiting to finally use it here, for this specific chapter and ending scene. Do
yourself a favor and listen to it/ look up the lyrics, and cry with me over its
Johnlock perfection. I've copied the lyrics in the end notes because they're JUST.
THAT. PERFECT.
>
> As always, thank you for reading, and I truly hope you enjoy :)

August 1992

“I took Sherlock out on Wonder in the canoe the other day,” I said.

We were standing shoulder to shoulder on the overlook deck at Eielson; Molly had
been developing a sled dog-focused Kantishna Experience talk, and Eielson was one
of the stops along the route where the visitors could get out for an hour for lunch
at the picnic tables. The bright, warm sun glittered across the field of flowers
rolling before us, and it glinted off the sunglasses and hiking poles of visitors
down along the Nature Walk trail below. There was a hum of rushing people and
families at our backs, and the distant growl of busses, and beside me, Molly took
another bite of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich before turning to look my way.

She shielded the bright sun from her eyes with her hand. “How did it go?” she asked
softly. I could hear the curiosity hiding behind her calm voice.

I couldn’t stop the quick smile from flashing across my mouth. I bent my head over
my arms resting forward on the handrail.

“Good,” I said, wishing I had the ability to choose better words. I kept speaking
down at my hands. “It was . . . yeah. We finally got to say some things, I think.
Things about . . . last year.” I coughed. “And, you know, the weather was nice.”

She suddenly laughed beside me. “The weather was nice?”

I grimaced at myself as she bumped her shoulder hard against mine. “Jesus, John, I
didn’t think you were eighty-five years old, yet. Not for another two or three
years at least.” She shook her head out over the tundra and laughed again as she
spoke under her breath. “’The weather was nice.’ Honestly, he goes and takes the
love of his life out on a canoe to try to win him back, and the only thing he has
to say about it is that the fucking weather was nice.”

I looked quickly over my shoulder as she spoke, suddenly painfully aware that any
one of the visitors surrounding us could hear. Hear what, I wasn’t exactly sure.
That I was a gay Park Ranger, or that I’d messed up the only perfect relationship I
ever had.

That I apparently had a love of my life. And that he was a _he_.

“No one’s listening,” she said quietly beside me, following my gaze over our backs.

I blushed and cleared my throat as we turned to look back down at the trail.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just . . . it’s not really ok, you know? If anyone found out, one
of our bosses –”

“I know. I’m sorry.” She put her hand quickly on my wrist. “I wasn’t thinking.”

I looked over at her and reached up to smooth her hair down the back of her head,
then leaned across to press a quick kiss to the side of her head, something I never
would have done in public before in a million years, but which now, after
everything that season, felt as right as the bright, full sun and clouds shining
above our heads.

That deep, hidden, ironic part of myself laughed that the Park Service finding out
who I slept with was far from the worst thing they could find out about me if they
ever decided to really look. I reached down with one hand and gently pulled up on
the buckle of my belt as if I was adjusting my uniform pants, feeling a calm
assurance at the heavy press of the cock inside my boxers against my skin.

She smiled and reached up with her hand to massage the back of my neck. “So. . .”
she started again. “This. . . mysterious canoe ride. . . with this mysterious
person. . . What actually happened?”

I knew that she wasn’t going to let it go, and a part of me brightened that she
actually wanted to hear, and that I could finally tell her.
I lowered my voice just in case as I spoke. “I told him about the key I had made
for him for my winter cabin,” I said. “That I still had it in a drawer.” My heart
started to race. “He asked me not to throw it away.”

Her eyebrows rose, and I could see the warmth glittering in the corners of her
eyes. “So. . .does that mean . . you’re back together. . .?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” I said quickly. Immediately I thought back to those
final moments out on the canoe – the way his warm palm had rested on the back of my
neck as the water lapped gently at the still sides of the little boat. The way his
breath had shaken when I leaned back slightly into his embrace.

“We, uh. . .” I started again. I glanced quickly down at her, and her eyes were a
full, deep brown. “It sounds stupid, but . . we hugged. After we docked back on the
shore and climbed out. We hugged for a long time, actually. Just . . . stood there.
And didn’t say anything.”

I heard her breath hitch next to me, and I looked down just in time to see her
quickly blinking a tear out of her eye. She huffed a laugh at herself when she saw
that I’d seen. “Fuck, I don’t know what you’ve done to me to make me cry about a
hug,” she said. “We’re too old for you to be making me emotional over a hug.”

I laughed along with her under my breath, and then found my own throat
embarrassingly tight. “It. . . it was a lot more than a hug,” I said quietly. “Not
physically,” I added, when her eyes widened. “Just. . . I held him for a long time.
. by the water. I felt him crying, a bit.” I cleared my choked-up throat until I
knew I could speak again without my voice sounding too rough. “It meant a lot,” I
finally said.

Molly was just opening her mouth to respond, her soft gaze fixed on my face, when a
woman came out of nowhere, bursting into the small space between us.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to barge in, but can I just ask one of you where – Oh, you’re
pregnant! Look at you, dear, how far along are you?”

My heart started to race at the sudden change in mood. A wild terror gripped me
that secret words would still come pouring out of my lips – that I would tell this
woman in her bright yellow Alaska Railroad pullover that I wanted to ask the Park’s
wolf researcher if he would once again sleep in my bed. That I wiped away one of
his tears with my thumb beside the lake she was on her way to visit, and that I
stood there holding his hand as the sun finally slipped below the distant purple
peaks she’d seen photographed on postcards back in the gift shop.

Molly flashed me a quick glance before putting on her visitor-face. I saw her
cheeks blush red, and her hand awkwardly rested over her belly curving beneath her
uniform shirt.

“Yeah, um, coming on six months I think,” she said.

The woman cried out and threw her hands up in the air, nearly knocking the
sunglasses off her head as she glanced between us both. “Goodness me, what a
beautiful family. A little Ranger on the way!” She looked back at Molly with
shining eyes. “Boy or girl?”

“We don’t know yet,” Molly said, at the same exact time I blurted out, “I’m not the
father.”

The woman paused for a second before turning slightly pink in her cheeks. She put a
hand on my arm and squeezed. “Oh, I’ve gone and put my foot in my mouth again,” she
said, laughing at herself. I suddenly realized that there was a teenage boy and
girl standing off behind her, both of them rolling their eyes and trying to look
away.

I started to fiddle with one of the patches on my shirt, then threw my hand back
down by my side when I caught Molly’s joking glare. “Oh, uh, totally fine,” I said.
“Easy mistake to make. I’m far better looking than the Ranger she’s actually with.”

The woman laughed too loudly as Molly rolled her eyes at me behind her back. “Well,
I was still right about the Ranger family then!” she said. Without warning, she
reached out and put a hand right on Molly’s stomach.

“Well, my vote’s for a boy, I’d say. Way you’re already carrying so low. Boys
always give their mother’s grief being low.”

She grabbed my arm again and gave me a hard pat. “Bet you gave your mother a hell
of a lot of trouble on your way out!” she said as she winked.

I nearly threw back my head and laughed at the sky. Immediately, the thought
flashed through my mind that I couldn’t wait to tell the story of this conversation
to Sherlock – that he was the only person on earth who could find it hilarious that
I, of all people, found myself trapped in this situation.

And suddenly, the small, simple fact that I actually _could_ tell him about it
brought a rushing tightness to my chest.

I thought of the countless times over the past year, all those months in the Grand
Canyon, and earlier that season, when I’d gotten in my truck or on my horse and
couldn’t wait to get back to tell Sherlock about my day. And I thought of all the
equally countless times when I would suddenly remember, seconds later, that he
wouldn’t be there to hear it. And the pain of it would surprise me with its
sharpness every time.

But there, standing on the Eielson Visitor deck with this beaming woman rubbing
Molly’s stomach, and saying that I must have been a terrible boy in my poor
mother’s womb, and thinking that I had been the one to have sex with Ranger Hooper,
I was breathless and giddy throughout my entire chest that this time, when I
stepped in my truck and thought, “ _I’ll tell Sherlock about this tonight_ ,” I
wouldn’t have to remember, seconds later, that he wouldn’t be around to hear it.
That it might not be that night, or in my own cabin, or side by side in my bed, but
he would eventually hear it all the same. And his laugh would join mine.

I blinked out of my thoughts to realize that the woman was long gone, and Molly was
standing beside me once again eating the rest of her sandwich, letting me stare off
into the distance deep in thought.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. I had no idea how long I’d stood there without speaking.

She smiled. “Thought we’d lost you there.”

I looked over my shoulder and spotted the woman dragging the two teens behind her
back into the Visitor Center, with a huge smile on her face and a fanny pack
bulging with folded up Park maps. I said a quick prayer for whatever poor Interp
person on desk duty got to answer her questions for the next two hours, then turned
so I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Molly again and folded my hands over
the rail.

“Sorry, I . . . I mean, what the fuck just happened? Do people just . . . do that
to you now?”

Molly covered her mouth with her hand to hide her bark of laughter. “God, you have
no idea. I’ve thought of changing the sign back at the kennels to ‘Sled Dog
Demonstration at 2pm Daily, followed by a pregnant Ranger at 3!’”

I laughed. “And Greg’s seen this happen, yeah? What does he say?”

Molly rolled her eyes. “He’s even worse than you just standing there looking like a
deer in headlights. My wonderful beloved likes to pretend he’s only just now
noticed that I’m pregnant. Looks down at my stomach all bug-eyed after a visitor
asks how far along I am like ‘Christ, Molls, you never said . . . Great Scott I’m
gonna be a dad!’ And the fucker picks me up and kisses me in front of them like he
just found out all over again.”

I was laughing almost too hard to speak. “You’re joking –”

“I’m one-hundred-percent not. And because he’s got that fucking accent everyone
just thinks he’s being sweet and adorable instead of a great big idiot.” She looked
down at her stomach. “Honestly, who wouldn’t notice?”

“Oh my God,” I choked out, “That’s priceless.” And then the two of us were giggling
leaning over the railing, trying to hold it in since we were both technically still
on duty. Her eyes sparkled as she looked at me, as if there was nothing on earth
she’d rather be doing than laugh by my side, and a sudden memory, long forgotten,
flashed through my mind carried along on the floral breeze.

That summer night with James, the first season we met, sitting side by side on the
top of one of Death Valley’s lookout points. The stars had been pouring down to
kiss the flat surface of the distant earth, silver meeting black over wide pools of
golden sand.

I remembered, seeing that twinkle in Molly’s eyes, how James had made a joke - one
which made me try not to laugh too hard beside him, and he’d looked at me, suddenly
serious, until I met his gaze.

“ _You know, you don’t ever laugh much,_ ” he’d said.

I’d shrugged, grateful the night sky could hide my blush. “ _Guess it’s not my
personality, I guess. . ._ ”

“ _No, see, that’s just it. You wanna laugh all the time. Always thinking of funny
shit to say in your head. And then you hold it back, like no one ever sat down and
taught you how to actually laugh. You know, just let loose and do it._ ”

I’d thought of laughing that one afternoon with my dad, running across our
neighbor’s field to try and catch their loose cat. The way he’d leaned over with
his hands on his knees as I slipped in a pool of mud and went sliding forward on my
stomach, and I’d been laughing too hard to care that the mud made my shirt cling to
the budding curves of my young chest. How he’d wiped happy tears from the corners
of his eyes, something I’d never seen him do before, as he watched me slip again
trying to leap and pounce on the cat hiding in the overgrown grass.

Before I could say anything back, James had reached over and put his warm palm on
my shoulder. I’d leaned into his touch. “ _See now, looks like I gotta show you
how,_ ” he’d said, laughing, and I’d felt like I was sixteen again, young and free
and sitting in that warm field. . .

“ _I like your laugh, John. It’s . . . well it’s sort of bubbling isn’t it? Reminds
me of my sister’s laugh before she passed. Totally carefree._ ”

And I wondered, standing there with Molly’s soft chuckle still in the air, if James
would think that my laugh still sounded exactly the same as her own beside me.

If Sherlock had ever thought the same thing whenever he made me laugh in those
early days the year before.

“John?”

Molly was looking at me with a slight frown on her face, sandwich halted halfway to
her lips.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. I took a deep breath. “Just . . . thinking about the rest
of the other day,” I said, only partly a lie.

She raised her eyebrows around a full mouthful for me to continue.

“It’s not interesting at all, it’s just . . . we talked, actually. On the drive
back. I told him all about the Canyon over the winter, and he told me what he’d
done.” I looked down at my hands and cleared my throat. “We never really . . . did
that, before. Just talked like that.”

Molly frowned around her bite. “What did you talk about then? You spent every
second together.”

I laughed harshly under my breath. “God, nothing, it seems like now. I mean,
sometimes we did, about our lives and all that, but mostly it was just . . .
wolves. Teasing each other. All the ways I drove at the incorrect speed or made
dinner the wrong way.” I lowered my voice a bit. “Sex. . .”

Molly quickly shook her head. “I can’t think about the equivalent of my big brother
having sex,” she said with her eyes closed. “I mean, great, that’s great, but don’t
ever mention it to me again.”

I laughed, grateful for the break in my clouded thoughts, and roughed up her hair.
Then I stole the sandwich from her hand to take the last bite. “Well if I’m so good
at convincing people I’m the father of this child,” I said with my mouth full,
“Maybe you should think about it. Might be you’ve been missing out. Plus, now I’m
available.”

She shuddered, and I laughed harder. “I’m going to vomit up this sandwich if you
mention having intercourse one more time,” she hissed under her breath. “And I’ve
already vomited three times today.”

I glanced down at her full stomach. “Oh, and like I don’t have to think about you
and Greg every time I look down?”

She shook her head quickly. “Immaculate conception,” she said, fake seriously.
“Greg’s only ever made it to second base.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Do I even wanna know ---?”

“Frenching,” she whispered dramatically, with her hand in front of her mouth. “One
time I even took off my shirt –”

“Nope, nope, nope,” I cut in. Her shoulders shook with her quiet laughter as I drew
my arm around her and pulled her into my side. Behind us I heard her bus driver
make the announcement to re-board.
“You’ll tell me what happens?” she asked quietly. The surge of warmth I felt for
her was nearly overwhelming, nothing like anything I’d ever felt for Harry, even on
those precious days when we were too young to understand, and she would let me call
myself her brother where we played pretend out in the dirt.

“Deal, kid,” I said. Her arm wrapped tightly around my back. When I went to pull
away, she held me even closer.

“I told you you didn’t throw anything away,” she whispered into my chest. I
breathed out hard and pressed my cheek into her hair.

The curve of her stomach felt odd pressed up against mine – but it was warm, and
soft, in a way I’d never felt before. I thought of the only time Harry had hugged
me back when she was pregnant – a few days after we came back from the ultrasound
that ended in her and my mom screaming in the parking lot by our breaking-down
truck. She’d crept up into my attic, the first time she ever even climbed up the
ladder, and cried, leaning over her huge stomach, while I put my arm around her
shoulders.

“ _Promise me you won’t ever get like this,_ ” she’d whispered. “ _You gotta
promise me._ ”

I’d promised her silently, with her tears on my shoulder, and I’d wondered if she
could feel through my t-shirt that my chest was tied down.

After a quiet moment, Molly pulled back and moved to start walking over to her
waiting bus.

“Besides, John,” she said back over her shoulder, flipping her long hair as she
jammed her Ranger hat back down over her head, “You won’t be available for long.”
She winked.

And as I stood there, and watched her disappear into the swarming crowd, I
immediately wanted to step forward and call out that she was wrong – that she had
no idea what she was talking about, and that she shouldn’t be ridiculous, and that
we both knew she was just trying to make me feel less like a failure.

But that flame. . . that flame started to crackle inside my chest again. It burned
through the very marrow in my bones and flooded through my hands. It warmed my
throat instead of closing it up with ice, and it made my vision sharpen until it
was nothing but clear.

It made the huge, soft sky floating endlessly above my head look like the brilliant
surface of the still waters – the very color of Sherlock’s eyes when I’d wiped away
his tear on the Wonder Lake shore. Right after he’d told me, half looking at his
feet and with my hand in his, that he missed me.

And then I’d told him, gripping his fingers and with the sky shining through his
curls, that every night, in my bed in the empty dark, I missed him too.

\--

“Watson! The hell you doing way out here?”

I stopped with one foot up in my truck and turned around to face Nick, jogging
towards me with one hand up over his head to wave me down.

I put my hands on my belt loops and leaned against my open truck door to wait. Even
after all this time, after all the decades, I still had to remind myself not to put
just one hand on my hip when I stood still waiting for something – the same way I’d
been standing that day Molly asked me if I grew up with a bunch of sisters. The
thought flashed through my mind that Sherlock would have taken one look at my hand
hesitating by my hip and given me a knowing smile. That he would have seen me, and
understood me, and not looked away.

“Nick,” I said, smiling, when he got closer.

He raised his forearm to wipe some sweat from his brow, then swatted at a mosquito.

“Didn’t expect to see you out East ever again now that –”

He trailed off, eyes wide, as he realized his mistake. I wondered how he had been
planning on finishing that sentence. “ _Now that your dog is dead. . ._ ” or “ _Now
that you don’t have any reason on earth to leave Toklat. . ._ ” or “ _Now that
you’re not following Sherlock Holmes around the Park anymore. . ._ ”

“Shit, sorry, Watson –” Nick was starting to say.

I smiled softly at him. “All good, Nick. I haven’t been out here much since. .
that, anyways. Just visiting Molly.”

Nick’s face immediately changed from deep regret to a knowing smile. “Ah, good ol’
Hooper.” He stroked his beard and looked off at the tops of the trees. “And how’s
her man?”

The question was fragile, and it reminded me of the odd, shocked looks I’d gotten
for the next two weeks after it became known that Molly and Greg were together last
year. Confusion, mixed with pity, mixed with outrage on my part that it hadn’t been
me kissing Molly Hooper after the staff meeting. I hadn’t had the energy to correct
them all. I was too busy thinking about long legs in a grey suit. . .

“Greg’s good,” I said. “’Right chuffed’ as he would probably say – getting ready to
be a dad and all that.”

Nick hummed and nodded. “Man, seeing the two of them. . makes me want to get a move
on and finally have a kid of my own, you know? You don’t have any kids either, do
you Watson?”

I shook my head, and then wanted to laugh since my brain immediately thought of
Lugnut the day he first jumped up into my arms. “No, no I don’t,” I said. “Not
really for me.”

Nick was silent for a moment, stroking the straining front of his uniform buttons
as he puffed up his chest. “You know, actually, I can’t say I disagree. The crying
and the poop.” He shuddered dramatically. Once again, I was in awe that Nick could
manage to create a conversation about literally anything.

I huffed a small laugh then nodded towards my truck. “Well. . .”

“Oh, right, reason for me flagging you down here,” he said. He put his hands on his
hips, all business again. “Been some personnel changes over at the Backcountry
Office,” he said. “Drama you sure as hell don’t even want to know about.” He waved
his hand and shook his head, rolling his eyes. It looked so natural on his face –
the movement – and I wondered if that’s what I finally looked like too whenever I
rolled mine – if I did it the same way.

“Thing that relates to you is,” he went on, “Got some patrols that can’t get
covered now. Don’t have enough staff. Don’t have even enough people to fully cover
the permit trainings, Neil says to me at least. I know you have your day off coming
up, but . . .any chance you could use it to cover a day-long patrol out through
Unit Thirty? Along Tributary Creek? You know, just the usual. Been some cub
sightings along the west bank of the river lately, but no mother in sight. Just
need an extra pair of eyes until they get themselves sorted in the office.”

He paused, waiting for my reaction to being told my weekend was essentially being
taken away.

I suddenly thought of Sherlock, hiking along beside me with his lone bear spray can
in his hand, matching his long steps to mine.

“Don’t worry about it, Nick,” I said. “I can cover it, easy.”

He breathed out a dramatic sigh of relief. “You’re a saint, Watson,” he said.

“You’re just about the only Ranger here I can trust to do a good backcountry patrol
anymore. I’ll have the forms sent to you – probably have our Hannah tape them to
your door once I get them together. She’s a sweetheart, you know.”

I laughed under my breath and nodded. “That, she is.”

I expected Nick to thank me one more time with a wave of his hand before walking
away, but instead he stayed there, standing a little bit too close to me by my
truck. He looked into my eyes for a long, awkward moment, and I started to prickle
along the back of my neck under his gaze.

“You know, John,” he finally said, in a soft voice I’d never quite heard him use
before, “I’ve never really told you how goddamn grateful I am to have you around.”

When I opened my mouth to cut him off he grinned and held up a hand to stop me. “I
know, I know, you’re as humble as a pile of shit, but, I need you to know, because
I don’t think anyone’s ever said it. We’d be lost without you here. Take you for
granted, I reckon. But, out of anyone here, you were born to do this. Probably came
out of the womb with the Ranger hat already on. We’re lucky sons of bitches to have
you around, John. Lucky as all hell.”

I thought of buttoning up my uniform shirt for the very first time over my newly
flat chest, the fierce surge of pride, the way that the heavens had opened up and
sighed above my head, and shone down on me with fresh air, and guided my nervous,
shaking hands. The brand new, gleaming nametag that said “Ranger John Watson” –
etched into metal like it could never be erased again from the earth.

“Gee, Nick. . .” I tried to say. To my horror, I felt a tear suddenly slip free
from my eye and slide down my cheek. I quickly wiped it away, but I knew Nick had
seen.

He didn’t point it out, but just reached out and put his hand on my upper arm,
giving me a good squeeze and a nod. “You’re a fine man, John. And a damn fine
Ranger. Should’ve told you that years ago, I see now,” he said. And before I could
clear my throat to say anything more back, he was already walking away, whistling a
little tune and wildly waving at a group of Kennel Rangers coming out of the
offices from their lunch.

“How’s the ol’ dogs?” I heard him yell. They started calling something back.
I hopped up in my truck before anyone else could see me standing there, wiping my
wet eyes. For a moment, it panged deeply in my chest that I couldn’t run over and
tell Lugnut all about what had just happened – hold his soft, warm fur in my hands,
and know that he would lick the trail of salt off my cheek.

“ _I did it, old man,_ ” I would say to him, as if I had somehow just accomplished
something. “Looks like I finally did it.”

Then I remembered that I would get to go ask Sherlock if he would come with me on
my patrol when I got back. The flame flared up to life, fizzling the wetness in my
throat. I yanked the truck into gear and pulled out of the lot, desperate to get to
Toklat as fast as possible. The rolling, rocky hills and seas of trees zoomed by,
waving in the breeze like giant meadows filled with rippling, green water. I put in
my favorite bluegrass tape – the old Jimmy Martin one that was starting to wear
out. The banjo swirled out the rolled-down windows on the fresh breeze.

I thought of the first time my dad looked down at me with pride burning in the back
of his eyes. “ _Oughta start calling you Ranger,_ ” he’d said. “ _Way you found
that damn cat faster than any of us could have in a whole damn year._ ”

I wondered what Sherlock’s face would look like after I asked him to go with me on
the Patrol – how his eyes would shine as he’d look down at me from his little porch
and say, perhaps softly, perhaps with a warm smile, “ _Of course, Ranger_ ,” and
then I would tell him all about the woman who thought I was about to become a dad.

\--

That wasn’t how it happened.

Between my work shifts and Sherlock’s research with his team, I didn’t see him
after that for another two days. I always kept that lookout in the corner of my
eye, scanning each horizon line for a glimpse of a head of curls, but more often
than not the horizon lines I glimpsed were empty of anybody else – dotted with
antlers gracefully roaming across the grass, or the tops of trees piercing the sky,
or a single white cloud dissolving into mist as it passed through the tallest peak.

Before I knew it, it was late evening, the night before I was due to cover that
backcountry patrol. I sat at my kitchen table in front of a half-drunk cup of mint
tea, turning the chipped ceramic mug in my hands.

The skin of my hands had never really forgotten the feeling of Sherlock Holmes’
lips – those few times when I would wake up to the sensation of wet warmth on the
back of my hand, tracing the tendons and veins, and Sherlock would be kissing it
like it was the most precious thing on earth. Kissing my calluses and the faint
scars on my skin, and tracing his lips across the hair on the back of my hands.
Kissing the center of my palm, my too small and too thin fingers.

A soft knock on my front door startled me from my thoughts, and I stood up with an
odd racing beat in my heart, wordlessly hoping as I swung open the door.

Hannah stepped back like she was surprised I was home. “Oh, John!” She pushed her
hair back behind her ears. “I didn’t think you were home – with the lights off – I
was just here to –”
She lifted the packet of papers in her hand with a shrug, the waterproof booklet to
fill out on my patrol the next day. I quickly glanced back into my dark cabin; I
hadn’t even realized I’d been sitting there without any lights on. The late sun was
just starting to slip below the distant peaks, even though it was past ten at
night, and the cool wind rose goosebumps on my bare forearms.

“Oh right, thanks,” I said, reaching to take the papers. For some reason I added
again, “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said. She stared down at my hand gripping the folded papers, and
suddenly the air between us turned heavy and stale. There was a sad twist to her
mouth, one that looked embarrassed. I felt that it was critical that I say
something in that moment – that I tell her that I didn’t hold anything from before
against her, or that I appreciated what she said after Lugnut, or something.

I cleared my throat and traced one of the wavy locks of her hair with my eyes. It
was the exact same color that mine had been all those year ago, in a different
universe, and a different life, before it ended up shaved off into a pile in the
attic, and it grew back again a much dirtier blonde a week later.

“So,” I started, wincing when my voice sounded too loud. “How are –”

“Hannah! Come on!”

She’d been looking at me as I started to speak, eyes wide and fixed on my face, but
we both jumped and turned at the sound of the voice, as if we’d been caught out
doing something we shouldn’t have been doing. She waved at Jess and yelled that
she’d just be a minute, then turned back to me, the odd nerves that had been
clouding her face before now gone.

“Look, a bunch of us are going up to Wonder for the evening. Gonna carpool in the
vans and have a campfire by the lake. Jess said people brought beers and s’mores.
You wanna come?”

Her smile lit up her face. I marveled at the fact that someone could be so
persistently positive in my presence. It reminded me of James – the way he used to
ask me to come with him again and again, and half the time I would say no, and half
of those times he would say screw everyone else and come be with me instead.

For one mad, pounding second, I thought of saying yes. I wanted to know, with a
sudden desperation, just what it was that kept my feet rooted to the doorstep of my
cabin, when I knew that a bunch of other Rangers, people I’d worked and lived with
for years, would be spending time together tonight by a gorgeous lake. I wondered
what would happen if I just hopped along in that van, and listened to Jess, Hannah,
Chris, Nathan, and all the rest of them talk about the latest Park gossip, or share
visitor stories, or moments from their latest hikes. I wondered what all of their
faces would look like when I showed up, stepping towards the campfire from out of
the shadows. If they would be shocked, or smile.

If they would care.

I realized I was opening my mouth to say “yes.” The beginnings of the word were
forming on my tongue.

Then I saw it.

Saw _him_ , rather. Far away from the cluster of Toklat cabins and the winding
forest of trees, from the perch of my cabin porch, I saw a flicker of small fire
out in the middle of the dry riverbed. It looked like a flame from a lighter, and
it waved through the air, flickering like a tiny firefly, until it reached the
shadow of a head topped with curls blowing in the breeze.

“John?”

I tore my eyes away from Sherlock’s long legs balancing on the uneven rocks. I
could barely make out the details of his body from that distance– almost like my
mind was filling in the blanks for me through the haze of the late sun and the
shadows of the trees.

“Sorry, Hannah, I – Well, thanks for inviting me,” I said.

I expected her face to fall, but instead it just looked resigned. She’d known I
wouldn’t say yes.

“Right, I’ll let them all know you say hello,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Thank you, really –”

“I knew it was a longshot,” she said, already turning to jog down the porch stairs.
She called back, pointing to the packet of reports in my hand, “Good luck with
that! Don’t get eaten!”

I raised my hand silently in goodbye and nodded, waiting until she was far out of
sight walking down to the gravel parking lot with Jess. The second I knew they
could no longer see me, I threw the papers inside, slammed the door, and started
speed-walking down the slope in the other direction towards the riverbed, where a
small curl of smoke was rising up from the silhouette of Sherlock’s back.

He was still smoking by the time I walked up to him on the bed of rocks, calmly
holding the cigarette in his hand and not even hesitating or turning around when he
heard me approach.

I stood by his side, a careful two feet in between us. I didn’t look sideways at
his face, but instead followed his gaze out towards the distant peaks. The last
embers of sunlight were settling over the riverbed, winding through the rocks like
a babbling creek of soft gold. The breeze when it blew caused the river rock to
tremble, crackling against each other like a sigh from the earth.

“Seriously?” I finally said. I didn’t even gesture to the cigarette.

He raised it to his lips and took a long drag before he answered. I could taste the
smoke in the air.

“You’re going to ask me to accompany you on that extra backcountry patrol tomorrow
– the one you’re giving up your day off for, since you can’t bear the thought of
letting anyone down.”

I grinned in the corner of my mouth so he couldn’t see. “Greg or Nick told you
that,” I said, not a question.

He exhaled loudly. “He did not, in fact. I do have other ways of knowing
information.”

“What, you just figured all that out without even looking at me right now? Read my
mind?”

He scoffed and flicked the ash out onto the river rock with a long finger. I
resisted the urge to immediately scoop up the sullied rock in my hands. “That would
be ridiculous,” he said calmly. He took a slow breath. “Max told me.”

I barked out a laugh. “Right, of course.” When he didn’t say anything back, and the
silence stretched on, I went on, “You know that’s not the reason why I’m down
here.”

He hummed. “It’s not the _excuse_ for why you’re down here, but it is the reason.”

I finally rolled my eyes and turned to face him. His gaze flickered over to me out
of the corner of his eye, and the expression on his face was calm and warm. He
quickly looked up and down my body, lingering on my face. He raised one eyebrow as
he took another long drag, and the wind pushed a curl across his forehead.

“You seriously can’t smoke here,” I said, trying to sound stern. “I could literally
lose my job for not stopping you right now.”

He grinned around his next exhale. “Then stop me.”

My fingers twitched, but I didn’t move. He smirked when he watched my eyes follow
the cigarette back to his lips. “Nobody cares, anyways,” he said. “They’re all down
at that dreadful campfire for the evening. You and I and two of the trail
maintenance people are the only ones still here. Greg’s having sex or making lists
of baby supplies to buy out East.”

I shook my head. “You’re unbelievable,” I muttered. The breeze picked up, carrying
a thick scent of smoke towards my face. I was suddenly struck breathless by how
good it felt to tease him – to stand there bickering back and forth, and hearing
his sharp, quick words, and all of it with the memory of his arms wrapped around me
on the lake shore still fresh in my mind, as if my skin could still feel the
strength of his embrace days later.

I heard him smirk. “I allow myself to have one a season,” he said calmly, as if he
wasn’t talking about something that could burn down a National Park. “That gum can
be truly atrocious. I consider it a special treat for having to put up with all
this camping nonsense every year.”

“Oh right, blame wolves for not hanging around in cities where it’s more convenient
to track them down,” I said back. Then I frowned, “Hold on, how is that possible? I
never once smelled it on you all last year.” The unspoken understanding that I had
been with him nearly all day, every day of the last season hung heavily between us,
but instead of freezing the air, it felt warm.

He inhaled again and exhaled his smoke up towards the sky. He cleared his throat
before he spoke. “I did,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear. “After.”

Realization flooded my bones, and I drew in a quick breath. I thought of myself,

standing in the middle of my cabin with my head in my hands, feeling sick to my
stomach, and Sherlock had been left out alone in the middle of the tundra, allowing
himself his one cigarette while he watched the empty path where I had walked away.

Or, at least, that’s how I imagined it. Needed to imagine it – that he had stared
at the place where I had disappeared instead of immediately looking away.

“Why tonight, then?” I asked softly. I realized I was afraid to hear his answer,
and I felt a surge of pride in my chest that I still asked him the question.

He smiled sadly at the ground, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a little
box. He opened it and stubbed out the cigarette on some gravel inside, before
closing it and taking his time to put it away. He took a long breath, and the last
ray of sunlight suddenly slipped below the peaks, bathing the world in cool purple
and grey.

“I was supposed to go back to London tonight,” he finally said. “Flight was out of
Fairbanks twenty-five minutes ago. Red-eye layover in New York before landing at
Heathrow tomorrow, where my brother’s people would pick me up and drive me straight
to a conference in Cambridge where I’m one of the paid speakers. Considering I’m
not officially employed by the NPS this season, I knew I could leave whenever I
wanted. Figured I’d have enough data by now to finish up last year’s research.”

I couldn’t speak. I had a sudden, terrible fear that he would look at me, say
cheers, and then walk away to still somehow catch that flight that left thirty
minutes ago. That this lone cigarette on the dry riverbed at sunset, with his
joking and his teases, was also somehow a goodbye.

We both knew that he wasn’t back in Denali that season just to finish up his
research.

“Why didn’t you take it?” I finally whispered.

I traced the side of his face with my eyes while I waited for his answer– the sharp
line of his jaw I’d tasted and kissed, and his eyelashes glittering in the last
golden light from the sun. I realized it was probably what he’d looked like that
evening all those months ago, when I couldn’t turn around to look, and when he’d
stood behind me and said, “ _John,_ ” and “ _I’m glad you came back._ ”

He finally looked at me, and his eyes were deep and clear. “I told you - Max told
me you were covering an extra patrol tomorrow,” he said. His face was soft with an
emotion I couldn’t name. It looked like his face that morning he’d handed me the
cock in the dawn air of the tent. Or that evening sitting on the roof of my truck
watching the caribou cross the Road, when I’d first reached out to take his hand so
that the entire evening sky could see.

I crossed my arms over my chest against the cold and softly smiled at the gathering
mist. “When you break into my cabin tomorrow morning, because I know you’re going
to do that no matter what I say, it’s your job to get the coffee and oatmeal
started,” I said.

He looked down at me with knowing eyes, and suddenly I was back in that canoe with
his hand on the back of my neck. I was back in my truck, that first day last summer
that I ever drove him out to a kill site, and he was curled up in my passenger seat
with the buttons of his uniform shirt straining, telling me, in a deep, calm voice,
“ _I know your name._ ”

“Do you still take your oats with a revolting scoop of peanut butter in it?” he
asked me.

I smirked and watched a lone hawk soar upwards out of the evening fog. Its cry sent
a shiver down my spine, and it caused a nearby hare to sprint away through the long
grass on the bank of the riverbed, scrambling up the loose scree.

I chuckled once through my nose. “I sure do.”

He huffed beside me, then bent down to pick up the rock he’d dropped ash on
earlier, holding it up for me to see before dramatically pocketing it in his pants.
“So you don’t lose any sleep over me disregarding your ridiculous ‘leave no trace’
rule,” he said, then he turned to walk back up the slope to the cabins.

Words poured out of me before I could even think to stop them. “A few months ago,
when you first found me down here,” I said to his back. I ignored the shaking in my
hands. He looked back over his shoulder when I paused, then raised his eyebrows in
acknowledgement for me to continue.

“I . . . I couldn’t even look at you,” I said.

He nodded. “You were angry, which you had every right to be.”

I shook my head and spoke slowly, forming the ideas even as the words were leaving
my mouth. “I wasn’t . . . angry. Not that, I don’t think. I just . . . I wasn’t
ready,” I finally said. “I couldn’t tell you, then, what I actually wanted to say.”

His beautiful eyes stared longingly into my face through the evening haze. “Will
you tell me now?” he asked.

I wanted to rub my hand across my mouth, but I kept it down at my side. I didn’t
look away. “I’m glad you came back, too,” I said, proud that my voice came out
steady.

He smiled, and it made him look fifteen years younger. Not young and fragile, the
way he’d looked that afternoon in my truck, slumped over right after he admitted
that I wasn’t alone in liking men.

No, now he looked young and alive – as if the past year fell right off his face and
shattered on the rocky ground. As if he could sprint across the tundra, and reach
up his hands to paint the darkening sky bright blue and gold, and bring me along
with him straight up into the billowing clouds, far away from the rest of the earth
where it slept on beneath our feet.

“I’ll break into your cabin at six-thirty then, Ranger,” he said, still smiling.

I finally allowed myself to smile right back, the same smile I’d had when I was
twenty years old. I didn’t care what it looked like, only that he could see.

“Deal,” I whispered back, before he finally turned and slowly walked back towards
his little cabin, long legs balancing perfectly on the uneven bed of sun-warmed
rock.

\--

It was sprinkling cold rain as we trudged through the damp moss.

Sherlock had, as predicted, broken into my cabin at 6:30 on the dot. I’d woken up
to the sound of his socked feet moving through the kitchen, avoiding the squeaking
spots on the hardwood as he put on the kettle to start our coffee. I’d heard him
get down the jar of peanut butter from the cabinet and pour oatmeal into bowls.

When I’d finally dressed and joined him out in the bright kitchen, filled with
clear summer sun, he’d reached out and placed his hand at the top of my back,
rubbing it the way he used to do what felt like years ago as he placed my mug of
black coffee in my hands.

Then he’d frozen. I’d realized, all at once, that he had forgotten that he didn’t
touch me like that anymore. Not now.
Just before he could move his hand away, I’d stepped closer to his side, and took
my first sip of coffee. His fingers were tense on my back, poised to lift away at
any moment.

“You know, you annoy the hell out of me sometimes,” I’d said quietly, with my mouth
held over the warm steam from the mug.

His voice had been tense. “Oh? Why is that?”

I’d taken another sip. “You somehow manage to make better goddamn coffee than I’ve
been able to figure out in almost two decades. With the same fucking beans and
water and grinder that I use.”

His entire body had changed, tension melting out of his arms. His palm was firm
again at the top of my spine, fingertips tracing the bones beneath my skin. “It’s
absurdly simple,” he’s said, taking a sip of his own. “Your problem is you’ve no
idea how to regulate the exact water temperature in ratio to the amount of grounds
you’re using, plus there’s the question of whether you’re even grinding it to the
correct consistency, which I doubt you’ve never had that pathetic excuse for a
grinder correctly calibrated, and then there’s –”

“Sherlock,” I’d cut in softly.

He’d stopped mid-word and looked down at me with his mouth half-open, an annoyed
frown on his face. “What? Don’t you want to know –”

“Sherlock, it’s six-thirty in the morning,” I’d said calmly, taking another sip of
coffee and closing my eyes. I could smell him in the air – the crisp edge of his
soap. “You can’t give me a lecture about something until at least eight.”

He’d sighed, and his fingers had brushed across my back for one more moment before
they slowly fell away. “You can be dreadfully boring sometimes,” he’d said, setting
down his own coffee before reaching over to steal mine from my hands and take a
sip. He’d grimaced as he swallowed.

And I’d grinned at him softly, reveling in the sight of Sherlock Holmes in my
kitchen, cradling my own coffee in his hands without any product yet in his curls.

“I know,” I’d said, feeling like I was saying a million things more.

Toklat when we walked through it to catch one of the early busses had been sleepy
and silent – the only sound on earth the crunching of our boots through the dirt
and gravel. I’d felt like I was sneaking off the edge of the earth following in his
wake – as if we would vanish from it all the moment we stepped off the Road, and
leave everyone else behind, and wake up in a place where I could reach out and take
his hand without looking over my shoulder. Without him pulling his hand away.

Now, as we dragged ourselves up steep, muddy slopes about a mile away from the
Road, I shivered as the foggy mist covered my clothes and drenched my hair; it was
too windy to wear a hat, and even my raincoat wasn’t saving me from the thick
sheets of rain. Sherlock’s curls were dripping and plastered to his forehead and
neck, and every time he huffed to brush them out of his eyes, the spray from his
ringlets flew back and splattered across my face.

“Think you could, you know, angle your hair flipping some other direction?”

He flicked his hair back over his head again, showering me in more water. “It’s not
my fault you’re short enough to be directly in the line of fire,” he said, not even
looking back over his shoulder.
I marveled, yet again, that if any other person on earth had pointed that out, that
I was so much shorter than another man, I would instantly feel icy fear grip tight
in my chest. But with Sherlock Holmes saying it, I only wanted to laugh and run my
hands through his curls.

The key was in my pocket, burning a warm outline into my thigh. I’d snuck back into
my room right as Sherlock went out to lace up his boots on the porch before we
left, and I’d looked back over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t looking before
opening the drawer, pushing aside the sock, and picking up the little key in my
hands.

But I knew that he knew it was currently sitting there, hiding in my jeans, all the
same. Just like I knew that he knew I wasn’t really planning on taking it out – not
today. That I just needed to feel the weight of it once more close to my skin.

“I figured short jokes would be a bit below you,” I said, trying to catch up to his
long strides. “A little pedestrian.”

I heard him chuckle, warm and deep, and saw a cloud of fog drift through the thick
air around his mouth. I walked faster until I was finally walking by his side. I
noticed him almost invisibly slowing his pace so we would match.

“Alas, Ranger,” he said, looking down at me with an odd warmth in his grey eyes.
“Here we come to the point in our acquaintanceship where you realize I’m not nearly
as clever as I claim to be. All just smoke and mirrors to hide the plebian within.”

His eyes shone like pockets of sunlight through the grey mist – the first rays of
dawn reflecting off the steely snow on Denali’s peak, burning fierce and bright
even as he tried to look morose.

“Oh don’t act so fucking depressed,” I said, knowing that my own eyes were shining
back in the same way. “I already found that out a long time ago. You’re just the
same as the rest of us fools,” I joked. “Except when it comes to tracking down
wolves.”

He hummed, grinning, then reached out quickly to catch my arm as I stumbled on some
loose rocks. “You have a point there, Ranger,” he said, a bit breathlessly. His
fingers stayed on my arm for a moment too long before falling away back to his
side.

He licked the dripping mist from his lips before whispering out towards the fog-
covered horizon, so quietly I wondered if I was really meant to hear. “But I
suppose you’ve always been able to see right through me,” I heard him whisper.

Something surged through my chest – a flood of words that wanted to come pouring
out in response. I clenched my jaw and swallowed them down, just as I usually did,
and kept walking as if I hadn’t heard him.

But then I remembered the flame. . .

“You’ve always seen me, too,” I said before I could think twice, forcing the
terrifying words out through my wet lips.

I looked over at his face, and I saw his mouth twitch into a sad smile aimed at the
ground. He was silent for a few steps, only the sounds of our feet slushing through
the thick, wet moss to break the earth’s still silence.

“I find myself unable to stop looking,” he finally said, speaking down at his feet.
My heart raced in my chest, and something breathless hummed in my throat. “Don’t
stop looking,” I said quickly.

He looked up at me surprised, with wet curls falling into his eyes. He didn’t brush
them away. We stood still, somehow frozen, and the wind whipped the cool mist
across our wet skin. I squinted through the fog as water dripped from my eyelashes
down to my cheeks.

“I don’t want you to stop looking,” I said again. “Sherlock, these last few
days . . .” I trailed off on a soft sigh.

His eyes looked that same way they had on the Wonder Lake shore just a few days
before, as his fingers clung tightly to my own. I knew I didn’t have to finish that
sentence for him to understand what I meant.

He reached out and pulled up the hood of my rain jacket, gently settling it on top
of my head before brushing away the layer of water on my forehead with his thumb.
His palms adjusted the shoulders of my jacket beneath my pack, then pulled my
zipper up as high as it could go against the rain.

“I won’t,” he whispered, his breath fogging warm in the cool air. The rain pattered
onto our jackets, like pebbles skipping across a seamless lake. Steam rose from the
drenched earth, swirling up into the thick, grey clouds.

My throat felt too tight to speak. I reached forward instead, towards the top
button of his coat, and pushed the cold button through the hole, right at the base
of his throat. My fingers lingered by his wet skin.

“Need to get you a real rain jacket,” I said, for some reason whispering.

He smiled, and I wanted to press my lips to the droplet of water clinging to the
corner of his mouth. “Where would be the fun in that?” he asked. “Honestly, John,
you’ve no sense of adventure.”

I laughed under my breath, then gestured around us at the wide open tundra and
soaring mountains with my chin, all bathed in a swirling fog. “This isn’t
adventurous enough for you then?”

Water dripped from his long eyelashes. “Well, not if I have you hovering at my
elbow to keep me perfectly safe every step of the way. You suck all the danger out
of everything with your compasses and your rules.”

I took a step closer, and the earth felt very small. Our breaths fogged together,
and his eyes were the only clear things I could see through the heavy mist.

“Are you asking me to stop?” I whispered.

His mouth twitched, and his tongue darted out to lick his wet lips. “No,” he
whispered back. The fronts of our jackets brushed along each other in the warm
space between us. “No, I’m not,” he said again.

I looked into his eyes, like pockets of clear blue sky in the storm of the misting
grey. I wondered what he would compare my own eyes to if I ever asked him - if he’d
ever really looked or wanted to notice their color. If he thought they were the
color of the freezing lake, like my dad used to say, or the color of the night sky,
the way that boy told me lying down in the warm grass, right before we went inside
the hot barn that day in July.
The color of sadness, like my mom said with her back turned towards me in the
kitchen, that night when I came home with a black eye from getting into a fight,
and she told me that I should have had beautiful bright green eyes just like my
sister.

I realized Sherlock was nodding his head towards the slope at his back, silently
asking if we should keep moving along on our hike, and I cleared my throat as I
finally broke our crackling gaze.

“Hope this rain clears up,” I said lamely as we started to walk again.

He hummed. “It won’t,” he said, squinting his eyes to peer through the mist at the
distant peaks.

I shook my head and hefted my pack higher on my shoulders. “Of course.”

We didn’t talk much more for the next couple of miles. The fog made it necessary to
keep calling out for bears every few trudging steps, wary of coming across one and
surprising it in the mist. Sherlock walked a bit ahead, choosing the best path, and
I ambled behind, little waterproof pad in my hand, making quick notes for the
backcountry office so I’d have something useful to turn in to Nick.

I was aware of him, every step, just like I knew he was fiercely aware of me.

Nearly two hours later we were soaked to the bone. I could see Sherlock shivering
where he slowly hiked ahead of me, nearly dragging his body across the moss and up
the steep slopes of the creek’s banks, and every muscle in my own body felt tired
and weary.

I paused for a minute and hurled my pack to the ground, then bent over to try and
shield the contents from the rain as I searched through it for my map. I traced our
route with a soaking wet finger as the raindrops immediately drenched the paper,
causing it to crinkle in my hands. We were fairly deep into the Unit, almost to the
last major fork of the creek, and I knew that there was a little valley about four
hundred feet northeast from where we stood, surrounded on three sides by the taller
peaks of the range. The creek waters were rising to a dangerous level with the
rains, flooding the entire bed so there was no place to walk along its banks. We
were going to have to ascend and walk back through the mountains, rising and
falling with each new peak instead of getting to walk on flat elevation most of the
way.

It was going to be a nightmare, and my muscled ached just thinking about it.

“It’s going to feel like shit traversing the ridges on the way back,” I suddenly
heard Sherlock say. He was standing a few feet in front of me with his hands on his
hips, breathing hard with his wet hair slicked back onto his head.

I nodded, too exhausted to be amazed that he’d read my mind. “Yeah,” I said simply.
I shuddered at the sensation of water tricking thickly through my beard, making my
face feel heavy and soaked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so miserable
out in the tundra, wishing that the ground below me would just swallow me up whole
so I wouldn’t have to haul myself back out to the Road.

And there was something else, something unsettled, in the way the static air clung
to my skin, as Sherlock Holmes looked at me through the thick rain and fog. It was
as if I was balancing on the highest peak of Denali in a storm, and the wind was
whipping me back and forth, and I knew that I would fall and tumble into the
depthless clouds any moment, unsure of where or how I would ever land in one piece.
I thought of what Sherlock might have done a year ago if we found ourselves in a
similar situation. If he would have walked towards me in the rain, and instead of
just doing up the zipper of my jacket, or awkwardly touching my back, if he would
have pulled me into his arms and kissed warmth back into my lips. If he would have
laughed with me up at the endless heavy clouds, or let me press him down into the
cool, wet moss, covering him with my body’s warmth beneath the shelter of a grove
of trees.

Sherlock watched me for another moment, reading the thoughts on my face, before
nodding up at the slope beside us. “Let’s get up to that clearing,” he said.
“There’s a caribou trail here we can fairly easily follow which keeps us away from
the scree. If we skirt along the edges of the valley we might be somewhat protected
from this wind by the peaks. Make it back in about three hours rather than four.”

Again, I was too exhausted to be irritated that it had taken him five seconds to
form a perfect plan without even glancing at the map in my hands. “Right, lead the
way,” I said, hefting my pack back up onto my shoulders. “Just get me out of this
fucking unit.”

I heard him chuckle ahead of me as we started up the slope, tearing our bodies
through the thick brush at the bottom as Sherlock found the switchback path. “There
now, Ranger, I thought I was the one who was supposed to complain whenever we’re
out here. Hearing you do it makes me worried I’ve woken up in an alternate
reality.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then quickly shut it. I was irritated at myself for
complaining in the first place – something I never did, as Sherlock well knew.
Instead I shook my head firmly and rubbed a palm over my face.

“Sorry,” I said, a bit out of breath as we climbed. I dug my hands down into the
mud to keep me from sliding back down the slope. “Sorry for dragging you out here.”

He looked back over his shoulder to respond, then suddenly lost his footing and
started to slide down the steep grass, scrambling to get a hold of something to
stop his slide. I cursed under my breath and dropped to my knees for leverage, then
reached up and grabbed his waist as he fell down towards me. His legs slammed into
my chest and knocked me from my perch, and then we were both sliding, losing our
footing in the slanted grass and loose rocks, until finally Sherlock grunted and
reached out to grab onto an exposed branch. We stopped sliding with a jerk, and I
clung fiercely to his belt and waist until I could get my legs back under me.

“Fuck, you alright?” I finally asked, catching my breath. We were in a tangle of

limbs, covered in water and mud, and I could hear that we were causing a small
landslide of loose scree and branches below us.

“Yes, you?” I heard him mutter from where his face was pressed into the moss. I
grunted as I tried to shift upright again, then slid down helplessly once more in
the slick mud. “Yeah,” I grunted out. I struggled for another minute to stop from
falling down the slope, the weight of my pack trying to pull me off my balance as I
finally shifted my body up onto my arms.

I heard an odd sound, then, as Sherlock started to turn underneath me onto his
back, with his chest up to the sky. I looked down just as I became aware that my
body was now hovering directly above his, and I realized that the sound I heard was
him laughing.

He was laughing, staring straight up into the raining, misty sky, with mud smeared
on his cheeks and wet leaves strewn in his hair. He was laughing, young and open,
and looking up into my face with sparkling eyes.
And I, exhausted and weary and soaked, with the rain battering down onto my back, I
started to laugh, too.

We laughed together in the mist, and the sounds he was making were settling like
warm shivers down my spine. Our legs were still tangled together, touching from our
ankles to our hips. I could feel the heat from his chest radiating in the small
space between our bodies. Water pooled in the wrinkles forming in the corners of
his eyes.

“You look ridiculous,” I finally choked out, reaching up to wipe off a smear of mud
from his face with my wet palm.

He laughed harder. “You should see yourself,” he said back. Our faces were inches
apart.

The flame roared in me, burning, flaring to life in the midst of the endless cold.
It was crackling in my fingertips still lingering by his face, pressing my hips and
chest down closer, and closer, and closer to his relaxed and easy body beneath
mine. To the warmth of his wet skin, and the heat of his breath, and the silk of
his hair; the soft curve to his smiling lips . . .

My pack was starting to ache on my shoulders where I still held myself hovering
above him. I looked down at him one last time, eyes shining through the fog, then I
rolled to the side and pushed myself up to my knees, trying to right my clothes.

We looked at each other, with him still lying calmly on his back, and the harsh
rain that had been falling suddenly faded away into a soft mist. “Let’s get you
up,” I finally said, nearly whispering.

He was still smiling softly, and he nodded, reaching up to take my waiting hand.
His fingers were somehow still warm. After I’d finally hauled him to his feet, and
we were both standing again, his hand stayed in mine for a few seconds too long.

By the time we made it to the top of the slope, climbing carefully to avoid another
fall, my thighs were shaking and sore, and my shoulders were screaming for a rest.

I paused and looked up at the sky to stretch my back, closing my eyes against the
mist. “Think we should –”

“We’ll take a break up here, yes.”

I opened my eyes to see Sherlock making his way around the outskirts of the valley,
sticking close to the rolling, rocky slopes which surged up to the higher peaks. I
followed him, realizing he was walking towards a more sheltered place at the base
of a steep hill. The mist up in the valley was light and soft, gently wafting
against my skin, but the clouds were still heavy and dark. A fog crept in with the
breeze, slowly eating away the view. It clung to the droplets of water in the mist
as I struggled to see, and was so thick in places I could only hear Sherlock
walking up ahead of me – swallowing up his back and curls into an endless,
impenetrable grey.

I had just reached his side and slid my pack to the ground when the fog rolled in
so thickly I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

“Shit,” I whispered, “Not sure how we’re gonna –”

His hand suddenly gripped my wrist from out of the fog. I could feel the tension in
his fingers, and I stood silently, with alarm radiating up my spine, until I heard
it, too. A twig cracking close, about twenty feet to our right.

I froze.

The entire earth shrunk down to the feeling of his hand on my wrist, and the sound
of the racing blood in my veins, our shakily held breaths, and then the shuffle,
then drag, then crack of another step taken by whatever was creeping towards us in
the fog, completely hidden within the thick mist.

Sherlock’s fingers squeezed harder on my skin as my other hand silently reached for
the bear spray in my pocket. I desperately wished that I was reaching for my gun
instead, but it was sitting back in my cabin, unloaded and left behind, since I
hadn’t worn my uniform even though I was technically on duty, all out of some
misguided desire to feel like I was simply hiking with Sherlock Holmes.

I’d been an idiot.

Another twig snapped, this one even closer, and the shuffle and drag and clomp of a
hoof or paw continued echoing through the mist, causing the long grasses and moss
to hiss and whisper with its steps.

I clutched the spray in my fingers, and for a quick moment closed my eyes. I
shifted my other hand so that my fingers entwined with Sherlock’s, with our palms
pressed together in a fiercely tight grip. I could feel his pulse through the veins
in his hand.

I opened my eyes, and blindly held out the spray before my face, ready with the
safety clipped off. I sucked in a deep breath and held it in a steady hand,
desperate to see the shadow of whatever was moving closer through the mist.

“John,” I heard Sherlock breathe, the softest whisper, into the fog.

Suddenly, a burst of wind roared across the valley. It hurled at our backs,
covering us in more spray, and then it blew through the dense fog in a rushing
wave, clearing a path of sight for the first time since we’d set foot up in the
clearing. I held my breath, waiting to catch a glimpse of what had been hiding in
the fog. I peered through the hazy mist, desperately searching for a hoof or a claw
or some fur.

A wolf burst through the tall grass not twenty feet away, sprinting away towards
the other side of the clearing and leaving us at her back. Sherlock jumped at the
sudden noise, and my own body shook with a jolt.

I watched, heart in my throat and adrenaline in my veins, as she eventually slowed

and shook the dew from her fur. Her graceful legs brushed softly through the thick
moss as she moved, light as air on her feet, and the hidden power in her legs
flexed as she bowed down to stretch.

The mist and fog continued to rise, banished away by the fresh breeze, until a
faint, grey light touched every distant corner of the clearing, a little pocket of
visibility with just the dark clouds hovering above our heads.

Sherlock’s hand was still in mine.

I glanced quickly over our shoulders to make sure there wasn’t any more wildlife at
our backs, scanning the distance for a rock that started moving, or any movement
among the boulders dotting the riverbanks down below.

“John,” Sherlock whispered, squeezing my hand. I looked back to see another dark
form moving in the tall grasses, making its way towards the female wolf standing
tall rising out of the mist.

A tiny, black nose burst its way up from the moss, followed by the small body of a
stumbling wolf pup trying to follow its mother. Its little legs must have been less
than two weeks old.

Its fur was jet black.

We watched, hand in hand, as it slowly made its way to the mother across the
clearing, slipping once in a wet puddle, until the mother walked forward and drew
it close to her body with her snout. She licked the water from his fur, then
nuzzled him with her face. For a few silent minutes, they stood perfectly still in
the middle of the valley. The mother looked up every once in a while to sniff the
air and listen, then bent her head back down to nuzzle the pup close against her
legs. Its small pink tongue was hanging out of its mouth, and the breeze created a
whisper through the soft, still silence.

Suddenly, the pup flopped over onto its back and wriggled, then leapt to its feet
as the mother pawed the ground, yipping wildly and jumping up and down to play. The
mist and fog continued to clear, and the tiniest rays of sunlight slowly warmed the
clearing, giving us a clearer picture of the two wolves playing out in the grass,
chasing each other as they ran and attacked.

Sherlock sucked in a quick breath beside me. “It’s the same mother,” he whispered.

I frowned at him. “What?”

He didn’t take his eyes off the two wolves in the far distance, slowly moving
farther and farther away as they played and rolled through the grass.

“Last year – the pup we came across that was dead. The mother that found it. This
is the same female.”

Something odd tingled in the back of my throat. I squinted my eyes to try and catch
a better glimpse of the wolf, nuzzling the small pup before bounding after it
across the field. “How can you be sure?” I asked, still whispering.

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Trust me, I’m sure.”

My throat felt inexplicably tight. I squeezed his hand harder. “She has a new pup,”
I said, somewhat breathlessly and stating the obvious.

Sherlock just hummed softly beside me. I thought I felt, just barely, his thumb
start to rub the back of my hand.

Eventually the two wolves disappeared from sight, running up and over one of the
distant hills. They paused, for just a moment, atop the pile of boulders at the
peak – two perfect silhouettes against the dense grey sky, before they darted off
into the far mist, evaporating like ghosts.

I finally released the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I looked back over
our shoulders one more time, scanning again for any new movement creeping into the
area. When I saw nothing, I turned back and pressed gently into Sherlock’s side. We
both stared at the place where the two wolves had nestled together in the tall, wet
grass.

I licked my lips, and then spoke softly enough that I wouldn’t shatter the odd calm
that had descended over the clearing.
“I used to wish I’d met you when I was twenty years old,” I said. Sherlock’s still
body subtly shifted beside mine. I knew that he was listening.

I went on. “I was twenty when I had my surgery, you know. I don’t think I ever
said. I was . . . fuck, I was terrified. Never been out of South Dakota before,
never been on a plane. Going on the word of what people had only whispered to me
about – you know, they heard it from this person who heard it from someone else.
There was this bar in Rapid City that I would take a long bus ride to a few times a
year, after my sister already moved out across town to have her own place with her
kids. My dad was drinking a lot by then, and my mom didn’t give a shit, so they
didn’t realize if I was gone for more than a day. It was a . . . well . . . it was
that kind of bar. For people like – you know, for men.”

I stopped to clear my throat, stunned that the words were pouring so effortlessly
from my mouth. Sherlock’s thumb continued rubbing the back of my hand, and the mist
continued to clear. I shifted on my feet, feeling my wet and muddy clothes stick to
my skin.

“Anyway, the place really did exist in New York – this clinic you’d only know about
if someone else told you. Probably looked like an idiot holding my backpack against
my chest everywhere I went because I was scared as shit that it would get stolen,
and every dollar I had was tied together in that bag. I don’t even really remember
now what happened before they put me under, actually – what all they asked me and
everything. I just remember . . . I remember waking up in so much pain. Most pain
I’ve ever felt in my life. I think now looking back that they must have had my
dosage wrong, for whatever pain medication they used – there’s no way in hell it
should have hurt that badly. Like there were knives piercing into my lungs, and I
couldn’t breathe. And nobody was there, in the room, when I first woke up. Was
totally empty. I remember I wanted to . . . Actually, I . . . I wished my dad had
been there with me, so fucking badly. Sherlock, you don’t know how much I . . . he
would have seen how badly it hurt, you know? He would have tried to do something,
get somebody to help –”

I had to stop and clear my throat again, and Sherlock’s shoulder pressed warmly
into mine. I realized I couldn’t even see the tundra in front of me; all I could
see was the white hospital ceiling, and the flickering fluorescent light. The empty
metal folding chair next to my hard cot.

“Anyway, eventually this nurse came in – woman who looked old enough to be my
grandmother. I remember she came in and she said ‘Mr. Smith, you can have a mirror,
if you’d like to see.’ First fucking time I was ever called Mr. anything in my
life, even though I didn’t give them my real name. So I sat up, hurt like shit, and
she held up a mirror for me, this little hand mirror, and . . . it was _flat_ ,
right? All covered in bandages and dried blood and all other shit but it was flat.
_I_ was flat.”

As if on cue, I looked down at my own chest, covered by my layers and my raincoat

and splashes of drying mud. My chest rose and fell calmly as I breathed, as if it
had always been that way, and that shape. My bare chest which Sherlock had seen and
kissed.

I spoke down at my feet. “So that woman, that nurse, she, uh . . . God, I can’t
remember how much later it was, but right before they let me go, I remember she
asked me what I was going to do, and I didn’t fucking know, because I had about
twenty dollars in my pocket and I was in New York and that was it. So somehow she
asked me what I wanted to do, if I could, and I told her it was ridiculous but I
always wanted to work in the Park Service – that I grew up near Badlands and saw
all the Rangers coming in to work. And she said, by whatever fucking coincidence of
the universe, that she had a cousin worked in the offices over at Canyonlands in
Utah, and two hours later she comes back in and says I have an interview there in a
week, and she gave me the Greyhound bus schedule and a fifty dollar bill as I
walked out of the clinic. I don’t even remember her name – don’t think I ever even
knew it.”

For the first time since I started, Sherlock finally spoke beside me. His voice was
incredibly soft. “So that’s the park where you worked first? Canyonlands?”

I nodded. “You ever been there?”

He shook his head. “Only have coyotes there, no wolves.”

I laughed under my breath. “Of course, no wolves. Why even visit?”

He looked over at me and smiled, and I swallowed hard when I saw that his eyes were
glossy, as if they were wet. We shared a long look before he raised his eyebrows
for me to continue.

“Right, well, I took the Greyhound from New York to Utah. Took me three days, I
think. I remember I didn’t have anything to do on the bus, so I just stared out the
window for hours. Thought a lot about things. You know.” And suddenly, deep in my
chest, I knew that I would one day tell Sherlock Holmes all about those things.
About the first time I ever said the name John, and how I knew, sitting on that
bus, that I would miss my mom’s cherry pie. How loud the shotgun blast had been
when my dad shot it into the sky. How he’d taken me and my sister to the neighbor’s
house down the street who had a television set so that we could finally get to see
‘The Wizard of Oz.’

But for now, in that little clearing with the mist rolling away up the green hills,
I squeezed Sherlock’s hand and blinked back the sudden water in my eyes. I knew my
voice wouldn’t be controlled anymore when I spoke, but I forced myself to keep
going.

“Last year, after we. . . after I left you,” I went on in a rough voice, “I used to
wish, so badly, that I had met you during those three days I spent on the bus. That
somehow you would have walked onto the bus with a bag over your shoulder, and we
could have met back when I wasn’t . . . well, when I was young, and excited about
everything. Before I got so . . .” I sniffed. “You know, I think I realized I would
always be alone, at some point. That nobody would ever want . . . this. And I used
to think, after everything that happened last year, that if I’d just met you when I
was twenty on that bus, when I had the whole world ahead of me, I would have been
whole, for you. I would have been someone who made you happy.”

He squeezed my hand hard. “You do make me happy,” he said in a fierce voice. “John,
you did make me happy.”

I shook my head, refusing to be ashamed that a tear was falling down my cheek. “I
know that now, I think,” I said. “Now I’m . . .” I turned to look at him, letting
him see the emotions on my face. “I’m so glad I didn’t meet you when I was twenty,”
I said. “I don’t know why, but I . . . I think I needed you to meet me like this.
Who I am now. Who I’ve been . . .”

An odd light burned in Sherlock’s eyes. His voice was rough when he spoke. “Be
fiercely grateful you didn’t meet me when I was that young,” he said. “I would have
been an annoying twat high out of my mind, and I probably would have announced to
the entire bus how I’d deduced about the surgery you just had.”

I barked out a laugh, perfectly able to imagine it, then I remembered . . .

“Actually, that’s how it got so infected,” I said, the smile falling from my face.
All I could remember was the pain. “I couldn’t keep the . . . them clean on the bus
during that time. And then by the time I made it out to Utah I couldn’t . . . I was
too afraid to go to an ER, you know? Didn’t know what they’d – So I tried to deal
with it in the motel I stayed in that week. Filthy place. And everything was still
infected when I had my first day on the job. I asked for my uniform shirt in a too-
large size so I could still button it up over the bandages and two layers of
shirts. Hurt like hell, God, it hurt, but . . . my nametag said ‘Ranger John
Watson’ on it. First time I ever saw it written down, and I . . . it didn’t matter
that it hurt like shit if I had that nametag, stupid as that sounds.”

“You and I both know that’s the farthest thing from stupid,” he said in a soft, wet
voice. “I’m a genius, you can trust me.”

I grinned, feeling lighter than air. “You are a genius,” I whispered back. I let my
eyes close for a moment, basking in the heat from his body against my face.

“John.”

The tone of his voice made me fling open my eyes. I gasped at the look I saw on his
face – something like desperation. The same way he’d looked at me all those months
ago when I passed by him outside the shower house and said, “ _Not now_.”

I stared straight into his eyes, unable to speak.

“John,” he said again, reaching out to hold my arms with both hands. “John, you are
. . . you have to understand, you are –”

“I’m going to kiss you,” I suddenly heard myself say. I put a shaking hand in the
center of his chest. “I’ve wanted to, for a while. I want to try –”

“You are the most astounding man. The most unbelievable, impossible –”

“Sherlock, let’s just . . . Let’s be tog–”

“Please,” he begged. He closed his eyes. “God, please.”

I stared at his face with his eyes squeezed close, and watched the nearly invisible
shaking in his lips. There was still a small smear of mud across his chin, and his
curls were starting to frizz up as they dried in the fading mist. I moved my hands
up to caress the base of his neck, letting my fingertips trail along his jaw and
the bottom of his cheeks. He signed through his nose and pressed his face sideways
into my palm.

“I am so fucking glad you told Nick you were riding in my truck,” I whispered,
because I needed him to know, to fully understand, that I didn’t regret anything
that had happened – not a single moment. I brought his face slowly down towards my
own as I spoke. His hands gripped harder at my shoulders, and chest shook where it
pressed against my own.

“Sherlock,” I breathed across his mouth, and then I licked my lips, tasting the
exhale of his warm breath, brushed my bottom lip lightly over his soft skin, and I
kissed him.

He sighed against my mouth. The taste of his lips flooded across my tongue and down
my throat, bursting with bright warmth, and the wetness from his mouth slowly
glided across my own lips as I moved, caressing his mouth with mine.

He was utterly still, his fingers still gripping into my shoulders, until I tilted
my face, and ran my thumb along his cheek, and breathed a wet sigh against his lips
with my tongue. I brushed his nose with my own, tracing his skin.

Then he melted.

I felt his body crash into mine, burying itself against my skin, and his long arms
wrapped around my back to grip my spine. He opened his mouth and let me lick across
his tongue, gasping for desperate air, as the intimacy of our lips pressed together
– the hidden secret of their taste – overwhelmed me with a longing I’d kept buried
deep inside myself.

He moaned, a soft sigh, from the back of his throat, and I felt the vibrations
along my lips – the quiet, tender rasp of my beard against his smooth skin, the wet
licks from our mouths, the shaking air in our lungs being exhaled across each
other’s lips.

I heard a rough noise escape my own chest, desperate as I tasted him, and I finally
pulled back just enough to take in a deep breath of air. I rubbed my nose along
his.

“God, you . . .” I breathed. Our panting chests pressed together.

I reached around to clutch at his back as he folded into my arms, burying his face
in my neck with a rough sigh as he pressed a wet kiss to the side of my throat.
“John,” I heard him whisper. “John, you’ve no idea. . . You’ve no idea --”

He clutched me in his arms, holding the back of my neck close as he kissed my bare
skin – the softest presses of his mouth as his chest shook beneath my palms.

I tilted my head back to look up at the sky, shivering at the weight of him in my
arms, and I gasped at the sight that met me as I opened my eyes.

The dark clouds had cleared, the mist was completely gone. I looked up, mouth open,
and I saw that the vast sky had transformed into the bluest of blue, endless and
bright and illuminated by the warm sun. I closed my eyes again as the rays beat
down onto my face, clearing away the water from the rain and covering my skin in
fresh air. I wound my fingers tightly into his curls and held the back of his head
against me, holding him impossibly close.

I kissed the top of his head, and I breathed in the achingly familiar scent of his
curls, now dry and warmed by the brilliant sun bursting through the clear sky.

“Sherlock,” I whispered, with my face pressed into his hair. “Sherlock, you are . .
. you are the person I . . . my one -- "

He kissed me, tasting the rest of the words on my lips. I gasped against him,
clutching him fiercely, as his kiss burned hot and wet across my skin. I groaned
into his mouth as his hand held my jaw, smashing my body and lips against him as
close as I could get, not even caring if I could breathe.

When he pulled away, panting, I grabbed fistfuls of his jacket in my hands over his
chest. His lips were full and glistening beneath the sun, and his eyes were shining
and wet.

“John,” he said, staring down into my eyes, then he shook his head and flashed a
huge smile up at the sky. He laughed once, under his breath, and looked down at me
again. It felt like looking straight at the sun, bringing tears to my eyes.

“John,” he said again, breathlessly, before he leaned forward and pressed a long
kiss to my forehead, wrapping me tightly in his arms and unable to say anything
else.

I clutched him so tightly I thought my bones would meld with his. I could feel
every racing beat of his heart pumping in his chest.

I pressed my cheek into his neck and gulped down the smell of his warm skin. “I
want you to come back with me,” I said, whispering it into his clothes. “Come back
to my cabin when we’re in Toklat. Stay with me. Don’t go back to your own place.”

“Yes,” he breathed against my forehead. “Yes, all of that, yes.”

I took a deep breath. “I want you to stay with me, in my bed. Sleep with me and
stay the night.”

His body shook once hard in my arms. His voice was choked and wet. “God, yes.”

I lifted my cheek from his chest and stared up into his face. A tear dripped down
from his shining eyes, rolling down his cheek until I caught it with my thumb. His
face was even more radiant than the endless sky.

Now, more than ever, I needed him to truly know.

“This means . . .” I started. I took another deep breath and gathered my thoughts.
“This means I’m with you, wherever you go,” I said.

He caught my hand on his chest and lifted it up to his mouth. He kissed my palm for
a long moment against his warm lips. “Wherever we go,” he whispered.

He leaned forward to kiss me once more on the mouth, this time soft and slow, just
holding our lips together. I held his face in my hands.

The softness of the kiss seemed to settle the racing in my heart, covering over
everything with a heavy, soft calm. He looked into my eyes for another long moment,
breathing perfectly in sync, and then he frowned.

“I have never, in over fifteen years, wanted to be out of the wilderness as

desperately as I do right now,” he said.

I threw back my head and laughed. He stood in front of me and crossed his arms over
his chest as I bent down to pick up my pack and heaved it back onto my shoulders. I
was still smiling.

“How can you be smiling about this?” he demanded as we started to make our way
towards the ridge we would follow back. “This is _unbearable._ ”

I wiped my hand over my mouth, then reached over to rub the top of his neck. “Let’s
get you home,” I said, chuckling, and he sighed dramatically as he followed my
path.

We walked for another minute, just up to the crest of the ridge, when Sherlock
spoke again, this time in a voice that was low and soft.

“What you told me earlier,” he said, speaking out towards the little sliver of the
Road in the distance. “I . . . I also realized I would be alone. Before . . . until
we met.” He looked at me once, quickly, as if he was afraid of what I would say,
then looked back towards the horizon, watching the last remaining storm clouds be
blown away. “Everything about this feels absolutely irrational. I can’t – it
doesn’t make any sense.”
And to my surprise, I smiled again, and reached out to take his hand in mine. I
squeezed his fingers once before letting them fall away. “It is irrational,” I
said. “But I thought you were the one with the sense of adventure?”

“I retract my earlier statement,” he said back, scrambling over some rocks as we

made our way down a steep slope. “You’re the one who got on a bloody plane to fly
to New York. All I do is just run around trying to find wolves in improper
outerwear before I get ‘mauled out in the wilderness’ as you’ve so elegantly put
it.”

And after I laughed, and then pulled him down to kiss him again in full view of the
sky, he walked by my side, with our shoulders brushing, and he told me of the very
first time he ever came across a moose out in the wild, back during his first
season working with Greg.

And his voice kept me laughing all the way back to the Road, filling my chest with
warmth until the flame within me burned even brighter than the sun itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you.

>
> This chapter was a tough one for me to get out. So much was riding on those final
moments together, and that first true reconciliation, that I wanted to get it
right. In the end, I let John and Sherlock decide where it needed to go, and I hope
you felt their love along with them. Sometimes it's the smaller moments instead of
the grand declarations, you know?
>
> Especially as we near the end of this journey, your comments and kindness are ALL
the more treasured! I am so grateful every time I get to hear back from you all,
and squee about Rangers, and fall in love with Ranger Watson, and swoon over
Sherlock Holmes in the middle of the vast Denali wilderness. You all are what make
writing this fic so special, and I truly can't wait to hear from you :)
>
> Lyrics to "Build Me Up From Bones" by Sarah Jarosz (aka: a song that was
literally written for Johnlock in The Bluest of Blue):
>
> Build me up from bones
> Wrap me up in skin
> Hold me close enough to breathe me in
> /
> The moon's a fingernail
> Scratching on the back
> Of the night in which we lay beside
> /
> I held every inch of you
> I wrote every line for you
> I made time when time was all but gone
> You're the love I've always known
> /
> The night's so dark and grey
> But you've helped me find my way
> Through the wild and wonders of this world
> /
> So take me with you now
> I need to show you how
> I can love you better than before
> /
> Play it sweet and low
> We've got nowhere to go
> I am yours, and you're the love I know
>
> \--
>
> Next time: So, what really happened at the end of 1991? I mean, I know we sorta
know. . . we kinda get it. . . but, seriously, what the fuck happened between these
two idiots?

14. August - Early September 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass-ish: Listen to "Where Do My Bluebird Fly" by The Tallest Man on Earth
[HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Giuw53r2BQ/)
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Run Away" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=lwKoGKp0QXk/)
>
> *Some content warnings for this (admittedly rough) chapter -- SOME SPOILERS BE
AHEAD:
>
> There are brief but explicit suicidal thoughts and ideas from John during the
scene where Molly mentions Seattle. Brief animal death when Sherlock discusses
wolves while they camp. There is an intense dysphoric experience for John while
being physically intimate with Sherlock during their first night camping in the
tent, as well as some very negative internal thoughts in the aftermath. Brief and
vague past reference to violence against a trans woman, a transphobic slur, and her
possible death during John's memory of being back in a 'regular' bar in Rapid City,
SD as a teenager. And, as always, some pre-transition memories from John's life,
including abuse from his parents.
>
> I know these are hard topics. If you have any questions before reading, ways to
contact me are in my profile. Be safe, and comfortable, and remember that we know
they get their happy ending in a year :) Enjoy, friends.

August – Early September 1991

“Are you sure?”

I looked up at Sherlock in the dim light of my bedroom lamp, tearing my gaze away
from the ripples of warm light across the rumpled sheets on my bed. Two of his
curled hairs were strewn across the white sheets, buried in wrinkles from gripping
hands. The sheets were still warm.

He gently cradled the syringe in his long, steady fingers. The needle seemed to
pierce the buzzing air between us, making everything hot and sharp, as if the air
itself was about to snap, and both of us were preparing for the burst of pain.

We looked at each other, and he waited. I didn’t know how I would respond.

We’d spent the whole day side by side in my truck like normal, driving between each
of the Ranger stations to prep them on security for the upcoming Road Lottery in
September. Sherlock had huffed and complained the whole way, saying how it was all
a disaster to let “common idiots” drive their own vehicles on the Road, and how we
were destroying the entire ecosystem, and how it shouldn’t be our fault if everyone
gets eaten by bears.

And the entire time I hid my grin and shook my head, patting his knee whenever he
got to the end of a long speech before I climbed out of the truck and headed
towards my next bit of work, knowing that he would be there waiting for me when I
got back – feet propped high up on the dashboard and curls in the open breeze.

It was on the final drive back to Toklat when it had happened – when he’d reached
over with his hand, and rubbed it slowly up my thigh, then suddenly pressed his
palm between my legs, right over the soft bulge of my cock through my uniform
pants. And when I’d cursed at him and told him that I was fucking driving, and
still technically on shift, he’d simply smirked at me and rubbed the heel of his
hand harder, so I could really feel it, and he kept up the rhythm, with the muscles
of his forearm flexing, until I was bucking up into his hand with my hips while I
drove. Until I’d finally gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and pulled
over to the side of the road, then watched as his hand disappeared into my pants,
gripping me through my boxers, breathing hard until I thudded my head back on the
headrest and silently came.

The second we’d finally made it back to my cabin at twilight, after hosing off the
truck the quickest way we ever had, I’d dragged him through the shadows of the
Toklat trees by the wrist, and pulled him into my cabin, and pushed him up against
the wall so I could kiss deeply into his mouth. Which had led to our clothes thrown
down and strewn across the floor, except my boxers, and tripping into the bedroom
like I always imagined teenagers must do it, and falling into oceans and seas of
white sheets, caressing his skin while I tasted him with my tongue and lips. The
sounds of his sighs had been reckless and undone, echoing in my ears and moaning up
my spine.

And then, as he was relaxing in my arms and breathing in our combined scent, just
as the little dust particles were starting to settle back down on my sheets, I’d
suddenly realized that I missed my shot the day before. The moment my body had
tensed, he’d immediately sat up and somehow known.

“Your shot,” he’d said, so calmly, as if he wasn’t saying anything out of the
ordinary at all. As if he was just talking about a flu vaccine, or a vitamin, and
not the little syringe that the older doctor in Fairbanks, the one whose name I’d
gotten from my previous doctor in Death Valley right before I moved Parks, had held
in his hands during my first visit, when I was trying not to sink back into the
fading wallpaper with shame, and he’d said, chuckling, “ _Well, here’s your magic
lie in a bottle, then, son,_ ” as he handed it over, and it had taken me almost a
year to find another doctor to go to, nearly all the way south in Anchorage, who
handed over the drugs every three months without a word.

I’d swallowed hard and stared up at the ceiling, not meeting his gaze. “Yeah,” I’d
said back, after too long a pause. My palms on his skin felt clammy and cold.

He’d traced through the hair on my chest with his fingers, the way that beautiful
women did in old Bond films as they smoked cigarettes, with a tropical breeze
blowing through the window, and expensive scotch in a gold-rimmed glass. The moment
felt heavy and drawn out, and I wondered if he was thinking, dragging his
fingertips across my chest, that none of it was really real – that it was all part
of a fabrication, a costume, a disguise inside my own veins.

“I can go –” Sherlock had started to say, when suddenly I’d heard myself blurt out,
“Will you do it?”

And so we found ourselves there less than five minutes later, sitting by the
flickering light of the old lamp, with his grey eyes fixed on mine, and my syringe
in his hands – the first time I’d seen it in anyone else’s hands but my own.

He knelt on the floor before me, still completely naked, and I found myself
transfixed by the small wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth.
Proof that he was human, and that he had lived. That he wasn’t some dream.

“Are you sure?” he asked again, or for maybe the third time, or even the fourth.
His fingers gripped the syringe with a sad familiarity, and I tried not to think in
that moment of the reason why he knew so well how to use it.

In that moment, sitting there in the heavy silence of the earth, I wanted to tell
him about the first time I remembered ever going to get a shot – when my dad had
taken me to the clinic four towns over to get I don’t even remember what vaccine.
Back when I was six or seven.

I wanted to tell Sherlock how I had reached out for his hand, completely terrified
of the needle, and he had started to pull his fingers away, and thumped me hard on
the back, and said, “ _Come on, now, don’t be scared like your sister. Take it with
your chin up. Come on, now._ ” How I’d nodded and blinked away my tears and let go
of his hand, then held my head high as the terrifying shot went into my arm.

And I wanted, without even knowing how I would ever form the words, to tell
Sherlock how, when I was twenty-three, I sat in a little motel room two hours
outside Canyonlands, with a brand new syringe in my own shaking hands. How I’d
rented the room so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do my first shot in the
crowded Ranger bunks. How I’d used two whole vacation days just to do it.

I wanted to tell him how I’d gripped the piece of paper in my hands, the
instructions the doctor had given me back at the clinic earlier that morning –
gripped it until it wrinkled and nearly ripped. How, at the moment I finally took a
breath and held the needle to my skin, how I’d heard in my head, “ _Take it with
your chin up, now, don’t be scared,_ ” and how I’d imagined I could feel that first
press of testosterone burn through my body, instantly making right all my incorrect
bones. How I’d imagined I could feel my dad’s palm on my back.

“I’m sure,” I told Sherlock, giving him a quick nod. My voice sounded like I hadn’t
used it in days.

I expected him to nod back seriously, or double-check that everything was correct,
or ask me if it was alright one more time.

But instead, he looked up at me, kneeling with his bare knees on the hardwood
floor, and he smiled. His eyes twinkled in the wavering light, and the wrinkles in
the corners of his eyes deepened like beautiful crags – the valleys etched into the
vibrant earth of Denali by the rushing rivers, flowing over the edge of the horizon
like swirled marble. The ones you could only fully see looking down from the
tallest peaks.

Before I could smile back, he looked back down at his hands. My thigh twitched. He
pushed up the fabric of my boxers to reveal my bare skin, then effortlessly,
without any hesitation at all, pressed the needle into my thigh.

Everything was silent. I wasn’t afraid.

I felt us both holding our breath as the slow, tingling burn started to flicker
under my skin, pressing against his palm which was rubbing slowly along my thigh,
tickling the hairs. And I felt, in that moment, that his palm was actually
underneath my skin itself, reaching deep into my muscle and bone. That his fingers
were surging through my blood, fixing every little sticking-out part of my body
back into place, and burning with a strange heat through the soft cock that still
sat in the pouch in my boxers, much cooler than warm skin.

I didn’t realize I’d moaned until I heard him suck in a breath in response.

Before I could say anything, try and explain what was happening to me, or why this
flame was running up my neck, Sherlock was cleaning and putting away the needle
faster than I ever thought possible. I fought down a wave of nausea in my gut –
that it was all too much for him, and too bare, and that he was trying to leave as
fast as he could. I watched him, mouth pressed shut, with a desperate plea for him
not to leave on the tip of my tongue. I waited.

But the second that everything was put away in the little pouch, he was surging up
towards my face with his large hands, and gripping my neck and jaw, and pulling me
down to kiss me hotly on the mouth, open and wet.

Shocked relief exploded through my chest. Fire rolled down my spine in a thick,
heavy heat. It wasn’t the brilliant sparks or aching pulse that I usually felt when
Sherlock’s lips were on mine. It wasn’t that heady, breathless, vibrating
excitement, or the stunning disbelief, or the wild, untamed, _wanting_ thing that
snarled in my core and burned in my thighs.

It was. . .

It was desperation, the way Sherlock’s warm hands gripped my jaw – my beard just
barely growing back in after I’d let him shave me two weeks ago. It was a
breakable, quiet thing, as he silently shifted to his feet, not breaking our kiss,
and climbed on top of my lap on the bed, straddling my thighs with my tongue in his
mouth. Desperation as his soft, bare cock pressed against my own through a thin
layer of fabric, not even erect, and yet somehow, with his wet lips moaning across
mine, it was the most intimate thing he’d ever done to me – the most erotic. As if
his hands had physically pressed the testosterone into my muscle, burying
themselves beneath my layers of skin, covered in my own warm blood.

As if seeing the stripped-down physicality of me as John Watson, the reason for my

beard and my face and my chest, distilled to liquid in a little bottle and a needle
in a thigh, was somehow sex in itself. Was a truer sex than the sex we just had in
the rumpled sheets, gasping and sweat-covered and rocking the bed against the
floor.

The weight of his body on my thighs was intoxicating. I held him in my hands and
surrendered as his fingertips trailed over every inch of my body – my jaw and my
neck, the rises of muscle on my chest, the lines of my ribs. They wound through my
hair, tracing the greying strands, and his thumb brushed across my lower lip, wet
from his own mouth.

It was slow.

I realized, as his body settled heavily on top of mine, and as he sighed into my
mouth, that neither of us was touching the other person to try and come. That his
hands on my skin, warm and firm, were touching me to feel, as if his fingertips
themselves could seep below the surface and touch the testosterone itself, making
my body one with his.

Sweat prickled on my forehead at the same time it dripped down his spine. The air
was thick and choking, clogging up my lungs. He was on me, and in me, and
surrounding me in the air. He was the warmth within my own marrow – kissing the
surface of my beating heart through my lips. I tasted inside his mouth, slowly
lapping at his tongue, and as his soft groan echoed through my bones, I noticed
that everything felt too heavy.

Too real.

My chest panged. I kissed him one last time, small and wet, before pulling away,
lips tingling and swollen. His breath was warm where it puffed across my open
mouth. For a moment, we both froze there, trapped within each other’s arms, with
the weight of his body pressing on the tender spot on my thigh from the needle.

Outside, the wind blew a few stray branches against the bedroom window, crackling
against the glass in a shower of taps. The room unfroze.

Sherlock held my jaw for one more moment in his hand and looked at me with an
unreadable expression on his face. My skin burned where he’d touched me. Then he
slid his fingers away without another word, and he moved to step off me back onto
his feet.

I let him go, trailing my palms over his bare skin as he moved away, until my
fingertips were just brushing the empty air. He didn’t meet my gaze as he stooped
to pick up his underwear from where it had been thrown off near the bedroom door.
He pulled them on. Our deep breathing echoed in the room, mixing with the soft pads
of his bare feet on the wood floors. He reached out to flip on the light to the
main room of the cabin, flooding the bedroom with fresh, bright light – harshly
illuminating the areas of my bedroom that had before been in shadow. It made the
bare skin of my stomach look fluorescent and fake.

He extended his hand to pick up the pouch still sitting next to my bed.

For the first time in nearly two minutes, our eyes met.

I saw in them, with something like a terrifying punch, that his grey eyes were just
as afraid of the heaviness as I had been – that he had noticed, too, how the press
of his warm, soft body against mine right after he gave me my shot had been
something else entirely, as if he had reached straight inside my skin, an act that
could never be undone. As if our lungs had joined, pumping hot blood straight into
each other’s bodies.

For a moment, I thought of the key sitting in the drawer. If I should take it out
and thrust it at him and tell him that every time I’d taken my shot for the last
twenty years, I’d always still felt that tiny spark of fear at the needle, but how
just then, just now, I hadn’t felt any fear at all as his steady fingers guided it
into my own thigh.

But he was still naked, nearly naked, and he broke our stunned gaze before I could
say anything more. He grabbed one of my old t-shirts from out of the closet and
throw it over his lean frame. Then he walked out into the kitchen to start the
kettle for some tea. He left the pouch still sitting on the bedside table
untouched.

I looked down at my thigh, feeling like I was moving in slow motion. Nothing seemed
real as I moved my fingers over the place where he had given me the shot, as if the
warm, firm thigh of my body beneath my hand was just my imagination, or someone
else’s leg entirely.

“You have some frozen salmon in here,” I heard Sherlock suddenly say from the
kitchen, voice completely normal. “Should I heat that up?”

I cleared my throat and got to my feet too quickly. I reached out and gripped the
wall as the room spun. “Yeah,” I said back, unsure if I even said the word out
loud. But I heard him get out the pan for the stove, and the rustle of the bag of
fish from the freezer.

I stood there for one extra minute in the empty room, trying and failing to feel
the warmth that had been there before.

I wondered, as I finally picked up the pathetic little pouch and threw it up into
my closet, how I would possibly find the words to tell Lugnut what had just
happened. That Sherlock had just held my shot in his bare hands, and pressed it
into my skin, and then _kissed_ me. How that kiss had felt like none he’d ever
given me before.

How I’d pulled away.

\--

I watched Molly’s back where she stood over her stove, fixing up her long hair into
a messy bun.

She was cooking for us, just like she normally did whenever I came over. Even after
all those years, I still asked her every time if she would let me help her out and
cook instead. And every time, even after all those years, she still shoved me out
of her kitchen, not believing I could make anything more than canned soup, and
telling me to make myself useful and fix something, or chop her some more wood.

The homemade stew she was throwing together for us was bubbling on the stove, and
the air in her cabin was thick with the smell of moose meat she’d bought off one of
the bus drivers who got a moose hunting permit last week. She was wearing one of
Greg’s oversized flannel shirts, thrown on over basketball shorts, and I thought,
for the millionth time, that she somehow managed to make absolutely anything look
beautiful, in a way that teenaged-me would have never even been able to imagine.

“So,” she said, moving her lips around the hair-tie in her mouth, “You haven’t told
me yet what your plans are for the winter?”

I set down the broken snowshoe I’d been fixing for her on the kitchen table, glad
that her back was to me so she didn’t see the brief look of nerves that shot across
my face. I cleared my throat to buy time.

The key was still sitting in my pocket.

“Oh, you know. My usual, I guess. Got my cabin in Talkeetna waiting for me – I
stocked it up before I left to come here for the season.”

I saw Molly’s shoulders tense from over the stove. She picked up the spoon and
started lazily stirring the stew.

“Oh,” she said slowly. She cleared her throat. “I guess I just thought –”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. I stared down at the broken snowshoe in my
hands, as if my answer would be written in the broken strap. “You thought . . .?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly, getting down two bowls. “I, uh . . . well, Greg and I
are taking a week down in Seattle in September, right after I close down the summer
kennels. You ever been to Seattle?”

I almost laughed out loud. The memory slammed into me, blacking out Molly’s
familiar cabin kitchen in front of me and replacing it with a glittering city
bathed in fog – a city I hadn’t thought about in nearly ten years.

I’d spent twenty-four hours in Seattle, give or take, the year I drove my truck up
from Death Valley to Denali for the first time. After three hours staring at the
outline of the Space Needle through my motel window in the dark, watching the
lights twinkle as it drifted through the thick fog, I’d heaved myself to my feet,
forced myself outside, and walked down smaller and smaller streets until the bars
started to look like places where my younger self would have wanted to go.

Except I hadn’t gone into any of them, not even slowed down as the thick metal
doors opened and closed again and again with blasts of pulsing music and hot air.
Groups of sweating, dancing men with their hands on each other’s’ bare chests. And
I’d somehow found myself standing by myself at the end of a creaking pier, alone at
the edge of the cold sea, with the icy wind in my face. The wood beneath my palms
was wet and smelled like salt, and I’d felt that the entire earth was sleeping at
my back, pushing me out towards the water and the horizon line with thick silence,
bathed in black.

I’d stood there for what felt like hours, wondering if I wouldn’t be better off
just walking off the splintered wood, letting the icy sea swallow up my skin. I’d
thought of James, far away and starting his day in Baltimore. I’d wondered what the
man next to him looked like when he woke up, cuddled close against James’ warmth,
knowing the scent of his bare skin in a way that I never, ever would.

I’d stood there, watching the fog until the sea birds started to sing, and the
fishermen made their way on aching legs down to the rusting boats. I’d watched
their huge, rough hands grab at wet rope and sea-stained nets.

I was between two worlds, far out of the minds of everyone in back Death Valley,
and just a name on a sheet of paper to a group of faceless Rangers to the north. I
was a nobody, expected by no one, with no one on earth who knew that I was standing
alone on a pier, and that I was John. No one who knew that I had existed before I
was nineteen years old, and also no one who knew that I existed now.

I’d wanted to drown. Have the last thing I felt on earth be my own hand on my flat
chest, reminding myself that I had been real, and that I had been true. That I,
John Watson, had been undeniable flesh and bone. And then I could close my eyes and
rest, and no longer remember the taste of my mom’s cherry pie. No longer remember
the warmth of my dad’s hand on my back, or the smell of my sister’s shampoo, or how
loud the shotgun blast had been.

I could just rest, and be buried at sea with a bulge still between my legs, and it
wouldn’t matter to my ghost at all what name they ended up carving into my grave.

Just as my grip tightened on the wet wood, and my legs tensed to jump, my eyes were
drawn to a sudden movement far out in the misty bay. For some reason, I’d stood
there frozen, riveted on the spot where something huge and black had moved beneath
the water. And I’d finally gasped as the head of a gigantic gray whale suddenly
exploded from the calm surface, bursting up into the sky with a booming plume of
spray.

It had arched up into the mist, shining like silver in the dawn, and it was just
close enough that I saw its beady black eye, as if it was fixed on me - _me_ \- out
of every other human being on the whole west coast. Then it disappeared back into
the sea in a great splash of foam and sea, muffled, as if it had dived down into
midnight blue velvet.

And I’d suddenly known, even though I hadn’t yet set eyes on the damn place, that
Denali – that little circled speck on the map in my truck – that it was my home,
calling out to me across the black water through that gray whale. That for the
first time since I handed over that backpack full of cash to the nurse, I was
finally making the right choice in my life.

That I didn’t care whether James ever thought of my name again. That I wanted to
live.

And I’d realized, as the sleepy city started to come alive at my back, that even
though I’d spent the better part of the last ten years as a Ranger in National
Parks, that there, now, standing on the Seattle pier, with the invisible hints of
the Alaska wilderness hovering just beyond the foggy horizon, I was finally about
to become a Ranger. That I was finally free.

“Spent the night there in a hotel on my first drive up here,” I said to Molly,
blinking out of the memory. I watched Molly spoon out steaming stew into the bowls.
“Didn’t see the city at all, really, just . . slept there and kept driving.”

Molly snorted over the black pepper she was cracking over the stew. “You men are
all alike. Get to go out and see the world on your own, no cares at all, no worries
or fears . . .” She kept talking as she set a bowl in front of me, slowly shaking
her head, “And all you have to say about it is that you saw the inside of a hotel
and got some sleep.”

I barked out a laugh and talked over a warm mouthful of stew. “I spent a few hours
standing on a pier after I couldn’t sleep. Watched the fishermen go out to their
boats. Saw some seagulls out in the distance. Does that count?”

Molly’s eyes brightened across the table. “Did you see that famous market? Where
they throw the fish?”

I frowned. “The what --?”

“Nevermind.”

She huffed and rolled her eyes at me and started to shove a mouthful of stew into
her mouth. I grinned at her and winked.

“Of course I saw Pike Place Market, you ninny,” I said, and then laughed as she
kicked me under the table with her socked foot.

We didn’t talk much while we ate, just both enjoyed the easy silence that came from
countless dinners spent over that kitchen table. By the time I got to my feet to
clear up our dishes, I could tell something was on her mind from the way she was
frowning down at the worn wood. I kept my ears open, waiting, as I washed the
dishes at the sink with my back to her.

Then she spoke, so softly I had to stop scrubbing the dish in my hands to hear.

“I’m going to miss him,” she said.

My heart sank. I’d never heard her voice sound so lost before – so young and
wavering and small. I wanted to run out of the cabin, go find Greg, and drag him
back out east by the collar. Yell in his face that he couldn’t possibly leave Molly
Hooper alone for a whole entire winter, not after I saw the way her face lit up
each time she talked about him all summer. Not after he made her eyes shine like
the stars.

I could hear her fingers tapping out a random pattern onto the wood table. When she
didn’t say anything else, I spoke into the silence. “Seven months is a long time,”
I agreed gently. “Of course you’ll miss him.”

And as I stood there in Molly’s warm cabin, clenching the soapy sponge in my hand,
I forbid myself from thinking of the key in my own pocket, what would happen if
Sherlock said no, what would happen if he went back to London on that plane beside
Greg, leaving me behind, and I wouldn’t even be able to tell Molly that I was going
to miss him as if I was missing one of my own limbs, because for all she knew he
was just my colleague and my friend. Not the man who held me when I woke up each
morning, and let me hold him, too.

I heard her sigh. “I feel stupid,” she finally said. “It’s not like it’s gong to be
seven whole months – not really. We’ll meet up with each other a few times – Greg
said something about a vacation somewhere where it’s warm, someplace south. And
there’s obviously the phone in the offices. And letters. . .”

Her voice trailed off, and I suddenly realized the thick ball of unspoken emotion
hiding behind her words.

“But he’s . . . not coming back next season?” I said.

Her chair scraped on the wooden floor, and I suddenly felt her arm against mine as
she reached into the sink and picked up another dish to wash. She didn’t meet my
eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t know.” She looked down at her hands washing
the bowl and sighed through her nose. “The NPS isn’t paying them to come back next
season, you know? None of their team. So unless something new pulls through, or he
finds some other way . . .”

“He’ll be in London,” I finished for her quietly.

She nodded down at her hands, then sniffed and quickly wiped a hand over her face.
“God, I hate this,” she said. She laughed under her breath and took a step away
from me before I could decide whether to put my arm around her shoulders. “I always
told myself I wouldn’t be the silly girl who cried over a boy,” she said, staring
up at the ceiling to blink the water out of her eyes.

It physically ached in my chest to watch her hands shake. I realized that my own
eyes were embarrassingly wet. “You’re not a silly girl, kid,” I said, glad my voice
was steady. “And Greg’s not just a boy,” I went on, feeling bold. “He’s . . .” I
raised my hand searching for the right word. “You know, he’s your . . .”

She nodded even before I could finish the sentence with a small smile on her lips.
“Yeah, I know,” she said under her breath. “He is.”

I took a step towards her, but she put up a hand to stop me. “No, no, if you come
and hug me right now I’ll lose it all over again,” she laughed.

My hand fell back awkwardly at my side as I matched her tired smile, and I stood
there leaning on the counter, watching her try and pull herself together. I
realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry – if I’d ever even seen
it before. I suddenly wondered if she was one of those kids who tried fiercely not
to cry when they were little. If she was like me, when I’d clench my hands, and
stomp my feet, and scrunch up my whole face just to keep a tear from escaping my
eye.
I remembered how I’d wanted to cry during that sunrise in Seattle, as the warm
hints of the sun were just starting to pool across the misty waters, and I’d
clenched my hands on the rotting wood beam to keep me from throwing myself over
into the sea. And I’d wondered, as the salt breeze brushed the heat from my face,
and the plume of the grey whale glittered up into the dawn sky, if it would have
looked sadder for a bystander to see a woman crying alone on the sagging pier at
sunrise, or a man.

I still stood there as she re-tied her hair up into a bun, wiping one last time at
the tear-track on her face. The sudden, fierce urge to pull her into my arms
surprised even myself. I’d never felt such a protective rush towards even my own
sister – even that night she sat by my side on my little attic bed, hunched over
her pregnant belly and crying into her hands.

I waited to speak until we were already busy again clearing up the kitchen, me
washing the dishes while Molly ladled stew into Tupperware to freeze.

“You’ll be alright, kid,” I said softly, not looking up at her over my shoulder.
“The both of you will be alright.”

The sounds of us cleaning the kitchen sounded more domestic than any evening I’d
ever heard back in our falling-apart house in South Dakota. It took her almost two
whole minutes to finally answer me back, “Thank you, John.”

When I gave her a quick hug goodbye outside her door half an hour later, Molly held
me by the shoulders before I could take a step away.

“You’ll be alright, too, yeah?” she said.

For one brief moment, everything around me turned to ice. It seemed impossible that
she knew, unbelievable that she had seen, and yet . . . maybe Greg had told her the
meaning behind what I mentioned to him that day a few weeks ago in the car, or
maybe she had seen the way my eyes lingered on Sherlock’s neck, or maybe she had
seen us hold hands in the shadows, heard the way I said his name, seen our lips
touch –

“I mean, you think you’ll keep in touch?” Molly was saying, after I had no idea how
long I stood there frozen. “You’ve become such good friends, I don’t think you have
to never see him again . . .”

And I could tell, all at once, that she really meant what she said, that we were
friends. I breathed out a silent sigh of relief, and tried to will my hands to stop
shaking. Tried to tamp down the self-hatred and shame that I was even this affected
by her finding out the thing that made me the most happy, like my eyes, too, could
shine like stars.

The key burned in my pocket.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, shrugging. She gave me a hard look, one that made me feel
two feet tall. I fought with my hand not to fiddle the key in my pocket. I forced a
wider smile. “I mean, yeah, I like working with him. So, who knows, maybe. Like you
said, maybe they’ll be back next summer. We’ll see.”

She looked at me for another long moment in the half-dark. A cool mountain breeze
blew between us, bringing shivers across my skin. Already my shoulders ached at the
thought of the long drive back to Toklat along the Road.

Finally, Molly licked her lips and stepped back. I expected her to tell me
goodnight, but instead I watched her eyes trace the lines of my face. “Look, I
never told you this really this season, but . . . I’m so glad,” she said, voice
barely above a whisper. “That you found him to spend time with . . . that he’s
been. . . Well, you know all these years I’ve been bugging you to move out East.
And it kills me to think of you alone in your cabin out at Toklat, going on your
patrols by yourself. So, knowing you’ve had him to hang out with, it’s made me so
happy.” She held up a hand, “And I know it’s none of my damn business, but. . .
John, you should keep that,” she finally said. “You should try and hold on to that.
Not go through another whole winter so alone.”

And staring into her face, holding my breath, I suddenly understood all the words
she wasn’t saying. That it pained her to know that she was my only friend on earth,
and that she wasn’t exaggerating in the least when she said she was glad I had
someone by my side in my truck that summer.

I swallowed hard as I tried to find the words to say. I was fiercely glad that the
darkness was hiding my blush over the fact that I was holding back tears for the
second damn time that night.

“Thanks, kid,” I finally said, breath fogging in the air. She nodded once, as if
that was all the answer she needed to hear, then glanced towards my truck. “Drive
safe,” she said, then she gave me one last wave before closing the cabin door
behind her.

Except I didn’t make it back to Toklat until two o’clock in the morning that night,
because I spent the next two hours after walking away from Molly’s door lying on my
side on the cold kennel ground, with Lugnut sleeping in my arms, and a brass key
held so tightly in my hand it left indents on my skin.

When I opened my cabin door, with sleepy circles under my eyes, and an ache in my
shoulders, there was still a warm, damp spot on the front of my shirt from his
little nose.

\--

For all the sleepless nights I spent wondering how to put my plan into action, in
the end, it was Sherlock’s idea to take one last grand backpacking trip together.

He said it so matter-of-factly as we sat across from each other at my little table,

hunched over bowls of plain pasta with sauce, as if he didn’t know that I had
noticed his eyes just flicker up to the calendar on my wall, tracking the dwindling
days left until he supposedly got on a London-bound plane.

I could tell he was expecting me to say I didn’t have enough time – that there were
end-of-season reports to write, and the Road Lottery to handle, and covering extra
shifts, and that I couldn’t drop everything for two days to go out on a trip with
him for no reason.

I clenched my hand against my jeans under the table and nodded. “Yeah, ok,” I said,
trying to sound calm. I went back to tastelessly eating mouthfuls of pasta.

I could feel his stare on me from the other side of the table, one eyebrow arched
slightly in surprise, but he didn’t say anything more, aside from, “You decide the
Unit,” and then he dropped his bowl unceremoniously in the sink and plopped down on
the couch with a book to read for the evening. He put his socked feet up on my
wall, like he knew I hated, and I could feel his smug grin from clear across the
room.

I really should have known then that he had his own plan to enact . . .

But I didn’t know, didn’t realize, and so we set off side-by-side from the camper
bus a week later, breathing in the fresh sunrise and shouldering our packs. We were
only going to stay out one night in the tundra, just enough to lie out under the
clear, open stars, and smell the fresh, soft earth, and feel a little soreness in
our muscles.

Just enough time for me to hold his hand in the tent and beg him not to leave.

That hike out there, that beautiful, shining, hike through the sun and breeze, with
the brass key waiting ready in my pocket, I felt like I was the king of the entire
world. That I was an eagle resting proudly on the tallest Denali peak, and that I
could outstretch my wings, with the wind ruffling through my bones, and leap off
and soar through the clear, open skies, tasting the clouds on my tongue, with the
pollen dancing around my skin.

I kept Molly’s words in my mind on a loop, the assurances that she had unknowingly
transferred straight through to my blood by her touch the other night. That he was
my friend, my dearest friend, and that he would want to say yes, and that he would
stay. That I couldn’t be the only one who knew that he was more than just a boy to
me.

He was vibrating beside me, too, filled with restless energy under the bright sun.
He ran his fingers idly over rocks and branches as we passed, caressing the earth
with his own touch with every step. There was something brimming in the air,
something beautiful and full, and the warmth of it made me constantly shiver down
my spine, itching to grab hold of the whole earth with my hands and press it up
against my chest.

That day, I could have done absolutely anything under the sun. I could have
survived losing hundreds of James Sholto’s to Baltimore, and hundreds of shotgun
blasts, and hundreds of surgical scars on my chest. I could have taken on a grizzly
bear with my bare hands and won. I could have looked up at the sky, and puffed out
my lungs, and screamed out to the universe that I was sleeping with a man.

And all the while, at the same time, I felt like everything could go up in flames
at the smallest spark – explode and incinerate in a cloud of black smoke,
disappearing from the face of the earth, with me standing helplessly knee-deep in
the rubble and fire all alone.

I ignored that part of my mind, and I breathed in the clean scent of the moss and
stream.

“You’re awfully chipper today,” Sherlock huffed under his breath when we were
midway through crossing a branch of the river. The icy water thrashed and shoved
against our buried calves, threatening to topple us down into the rushing current
and soaking our socks and feet.

I hadn’t realized I was smiling as we held on to each other’s shoulders and

shuffled sideways across it. I tried to hide my grin as I grunted against a
particularly strong section of current. “Yeah, well, it’s a gorgeous day, in a
gorgeous place,” I said back lamely.

He groaned. “Of course, you would say something like that.”

And for some reason, instead of feeling irritated at him, I only laughed, feeling
buzzing and lighter than air. “Oh, come on,” I said, as we took our final steps up
onto the dry bank, breathing hard. “Look at yourself, you asshole, you’re smiling,
too.”

He frowned and put his hands on his hips as sheets of water dripped down from his
soaked legs. “I am _not_ smiling,” he said. “I’m soaking wet after crossing that
damn river since you wouldn’t allow us to get too close to those moose a mile back,
where it would have taken only two-steps to cross instead of thirty-two, and how
I’m cold, and my feet are wet, and all you’ve brought to eat is more of your
revolting peanut butter and oatmeal. There’s no possible way that I am smiling
right now.”

I didn’t respond, but finished changing into my dry socks and re-shouldered my
pack, not even waiting for him behind me as I set off. My chest felt warm.

“You are smiling,” I finally said, speaking softly over my shoulder.

I heard him rushing behind me to try and catch up. He never argued back.

That night, sitting by the remnants of an oatmeal dinner at our cook site, Sherlock
leaned back against my chest between my legs and sighed as I wrapped my arms around
him from behind. He sipped slowly at the few fingers of whiskey he’d snuck along in
the bottom of his bag, passing the metal flask back and forth to me so we could
share. The rim felt warm from the press of his lips, and the whiskey warmed through
every inch of my cold blood and bones.

I breathed in his curls, and looked down at his hands, as he looked out ahead of us
at the slowly setting summer sun. The earth was painted in soft pink and gold, and
the wildflowers blew in the breeze like quilted waves along a shore.

It was one of those moments where I couldn’t believe I was allowed to witness
something so beautiful, to be a part of something so perfect and good. Where I
wondered what I’d ever done to deserve being chosen for such a scene.

And all the while, that thick, quivering blackness hovered at the corner of my
vision – threatening to burn it all before me into ash because it was too
beautiful, to ignite it in a deadly spark, to tip me over off the top of the cliff,
and I wouldn’t have any feathered wings to catch me as I fell. . .

“You know wolves mate each other for life,” Sherlock suddenly said. His voice was
quiet, and yet it sounded like a bomb blast across the still silence of the tundra,
echoing across the moss and against the farthest peaks.

It startled me out of my spiraling thoughts, and I clung to the sound of his lungs
as they breathed under my arms, pressing back against my chest through the warm
line of his spine. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, how I could at one
moment be soaring breathlessly through the clouds, and at the next moment be
terrified that the air itself would burn my skin.

He kept talking before I could find any words to respond.

“Usually, I guess I should say,” he went on. “Most of them do.” I could feel his
heartrate quickening beneath his chest. “I used to think that was such a load of
shit when I was younger. Back when I first started my research and working with
Greg. All the papers said it – all the big names in the field, and yet I couldn’t
believe it. The fact that they could be the freest creatures on earth, with nothing
to hold them back, and everywhere to go, and they have their whole pack to protect
them, and that they’d still choose to stick with only one mate? Forever? Didn’t
believe it at all.”

I snorted softly, imagining a young Sherlock Holmes going head to head with an old
professor in a stuffy office. “I can imagine that,” I said.

I felt him grin. He leaned back further into my arms. “Anyway, I thought I was
going to prove that everyone was wrong. The ultimate tracking project. Me versus
the establishment and taking down the man and all that. I was young, remember.”

I smiled and pressed my cheek into his hair. “I know.”

“So I walked out of Greg’s office one day and took a taxi to Heathrow and got on a
plane to the nearest location to a place with wolves I could find on the flight
board –”

I laughed, “Of course you did –”

“Spent the entire summer avoiding all of Greg’s calls and bumming rides around to
different Parks in the States, using up all the savings I’d put away until my
brother started funneling me some emergency cash. I checked up on old wolf packs
from all the biggest research papers – whether those wolves were still alive, and
whether the mates were still together. Kept all my notes written down in about ten
spiral notebooks in my bag.”

He paused, then, and I noticed that his voice was getting strained. I waited for
him to speak, focusing on the beat of his heart beneath my arms. He shook a little
in the breeze, and I wrapped him closer against me. I could imagine it all – his
curls, and his young face, his eager eyes scanning the woods with a spiral notebook
in his hands. I could see it as if I had been standing there, back when the scars
on my chest still hurt when I moved.

“I found this one pair, this alpha male and female who’d been tracked seen together
for nearly ten years. Led a pack together around the Northern Rockies mostly. I
followed them at a distance for nearly a month. Kept running out of food or water,
having to go back to a town and re-supply and then leave to go and hunt them all
down again. Utterly ridiculous waste of time –”

“Yeah, survival sure can be a waste of time –”

“You know what I mean. Anyways, I came back out to re-find them one day after I
took a weekend off taking a trip out to Denver. I remember it was early, just
before sunrise. I was just packing up my tent from the night when I saw something
move off in the distance – realized it was the female walking around in a circle.
Something was on the ground. Something that wasn’t moving.”

He paused again, and this time one of his hands reached up to hold my own. His
fingers were shaking, and I knew it wasn’t from the cold. “By the time I got close
enough to see . . . it was the male. Dead. Shot down in the back of the left
shoulder. The female must have caused hell enough that the hunter couldn’t bag it
after they brought it down – only reason I could think of why they’d leave the
carcass out there in the middle of nowhere. I . . . I watched her stay with him
from a distance. For three days. She didn’t . . . leave, for anything. Didn’t leave
for food or water, just lay down next to the carcass in the grass.”

“Is that typical?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud.

He shook his head against my chest. “No.”

“Did she --?”

“She died,” he said.

I suddenly felt that the tundra was empty and cold, a huge valley filled with
ghosts, and they were silently howling against my skin. I shivered as the last rays
of the sun dipped below the peaks, bathing everything around us in shadow and grey.

“I went back to London after that,” he went on in a whisper. “It was worthless,
what I was trying to do. The fact had already been proven.” He lifted his hand
before him, moving it as he spoke as if to make a headline. “Wolves Mate for Life –
Already Known Fact Proven Again by an Ignorant Kid.”

My chest panged. “What did you do when you got back?”

He sighed through his nose, and it sounded like a laugh at himself. “I couldn’t
stop thinking about it. Not even . . . not the death, really. Not that. Just . . .
what could be so bloody great about something that would make a wild animal want to
die? It didn’t make any sense. There was no logic to it. No . . . no rules.”

I could tell he was holding something back. “So . . .?”

His body felt unnaturally heavy against me. I felt like he was on the cusp of
saying something – something important. I held my breath waiting, ears straining
for the eventually sound of his quiet voice. I heard my blood beat in my own ears.

But instead, he only took a deep, long breath after a few silent moments, and he
said, “So, wolves mate for life. It’s fact. I’ve just had to accept it.”

I could tell that we were talking about far more than wolves, and the air around us
felt fragile, too tense with energy, as if it could crack. “It can be a hard thing
to accept,” I said softly, pressing my lips into his hair, and then he was turning
in my arms, holding my face in his hands, and he was kissing me, so sweet and
softly that it felt like puffs of air against my lips.

It felt like yearning – the sweet, utter longing I’d felt standing on that Seattle
pier, for that grey whale to truly see me, and for it to somehow know my name.

“Take me to bed,” he whispered against my lips, and his breath was warm and wet
while his fingers stroked my jaw. It made the entire rest of the vast tundra
surrounding us fall away, dissolving into the oncoming mist, as if our warm tent at
our backs was the only solid place left on the earth. It called out to me, its
fabric sides flapping in the soft wind. I wanted to feel nothing but the earth
beneath my thighs, and his warm body on top of mine, and his sweet tongue in my
mouth, and his hands, the soft hair on his stomach, the muscles of his upper arms .
. .

I shoved our cooking supplies into the bear can without cleaning anything off and
followed him to the tent, heart in my throat. We were about to do a thing we’d done
countless times before, and yet walking in his footsteps, with the key in my
pocket, and the echo of his story in my head, I felt that we were about to leap off
the tallest cliff side by side, and neither of us would find out if we had wings
until after we jumped.

He pulled me down on top of him on the sleeping bags inside, and instantly I was
consumed, held down to earth by just the heat of his hands. He held me so tightly I
thought my bones would break, and he kissed slowly up my neck, reaching deep into
my mouth.
“John, please,” he whispered against my shaking skin. I tasted his voice.
“Please. . .”

I realized something hard was being pressed against my chest. I looked down and saw
the cock grasped in his hands, long black straps trailing down onto his stomach and
chest.

“Please,” he said again, looking into my eyes.

Everything paused.

I swallowed hard. I didn’t move to touch it. “How did you --?”

“Bottom of my bag,” he said. His voice was breathless.

I stared back down at the unnatural thing in his hands – the thing we’d only ever
used a mere handful of times before. There were so many nights, now that it was
nearing the end of the season, where we would fall into bed exhausted, and mutter
goodnight while just brushing a hand against each other’s arms. There were nights
when the slow kisses gradually turned deeper, wetter, more urgent, and Sherlock
would roll me on top of him in a heavy embrace, and roll himself against me, and
touch me with his palm through my boxers until we both came.

There were so many nights when I didn’t want to stop and remember – that I couldn’t
just effortlessly push inside him without breaking our kiss. That I had to break
the thrumming heat between our bodies, and stand up and face the opposite wall of
my room as I pulled the cold straps up my legs, and halt everything, leave him
alone on the sheets, in order to finally join with his body.

Those few precious seconds it took me to put it on each time felt like an endless
eternity in my mind, awkward and too-silent. I could tell Sherlock understood, that
he could see it each time in my eyes, and so more often than not, that cock which
had once felt a part of my own skin stayed safely tucked away in a drawer, leaving
nothing unnatural and cold between our warm bodies, letting us come together
without any pauses where he could suddenly change his mind.

That night, though, as the walls of the tent moaned, and the moss beneath us made
the tent floor cool and damp, he begged me with his eyes.

“John,” he whispered, so softly, and yet I feared in that moment that every single
Ranger in Denali could hear his voice. He swallowed hard, and his voice was deep
and rough. “Please . . . please take it . . . take me –”

I came undone.

I grabbed the cock from his hands and leaned back on my knees. There wasn’t enough
space in the tent for me to stand up and put it on, and I was frantically trying to
decide whether to step outside the tent or awkwardly crouch over when Sherlock’s
fingers were on the front of my belt, tearing open the buckle. I watched with a dry
throat as he yanked open my jeans and shoved them down my thighs.

I quickly looked away.

I couldn’t bear to see the flatness that would be beneath my boxers – not when I
hadn’t put the other cock in there that morning since we would be hiking alone all
day, and not when my body was currently pulsing, aching to be inside him, and in
the deepest part of my mind I was hard, and heavy, and thick, and waiting to pump
inside him with my own hot skin.
Not flat.

His wet lips were on my neck, and I hadn’t realized until then that I’d closed my
eyes. He kissed beneath my jaw in a warm, slow line. I felt that my blood was about
to vibrate out of my own skin – that my lungs would burst, and my heart explode,
and I would fall apart in his hands from just the touch of his mouth along my neck.

“Lie down,” he whispered into my skin. It echoed through my bones – an avalanche of

ice and rock smashing against the empty valley of myself, filling it with noise
where before it had been a void.

I was flat on my back before I could remember deciding to do it, and Sherlock’s
heavy body was thrown on top of mine, rolling and warm, and he breathed kisses
against my lips. My jeans were somehow completely off my legs, thrown into the
corner of the darkening tent, and all I could focus on was the sound of his breath
in my ears – the specific weight of his hips that my body was memorizing week by
week.

I struggled to breathe. “Do you have . . .?” I tried to ask.

He shook his head, and my heart sank. He was kissing me, and he wanted to be
fucked, and we didn’t even have lube for me to open him – open him for a fake cock
that he would silently pretend was me . . .

“Don’t need it,” I heard him saying. Before I could question him, he grabbed my
hand and shoved it down into his pants beneath his tight pair of briefs. He guided
my fingers deeper, lower, until his skin was damp and warm, and I breathlessly
reached out to feel his hole as he caressed my mouth with his.

I gasped.

I couldn’t feel his hole – couldn’t feel anything but something hard and round
emerging from his body, pressing up beneath my shocked fingertips.

He kissed me more, deeper. I grabbed the warm skin of his ass with my hand,
overwhelmed.

“I’m ready for you,” he panted in my ear. He was writhing on top of me, holding me
down and surrounding me and flinging me up towards the sky.

Stroking my hair.

“I’m stretched for you. Please, John. God, please, do it . . . take it –”

I couldn’t even believe what was happening. I nodded, eyes still closed, and his
sigh of relief washed over my skin like a wave. He kissed through my beard, down
the side of my neck, sucking my skin. The cock was lying beside me on the sleeping
bag, waiting for me to put it on, and suddenly Sherlock’s hands were on the
waistband of my boxers, starting to pull. I clutched at his back as his muscles
shifted beneath my hands. I groaned and gulped down air.

“Sherlock,” was all I could say.

He rubbed his cheek across my chest through my shirt, moaning at the feel of me
shaking beneath him. And I _was_ shaking, and wet, and vibrating out of my skin.
Filled with rolling heat and desperate to be inside him, pulsing inside his body,
filling him with myself. Desperate to press him down into the earth. And he was
_open_ for me, had stretched himself, was kissing me like I was oxygen itself, and
he wanted me, he wanted . . .

I realized too late that my boxers were moving down off my waist, dragging down
across my pubic hair, down towards the tops of my thighs.

In one blinding second, every moment of my entire life coalesced.

He had never seen me there before, not without my boxers, not without the cock
already strapped on. He had never seen the bare skin with his eyes. Nobody on the
entire earth had.

I turned to ice.

“Stop,” I said, too softly for him to hear. He kept licking my neck, sighing into
my skin, pulling my boxers down, down, down.

I grabbed his wrist with too much force. “ _Stop_ ,” I said again. Maybe I yelled.
Maybe I screamed.

His hands fled from my body faster than I could blink. He immediately sat back and
froze, and both of us held our breaths. My boxers were still pulled down around my
thighs, leaving me bare and exposed, and the air in the tent was so thick I was
afraid I would roll over and throw up.

I couldn’t breathe.

“John?” I finally heard him whisper, and he sounded so small, so hurt, so scared,
so confused, and I wondered if I had left a bruise on his wrist from my hand.

My eyes burned in the corners, and the tent ceiling above me turned to hazy water.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself choke out, and then I was pushing him aside, yanking my
boxers back up my legs, grabbing my wrinkled jeans from the corner.

I had to get out. I would suffocate if I stayed in the tent. I would wither and die
– I would disintegrate and collapse.

My heart was painfully pounding in my chest as I crawled through the tent door and
stood up on shaking legs. The wide-open tundra mocked me as I struggled to pull my
jeans back on, nearly falling over in the wet moss. My bare feet clung to the earth
so I wouldn’t fall.

I walked blindly away from the tent, making my way further into the empty dark. The
wind slapped ice against my clammy skin and poured sweat down my spine. I thought
of Sherlock sitting alone back in the tent, half-undressed and disheveled, with an
erect, disembodied cock lying on a sleeping bag beside him, and a plug still in his
ass.

The memory of the confused, shattered, terrified look on his face when I told him
to stop made my throat burn with acid.

When I was far enough away that I could forget the tent existed, I stopped, and
wrapped my arms around my chest, and tried to force myself to breathe. My lungs
were still tense and shaking, and my heart sat heavily down in my stomach like
lead.

And I thought, as I looked out at the endless grey fog, and tried not to fall down
helpless on my face, of that one night I’d been back in a bar in Rapid City when I
was seventeen – a different bar from the one where I’d heard about the clinic all
the way in New York City. A usual bar. A normal bar. Not one for men like me.

I remembered how I’d hidden in the corner with my baseball cap pulled down too low,
and my long hair draped beneath it around my shoulders, and a too-large flannel to
hide my chest. With my hands wrapped tightly around a beer. Nobody had even noticed
I was there.

There had been a commotion at the door, raised voices and a wooden chair smashing
to the ground. I’d turned just in time, with my face still hidden in the shadow of
my cap, to see a woman being shoved towards the door by a group of men. They were
yelling words at her I’d never heard, names I’d never even heard anyone be called.

“ _Fucking tranny!_ ” one of them screamed, and they reached out to try and rip her
beautiful dress down off her shoulder. There was chaos. Yelling, and shattered
glasses, and one high-pitched scream, until the whole group had been forced outside
by the other people in the bar – old oil workers with callused fingers trying to
avoid going back home, and teenage boys eyeing the bar girl in high-heeled cowboy
boots. And everyone went back to their drinks, to the calm drone of the jukebox in
the corner playing an old country song, and their lukewarm Coors on the sticky
tables waiting to be gulped down.

Two weeks later, I snuck back out to Rapid City, leaving behind my parents sloshed
drunk in separate rooms, and I’d sat at the same stool, in the same corner, with
the same beer. I listened, and I eventually found out through the grapevine of
gossip that that woman from a couple weeks ago was run out of town or dead. Only
they hadn’t used the word ‘woman.’ No chance in hell.

And I’d sat up for hours later that night in the attic with my head held in my
hands. I’d wondered why the hell I somehow felt responsible for it all. Like I
should have rushed towards them all, and thrown myself in front of her, and
screamed out that she was just like me. As if the sight of me, just a seventeen-
year-old girl with an ugly shirt and a cap pulled down too low, could have somehow
frozen them all in their tracks, and stopped them from ripping her silk dress out
in the snow.

I had no idea how much time had passed since I’d fled from the tent. I realized
that a part of me was waiting to hear Sherlock’s footsteps padding out into the
moss. I was waiting for him to follow me, to join me out in the darkness, and to
touch my arm.

But that sound never came.

He stayed back in the tent, and eventually I looked over my shoulder to see that
he’d shut off the little lantern light. I couldn’t decide whether I was fiercely
glad he hadn’t joined me, or gutted that he didn’t.

Fear still curdled like thick poison in my gut as I stood, as if someone had poured
mud from the nearby stream straight down my throat. When my feet finally grew numb
from standing out barefoot in the cold, I turned back to the tent, finding my way
in the foggy dark. An odd pang spread through my chest when I unzipped the tent
flap and saw that Sherlock was still inside, as if I was subconsciously afraid that
he would have disappeared off into the night, with his belongings strapped to his
back and the cock lying alone in the middle of the tent floor – his goodbye note
without even having to write down a word.

But he was still there, and the cock was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn’t tell,
as I settled down beside him in my bag, if he was even asleep or just pretending to
be. His body didn’t stir. I got into my bag as quietly as I could, leaving on my
jeans and belt even though I knew I would regret it in the morning. My bare feet
slowly thawed in the warmth of my bag, and I clenched my toes as the prickling
needles spread through my feet just so I could feel anything at all.

Long minutes later, when I finally allowed myself to turn my head to look over at
Sherlock’s back, I choked back a sob like I’d never experienced before in my life.
He was right there, inches in front of me, and yet he was a million miles away.
There were endless chasms between us – more insurmountable than a wingless bird
flying straight up to Denali’s peak.

I wondered what he’d looked like when he eased the plug out of himself and put the
cock away in his bag all alone in the tent. If he had been furious at me, or hurt,
or scared of the way I’d shoved him off me when I fled from the tent.

If he had understood it at all, or if he understood it better than even me.

I wondered these things, watching his lungs rise and fall in the dark, and I
suddenly fiercely hated the skin between my legs, and the scars on my chest, and
the smallness of my hands. I hated my name, and my dad, and the sound of that
woman’s dress ripping all those decades ago in the bar. Hated that I’d just felt
the same blinding fear with Sherlock Holmes that I’d felt that night in the alley
in Talkeetna my first winter, with whiskey on my lips, and drying semen on my palm,
and that nameless man’s hand unknowingly reaching for the buckle of my belt.

I hated the memory of Sherlock’s gentle bones cracking under my hand when I’d
grabbed his wrist too hard as he tried to kiss my skin.

And I hated myself, more fiercely than I had even when I was fourteen, when I was
tearing out clumps of my long hair in the attic with my bare hands and throwing it
down onto the floor.

I hated myself until I thought I would pass out, and I memorized the shape of his
body, the smell of his sweat, and the sound of his breaths, then I closed my eyes
and drifted wearily to sleep, aching somewhere deep inside.

Sherlock was gone when I opened my eyes the next morning.

I expected it.

It still hurt though. Fuck, it hurt. The pain gripped me in my lungs and refused to
let me move. I clutched my hands into fists inside my sleeping bag, pressing hard
against my stomach. It felt like I’d been punched straight in the face, tackled to
the ground by a grizzly, dragged miles and miles from the back of a truck.

I forced open my eyes, not realizing I’d squeezed them shut, and my vision slowly
focused on something next to me in the tent – something shoved into the corner by
my feet.

His bag.

I shot up, heart pounding, and before I could even open my mouth, I heard a gentle
voice from the other side of the tent door.

“I’m just out here, John,” the voice said, his beautiful voice. “I’ve got coffee
ready, come out here.”

His words washed over me like cool, fresh water. The fire in my limbs evaporated,
and the roar in my heart softened to a whisper. I crawled out of my bag slower than
I needed to. I felt like a fool – knowing that he had heard me panic when I woke
up, that he knew I had expected him to be gone. That I needed him to assure me of
his presence like a child afraid of the dark.

I finally ducked out of the tent and joined him sitting on a patch of flat rock
just outside. He handed me the Stanley of instant coffee without looking my way
when I sat down, but he placed his hand for a moment, just one small moment, on my
thigh.

That was what did it.

Relief like I’d never felt before in my life suddenly flooded through my chest,
punching the air from my lungs and slamming me in the face with a burst of cool
breeze.

It was a more powerful relief than the one I’d felt that moment I looked in the
hospital mirror and saw my flat chest for the first time. More intense and
revolutionary than the one I’d felt buttoning up my very first uniform shirt, or
when my eyes saw Denali’s peak emerging through the clouds for the first time. More
than that first, breathless moment Lugnut had leapt up into my arms.

Sherlock was still there, he hadn’t left, and he was reaching out to touch me, to
hand me my coffee, to let me know that it was alright, that he somehow understood,
and that I hadn’t scared him away.

I looked quickly down at the wrist I’d grabbed the night before. I hadn’t left any
bruises.

With water in my eyes I started reaching into my pocket. My fingers gripped the
key, warm from my skin, and I held it in my palm, slowly stroking it with my thumb.

And I realized, as I opened my mouth to say his name, that his name tasted sweeter
than the first time I ever opened my lips to whisper “John,” lying on the little
bed my dad built in the airless attic, his old sock shoved down my pants to create
a bulge.

I took a deep breath and turned to face him, glowing and beautiful in the fresh
morning sun.

“Sherlock,” I said. He turned his head to look at me and raised his eyebrows. I
caught my breath at the perfect lines of his mouth. His eyelashes reflecting the
sun.

“Let’s . . . let’s stay out another night,” I told him, feeling like I was begging.
I kept talking before he had the chance to interrupt and tell me I was insane, that
he would never want to stay out there another unplanned night, not with me, not
after what happened last night –

“We have . . . there’s plenty of food for us for another night,” I said, “and I can
filter some water a little ways up this creek. Weather should hold up fine. I don’t
have a real shift tomorrow, just Lottery prep. I just . . .” I paused, unsure how
to even put it into words – that I couldn’t have my last night out in the
wilderness with him be tainted by what had happened the night before. That I wanted
to try again, give myself another chance, feel his skin for one more night in the
warm air of a tent instead of my cabin, to re-do it all.

And, to my surprise, he didn’t shoot back any arguments at all.

“Yes,” he agreed, with an odd look in his eyes as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
I smiled at him, and I let him see my wet eyes.

“Okay,” I whispered back. I nodded as I secretly slipped the key back into my
pocket. It could wait until the next morning – the next perfect morning with him
lying in my arms. “Okay,” I said again, and he smiled back at me before kissing my
coffee-warmed lips.

So we stayed out that second day. We didn’t go back.

It was the most perfect day I could have ever dreamed. It was the sort of day I
used to imagine I could have one day if I became a Ranger – where the entire vast
world was right at my feet, waiting to be explored and discovered and touched.

I lead Sherlock, and Sherlock lead me. We sat together in the shade for long hours
watching some moose cross over the hills, and he talked me into scrambling up some
scree just so we could slide down from the top. The entire day, he was right there,
warm and sturdy by my side. And once, just once, I caught him smiling at me when he
thought I couldn’t see.

That night, in the tent pitched on a bluff overlooking snow-capped peaks, I pulled
him into my arms and held him close against my chest. He melted against me, sighing
deep into my own bones. There was warmth between us, something thrumming with
possibility in the air caught between my chest and his – between our entwined
thighs.

I pressed my lips into his curls and breathed in the scent of a day’s worth of
sweat and sun.

“Sherlock, I’m . . .” I started to whisper. I swallowed hard. “Last night, I didn’t

mean to . . . It wasn’t . . . Sherlock, I’m so –”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. He pushed up quickly onto his elbow and
looked down at my face. His fingers twitched by my cheek, as if they were going to
stroke my face, or brush my hair behind my ear. I hid my flinch, thinking of the
barn, of the hot field in the sun . . . but then he clenched his hand into a fist,
and moved to reach down and grip my shoulder instead. I relaxed.

And I wanted, in that moment, to say anything and everything to him.

I wanted to ask him if he understood how impossibly unbelievable it was that he

understood how to touch me, and where to put his hand. If he could read in the
lines of my body the entire story of the alleyway behind the Talkeetna bar. If he
could see how revolutionary it was that he knew the truth of what was beneath my
boxers, without even having seen it with his own eyes, and that he still begged for
me to enter him, and still let me mark him with my beard. That he still called me
John without any hesitation at all.

“John,” I heard. He moved his hand to grip my upper arm, and I blinked up into his
concerned face. “John, you don’t have to say anything about it,” he said again.

The forbidden words all hovered on the tip of my tongue for a breathless moment.

I swallowed them away.

I nodded, then reached for his face and brought his mouth to mine. He moaned
against me, a sound that was desire and relief all mixed into one. He was heavy,
and he was warm, and the vibrations of his heartbeat rattled straight through into
my own lungs and chest.
“Let me,” I panted. “Let me . . . please –”

“Christ yes,” he breathed. He pushed off me so my own shaking hands could reach for
the zipper of his pack in the corner, yanking out the cock without hesitation. He
flung himself onto his back and started shoving off his pants while I tore off my
own clothes beside him. I crouched on my knees facing away from him, refusing to
feel embarrassed, as I awkwardly maneuvered the straps up over my thighs and around
my waist. I could hear him panting behind me, touching himself and writhing on the
fabric of the sleeping bags, filling the tent with the sound of his body – the
sound of his want for me.

I heard the cap to something click, and the hiss of his breath as his fingers
entered himself.

He didn’t say anything at all when I pulled my boxers back on over the cock,
letting it stand erect out through the hole in the fabric. He didn’t even hesitate,
didn’t blink, when I turned back to face him with a question on my face – silently
asking if he understood why I needed to, why I couldn’t be bare now, not just yet.

He understood.

He grabbed my thighs and pulled me down on top of him, laughing when my nose
crashed into his as I lost my balance. And we laughed together, moaned and sighed,
as we joined, and my body finally pressed into his. My _own_ body, my own skin and
bone, and in my mind, I was filling him with the heat of myself as he cursed and
begged.

I fucked him. We had sex.

Two things I never thought in a thousand years I would be able to say about my own
life.

When I eventually came, after a very long time moving slowly together, breathing
each other’s air, there were beads of sweat dripping down my bare back. The air in
the tent tasted of his wet lips, the sounds of his sighs, and my eyes were fixed
looking down at the place where my cock was pumping into his open body.

It was intoxicating, the sight of me emerging from my boxers – no hint of black

straps to be seen. He was stretched around me, aching, pulling me freely into
himself.

And it was more breathtaking, more beautiful, than the reflection of the sunrise
off the back of that gray whale. It left me more awestruck than the sight of the
endless Death Valley stars.

In the morning my thighs were sore, and my body felt glorious and strong and
fucked.

I cracked my toes in the bottom of my sleeping bag and flexed my feet, reveling in
the soreness throughout the muscles in my legs. Then I reached a tired hand out of
the warmth of my sleeping bag and rummaged around for my jeans, trying to retrieve
the key.

_”Come with me to my cabin,_ ” I was going to whisper to him as he woke up in my

arms. “ _Stay here with me, just a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Come back
to me next year. Let’s keep, let’s keep on. . .“_
My hand found my jeans. I was going to tell him that he was better than the
darkness in my little attic, and more beautiful than Denali’s clear peak in the
melting sun. That I wanted him to stay, stay in my life, and keep sleeping between
my sheets, and make my cabin in Talkeetna smell of only peppercorn and cedar. And
sex.

How I wanted him to be with me. And I with him.

I jumped when his hand was suddenly on my arm, pulling me away from the pile of
clothes in the corner of the tent and yanking me on top of his body, sleeping bag
and all.

I frowned. “Sherlock –”

“Morning,” he said, in the deepest voice I had ever heard. He arched his back and
pressed his hips up into me, and even through two layers of sleeping bags, I could
feel him hard as steel – wanting and warm. He reached his hand down into my bag and
stroked my bare skin beneath the layers of shirts I had thrown on in the middle of
the cold night. My skin shivered beneath his fingertips. My ribs ached.

The key could fucking wait just fifteen more minutes.

“Fuck,” I whispered. He grinned up at me, and his curls spilled wildly across the
flannel liner in his bag. “Exactly,” he said back, and then he kissed me until I
couldn’t breathe.

An hour later, I crawled out of the tent to join him where he’d been making our
coffee and waiting for me to get dressed. The sun was shining a beautiful,
brilliant gold, and the sky was an endless blue, and the snow on the mountain peaks
glittered like stars. The air smelled of wildflowers and cheap coffee and sex.

My breath filled my lungs and puffed out my chest. I didn’t even allow myself to
hesitate when I finally reached his side.

“Sherlock, there’s something –" I started to say, but he looked at me at the exact
same moment, with a warm glow in his eyes, and he said, “I think you’ll grow to
really like London.”

The words died in my mouth. I stared at him, mouth half-open. A strange warning
zipped up my spine, causing my palm wrapped around the key to start to sweat.

“What?” I finally said, barely a sound carried on my breath.

He looked at me as if I’d somehow grown a second head. “London, John. You’ll grow
to love it, I think, once you get settled in.”

I was in one of those dreams – those dreams where you run, and run, and run, but
your body never moves, always stuck in slow motion and tar, and you end up five
steps behind where you even began.

“London,” I said, not even a question.

“Yes, London.”

I opened my mouth and closed it a few times before speaking again. I felt ten-
years-old.

“When I visit?”
Sherlock frowned, then, and finally fully turned to face me, coffee half-halted on
the way to his mouth. He spoke to me slowly, as if I wouldn’t otherwise understand
anything he was saying. “When you move there with me,” he said, still frowning.
“After this season.”

“Move there with you?!” I said back, heart racing.

And then his face fell. The light that had been glowing warm in his eyes when he
said the word ‘London’ withered and died. The hand holding his coffee dropped back
down to his side.

I stood there, stunned, and watched the emotions flash across his face:
realization, then annoyance, then something that looked a lot like disappointment.

“Oh,” he said, turning away from me. He nodded, frowning now at himself, as if
there was something he should have realized much sooner. “I see. You weren’t
expecting this.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I thought my heart would explode
out of my chest. My limbs were frozen.

“How the fuck could I have expected this?” I finally asked, knowing my voice was
far too loud.

He laughed, but it sounded strange and harsh coming out of his mouth. “Don’t tell
me you were actually expecting to spend this whole winter alone back in your
cabin,” he said, and even though his tone was gentle, there was something
underneath it, something brewing and frantic. “You’ve obviously been wanting to
tell me something important for weeks now. I can practically see whatever it is on
the tip of your tongue before you go and ignore it, or change the subject. You were
dreading going back to that place this winter anyways, dreading my plane ticket to
leave, and our conversation about it kept getting delayed due to your inability to
start the conversation with me and ask that I take you along. Therefore, I’ve taken
care of everything. It’s all already done. We’re set to go.”

“Set to go?” I repeated, feeling like an idiot and a robot and a child all at once.

I watched him hold back his sigh. “Yes, John. Set to go. Your job’s been given
notice, your ticket is bought, you’ve three interviews lined up for you with
conservation groups back in London, and our housing is set.” He paused and took a
deep breath, and I saw a strange look pass across his face, one that looked small
and hurt.

“Honestly, I thought you’d be pleased,” he finished.

I shook my head against my will and took a step back. “I can’t . . . I can’t just
move there with you,” I heard myself say. The earth was starting to tilt beneath my
feet. “Jesus, Sherlock, what the fuck are you even thinking –”

“Look, it’s a waste of time standing here arguing about it when we both know what’s
going to happen,” he shot back, and I could hear the irritation steadily growing in
his voice. “You cannot honestly tell me that this isn’t what you wanted – what you
were going to ask me for –”

“But this is my home!” I cried. My chest was heaving beneath my shirt, which felt
tight and constricting across my skin. “I can’t just . . . I can’t just quit and –”

“And what? Start living? Start allowing yourself to be in the world?”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt that Sherlock Holmes was nothing but a mirage
just in front of me, turning into smoke and slipping through my frantic fingers –
taking away the tundra and the Denali range along with him. Taking away my
uniform . . . the buttons from that first uniform shirt . . .

“This is my _home_ ,” I said again, voice too high. “That cabin is my home –”

“That cabin is your hideout, not your home,” he spat back, as if it was a truth
that everyone on earth understood but me.

Instantly I thought of building that cabin ten years ago with my bare hands, log by
log, nail by nail, until the calluses on my hands looked exactly like the calluses
on my dad’s that day he built my bed for me up in the attic, when he showed me how
to hold the drill, and steadied my arms with his hands, and said “ _That’s it,
Ranger. Good, just like that_. . .”

I held back the “fuck you” hovering in my mouth and said the first other words that
came to mind instead. “What the fuck makes you think that this is ok? That I was
asking you for this? I mean, my fucking _job_ , Sherlock, my _house_ , Jesus –”

“What makes me think this? How do I know? I’ll tell you how I know, John,” he said,
crossing his arms over his chest. He looked one-hundred feet tall. “You clench your
fists and stare off into the distance whenever someone mentions the end of the
season; Molly Hooper told Geoffrey who told me that you looked like you just found
out somebody died when you told her you figured you’d just spend the winter like
usual in your cabin; you have tried to tell or ask me something important
approximately fourteen times in the past four weeks without actually saying the
goddamn thing; you didn’t actually go to the office to do paperwork that day you
left a few weeks ago after we took Lugnut outside the Park, but you did, in fact,
drive out of the Park, judging by the mud that was left on the tires, and I can
only assume it had something to do with possibly selling your cabin since you came
back empty handed except for an important piece of paper folded up in your pocket;
you love when I tell you about London; your face sags whenever you have to leave in
the morning to go out on another boring patrol; you –”

“Stop it,” I said, flashing back to that same word leaving my mouth two nights ago
in the tent. “Just stop it. You will not deduce me like this, you don’t _get_ to
deduce me –”

“Don’t get to?” Sherlock lifted his hands towards the sky and nearly laughed.
“John, how the hell do you think I _knew_ without deducing you? Tell me that?”

“Fuck,” I breathed. I turned my back to him and grabbed the back of my neck with my
hands, breathing up heavily towards the sky. Clouds were slowly rolling in, hiding
the sun and bathing the tundra in shadow. Icy wind shivered across my skin even as
a bead of cold sweat dripped down my back.

“Fuck,” I whispered again.

I heard him sigh behind me, and I shivered again at the hopelessness in the sound.

“I don’t understand, John,” I heard him say in a soft voice. “You . . . you want
this, you can’t tell me you’d rather . . . for me to go, and you to stay here. All
the signs point to –”

And God, how I wanted to just throw the key at him right then, to explain how wrong
he was, how all I wanted on earth was to keep being by his side, but I couldn’t. I
just couldn’t, because . . .
“My job, Sherlock,” I said, voice shaking. “You put in my notice for my fucking
_job_. My – my life. . . I _am_ a Ranger, my entire life, and you just –”

“You’re being irrational, John,” he said, fire back in his voice. I turned towards
him, standing ten feet away, and I braced my legs into the earth as if I was about
to survive a grizzly attack. Before I could even form words in my head to respond,
he kept going, “You don’t need to live here out in the middle of nowhere anymore.
That isn’t who you really are. You’re _better_ than this –”

“How the fuck do you know who I really am?” I somehow grunted out. “That this isn’t
me?”

His face twisted in disbelief, “Because you’ve just been hiding away from the real
world out here!” he yelled. He reached up to grip his curls in his fists. “Keeping
yourself hidden away so you won’t have to get close to another human being!”

His words punched me in the gut and burned in my eyes. I saw myself, as if from
above, that night after I sprinted away from the man in the alley, when I’d sat in
my cabin all alone in the freezing dark, and wished, just wished, that someone
could have come, that anybody could have stayed. Wished for it so desperately that
I cried more tears than I did that morning my dad hefted the shotgun and hissed, “
_You’re no fucking daughter of mine._ ”

Somehow I was taking steps towards him in the moss, nearly tripping on the uneven
rock, and my shaking hand was reaching out to press into his chest.

My voice broke, “You, of all fucking people, Sherlock Holmes, do not get to make me
feel ashamed. Not you. Not you of all people.” I pressed my finger harder into his
chest, until his heartbeat smashed wildly against my skin. “I will not be fucking
ashamed of who I am, of how --”

“Of course this isn’t about being ashamed,” he cut in. I’d never seen him look so
exasperated – so wide-eyed and desperate. “Christ, John, this is about finally
_living_. Being a part of the real world, with me. We can be together. You want to
move to London with me.”

“I am _not_ moving to London –”

“You don’t need all of this anymore, not now that –”

“This is my fucking _home_ \--”

“You don’t have to keep hiding, keep –”

“This is my life! I’m not fucking hiding –"

“John, you can be free –”

“Be free?!”

I suddenly wished, more than anything on the entire earth, that I had the cock
between my legs. Just one thing to make me feel right, to make me feel whole, and
not like my soul was currently being sucked painfully out of my chest, out from
between my heaving ribs. Sucked out through the scars.

My hands flailed wildly out towards the distant horizon, slowly darkening under the
thickening sea of grey clouds. “This is the only fucking place on the fucking earth
where I am free,” I said. I angrily wiped a tear off my cheek with my forearm. “How
can you not . . .Fuck, you’re taking it away from me –”
“I’m taking it away from you?” Sherlock’s red-rimmed eyes looked up towards the
sky, and he groaned in frustration. “John, you’re taking it away from yourself. I’m
trying to _help_ you, if you would just listen –”

“So, what?” I heard myself yell. We were somehow back to standing ten feet apart,
chests panting, and the entire world was black except for the fierce whites of his
eyes. “So you just looked around and picked the most broken Ranger you could find?
Someone to fix as your summer project so you wouldn’t get too bored between finding
your fucking wolves?”

The look on his face sucked the breath from my lungs. He was confused, and hurt,
and standing all alone with the entire range of Denali at his back. He was
terrifying, and he was beautiful, and it made me want to sink to my knees and weep.

He was furious.

It made me want to scream – to reach out and smash Denali to rubble with my bare
hands.

“Yes!” I heard him scream. Only half-a-second had passed since my question, and I
felt like I was being ripped through the fog of a dream, where the ground was the
sky, and everything was too loud. “Yes!” he was screaming, with his hands clenched
in his curls, “Are you honestly saying you would have been happier if I’d left you
alone?”

For one second, one blinding second, the entire earth was silent and still –
nothing moved, nothing at all, except for his words echoing across the empty
valley, hissing through the rocks and grass, sinking down into the deep.

I shattered.

The pain of my heart breaking was unprecedented. I doubled over, as if I’d just
been punched, and I saw myself from far away, a pathetic man and a fool, who’d had
the answer to his happiness in his pocket for weeks and been too afraid to take it
out into the light. A man who was not even a man, not according to everyone on
earth, not according to anyone except the man standing before me, screaming at me,
with tears in his eyes because of my words.

Who’d just taken away my life, so swiftly and easily it was like my life had never
existed at all.

I was just John Watson, no longer a Ranger, world’s biggest fool, who’d thought I
had finally found happiness, and instead I was just a puzzle to keep a beautiful
genius from getting too bored.

Who’d taken off my clothes, left the lights on, let him see me. Who’d thought that
he would leave London, stay in a boring one-room cabin, somehow, for some goddamn
reason, stay with _me_. . .

I sucked in a breath, stunned. I needed to leave. Needed to get off that fucking
bluff and away from the tundra and back to the Road. Needed air that didn’t smell
like his sweat and the hints of his cologne buried in the folds of his fucking
shirt.

“John, wait.”

I shook my head. I took two steps back while I watched his face crumble, and his
voice shook like a flame on the verge of being blown out. “John, believe me, I
didn’t mean it like that,” he begged me. A tear slid down his cheek, and I looked
away. “You know that’s not at all what I meant.”

I turned back to the tent with numb legs, then sank hard to my knees and crouched
inside to grab my pack. I shoved the clothes and supplies I had lying around the
tent haphazardly inside, not even rolling up my sleeping bag or caring about the
tent itself. My fingers were shaking so fiercely I couldn’t even get the zipper
back up.

And all the while, behind me, a steady stream of his voice. “John, please, that’s
not what I meant. . . that’s not what I was trying to say . . . Don’t -- John,
_please_ \--”

I heaved myself to my feet, barely keeping myself from falling back into the grass.
I couldn’t look at him. I walked straight past him, with my eyes at my feet, and I
heard him trying to breathe, struggling to form words.

“John wait,” he was pleading. “John, don’t – Wait! I didn’t mean it, please wait!”

His hand touched my shoulder, and it burned my skin so fiercely I shrugged him off.
“I can’t do this, Sherlock,” I said, barely forming his name with my lips. I kept
walking towards the horizon, towards the emptiness of the park.

“John,” I heard him say, so small and broken, so unbelievably sad.

It sounded exactly the same way my sister had called me, decades ago. When she’d
stood on the porch, with a baby in each arm, and stood next to my mom lying crying
on the front steps, and my dad chasing me out in the yard.

She’d called me a different name – different sounds leaving her tongue.

But it had sounded exactly the same.

And just like I had all those decades ago, I didn’t stop and look back. I kept
going. Walking this time, instead of sprinting, but leaving all the same.

“This is my life,” I whispered back over my shoulder, not even sure if he could
hear.

His voice carried to me on the breeze, shaking and wet. “Fuck,” he said. It tore
straight through my chest – searing through my blood, snapping the bone.

I couldn’t look back at him. “Fuck,” he whispered again.

I kept walking, for what felt like ten days and ten seconds at the same time. And
all the time, with each numb step, I waited to hear footsteps running up behind me.
Waited to hear the one word I hadn’t yet heard from his lips - _sorry_. I waited
for me to shake my head, and forget it all, and run back to him with open arms.

Then I remembered his face when he’d spoken of London. The warm light in his eyes,
the excitement in his hands. The way that every inch of his body had lit up with
purpose, with joy, with an emotion I’d never even seen on his face when he looked
at me in the sunrise light of a tent.

I remembered the way that warmth had died when I told him that this place was my
home.

And so I kept walking, one step after another after another, for what felt like
years.
I kept walking, and I never heard footsteps running up behind me.

I walked in a fog, thinking of everything and nothing all at once – hearing nothing
but the sound of my feet, the air of my breaths, the shifting of my pack. Rain
fell, a pathetic mist that drenched my hair and dripped down into my eyes.

I thought of nothing, and I walked, and somehow, hours later, my fingers gripped
the handle of my Toklat cabin door. I wrenched it open and hurled myself inside,
desperate to get in unless it disappeared into smoke right before my eyes – as if
whatever Sherlock had told my bosses, whatever paperwork he’d filed about my job,
would make the door not open to my touch, impenetrable and locked.

But it opened for me, and I collapsed inside, and I sunk to my knees on the hard
wood with my pack thudding to my side.

My cabin was utterly silent.

No bare feet padding on the wood, no other pair of breathing lungs. A dark curly
hair was blown by my breath across the empty floor.

And I suddenly wished, as the pain burned in my chest, and my eyes stung with hot,
disbelieving tears, that I could pick up a phone, cradle it to my ear, dial, and
call my dad.

My dad, who had probably told everyone for the past two decades that I was dead,
and who might even be dead himself, and who, for the first time in my entire life,
didn’t stand in the way so my mom wouldn’t slap me that one morning, that one
fateful morning.

My dad who came home drunk one night from his own dad’s funeral, and the next
morning let five-year-old me pretend to use his razor with him in the little
trailer bathroom – who covered my face in shaving cream, and said “ _Now, don’t
tell your momma_ ,” and let me shave it all off, guiding my fingers with his own
hand.

My dad.

I wanted to call him, hear his voice over the phone, no matter what name he called
me back, just to hear him say, “ _Chin up, now, don’t be scared, come on. . ._ ”

I could tell him I had lost him, lost everything, that it was all over, that I had
been stupid and naïve. That nothing had been real.

And even though I apparently no longer worked for a National Park, he would still
call me Ranger.

But I couldn’t call him, would never call him again, hadn’t called him for twenty
goddamn years, and the pain of that was somehow sharper than what I’d felt walking
away from Sherlock Holmes back out in the rainy moss, with his whispered curses
like ghosts haunting the empty air behind me.

I leaned back against the door and covered my face with my hands.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that, hunched over on the floor with rain
dripping from my soaked clothes. I felt that the whole world would laugh at me,
then, if they peeked through my cabin windows and saw me in that state – a grown
man, a _Ranger_ , reduced to slumping on the floor over another man’s words.
Another man’s lips, lips which had kissed me, had said the words, “ _You are, I
know, I know_ ,” and that same man’s lips had now furiously crumpled and yelled the
word, “ _Yes!_ ”

And then it hit me all at once, a raging, blaring panic which screamed like fire up
my spine:

I shouldn’t have left him out there.

Horrific images flashed through my mind. He could be hurt, or lost, or unable to

carry back the supplies I left behind. He could be wandering alone through the fog,
unable to find the Road, with not enough water. He could fall into a river, slide
down loose scree, walk straight into a bear and end up in pieces torn on the
ground.

My heart lurched. My throat went dry.

I was just about to leap to my feet and throw open the door to search for him when
I heard voices out in the pathway up to the cabins.

“Holmes!” Nick’s voice called out.

My heart stopped, and I froze. Relief panged sharply in my chest even as another
emotion flooded hotly through my veins.

“Holmes, what the hell? Where the fuck is Watson? Weren’t you two out together?
Supposed to be back yesterday?”

Then I heard another voice, that too-familiar voice, the voice I heard every night
in my dreams. The voice I heard in the warm spaces between my sheets, whispered
across my bare skin, hidden in the golden palms of every sunset valley.

The voice I would never hear that way again.

I heard that voice say back, completely normal and calm, “Watson’s already back in
his cabin, no need to worry. I requested we stay out another night to conduct extra
research when we came across fresh tracks. He wanted to be rested for his shift
tomorrow and headed back early. Few hours ago.”

My fists were clenched in my lap, and I realized I had pressed my ear up against my
front door to listen. I couldn’t move.

“Strange,” Nick was saying, “Never known him to abandon you when you’re in the
thrill of the chase before – you must’ve dragged him around real good for him to be
tired enough to head back.”

I heard Sherlock breathe, an odd sound from his nose. “Something like that.”

“Look here, now I have you,” and Nick’s voice grew fainter as he took a few steps
away from my cabin, closer to Sherlock. “Been meaning to ask you when I should meet
with Watson to finalize his paperwork for his notice and all that –”

Sherlock interrupted him, saying something I couldn’t hear for a second, before
Nick cut in, “I know, I know, you had your own plan and all, but that ain’t how it
works. You’re a smart enough man to know I can’t accept a notice without the actual
person handing it in –”

More words I couldn’t hear. I pressed my ear harder against the door, heart in my
throat.
“Really, now?” Nick said louder. “You sure? . . . . Well, you just seemed so sure
of it a week ago, but I can’t say I’m sad that he’ll be sticking around. Was gonna
be damn hard to replace a Ranger like him, let me tell you.”

Nick laughed then, his usual laugh, and I heard a sound as if he thumped Sherlock
on the back.

“You tell him from me he’s all good, then. We’ll just pretend it never happened,”
Nick was saying. I heard his boots crunch in the dirt as he started to walk away.

“Of course,” Sherlock said, still sounding perfectly normal, so perfectly calm.

And it occurred to me, with my ear pressed to the rough wood of my cabin door, that
I never thought the saddest words I’d ever hear in my life would be Sherlock Holmes
telling Nick that I wasn’t actually going to quit my job.

Nick was gone, but I hadn’t heard another set of footsteps walk away. Sherlock was
standing there, I knew, just a few feet from my cabin porch, standing still in the
dirt.

I held my breath.

I waited, desperately waited, for his footsteps to grow louder in the dirt. For his
feet to pad up the stairs, avoiding the spots in the wood he knew would creak, and
for his hand to knock on the door, for his fingers to pick the lock, for him to
pull me into his arms and call me John. Ask me what was for dinner.

I waited for what felt like hours, and I wondered if he could somehow tell that I
was sitting slumped against the door, collapsed on the wood like a child, unable to
do anything or stand. If he knew that the rain was still dripping down my neck from
my solo hike back.

He moved, just one step. I tensed. I couldn’t tell if he’d moved towards or away
from my front door.

For one blinding, fierce moment, I wanted to leap to my feet and throw myself
outside. I wanted to run towards his body, tell him I was sorry, that none of this
had to happen, that we could forget everything we just said.

Anything to have one last moment in his arms, one last kiss which I now knew I
would never have, one last embrace. But maybe, if I just went out there, if I
walked towards him now, even if he didn’t come up and knock . . .

But I somehow knew, deep down as I still sat there crouched on the floor, that it
was all for the best. That the universe was righting itself now after a summer-long
foolish mistake involving one forgettable John Watson and a brilliant researcher
named Sherlock Holmes.

It was for the best, with me in my cabin, and his footsteps now walking away
outside – walking the other direction.

It was for the best, because I was a coward, who kept the key in my pocket for
weeks instead of giving it to him the day I had it made. And because I was a
Ranger, and he belonged in London. Because I now had my memories of the greatest
few months of my life, a summer I never deserved, and because Sherlock could be rid
of me now, moving on to his real life and his real home, and because he told Nick
to take away my job.
Because not even Sherlock Holmes knew my other name, the one my sister had said.

It must be for the best.

I wished I could call my dad to ask him if I was right.

\--

Lugnut could always tell the last day of the season when I was leaving.

He knew the moment I crouched down in front of his hut with my hand held out, as if
he could smell it on my skin, or read the thoughts on my face.

He knew, then, as I crouched down and held out my hand for him to sniff, and he
hobbled out on shaking legs and collapsed into my open arms, burrowing his nose
along my neck and wriggling against my chest. His flapping tail created little dust
clouds in the dirt, and I breathed in the scent of him like a balm, like the purest
oxygen I had ever breathed, as I whispered his name.

“You know what I’m here to say, old Lug,” I whispered into his fur. He whined under
his breath and started to lick along my jaw. I clung to him, and my throat suddenly
closed. “I . . . I don’t want to say it, but . . . you know, old man, you know I –”

I swallowed hard and pressed my cheek to the soft spot between his ears. He let me
hold him, just like he had a week ago when I’d stumbled into the kennel yard in the
middle of the night, still wearing damp clothes, and silently pulled him into my
arms.

I’d sat there in my cabin for another hour after I heard Sherlock walk away,
wanting to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t still somehow be standing there when I
left.

Wanting to give him the chance to still knock on my front door and call my name.

And after an hour, when no knock came, and I was sure he wouldn’t be hiding
somewhere in the trees, I’d run down to the gravel lot and hopped in my truck as
fast as I could, then sped through the evening light for hours, barely breathing
until I had my face pressed in Lugnut’s warm fur.

I hadn’t been able to say anything to him, explain anything at all, but he had
somehow understood, and curled up for the rest of the night in my arms.

I hadn’t seen Sherlock Holmes for a single second the whole week since. I knew he
was still there, technically, since his plane flight with Greg wasn’t for another
few days. I came home from a long patrol three days after I left him alone out in
the wilderness to find my tent neatly folded on my porch, with my camping stove and
a pair of socks I’d left behind stacked next to it.

I’d wanted to lift the socks to my face and smell them, to see if they somehow
smelled of his hands, a hint of cedar. But then I realized that would have been
stupid, absolutely idiotic and insane, and so I threw them immediately in the
hamper to wash instead and walked away.

I saw Greg a couple times that week, always just from a distance with a pleasant
wave. He was finishing up the research, spending time with Molly, packing his bags,
doing the long rounds of goodbyes as more and more Rangers left for their winter
plans.

You could have offered me a million dollars to guess, a cool million, and I
wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether he knew anything strange had happened
or not.

Two days after that I stared for a long time at the key, placed back in the drawer
and mostly hidden in the shadows. I stared at it until my vision grew blurry, and
until Sherlock’s scarf, which I’d been holding in my hands, started to wrinkle from
the grip of my fingers. Then I looked away, and quickly threw the scarf up into the
top of my closet, telling myself I’d put it on his own porch before I left, even
though I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the damn thing again.

Then I walked down to the office, picked up the phone, and called up the Canyon
offices using the NPS directory taped to the wall, since one of the bus drivers had
let slip in the break room that they needed extra winter Enforcement Rangers for
patrols.

And now I was crouching there in the dirt holding Lugnut to say goodbye, after what
had simultaneously been the quickest and longest season of my entire life. My small
bags were packed and waiting behind me along the fence. I’d made a deal with the
Park staff to leave my truck with someone in McKinley Park over the winter – as if
it was some sort of insurance for them that I would actually come back.

It was the first time in nearly a decade that I wouldn’t end my season by stepping
up into my truck after kissing Lugnut goodbye.

“You’d leave without saying goodbye?” I suddenly heard behind me.

Lugnut perked up at the sound of Molly’s voice and squirmed in my arms so she could
reach down to rub his belly. I turned to look at her over my shoulder, and the
barely concealed hurt on her face made my eyes sting in the corners. I shook my
head at myself.

“Course not, kid,” I said, before I rose to my feet and pulled her into my arms.
When I went to pull away, she held me closer for another minute. Her hair smelled
like fresh oranges, and I knew she must have somehow gotten her hands on some late
season fruit on a recent trip to Fairbanks – one she probably took with Greg.

“Some lunatic told me you’re working in the Canyon for the winter?” she finally
said, speaking into the fabric of my jacket.

I pulled back and patted the back of her head once before letting my hand fall
away. I shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t play with the buttons on my
shirt. “Yeah, well, whatever lunatic told you that is right.”

Her face was unreadable. “Was hoping that was just a stupid rumor, but . . .”

I nodded, and I tried to keep my face from looking as sad as I suddenly felt. I
half-smiled. “Not a rumor.”

Lugnut started to cry between us since we were ignoring him. He flopped onto his
back with his tongue hanging out, and I crouched down to pet him again. I watched
the lines of my fingers slowly stroking through his long fur.

I could tell that Molly wanted to ask me a million more things – questions like
why, and what about my cabin, and was I still going to come back, and why I looked
like I was on the verge of crying over something as innocent as new winter plans.
We looked at each other for a silent moment, then she took a deep breath and
shrugged her shoulders. “Well, that’ll be fun?” she said. “I’ve never seen the
Canyon in winter before. Should be beautiful.”

I nodded and looked back down at Lugnut happily groaning as my hands massaged his
ears. “Yeah, should be.”

She stood there for another silent minute while I petted Lugnut goodbye, finally
holding him close in my arms until I could feel his rapid heartbeat pressed against
my own.

“Gonna miss you, old man,” I whispered into his ear. I blinked hard over my wet
eyes and let him lick the stray tear that fell down my cheek. “Miss you like hell.”
I held his face in my hands, his little twitching black nose, and looked straight
into his grey eyes – eyes which always looked the same color as the back of that
whale.

“You be good for them, you hear?” I said to him. He yipped and licked my chin.
“You’ll be my good boy? My well-behaved old man?”

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I thought of Sherlock lying beside Lugnut that day
out in the field – the way his strong hands had gripped his fur and rubbed his
legs. The way he’d whispered secrets into Lugnut’s soft, willing ears.

I shut my eyes tight and shook my head against the memory. I couldn’t associate any
of that with Lugnut, not with what felt like the only good thing I still had left
on the earth. Couldn’t be thinking of the warmth of Sherlock’s hands whenever I
pressed my cheek into his soft fur. Couldn’t be remembering his voice, the warmth
of his skin . . .

I kissed Lugnut on the snout for a long moment, not caring that Molly could see,
and then rose to my feet. Lugnut could tell it was the final goodbye, and he curled
up in the dirt and started to cry, like he always did. And like I always did at the
end of every season before driving away, I gave him one last long look before
rising to my feet, then I walked out of the kennels with his cries echoing in my
ears.

Molly was by my side, tugging on the end of her ponytail with her fingers. “You
taking the train?” she finally asked after I hefted my bags up onto my shoulders.

“It leaves in fifteen,” I said.

She nodded and didn’t slow down as I started walking down the visitor pathways
towards the nearby station. “I’m coming with you,” she announced, taking one of my
bags from my shoulders to carry.

I looked down at her, at her beautiful brown hair, and wondered if she would ever
understand how grateful that made me feel.

I smiled. “Okay.”

By the time we reached the platform, the last few visitors were climbing up the
sets of stairs into the train. They would be sitting in the fancy tourist cars with
the observation windows for the five-hour ride to Fairbanks, with a fancy cooked
dinner and cameras aimed through the windows trying to spot a moose or a bear.
When the steam blew out from the engine across the now-empty platform, Molly
grabbed my arm.

“Tell me you’ll be alright,” she said, sounding desperate. Before I could respond,
she continued, “Look, I obviously have no idea what happened, why you look so sad,
what the hell is going on, but please, please tell me you’ll be alright. I have to
know that before you leave. You have to say.”

Her wide eyes were fixed on my face, and her fingers dug into the muscle of my arm.
In that moment, I wanted to throw my bags down onto the ground, and take her by the
hand, and sprint as fast as I could away from the waiting train. Run all the way
back to Toklat, back to my cabin, with Sherlock’s scarf in the closet. Watch Molly
cook us dinner, and fill out reports for Nick, and see Lugnut in the morning. Give
myself my shot again in two weeks, alone in my room with the lights off like usual,
and then go out for another patrol.

Never see the Grand Canyon with my own two eyes.

The train whistle blew, and one of the workers shouted out for last call.

“John,” Molly said, shaking my arm. “Please, please just tell me you’re alright –”

“I’m alright, kid,” I whispered, reaching out to place my palm on her cheek. “I’m
just . . . everything’s alright. It’s all fine. I’ll be alright.”

Her confusion was written all over her face, mixed with something like despair. “Be
safe,” she whispered, as the train slowly started to pull away. Her eyes were wet.

“You be safe,” I said back, pressing my palm against her face, and then I was
hurling my bags up into the open door to the staff railcar and leaping up onto the
moving train before it gathered too much speed. I hung off the side of the train by
the handle and turned back to see Molly standing alone on the platform, hugging her
arms over her chest with the wind from the train blowing through her hair.

“Have fun in Seattle,” I called back to her. “Say goodbye to Greg for me!”

Her face broke, and I instantly realized my mistake, that I hadn’t told her to say
goodbye to Sherlock for me as well. She didn’t answer me, but nodded, and lifted
her hand to wave right before she disappeared into a billow of dust in the
distance.

I stepped fully inside the train as we pulled around the first major curve leading
away from the Park. I was alone in the walkway between the railcars, and the green
and grey earth rushed by faster and faster on either side as we gained speed. I
could hear the Alaska Railroad workers starting to make their safety announcements
in the passenger cars, letting everyone know the menu choices for the evening meal.

A rush of panic suddenly washed over me, fierce and sharp. I threw myself back
against the rattling wall and gripped the steel with my palms, shutting my eyes
tightly before I did something insane like leap off the side of the train.

I needed to go back there, needed to get off, needed to walk on the Denali gravel,
needed to hear Lugnut’s bark.

I needed to find Sherlock Holmes, and grip his shoulders with my hands, and tell
him that I would gladly be his puzzle, I would be his puzzle forever, if it meant
that those desperate, angry minutes out in the tundra didn’t have to mean goodbye.

He had kissed the scars on my chest. He had kissed them, and I'd never really told
him how I got them, how much it hurt, about the old nurse and the Greyhound bus. I
had never just opened my mouth and said.

I heard a moan escape my throat, and I sniffed hard so I wouldn’t cry. When I
opened my eyes again, the world seemed dimmer, the green of the mountains now muted
and grey, and I reached down with my hand to feel between my legs. I adjusted the
sock in my boxers, and desperately missed the weight of the cock, the full feel of
it in my palm. The cock I’d left behind shoved in my Toklat closet, since wearing
it now felt like Sherlock’s own fucking hands touching my bare skin beneath my
jeans.

So instead I felt the rolled-up fabric through the denim, and told myself it was
warm and real, heavy and _me_. Then I closed my eyes against the rushing Alaskan
wilderness, and I thought about how I would be in the Grand Canyon before the sun
set the next evening.

Then I whispered, so softly I could barely hear myself over the roaring engine, in
a voice that sounded desperate and small and wet.

“Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it help at all if I tell you this is the last chapter from 1991? <3
>
> This fucking chapter was, in all honesty, the hardest thing I've ever written.
For weeks (as you all know) I've labored over this, trying to get it out in
writing, and get in the right headspace, and write out where it all went wrong. I
feel so grateful for all of your patience and continued *incredible* support and
encouragement for this fic. As much as I didn't want to write this chapter, and as
much as many of you probably didn't want to read it, it's also so important to know
where they came from to understand where they finally are now (which is in love,
obviously, and so, so relieved to be together).
>
> That all being said, I would be so grateful to hear from you all on this chapter!
I'm SO HAPPY to get it out of my life, and hearing from all of you is one of my
greatest joys and sources of inspiration. You're all great.
>
> Quick note: The Road Lottery is a tradition unique to Denali that started in
1972. That year, the park service decided to close the one Park Road to private
vehicles and limit the traffic to *only* park (and lodge tour) busses and
government vehicles. Originally, the lottery was meant for Native Alaskans to be
able to continue to drive the Park road like they used to enjoy. Eventually, the
lottery expanded so anyone can apply, usually in May, and if chosen, you can drive
your personal vehicle as far as you want down the Park Road for the day during the
2 weeks of Lottery at the very end of the season. If you ever get the chance to
apply and win, DO IT. Driving that one-lane dirt road is unlike anything else.
Truly a once in a lifetime experience. You can park, get out of your car, and see
absolutely no civilization, nothing but tundra and the Denali range, for as far as
your eye can see. I've sat in a vehicle on the road with my Ranger, no one else in
sight, and watched the caribou herd roam across the hills like John and Sherlock
see earlier in this fic. Truly unforgettable.
>
> Just two chapters left! And I promise these next chapters will be hot on the
heels of this one :) I can't wait to write them and share the ending of their story
with you all!
>
> Next time: we pick up where we left off, with Sherlock and John heading back to
John's cabin after reuniting. I wonder what will happen behind closed doors?!?!
(hint: you know exactly what will happen)

15. August 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Caitlin Canty sing "Wyoming Wind"

[HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqp5yCUSqb0/)
>
> *I know, I know, my definition of Bluegrass is very loose. But if this song
doesn't remind you of an older Ranger John Watson remembering his youth while
Sherlock Holmes lies in his arms, I don't know what will. Additionally, I would
sell my soul for a good slide guitar.
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Mile on the Moon" [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=0SrN58PTvW8/)
>
>  
>
> It's here! The second to last chapter! A quick reminder before you dive in that
John's sexual experiences and thoughts obviously do not represent those of every
trans person. You can have sex any goddamn way you want, and as long as everyone
involved is into it and safe, then it is true, full, meaningful sex. No matter how
many clothes you're wearing, or who is touching who where. Enjoy, friends. :)

August 1992

The second we sat down next to each other in the last row of the old green park
bus, I instantly longed for the solitude of the tundra.

The bus was full, and everyone was talking, and the crackle of the bus driver’s
intercom mixed harshly with the sound of the wheels crunching through the harsh
dirt. That quiet dream, that little pocket of solace where I had held Sherlock in
my arms, close and unafraid – that dream was suddenly gone. Shattered with the
clamoring of the real world, rattling the bus windows with noise and heat.

I felt like I’d been dragged on a stage and paraded before thousands of people, and
everyone was studying every inch of my body, taking notes on my clothes and my
skin, even though nobody on the bus was even looking our way. I took a long breath
through my nose and closed my eyes – picturing the foggy clearing from earlier that
day. The silence and the calm. The stillness that had covered me, hovered over us
together.

The bus engine roared, and two little kids towards the front of the bus started to
scream.

Sherlock was staring out the window at the rolling blue and grey and green. I
glanced at him, tracing the achingly familiar line of his jaw, the soft curve of
his cheek. It was the profile that had been etched into the down of my pillow over
the last year. Lonely nights spent lying awake in my bed, and I could perfectly
picture the way his bones would press themselves into the mattress. A year spent
sleeping with ghosts, dreaming of cedar-scented sheets.

Everything was painfully, chaotically loud, threatening to drown me in the crowds

and noise.
And then, without looking away from the window, Sherlock quietly reached over to
take my hand.

I stared down at our fingers wrapped around each other, hidden between our thighs
in the crowded bus. He gripped me, hard. There were freckles from the sun blooming
across the back of his hand, and there was mud still smudged across his skin from
our fall down the slope back out in the rain. He had held the back of my head with
those very same fingers. He had caressed the side of my neck.

The simple warmth of his hand engulfed my palm.

And I realized, as we sat there together swaying with the bumpy turns of the bus,
that nobody else on that bus even knew that I was a Ranger. I didn’t have my
uniform on, no hat, no badge, no gun. I wasn’t filling out reports, or giving out
orders, or on my way to conduct another safety patrol. They didn’t know that I was
on my way back to my cabin in the middle of the Park, or that I had official
backcountry reports to finish writing in my pack, or that I had a grueling
thirteen-hour Road Lottery shift that started the next morning at six.

No, sitting there on the hot leather seat, with the hum of chatting visitors and
the clicks of flashing cameras surrounding me, with the Denali landscape rushing by
outside the dusty bus windows, I realized that I was just a man.

I was a man riding the late afternoon Kantishna bus through Denali National Park,
holding the hand of the one person I wanted to be with more than anyone else on the
earth. Watching him stare out the window at the most devastatingly beautiful place
I’d ever known.

And he was holding my hand.

Thick emotion suddenly overwhelmed me in a wave – everything that I had kept held
in on our hike back out to the Road earlier that afternoon, when we’d laughed
together, and quietly reminisced, and enjoyed our feet walking in perfect sync.

We were riding through the park together, and I could still taste the wetness from
his mouth on my lips, and we were both still damp from mud and rain, and it was
more awe-inspiring, more overwhelming than that first drive I took in my truck
through the Denali entrance, just four days after leaving Seattle, when I’d filled
my lungs with the scent of the quaking aspens for the very first time.

And I had never, in my entire life, felt more like a Ranger than I did in that
moment.

Just when I was going to turn to him and somehow put it all into words, the bus
slowed to a halt, and a hum of excited whispering filled the hot air. Cameras
clicked and flashed. The bus driver murmured into his intercom that there was a
lone male wolf coming up around the next curve of the Road, and for everyone to be
silent and keep their arms and legs inside the bus.

Everything went absolutely still.

We were the only two people who hadn’t leapt to our feet and crowded the windows on
the opposite side of the bus. Visitors were plastered to the dusty windows,
everyone holding their breath, and I heard the collective gasp and clicks of
cameras as the wolf must have come into view, slowly ambling along the edge of the
Road towards us.

I smiled quietly, remembering the first time I’d seen a wolf in the park. It had
taken me almost three months back in my first season to spot one – back then,
before the major wolf territory conservation projects had kicked in, and seeing an
actual wolf in the park by chance was far more of a badge of honor than spotting a
grizzly.

I’d been riding in the passenger seat of one of the Park vans, being driven out to
a crack-of-dawn shift at Eielson by Steven, one of the oldest Park Rangers at the
time who called anyone under the age of fifty-five “junior” instead of their name.
There’d been constant bear sightings down near the Alpine Walk trail, and they were
keeping extra Enforcement staff on hand in case any visitors got too close. I was
sitting there in the seat, just enjoying the grey dawn light as it spilled over the
park, chasing away the thick layer of fog that had settled around Stoney Point and
revealing the outlines of moose antlers far off in the distance, when suddenly,
startling me, Steven had slammed on the brakes at the top of a hill.

“Everything ok --?” I started to ask, but Steven just held up his hand and quietly
said, “Look.”

And just before us, appearing out of the mist like a mirage, with streaks of golden
sun illuminating its steaming fur, a wolf had appeared, raising its head to scan
across the valley.

We watched it in complete silence. I could have heard someone whispering from clear
across the other side of the park. My heart raced in my chest, pushing out against
my uniform, and I gripped my thighs with my hands so my fingers wouldn’t shake.
Dust that had kicked up from the tires gradually settled from floating up into the
air, blowing away with the mist and fog, and it felt like the three of us were the
only beings alive.

The wolf stood there for what felt like hours, looking out at the distant peaks. I
watched its muscles quiver, and its chest rose and fell with quick puffs of breath.
Then finally, it bent its head to sniff at the ground, then kept its nose to the
moss as it slowly turned down the peak and trotted away.

Just when the last bit of its tail disappeared around a mass of boulders, Steven
whistled through his teeth, and I jumped, forgetting I hadn’t been alone.

“Never gets old, Junior,” he whispered as he turned the truck’s engine back on. He
shook his head and grinned as we kicked up another cloud of dust and started to
drive. “Never gets old,” he said again.

And I’d looked down at his weathered hands gripping the gear shift of the truck,
thought of all the beautiful things they’d seen, the powerful things they’d
touched, and I’d known, right then, that one day my own wrinkled hands would be
pointing out a wolf to a new Denali Ranger, too.

I blinked and looked over at Sherlock, expecting him to be craning his neck to see
the wolf walking by our bus, either that or muttering under his breath that all the
visitors flashing their cameras were idiots, but instead he was just looking out
the window, the opposite direction of everyone else. My chest panged when I saw him
reach up his other hand to cover his eyes.

I heard a hitch in his breath. My whole body froze at the sound.

“Sherlock?” I whispered. I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice – that I had
gotten him back for just a few hours, but now he was already slipping away,
slipping right through my fingers, just out of reach of my touch –

But he squeezed my hand harder, kept hidden between the warmth of our thighs. He
sniffed hard and wiped again at his eyes. I saw his lips shake.
And then, with a power that knocked the breath from my lungs, he took his hand away
from his face, drew in a long, shaky breath, and he met my gaze in the reflection
of the window. His eyes were wet, and rimmed with red, and the tops of his cheeks
shone from wiped away tears. We looked at each other, and he tried to smile before
his lips twisted again, unable to hold anything back, and it was in that moment
that I understood.

He wasn’t upset about anything at all. He wasn’t slipping away through my fingers.

He was still holding my hand.

Something in me released, something that had still been held tightly in my chest,
even after we’d kissed, even after he’d laughed with me on the long hike back.

I let out a breath and held his hand in both of mine. I kneaded my thumbs into the
soft skin of his palm. My head relaxed against the seat behind me, and I felt every
bit of tension leave my body in a rush.

“I know,” I whispered, so softly that even he could barely hear it. He read my lips
in the window reflection, and his mouth broke again into a wet smile. He wiped his
arm across his eyes and laughed under his breath at himself.

“Sorry,” he finally said in a rough voice. The other people in the bus were
starting to re-take their seats, a mass of whispering and movement now that the
wolf had disappeared behind us. The bus engine roared to life.

He wove his fingers through mine. He still looked at my face through the window.

“It’s just . . .” he said, and when he shook his head, when he couldn’t finish, I
felt my own eyes grow wet.

“I know.”

He looked at me for another moment, reading the lines of my face, and I knew, deep
down, that he was somehow seeing a memory I’d never even told him – not yet.

He was seeing the whale, or the gun in my father’s hands, or the day I finally
graduated from our rundown high school, even after missing more than half the days
of school, and I walked out of the stuffy gym with my hat sitting sideways on my
head, and the rolled up piece of white paper in my hands, and I’d realized, looking
out at the sea of families hugging in the dead-grass yard, that nobody I knew had
come. Not even my sister. Not even my dad.

And so I’d walked the three miles back home through the fields, with my graduation
gown and dress stuffed back in a trash bin by the school, and I’d come home to the
weedy front yard of our house swarming with police – something about my mom having
gotten her hands on a knife. Something about my sister and her kids crying at the
next-door neighbor’s house. Something about scotch spilled on the hardwood floor.

And my dad had looked up and seen me there, standing in the middle of the chaos in
my gym uniform I’d changed into before leaving the school, with the rolled-up paper
of my diploma still clutched in my hand, and his mouth had twisted the same way
Sherlock’s just had, and he’d thumped me on the back and said, “ _You know I wished
I coulda been there, Ranger. You know I woulda come._ ”

And I realized that Sherlock was somehow seeing, looking at my face in the
reflection of the Denali bus window, that I had been glad, been _relieved_ ,
standing there in the yard after a graduation ceremony I’d walked away from alone.
Because if nobody I really knew had been there to hear them call out my name, and
see me hide my flinch at the sound, and seen the hints of the dress my mom had sewn
for my sister peeking out through the gap in the graduation gown, then maybe I
could pretend that none of it had ever even happened. Maybe I could make myself
believe it had all been a horrible dream.

And I knew Sherlock could see, too, even though I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to
say the words, that the shotgun had happened just nine days after that, the morning
that I came down to the kitchen with a freshly buzzed head, and a pair of my dad’s
old jeans thrown on over my thin legs, and absolutely no fucks left to give.

“Looks like the two of you got yourselves caught out in that storm earlier today,”
I suddenly heard. I jumped, and then looked up to see a woman around Sherlock’s age
peering over the back of the seat in front of us. For some reason, my eyes focused
immediately on the bright pink nail polish on her hands.

Then I remembered my own hands, still holding Sherlock’s between my own.

“Got more mud on you than there is outside,” the woman was still saying. My heart
raced. I went to move my hands away from Sherlock’s, when I felt his fingers
tighten around my own, not letting me pull away.

“We did. What a stunningly brilliant observation,” I heard Sherlock say beside me.
I couldn’t even look over to tell him to knock it off. All I could feel was his
hand in mine. All I could focus on was the neon pink of her nails. The fact she
might see . . .

To my surprise, the woman threw back her head and laughed. It caused some of her
long braids to fall over the back of the seat, nearly brushing my knees.

“Alright there, sassy,” she said, still smiling. “Point taken.” I waited for her to
turn back around, or to mention the fact that the two men were holding hands in the
seat behind her, but instead she just rested her chin on her hands and looked out
the window at the park passing us by.

“Bet you were glad when those skies finally cleared up,” she went on. “I know I was
– came all this fucking way from New York just to celebrate my grandparents’
anniversary and all we saw all morning was a giant grey cloud.”

Sherlock hummed beside me. “Yes, this place will do that to you,” he said.

She frowned. “Don’t tell me you were fine with all the rain – sounds like you came
clear across an ocean just to be here.”

He smiled, and I felt his fingers tighten around my own. “Indeed, I did.”

Warmth flooded my chest, and for the first time in the conversation, I spoke. “We
were glad for the clear skies,” I said. “Definitely glad.”

I felt Sherlock’s gaze flicker to the side of my face. I knew that he understood I
was talking about far more than the weather.

The woman looked over her shoulder at a group of people sitting a few rows up –
family, from the way they smiled back at her – then she turned back to us and
leaned farther over the seat.

“Look, since you’re not being antisocial retirees like half the other old people on
this bus,” the woman said in a fake whisper, and as I laughed, she went on, “Either
of you know enough yet to be able to tell me what the hell is the difference
between a caribou and a reindeer? My son’s asked me two hundred times on this trip,
and trying to pin down a Ranger to talk to him for more than ten seconds is like
trying to speak with the President, you know? I’m running out of ways to distract
him playing ‘I spy’ - Everything out here is just brown and green . . .”

I tensed again, waiting for Sherlock to rip her a new one, but instead, I felt his
body relax into the seat, and he gestured towards me with his head. “Actually, John
here is a Ranger,” he said. “He can tell you far more than just that, if you like.”

“You’re a Ranger?!” she said, amazed. Her hand clutched the seat harder with
excitement. Her eyes traveled over my face and clothes. “But you’re not wearing –”
her voice trailed off, and I realized with a sickening lurch that she had finally
noticed our joined hands.

That split-second lasted for an eternity in my mind. She saw our hands, and she
looked back up at my face, at my plain clothes covered in mud and drying rain. She
glanced over at Sherlock who was steadily holding her gaze.

Sherlock’s thumb stroked my skin.

She licked her lips and looked back at my flannel shirt. “Well, unless ‘mud’ is the
new uniform color, you’re not wearing any Ranger uniform I can see,” she finally
said, as if that pause hadn’t even happened.

The air in the bus seemed to melt. The ice in my spine was gone.

I gulped down a lungful of air and cleared my throat so I could speak, hoping my
voice wouldn’t shake. “I’m off duty today,” I said. “But yeah, I work here.”

Her face brightened, and she gave me a small smile I couldn’t fully read. The bus
went over a particularly large bump, and she gripped the seat to keep turned around
while the visitors in the rest of the bus cried out in surprise.

“So, what’s your story, then?” she asked. When I frowned, she added, “Well, you
know kids. My son’s been asking every person out here in a uniform why they wanted
to be a Ranger. Can’t get enough of it - thinks you’re all superheroes.”

I laughed. “God, I hope not –”

“Well, my son’s rubbed off on me, so I’m gonna ask you. What’s your story?”

It was a question I had been asked hundreds of times before. In Canyonlands, in

Death Valley, in the Grand Canyon, in Denali. I’d been asked it by little kids
holding grizzly bear stuffed animals, and grandparents holding hands on their 50th
Anniversary vacations, and teenagers who dreamed of adventure in the outdoors. By
teenagers who looked bored to tears being dragged along on the family trip.

And every time, my answer was the same: I grew up near a National Park, I went out
on that first hike my first week at Canyonlands, someone got me a connection with
the job, etc.

And every time, the person who asked always looked amazed. How could I possibly
choose this, and how difficult it must be, and how lucky I am. How my life must be
so different from everyone else’s, living in a place like this. Where the hell do I
go to buy food.

As she waited for my answer, I suddenly remembered walking down the street in New
York City towards the clinic, directions someone had written down for me back in
South Dakota clutched in my hand, and my backpack wrapped up against my chest in my
arms. I’d been walking, frantically looking at the street signs, dodging taxis, and
trying not to get lost, with my hat pulled down and a too-tight-to-breathe strip of
cotton around my chest.

And I’d turned a corner, looked up, and seen a couple holding hands. A young man
and a woman, casually holding hands and walking down the street towards the park,
and the man had leaned over and kissed the side of the woman’s head, whispering
something into her ear, before they both laughed and glanced into each other’s
eyes.

Nobody else had paid them any attention at all.

I’d stopped in my tracks, staring, and in that moment, I doubted every single thing
in my life. I doubted my short hair, and the name John, and the money bundled up in
the backpack in my hands. I doubted the clinic, the scars I knew I was about to
have etched into my chest, and the last words I ever yelled back at my parents. I
doubted not turning around in the driveway when my sister had whispered my name.

I’d wanted to turn back.

Screw the clinic, grow back out my hair, untie my chest, change my shirt. Anything
to be able to have what those two strangers just shared in the middle of the New
York sidewalk. Anything not to be walking through the crowded streets all alone, to
look over and have someone at my side, to have someone holding my hand for everyone
to see.

I’d stood there for a long time, so long that I knew I was going to be late.

Then I took one step backwards, away from the clinic, just one step. I turned my
head to start walking the other way, walk back to the airport, back on a plane. And
as I turned, I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the Macy’s window
to my left.

I’d seen myself, _myself_ , the way I always wished I could see me in the dingy
bathroom mirror back at our old house.

I’d seen John Watson, walking through New York City, with an old Minnesota Twins
baseball cap on his head.

“ _Sir,_ ” I heard behind me. The person was irritated. “ _Sir!_ ”

I turned, and I saw that there was a woman behind me trying to push a stroller down
the sidewalk. I saw I was blocking her path. She had been talking to _me_.

I muttered, “ _Sorry_ ,” in my deepest voice, and quickly stepped out of the way.
And once she had passed, after rolling her eyes, I looked down at the folded paper
in my hands to check the directions. Then I’d marched to the clinic, head held
high, without once turning back.

The woman on the bus was still waiting for my answer.

Sherlock Holmes was holding my hand. And she had seen. And she had still asked.

“Not a very exciting story,” I finally said, squeezing Sherlock’s fingers in mine.
“Just . . . it’s always been me. The only thing I did that ever felt right, I
guess. Working out here in the parks.”

I expected her to look disappointed in my vague answer, but instead she only nodded
and held my gaze. “You been doing it a long time?” she asked.
I raised my eyebrows, suddenly shocked at my own answer. “Twenty years.”

“Well, shit, if you haven’t been eaten by any wild animals by now, I’d say you’re
pretty good at what you do.”

Before I could respond, Sherlock sat forward next to me in the seat. “John is
excellent at what he does,” he said, so solemn and serious it was like he was
pronouncing someone’s fate. “He is by far the most competent Ranger in this entire
park.”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “That’s quite the pronouncement.”

I laughed. “He’s exaggerating –“ I started to say, but then she gave me a small
wink. “I wouldn’t argue with the likes of him,” she said. Then she gestured over
her shoulder, and her face looked a bit guilty. “Look, I know you’re not working,
but my son would be over the moon if he could meet you for a minute. Most of the
other Rangers we’ve seen haven’t really had time. . . He really loves the outdoors
whenever he gets to go. . .”

My original intention for that bus ride had been to take a nap next to Sherlock’s
body, feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt, breathe in the same air as his
lungs, remember the press of his lips.

Sherlock’s thigh pressed into mine. I smiled at her. “I’d love to meet him,” I
said.

Her face washed over with relief. “Right, I’ll call him over. You’re a real saint.
He’s gonna pee his pants.”

I was still laughing when she leaned over her shoulder and called out, “Alexander!”
to the group of people sitting a few rows up. A little boy popped up from his seat,
about nine or ten, and he stumbled down the bumpy bus, clutching the backs of the
seats, after the woman waved him over.

“Got someone for you to meet,” she said, holding his shoulders so he could sit down
next to her on the seat. They both leaned over the back.

“This here’s John. . .” She paused, and she looked at me to help her out.

“Watson,” I said.

“This here’s John Watson. He’s a Ranger here in the park. Wants to meet you.”

I expected the boy to smile, or look excited, but instead he only gave me a hard
look and frowned. “He’s not wearing a uniform, or wearing a badge,” he said. He
turned to his mom. “This man’s lying to you!”

And just when the woman blushed and opened her mouth to correct him, Sherlock
laughed loudly beside me and leaned forward in the seat. He pulled his hand from
mine, gently, then extended it towards the kid.

“You make an extremely valid point,” he said. “It’s always good to be fully aware
of the facts before trusting anything you’re told. I can, in fact, confirm that
this man beside me is a Ranger. He is a GS-9 level Enforcement Ranger, although he
could easily be a GS-11 if he chose, and is tasked with keeping the park and its
visitors safe. He is not wearing his uniform because I requested he accompany me on
a casual backpacking trip the last three days. Now, what is your name?”
The kid looked at Sherlock with wide eyes, mouth hanging half-open. He extended his
hand slowly, reverently, and Sherlock took it in a firm grip. They did a business-
like handshake.

“Alexander Brooks,” the boy said, with a firm nod.

Sherlock bowed his head. “Mr. Brooks, Sherlock Holmes.” He turned to me. “This here
is Ranger John Watson.”

Alexander turned to me and very seriously took my hand. “Ranger Watson,” he said,
mimicking Sherlock’s deep voice.

I hid my grin. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Brooks. Your mother tells me you might
have some questions about the park?”

He nodded and reached down into his pocket to bring out a small spiral notebook,
covered in lopsided writing. He flipped through a few pages, nearly falling over
with the turns of the bus. “I do,” he said, and I could practically feel the power
of Sherlock’s grin beside me.

“Shoot,” I said.

Alexander cleared his throat. “What, exactly, is the difference between a caribou
and a reindeer?” he asked.

His mother gave me a knowing glance, then rolled her eyes. I had a feeling she had
heard him ask that question a hundred times before.

I leaned forward. “A lot of people have that question,” I said. “It’s a good one to
ask. You see, most people think that they’re two different types of animals, and I
could see why you would, I mean, they have two totally different names, but
actually –”

“Oh, come on, just answer him, will you?” Sherlock cut in. He leaned forward and
held Alexander’s gaze over the seat. “Reindeer are domesticated caribou,” he said
quickly. “It means caribou that were taken out of the wild, or born in captivity,
and raised by humans. Next question.”

The boy’s eyes widened, and I tensely waited for him to cry or turn to his mom to
complain, then a brightness washed over his face, and he flipped through his
notebook again, looking only at Sherlock. The rest of us didn’t exist.

“What is the most effective way to survive a brown bear attack versus a black bear
attack?”

His mom huffed. “Alexander . . .”

“Mom!”

Sherlock grinned. “It’s quite simple. I assume you know the fastest and most
effective way to distinguish a brown bear from a black bear?”

“The shape of its head and snout. Obviously.”

“Obviously. Now, if you see that the bear is guarding its cubs or food, regardless
of whether it’s black or brown, then you’ll want to lie down and play dead, the
easiest way to do this being ---”

I gradually tuned out the specifics of Sherlock’s answer, watching his eyes light
up as he answered question after question. His thigh pressed into mine. The two of
them talked, answering more than ten of Alexander’s questions, until the bus
finally pulled into the gravel lot by the visitor tent at Toklat. The woman flashed
me a grateful smile as the bus driver made the announcement that they’d take a
thirty-minute break for people to use the bathrooms and talk to Rangers in the
tent.

“Thank you,” she mouthed as everyone started to gather up their stuff.

I glanced at Sherlock and Alexander, still deep in a conversation about types of

moss. “Trust me, he loved that,” I said. “There’s only so much that I’ll put up
with his ramblings on things. Having such a willing audience was probably like
Christmas.”

“So, he works here too, then?”

I nodded. “Tracks and researches the wolves.”

She gave me an odd look before asking, in a quiet voice. “Is that how you met?”

I suddenly remembered Molly’s timid voice at her kitchen table from a few months
ago. “ _So. . . does that mean . . .are you – out?_ ”

I looked back at this woman, this woman whose first name I didn’t even know, and I
nodded, forcing myself to keep my head high. “Last season,” I said, realizing I was
grinning as I said it.

She smiled back as she hefted a backpack onto her shoulders, then guided Alexander
out of the bench with a hand on the back of his neck. “Come on now,” she was
saying, “Let the poor man get his stuff.”

Sherlock looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was even there. “Sorry, I didn’t mean
to –”

“That kid loved that,” I said, handing him his pack. “And so did you.”

He looked quickly out the window, but I caught the corner of his grin.

Alexander and his mom were waiting for us outside the bus at the bottom of the
stairs. I breathed in a lungful of the familiar Toklat air – the fresh breeze off
the river rock and the cool, green wind blowing down from the nearby slopes.

Sherlock held out a hand for Alexander to shake. “You’ve got the mind of a
scientist, Mr. Brooks,” he said. “If you ever find yourself in London and need a
lab to work in, I can put in a good word for you in a number of places.”

His mother laughed and put her arm around Alexander’s shoulders. “Let’s hope that’s
not for another decade, at least, right?”

The kid rolled his eyes and huffed. “Mom!”

Sherlock was letting Alexander ask him another question about types of birds, and I
caught the woman’s gaze. “I never got your name. . .” I said.

She held out her hand. “Sorry, Natasha.”

When I went to pull away from our handshake, she kept my hand in hers. “Thank you,”
she said softly. “He’s been . . . having a rough time. At school. Having two
Rangers give him the time of day for so long, it means a lot. Haven’t heard him
talk this much in months.”

I swallowed over my tight throat and shook her hand again. “Thank you, too,” I
said, unable to say anything else but hoping she understood what I meant.

She nodded back, seriously, then glanced quickly at Sherlock. She understood.

“We’d best be going now, Mr. Brooks,” I heard Sherlock say next to me. The kid
frowned. “Aren’t you getting back on the bus with us to Wonder Lake?”

“We live here, actually,” I said, looking farther down the side road towards the
hidden cabins in the distant trees. “This is our stop.”

Alexander’s eyebrows rose up his forehead. “You live here?! You both _live_ here
all the time in the park?!”

Before I could open my mouth to correct him, to tell him that only I really lived
here, and not all the time, Sherlock answered, “We do get to live here all the
time,” he said, nodding. “It’s a special place to us both.”

I wiped a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t reach out to kiss him instead.

Natasha gathered Alexander back to her side. “You both have a free dinner in New
York City if you ever stop by, okay? You ever been?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Only layovers at the airport.” He flashed me a quick
glance, unsure as to what I would say.

I held her gaze, and I remembered the way the sunlight had reflected off the top of
the Empire State Building as I’d waited for my Greyhound Bus bound for Utah, that
nurse’s crisp fifty-dollar bill folded deep in my pocket.

“I have,” I said. “I want to take him back there with me some day.”

She winked and handed over a business card for a salon. “This here’s my place,” she
said. “Call us up when you’re in town.” She looked over at Sherlock and waved her
hand towards his head. “And we’ll deal with . . . fixing whatever hairstyle you
claim to have going on up there.”

Sherlock scoffed as I barked out a laugh. “Well it’s hardly fair to judge me if
I’ve just been caught in a storm, as you so ingeniously pointed out.”

“We can take you to the Natural History Museum!” Alexander cried out.

Sherlock gave Natasha another fake-harsh look before he bowed seriously and bent to
look Alexander in the eye. “It would be a pleasure.”

I suddenly remembered something, something I always had on me, and I patted my

pockets before I remembered I wasn’t wearing my uniform shirt. “Hold on, before you
go,” I said, then bent to dig in the smaller pockets of my bag. I smiled when my
fingers clasped around the little wooden badge I was hoping would be in there. I
knelt on one knee and held it out to Alexander in my palm.

I cleared my throat. “Mr. Brooks, I hereby pronounce you a Junior Ranger of Denali
National Park,” I said, in my official voice. When Alexander didn’t immediately
take it from my hand, I leaned forward to pin the little carved wooden badge to his
shirt.

But he leaned back, and he looked me right in the eye with a frown. “Hold up, isn’t
that for babies?”

I held in a shocked laugh as his mom put her hands on her hips. “Alexander Devon
Brooks, you will apologize to Ranger Watson, and thank him for his –”

“It’s fine, really,” I said up to her, taking the badge back in my hand.

“While your reasoning that these pins are mostly created for ‘babies’ – as you say
– is sound, I must inform you that you are, in fact, making a grave error,” I heard
Sherlock say above me. He knelt down beside me on one knee and looked Alexander
seriously in the eye. “A badge from Ranger Watson is not simply ‘any’ Junior Ranger
badge. It is an honor of the highest rarity. I have never before, with my own two
eyes, seen him bestow it on another human being. It is reserved for the brightest
and best. The most promising in the Natural Resources Field. Are you sure you
really want to reject it now, Mr. Brooks?”

I stopped my mouth from hanging open at Sherlock’s words, for what felt like the
hundredth time in the last two hours, then turned back to the kid, looking at me
now with a guilty face. “I’m sorry Ranger Watson,” he said, looking at his toes.

I grinned, then leaned forward to pin the badge again to his checkered shirt.
“Nothing to apologize for,” I said. “This is an honor I’m proud to give.”

His chest puffed up when I finished pinning the small badge. I looked up just in
time to see Natasha quickly blinking her eyes.

“Natasha! Come on, we wanna take a group photo with these antlers they got over
here!”

An older woman was waving over Natasha towards the telescopes, standing with their
large group by the antlers the Rangers set out for photo props.

“We’re being summoned,” Natasha said with a sigh, as Sherlock and I got to our
feet. “Thank you both, again.”

I reached up to tip my uniform hat, then realized halfway to my head that I wasn’t
wearing it. I heard Sherlock chuckle beside me. “Enjoy the rest of your trip,” I
said, and we both waved as they turned away.

We stood there, shoulder to shoulder, as the crowds in the gravel continued to

shift and move around us. Alexander looked behind him and waved one last time to
Sherlock, and Sherlock raised his own hand and nodded in goodbye. We watched him
show off his pin to the whole family when he reached them by the antlers.

I gently bumped Sherlock’s side. “Did I just meet the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes
as a nine-year-old?”

Sherlock grinned, but I looked over just in time to catch a flash of sadness on his
face. “I believe you did,” he said, then, in a whisper, “but I also hope not.”

Just then, someone spotted a moose out on the riverbed, and a massive crowd of
visitors swarmed past us to get a better view. I waited to speak until we were
alone in the gravel back by the bus, watching the backs of children jumping to try
and get a better view over the adults.

“There was a kid visited Death Valley my second season there,” I said in a low
voice. “I met the family waiting for the dad to bring the car around from the
parking lot. The mom was asking me where they should go for an easy hike.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could see it all like a film preserved right
in front of my eyes. The way the girl, the kid, had been hunching her spine back in
her shirt, standing away from everyone else. The way she’d been staring at the
ground. There was something about her hair, the look on her face. . . And I didn’t
know for sure, of course I didn’t know, there was no way I could ever even have the
right to know, and yet, watching her stand there, it was like watching a twin of my
twelve-year-old self – like seeing a ghost.

I opened my eyes again, and I blinked in the harsh sun glare illuminating the metal
busses and the rock river bed. “I don’t know,” I finally said with a shrug. “I
don’t . . . I don’t know why. How I even thought this, but, I think . . .” I looked
over at Sherlock, hoping he would understand. “I just knew. Looking at h--, looking
at that kid standing there sweating in the parking lot, I just knew.”

Sherlock’s eyes were soft. “I don’t think you need to have a reason for how you
knew.”

I shrugged my shoulders again and crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t talk to
the kid, or anything, once I was done talking to the mom. I think I was late for a
shift, if I remember right.” I shook my head. “God, I regret, so much, that I
didn’t walk over there. That I didn’t . . . that I didn’t just say –”

“What would you have said?” Sherlock asked, gently.

I laughed at myself. “Hell if I know.”

And I wanted to tell him, I wanted to explain to him how I still searched for that
kid in the crowds. How I looked at every face. . .

I turned to him. “You know, even all this time later, every late-twenty-something
guy that I see here in the park, who looks even a little bit like that kid . . . I
look at them, at their face, and I hope it’s them. Guys here with their own
families, with their own children, with their friends, I hope to God every time
that it’s that same kid. That they . . . that they made it, you know?”

Sherlock looked into my eyes. “Like you,” he whispered.

I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Sherlock looked at me for a long moment before gesturing back to the cabins. “Let’s
go home,” he whispered.

An unexpected relief flooded through my bones. I nodded.

We were silent as we walked up the road towards the cabins, ambling slowly with
sore muscles after so many days of hiking and the long ride in the cramped bus.
Just before we were fully out of sight from the parking lot at our backs, filled
with four separate visitor busses, Sherlock rubbed his palm all the way down my
arm. He lightly gripped my wrist with his fingers, and my entire body shivered at
the warmth.

He took a deep breath, and I waited for him to say something important – something
about New York, or what happened out on the tundra, or the fact that I just let
another human being see us holding hands.

Instead, he said, “You know, nothing could have killed my sexual desire more than
watching you pick up a woman’s phone number over the course of an hour on a filthy
bus.”
I threw back my head and laughed, and it echoed through the warm valley.

“You know she only gave me that so you can field questions from her son again for
hours. I noticed you barely even touched on the topic of wolves with him.”

Sherlock huffed. “That doesn’t mean you had to be so . . . _charming_ about it

all.”

And as I laughed again, he met my gaze, and his fingers tightened around my wrist.
And I suddenly remembered, suddenly realized, how big that moment had been for him,
too.

“ _Nobody’s ever known_ ,” he had said to me, more than a year ago in the front
seat of my truck. We were both remembering it now.

“I’ll be more of an antisocial dick next time,” I said, smiling at his warm gaze.
“Take a page from your book.”

His eyes grew warm, and the wind blew a curl across his forehead. “Excellent,” he
whispered, and he ran his thumb along the vein in my wrist before letting my hand
fall away, right as we came into view of the sea of cabins.

“I’m not doing anything else before a shower,” I said as we reached my porch steps.

He opened his mouth to argue, but I put my hand on his chest. “Seriously, we’re
both covered in mud. I won’t have . . .” I swallowed and lowered my voice. “I won’t
be with you again when I’m all filthy and wet,” I said.

A saw a shiver run up the skin of his neck. He smirked. “What if I told you I
wanted it filthy and wet?” he asked.

I stared at him, and the sudden warmth I felt for him, overwhelming every inch of
my body, was so intense that I almost stepped forward and pulled him into my arms.

I traced the lines of his mouth with my eyes.

“I’m taking a shower,” I said, for some reason whispering, and I knew I wasn’t
hiding my grin.

A breeze blew through the trees surrounding my cabin, brushing the branches against
the rough wood and blowing the curls back from his face. I watched his eyelashes
tangle together as he blinked once, twice.

“I’ll meet you back here,” he said, and we shared a mutual breath, before he turned
to walk back to his cabin to get his things.

When he had taken four steps away, I heard myself calling his name.

“Sherlock!”

He looked back over his shoulder, and the sunlight illuminated a stripe of warmth
across his cheek. I stood there, not even knowing what to say, unsure of how to
tell him that I’d sat slumped against the very same wooden door behind me a year
ago, listening to his voice out in the gravel, thinking I’d never hear it ever
again.

“John,” he said back, and I realized then that he was thinking the same thing.
“Right. See you back here, then,” I said, lamely. He grinned, and I thought I
caught the hint of a wink before he turned and practically floated across the
ground back to his cabin through the trees.

I watched him disappear into the shade completely before I opened the door to my
cabin and closed it behind me. I dropped my pack to the floor.

My cabin was utterly silent.

And yet, I could hear the sound of my own breathing. I could still feel the warm
imprint of his fingers around my wrist. I could smell a hint of his scent buried in
the collar of my shirt from where his hands had gripped me as we kissed.

I knew, within a few hours, that one of his curled hairs would be lying on my
hardwood floor.

I expected myself to be in a rush, desperate to speed up time, trying to jump

ahead, and yet my body took its time, gathering up my shower supplies, digging
through my drawers to find sweats and a tee to wear. The shower house was empty
when I entered it, and I kept the light off out of habit, then sighed as a blast of
warm water hit my skin. It was the same wave of relief I’d felt countless times
before – that first rush of warm, clean water across my body after days out camping
in the wilderness. I could feel it blasting the dried dirt and mud from my skin,
caressing the tired muscles in my shoulders and legs, and I softly moaned under my
breath.

I heard the shower house door open, and feet padded across the tile to enter the
stall right next to mine. The lights were still off. Without even having to think,
I knew it was him.

I heard him setting out his shampoo and conditioner on the shelf, then his own
blast of water filled the bathroom, and the steam from our stalls started to turn
to thick fog in the air.

I heard him moan, too.

Suddenly, my mind was filled images of his bare skin dripping with water. Droplets
running over the rises of his chest, pooling in the dips of his collarbones,
clinging to the bones of his hips. In my mind, I saw his curls plastered down his
neck, the way water would cling to the tips of his eyelashes and cover his full
lips. The way it would soak through the hair above his cock, and caress the skin of
his thighs –

I slammed off my shower and sucked in a breath. A deep warmth was starting to thrum
low in my gut, in a way I hadn’t fully felt for nearly a year. And though I
desperately wanted to reach down and feel myself, to imagine Sherlock moaning,
dripping with water, bare and hot in my own wet arms, rubbing up slick against me
in the place where I was growing hard, I also somehow knew that it was imperative
that I wait for him. That I waited to see him in my cabin, real and whole, flesh
and bone, and not just my imagination.

I took a deep breath, shook my shoulders, then stepped out into the cool air to
grab my towel.

He was still showering as I made my way towards the door, dressed in old sweatpants
and a t-shirt I had picked up from the Death Valley gift shop my last day on shift.
I heard the water splash off his skin, and his breath mixed with the sound of the
spray in the air. The scent of his shampoo filled my nose, and I breathed it in,
marveling in the fact that he probably knew I was hesitating by the door to do just
that. That I was allowed to be there, knowing he was naked on the other side of a
thin door.

The air back in my cabin felt electric against my skin. I stood at the kitchen
counter looking out the window for about ten seconds before I gave up and started
moving around, putting away our backpacking supplies and hanging up the fly of my
tent to air it out. I lost myself in the simple routine of it all, putting back
everything exactly where it went, cleaning off all the gear, re-rolling our
sleeping bags and pads. I was so lost in the movements that it startled me to hear
my cabin door opening.

I leapt to my feet from where I’d been crouching in the kitchen putting my camping
stove away, and a sudden relief filled me, so sharply it brought water to my eyes,
that Sherlock had simply entered my cabin without even knocking.

I stood there, in my simple clothes, with my still damp hair, and my bare feet, and
he looked back at me like I was the sun in the middle of the hardwood floor. He was
wearing an old Henley I’d seen last season and the flannel pajama bottoms I knew he
loved. I could smell his soap on his skin, see a little drop of water fall from the
tip of his curls.

We stared at each other, neither of us wanting to break the spell and move. I
remembered that morning what felt like decades ago, when he stood in almost the
exact same spot after breaking into my room, and looked at me in the same frozen
way, that morning I’d walked out in my underwear to make us coffee without even
realizing I didn’t have my sock rolled up in my boxers.

And he was more beautiful, more unbelievable, standing there in the dim light of my
kitchen, with his drying curls frizzing about his head and a sunburn tinging his
cheeks, than he had been that very first day back East in the parking lot in a
perfectly tailored suit.

I breathed out through my nose, and my breath shook. He was standing there, in my
cabin.

He was standing there, and he wasn’t going to turn and walk away.

Suddenly he was rushing towards me, arms outstretched, and I was pulling him
against my body, straight into my chest, and gripping his back. I held him, and he
held me.

“John,” he whispered in a tight voice. I sighed again. I couldn’t say anything

back. I clutched him to me as he pressed his cheek into my neck. I could feel the
warmth of his skin from the shower through his shirt, still a bit damp beneath the
cotton, and his spine pressed back against my hands as he took deep breaths.

We had never hugged like that before. Not ever.

We had never hugged, and just stood there breathing in each other’s arms. Had never
stayed in the stillness of each other’s bodies, feeling the bones, clutching the
muscle, caressing the planes of skin. I felt my own heartbeat start to shift in
time to his, matching his slower rhythm until our chests beat together as one
pulse.

I held him.

Not even that day after taking the canoe out on Wonder, when I had hugged him
afterwards by the shore and felt his chest shake in my arms – not even then, had it
felt like this. Because every second we had stood there, our heartbeats had stayed
out of sync, and each passing second my mind had whispered “ _you need to let go
now, you need to let go now, you need to let go_ ,” until I’d finally pulled back
and walked two feet away from him back to the truck.

Now I didn’t have to pull away. I didn’t have to let go.

His body surrounded me. It was as if the Denali air itself had taken physical form
to hold my skin. As if the snowmelt from the peaks, and the pollen of the
wildflowers, and the endless beds of moss were currently covering my body with
strength and warmth. I could smell him. That familiar, specific spark of peppercorn
and cedar that I used to ache for back in the Canyon, when I would lie awake
through the endless winter nights, and clutch empty handfuls of sheets, and think
that maybe I should have leapt into the icy bay to join that whale. Maybe I should
have gotten on a plane to London. I should have, I should have, I should have . . .

“I’m here,” I heard him whisper. “I’m here now.”

Water stung my eyes. I ran my palms up the hard planes of his back, fingers
trailing over his spine. I nodded into his curls and whispered back, “I’m here,
too.”

I don’t know who moved first. Our noses were brushing together, sharing hot puffs
of breath, and then his mouth was on mine, tongue pressing inside, and heat flooded
down my throat and bloomed behind my lungs. It was deeper than any kiss we’d ever
shared, even that evening after he’d pressed the shot into my skin with his own
bare hands. My tongue was along his, he was tasting my mouth. I breathed nothing
but his air, felt nothing but the hot slide of his lips on mine. I gripped his face
with my hands, traced the smooth lines of his strong jaw, freshly shaved from his
shower, and his chest pressed fiercely against mine in a rhythm of _don’t let go,
don’t let go, don’t let go. . ._

I kissed him, slow enough that I didn’t know where my mouth ended and his began.
The wet sounds of our tongues and lips filled the cabin’s air. The hushed groans of
our breath.

My toes curled.

“Come with me,” I whispered against his mouth. I held him by his sides and started
to walk backwards towards my room. He let me lead him. His body was easy and pliant
beneath my hands, muscles loose from his shower, and his skin scrubbed and soft.
And all the while, with every slow step, his lips never left my own. His breath
never stopped dancing with mine, warm and wet and fresh like soap.

I lead him into the bedroom, where the bedside lamp was still turned on from when
I’d been unpacking before. Sherlock reached to turn it off without breaking our
kiss, but my hand settled on his wrist to stop him.

He frowned at me. I didn’t know how to tell him why I wanted the light kept on
without sounding young and ridiculous. That I needed to see him, that I needed him
to see me, that I couldn’t lose him to the blurry darkness – the pitch black that I
used to long for growing up in my attic.

I wanted him to see my skin – the way it had wrinkled, and the way it had changed.
I wanted to count the freckles on his lower back to make sure they were all still
there, that they remembered the year-ago touch of my lips. The small grasp of my
hands.

But he looked at me, really looked at me, and something deep glowed in his eyes –
something pained, and relieved, and filled with such emotion it was like the banks
of the Toklat overflowing with deep blue water, runoff from snow far up in the
peaks, softly flooding the wildflowers and moss until it reflected the golden sun.

He let me guide him to the edge of my bed, and he left on the light.

His hands slowly roved up my sides, conforming to the curves and lines of my body
and ribs. I let my lungs press out into his waiting palms. My body was slowly
relearning the touch of his skin, remembering how to be held, re-melding to the
strong lines of his bones.

He was breathing harder, now, and the sound of it burned in a rolling fire to the
base of my spine. He moaned my name when I pulled him closer to me by his hips.

I gasped for air. He was hard.

Hard just from kissing me, with my body in his arms. Hard and pressing out through
his underwear and his soft flannel pants. Hard and hot like steel against the top
of my thighs. I looked down at the outline of him straining the fabric, listened to
the soft, uncontrolled moans coming from the back of his throat when he realized
what I was looking at, that I was seeing that he wanted me, that I made him erect,
lose control, _wanting_. . .

My fingers grasped the bottom hem of his shirt before I even realized what I was
doing. He sucked in a breath. I froze.

But the second I hesitated, with the shirt hovering just off his skin in my hands,
he reached down and pulled it slowly all the way up over his head. His skin
shivered, and his nipples pearled at the rush of cool air from my room.

My lungs tightened. I rushed forward and pressed my cheek to the warm plane of his
chest as his shirt fell in a heap to the floor. The quick thrum of his heartbeat
echoed in my ear, and his ribs expanded beneath my hands, and it was suddenly so
horrifying, so painful, that I might have gone the rest of my life without this –
without the simple fact that I could touch his bare skin, that I was allowed to
hold him and see.

I rested my face on his chest and simply breathed in deep through my nose. My ears
tingled at the sounds of his palms running up my back over my thin shirt. He
grasped the top of my arms.

“John,” he said. The vibration of his voice rumbled against my cheek, and when I
finally looked up at him, his eyes were nearly black. He swallowed. “We don’t . . .
I’m not expecting anything,” he went on in a whisper. And I felt him shift, just
barely, so that there was an inch of space between our bodies. So that his erection
wasn’t pressing into my skin. “Just, just being here with you, kissing you again,
is . . . Anything you w –”

I didn’t wait to hear the end of his sentence. I kissed him. He hummed against my
lips.

“Take this off,” I whispered into his mouth. I reached to place his hands down on
the bottom hem of my shirt. Without even having to look, I felt his answering
smiling against my lips. And as he pulled my shirt up over my head, as I felt my
bare skin shiver without the layer of fabric, I knew I wanted to cover him, be
covered by him, and wear his body closer than my own muscle and bone. I wanted to
hold the warm waist I thought I’d given up forever in the middle of the raining
tundra.
I wanted him to touch the stomach and chest and ribs that I thought no other human
being would ever again see.

His skin was so soft against my own, still warm from the shower. That time, when he
kissed me, it was desperate and deep. I tasted his moan on my own tongue, and I
shivered at the wet heat of his open mouth. He was starting to pull me back towards
the bed, pulling my sides so I would lay down on top of him and press him into the
sheets. My body felt reckless and wild as I reached down and shoved his flannel
bottoms off his hips, listening to them pool around his ankles on the floor, then I
laughed under my breath as he nearly fell over trying to yank off and step out of
his underwear, too.

Just like that, he was naked. Naked in my room for the first time in nearly a year.
My throat felt too tight.

And he was pulling me, still, pulling me towards him as he started to lie back on
the bed. He wanted me to cover him, wanted to feel the weight of my body, and he
didn’t even care that I was still wearing sweatpants and boxers. He was still hard
for me, leaking, and his glowing skin looked breathtakingly beautiful against my
plain sheets.

And it was in that moment, that moment when he was still pulling me down towards
his bare skin, that I knew what I wanted.

I stood up straight, leaving him lying back on the bed. His chest was heaving,
curls spread over my pillow, eyes dark. The light from the bedside lamp poured
pools of gold across his stomach and ribs – cast shadows in the dips of his thighs.
Illuminated the wetness starting to slowly drip from his erection.

He frowned and held up a hand. “John?”

I looked straight into his eyes, and suddenly nothing else existed in the world.
There was nothing to be afraid of in his eyes, nothing to point between my legs,
nothing to laugh.

I placed my hands on the waistband of my sweatpants and boxers, and I took a deep
breath, and I pushed the fabric down.

Naked.

For the first time in my entire forty-one years of life, since I was a baby in a
crib, I was willingly, completely naked. Standing tall in front of another
breathing person with my bare skin. My boxers and sweatpants pooled around my feet
on the cold floor.

His eyes never left my own. I clenched my fists to keep from reaching over to cover
my genitals, or cover my face. I watched his throat move as he swallowed, and his
erection was still straining towards his stomach and hard. If anything, it was
harder.

I forced myself to breathe. It was the only sound in the silent air.

“Look at me,” I said, not even a whisper, just barely a sound on my breath.

I stood tall as his gaze slowly traveled down my body, down over my chest, across
my stomach, to the tops of my thighs. He looked at my knees, at my ribs, and the
muscle of my forearm.

He looked at my pubic hair. He looked at the place where I was already aching and
hard. Looked at it with his own two eyes, and then he looked back up at my face,
where my jaw was clenched, and he said my name, a wet sound, in a way that chased
every last doubt I had far away.

He held out his hand for me, and I took it. I climbed onto the bed, onto my
familiar lonely sheets, except he was there now, keeping them warm, pulling my body
towards his own. I crouched above him, hovering, and his huge hand was on my cheek.
I shivered at the heat of his kiss, the desperate groan in the back of his throat.

I was wet. I wanted to feel . . . I wanted –

I looked down at where my own body was hovering just above his cock. His eyes were
huge and black.

“Do we need . . .?” I whispered.

He shook his head, and his voice was breathy and low. “There’s been no one.” He ran
his hand up my arm, fingers trailing over the lines of muscle and bone. “Only you.”

It was the last thing I needed to know. With every ounce of strength I had left in
my body, I lowered myself down, slowly, so slowly, until my bare skin was heavy and
lying against his own.

It was indescribable.

We both moaned out loud at the contact. I could never have imagined the heat of his
erection against my bare skin, the way his pubic hair tangled with mine, the way my
wetness would leak onto the hard skin of his cock. There was no way I could have
ever fantasized, no way I could have ever known.

There was nothing between us. He felt every inch of me. He clung to it.

His kisses drowned me, his hands caressed me, he let me rub the full weight of
myself along his bare skin. The room filled with the smell of sweat and sex as I
rubbed my own hardness along his erection, trailing from the root to the tip, and
he was gasping, freely moaning, desperately panting against the skin of my neck.

And we were moving together, rocking, deep rhythm and heat and the strength in his
thighs. . .

He whined when I wound my fingers through his curls, and my eyes grew wet as the
forgotten memory of their touch shocked through my brain.

I had walked away from it, I had turned my back in the tundra and hiked back alone
to the empty road, I had lost, I had _missed_ . . .

“John . . .” I heard him groaning beneath me. I kissed him hungrily, devouring his
mouth, swallowing his words, sweat dripping at the places where our skin touched. I
was pulsing between my thighs where I could feel his bare erection against my body.
I couldn’t breathe unless my mouth was touching his.

“John, what do you . . .” he whispered. I kissed him again. Fingers through curls.
“I want to . . .” he was panting. His hands trailed down my spine. “To . . . to
touch you,” he moaned. I curled my arm beneath the low of his back. “Fuck . . . I
want . . .Christ . . . John, wait –” He put a hand in the middle of my chest, still
and firm, and I leaned up on my elbow away from his body.

He paused for a moment and looked at me. I saw my own face reflected in his grey
eyes. Then he whispered, through labored breaths, “I need to know what’s alright.”
His hands were gently holding either side of my waist.

Like an explosion, like a blast of wind, I realized what he was trying to say. For
one eternal moment, the breathless haze of our desire suddenly cleared.

And I paused, waiting for the ice to freeze along my spine. I waited, and I waited,
and I waited.

I waited to feel back in that Canyonlands shower, back at the kitchen table that
last morning I saw my parents, back in the alley. I waited to feel back in the hot
barn.

I waited, and he waited for me.

But when it didn’t come, when I still craved him with every bone in my body, and
knew that I wasn’t anywhere else except here, with him, in my own bed, I sighed
into the silence and looked deep into his eyes. The delicate skin around his mouth
was pink from my beard. His lips were wet.

“Just . . .” I touched his face, running my thumb along his bottom lip. “Just don’t
. . . go inside,” I said. My voice broke on the last word. It felt like I had just
taken a microphone and announced to an entire Kantishna bus tour that I was gay.
That I wasn’t at all who they thought. That I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t --

He nodded quickly. His eyes were half-lidded. “Yes . . . alright, yes . . ."

He was still hard; I could feel his erection hot against my thigh. His palms held
my skin.

And I realized, in a sudden, breathtaking moment, that I was smiling, nearly

laughing. A twenty-year-old weight I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying was gone
from my shoulders, completely disappeared – just like that.

He was still lying still beneath me, waiting for what I wanted to do. He was still
naked in my bed.

“John,” he breathed, as my fingertips traced his lips.

He still called me John.

I knew that everything had changed.

I looked at him, then I reached down, and I grasped his full erection in my palm,
shivering at the forgotten weight and heat of it in my fingers. “Touch me,” I
breathed. My lips smiled against his in an open kiss, and his body arched up into
my hand. He groaned as I whispered into his ear, “God, Sherlock, I’ve wanted . . .
I’ve missed . . .touch me –”

I was flying. I was at the peak of Denali with fluttering wings. I had captured the
sun.

I felt his fingers press briefly against the top of my thigh, a question and a
warning, and when I nodded against his mouth, sighing across his wet lips, Sherlock
reached between our warm bodies, pressed his lips to the soft place below my ear,
and he touched me.

He touched my bare skin with his fingers, stroking along the length of me, rubbing
the heel of his hand through my hair. I clung to him and let myself moan from deep
in my chest, trying to unleash the desperate power that came from lying heavy in
his arms and thrumming between my legs at the stroke of his fingers – the firm
touch of his hand, the heat and softness of his skin.

It was nothing like any of the times when he’d touched me there before – back when
a layer of thin fabric had been between us. When he could feel me grow hard, and
see me shudder, but he couldn’t feel the pulse of my building orgasm against the
bare pads of his fingers. He couldn’t feel the heat of my living body, the
desperate thrum of my blood and muscle.

He circled me with the pad of his finger. He traced my length, dragged his finger
over my swollen tip. Then he brought his finger up to his tongue. He closed his wet
lips around it, sucked, and hummed.

My vision went grey, and every inch of my skin shivered. I couldn’t breathe.

“Fuck, come here,” I heard myself moaning. I pulled him down on top of me,
devouring every inch of him with my arms. He sighed when I held him close. “Come
on, come here. . .”

He kissed my mouth, my swollen lips, down the side of my neck, across my chest.
Nothing existed on earth but the open, wet slide of his lips, the gentle suck of
his kisses, the wet trail from his tongue. I sank back into the mattress and
groaned as his huge hands caressed the planes of my ribs, holding my body together,
and his curls tickled across my skin.

I had missed them, the silky feel of them as they dragged across my chest, the
chest that he now fully understood, fully knew. Jesus Christ, how I’d missed them .
. .

He hummed when his tongue traced the outline of my hipbone, then he looked up at
me, with his chin just inches from my pubic hair, and he paused.

The muscles in his back flexed beneath my palms when he looked up at my face. He
was miles of skin, miles of bones, oceans and oceans of tumbling curls.

He was a pair of eyes piercing through my dim cabin light – the first time I saw
the Northern Lights whispering above the mountains through the fog.

“I want to suck you,” I watched his swollen lips say.

I sucked in a breath and blinked. My chest was still panting, and my palms sweat.
“What . . . you brought . . .?”

Because I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that the thing, the cock, which
felt like it had last existed two hundred years ago - it couldn’t possibly be here
in my room, brought back with him, within my reach . . .

He held my gaze and shook his head. “It’s back in London. I didn’t . . . well,
obviously, I didn’t know, didn’t want to hope –”

The air was silent.

The realization of what he meant dawned on me all at once.

“You want to . . .” I whispered, afraid to finish the words – afraid that he would
hear them, and cringe, and say back, “ _No, obviously not that --_ ”

“Yes,” he said, breathless. His thumbs rubbed slow lines across my stomach. “Only
if you want.”

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

He must have read the thoughts on my face, because I watched his throat pulse as he
swallowed, then he crawled back up to me so he was looking straight down at my
face. His fingertips settled in my beard, and I shivered at the weight of him as he
allowed his chest to press fully against mine. His back was damp with sweat.

There was a frown line between his eyes.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, I leaned up to kiss
him softly on the mouth, letting my lips linger until the taste of his breath
covered the surface of my tongue. When I lay back on the pillow, his face was open
and clear.

He licked his lips. “I told myself the whole way back on the bus that I would do
everything not to make the same mistakes again –”

“You had that thought while explaining the difference between animal scat to
Alexander?”

He huffed and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I can have two coherent thoughts at
once. It’s physically possible –”

I grinned and traced my hand up his spine. “Right, so you were thinking . . .”

He took a deep breath, and I felt the warmth of it blow gently across my cheek. “I
don’t . . . I don’t want to keep things from you. To hold back from what I want you
to know, out of . . . because I can’t . . .”

I rested my nose against his and closed my eyes. I nodded so he could feel my
answer. My throat was too tight to speak.

“And what I want you to know, right now,” he finally went on in a whisper, “Is that
. . . if you want me to, if you . . . if you’d like . . . I want to taste you . .
there. I want to feel you in my mouth. It’s something I would like to do, if you
wanted it.”

I squeezed my eyes and grounded myself in the weight of his body on mine. He
pressed his nose into my cheek, and he waited, perfectly still.

Of course I wanted it.

I wanted it with an intensity I had never even realized until he was suddenly
naked, asking me, and my stomach and the tops of my thighs were still damp from the
presses of his lips. I wanted to fuck his mouth, look down at the sight of his lips
against my bare skin. No black straps in sight.

But I had to make sure.

“What, exactly, do you want?” I asked him, barely whispered to him, and I hated how
soft my voice sounded, how small. I traced my fingers up his spine so he could try
to understand what I meant – what I needed him to say.

He paused, then he slowly rolled his hips across my body, pressing his cock into my
skin as it grew warm again and filled. My eyes flew open, and I gasped, when his
tongue traced the outline of my ear.
“I want your cock in my mouth,” he said, in the deepest voice I had ever heard.
“Want you between my lips, running down my throat.”

I moaned, and he started to thrust his erection into my hip. It was making him
hard, _I_ was making him hard, the thought of doing that, the thought of me. . .

“Want you heavy on my tongue.” He softly bit the skin on my neck. “Taste you when
you’re hard . . .”

“Fuck.” My fingers were wound through his curls. I laughed once under my breath.
“God, you –”

I felt his lips smile against my skin where they traced over my collarbone, down to
my chest. “I want you in me. . . in my mouth,” he whispered across my ribs. “Just
you, just your body. . . I want . . .” he looked back up at me with dark eyes and
an open mouth. My stomach shivered from the wet trails of his lips on my skin.

“John,” he whispered, in a tone of voice that seeped straight down into my

bloodstream, hunkering warmly in the spaces between my bones, surrounding the air
in my lungs.

I didn’t have to make sure anymore.

I turned my head so I could kiss the inside of his wrist which was planted up by my
cheek, then I put a steady hand on his shoulder, grasping the firm muscle, and I
watched the heat in his eyes, the wash of heavy understanding, as I slowly started
to push him down towards my legs.

I closed my eyes as I opened my thighs so he could settle between my legs. I kept

my eyes closed as his breath ghosted over my bare skin, tracing the insides of my
thighs with heat. His palms traced up my legs, thumbs dipping into my hips, and the
air crackled when he paused, with a sigh in the back of his throat.

He breathed across my skin. He drew the scent of me into his nose. His shoulders
expanded under my palms.

Then everything exploded.

Warm, tight, heat engulfed my skin. Full lips surrounded me, closing around my body
and sucking, licking, pulling me into his mouth. Moaning vibrations at the taste.

He was kissing me there. He was tasting, swallowing, moaning around a part of

myself I hadn’t even been able to look at in years – decades. And he was _kissing_
it. Sucking me.

My eyes flew open as prickling heat gathered in the corners. The ceiling became a
blur, and I thought maybe I would never take in a full breath ever again. My
fingers were wound through his curls, clutching the reality of him buried between
my legs, spreading my thighs, urging my back with his hands to arch up into his
mouth.

I was in his mouth. In another man’s mouth. In Sherlock Holmes’ mouth.

He closed his lips around me one more time, and I felt huge and hard down his
throat. Like I was spreading his lips, dripping onto the back of his tongue, long
and erect and pressing up into his open mouth – his mouth which was sighing,
moaning around me in a way I’d never before heard, never even heard in my wildest,
most reckless fantasies alone in my room in the dark.
I looked down just in time to see his mouth pulling off me. I saw myself, my own
bare skin, slowly emerging from between his lips – glistening, pink skin from the
heat of his mouth. I was swollen, and hard, and standing up erect from the rest of
my body, from the pressure of his lips and tongue.

He closed his eyes and ran his tongue one last time along the length of me, slowly,
slowly enough that it made me feel ten times longer than I really was. He sucked on
the tip and hummed. I heard him breathe in the scent of my skin.

And it was as if the rest of me, the wet folds of skin that existed in the shadows
behind his mouth, they didn’t even exist. They didn’t even matter. Nothing mattered
at all except the sight of his head bobbing over my own real skin – bobbing over my
cock - which was hard and thrumming and pulsing in pleasure from the tight heat of
his mouth.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw him open his eyes. I waited, throat dry, as his
eyes traced over the sight of me up close.

I left my legs open.

He saw everything, saw it all – my hair, and the wetness, and the small part of me
he’d been sucking - the part of myself I’d fought for for years, and years, and
years.

He looked at me in the fresh silence, drank in the sight, as if nothing was missing
there at all. As if it was exactly what he wanted to see, as if he couldn’t stop
looking, as if it was everything . . .

And when he looked up at me, with his wet lips parted, and he met my gaze, I
gasped.

He wanted me.

I’d never seen such hunger before in his eyes, such a fierce, hot desire. I felt
his body shiver between my legs, watched in awe as his hips rolled against the bed,
getting himself off. He reached up and gripped my hand on the sheets.

“John,” he whispered, in a rough, broken voice.

I blinked hard to keep the water out of my eyes. I held his gaze. “God . . .”

He was panting. “Is it . . . can I . . .?”

I threw back my head on the pillow and shook at the force of my words. “Suck me.”

I heard him groan. Felt the drag of his lips back on my skin.

“Take me,” I heard myself breathe. I cupped the back of his bobbing head with my
palm. “Fuck, suck me . . . yes . . .”

He pulled off to curse under his breath. The word vibrated against my skin.

“Sherlock,” I gasped.

I was lost.

We moved together, rolling as I pressed up between his lips. His hands were on my
hips, and his nose was buried in my hair, and my entire body lit up at the shocking
heat of his sucking tongue along my hard skin, his hot breath and his cries, the
shake of the mattress as he ground his own erection down into the sheets.

I heard myself whispering, moaning, gasping at the caress of his mouth against my
body. Warmth was building in my thighs, pooling deep in my gut, as I pressed, and
fucked, and arched up against the wet heat of his tongue. I was laid open, I was
completely bare, I was more naked than I’d ever been in my life. And yet I was
surrounded by him, consumed, held safe and strong in the lines of his arms,
grounded beneath his weight.

I was standing up at the peak, way up in the clouds, and he was holding my hand
beside me. I was not going to fall.

I knew when my toes curled that I was about to come – come straight down his
throat, between his lips, across his lapping tongue. I looked down again at the
sight of myself in his mouth, staring down over the hard, smooth planes of my flat
chest, down over the muscles of my stomach which clenched as I rolled my hips up
towards his bobbing head, his sucking lips. I saw the long, endless line of his
strong back in the warm light of the lamp, shadows spilling across his muscles and
ribs. The full curves of his ass as he dragged his cock across the sheets.

“I’m gonna . . .” I heard myself gasp. My fingers tightened in his curls. “Fuck,
I’m gonna –”

“Yes,” he cried around me. He sucked me harder. Wetter. “Christ, yes . . .”

But I wanted . . . I wanted to see –

I reached down for his shoulders and pulled. “Come on, up here,” I panted. “Up
here, with me.”

He gave me one last wet kiss between my thighs, engulfed me in messy heat, before
he flung himself up onto my chest and came down hard on my body. He kissed me
before I could fully breathe, pushing his tongue straight into my mouth. His hands
gripped my shoulders.

I tasted myself.

I choked back a moan, a cry, maybe even a sob. I was tasting myself in his mouth,
something that was impossible, inconceivable – something I had known, just like I
knew I was meant to be a Ranger, would never, ever happen in my life. Something
that was relegated to midnight dreams. Those twilight hours when I rolled my hips
alone against my sheets.

And yet there he was, licking past my lips, breathing across my tongue, devouring
me in an open kiss that tasted of sex, and heat, and _me_.

I held his face in my hand and rolled us onto our sides. I kept kissing him as I
reached down blindly and grabbed the base of his cock.

He nearly yelled.

He was thick and hot in my hand, hard as steel, harder than I’d ever felt him
before. I pulled my fingers along the heavy weight of him. It was going to be hard
and fast, blinding, pulsing with the sweat dripping down our skin.

“Come on,” I whispered onto his tongue. “Yeah, come on, come on. . .”

He shook as he fucked up into my fist. He clutched my back, my chest, my sides, my

ass. He whimpered when my thumb slid over his dripping slit. “Fuck . . .”
“Come on me,” I gasped. “God, let me feel you . . . let me see –”

“Yes, fuck –”

“Come on me, Sher –"

The words died in my mouth when his fingers suddenly slid over where I was erect.
He rubbed me, stroked me, pulled the length of me in his hand to the rhythm of his
own hips pressing through the tight hole of my fist. I licked up his neck towards
the corner of his mouth. I held his bottom lip between my teeth. I marked his skin
with my beard. I tasted his sweat.

“Come on me,” I whispered again, even as I felt my own orgasm building in me,
pulsing, crackling like heat between my thighs under the firm pressure of his hand.
I felt the muscles of his forearm flexing against my own where I pumped his cock.
He dripped onto my palm.

He opened his eyes, piercing blue, shooting straight down into the pit of my chest,
the same piece of my soul where I had first whispered ‘John,’ and then I watched,
mouth open, as he softly cried and came into my hand.

I tipped over. The sight of him coming apart sent me straight over the edge,
pulsing into his hand, covered with the spray of his semen. I told myself his was
mixing with my own.

I came.

“John,” I heard him moaning. Hot breath on my neck. “Fuck. . .”

My body ached in his arms. I opened my eyes to see him looking down at where we
still held each other in our hands. My body jerked with each of my heartbeats,
pumping blood through my veins as it slowly sizzled through my muscles with the end
of my orgasm.

I put my hand on his hip, trying to catch my breath, then I watched, with something
like awe, as he held his own softening cock in his palm and pressed his hips
forward so his penis rested straight against my skin.

Breath left my lungs. He softly, gently, traced the tip of himself along my own
body, covering me with the remains of his semen, mixing it with the wetness on my
tingling skin. I gasped at the sensitivity of his skin on my own, the slow trace of
his penis as our bodies softly touched. He cupped himself in his palm and rubbed
his thumb gently over my own swollen skin. He held both of us in his hand, and we
both stared down at the sight of our bodies pressed together.

And I didn’t care that I looked different, that I wasn’t the same, that I wasn’t
big enough to be lying beside him in his palm.

I didn't care, because he was holding us both, wet with semen, still wet from the
spit of his mouth. We were naked, and we were together. We were two men who had
just come in each other’s arms, gazes locked. I closed my eyes as my lungs
squeezed. My next breath came out wet.

His nose pressed into my forehead, and I listened to him sigh. “I thought I’d lost
this,” he whispered, barely a sound. He slowly moved his hand away from where he
held us both and moved it up to the center of my chest. I held him close by his
back.
“I thought I’d . . . that you were gone, that I’d never –” His voice broke.

“Hey,” I whispered. I moved him so his head was pressed down against my chest. I
wrapped him in my arms, breathing in the scent of his curls. He clung to me. His
soft penis pressed into my thigh. I felt my own self held close against the skin of
his stomach.

“Hey now,” I said again, kissing his forehead. I swallowed hard over a tight
throat, then realized that I didn’t even know what to say. No other words formed in
my mouth. No words could have any meaning when we were lying naked together. Naked
in sweat-covered sheets.

I listened to the slowing rush of his breathing as I held him, and I realized, as
he grew heavy, that I didn’t have to say anything different at all.

“Hey now,” I whispered again, so softly, against his scalp. He held me closer, and
I reached over to pull the pushed-off sheet over our bodies, then stretched to the
bedside table to shut off the lamp.

The sound of our breathing inhabited the darkness.

I rubbed his back with my palm, and I spoke one more time as I felt him drifting
heavily off to sleep, just so he could hear my voice. “Hey now,” I said again, and
I felt his fingers twitch against my skin.

Then I closed my tired eyes, and I let my body sink away into the comforting black.

I woke up the next morning to a hand shaking my arm.

The early, summer light was spilling through my curtains, burning my swollen eyes,
and I tried to blink them open and figure out who I was, where I was, what was
happening.

“You’ve a Road Lottery shift starting at six,” I heard in a deep, rough voice.

My eyes shot open.

Sherlock was facing me, eyes wide open, with a lock of frizzy hair draped across
his forehead. We were in my bed, and we were both naked, and my skin smelled like
sex.

It hadn’t all been a dream.

I groaned as the realization of my work shift suddenly washed over me, drowning my
joy. I rubbed a hand over my tired eyes. “Fuck that,” I groaned. I stretched my
hands over my head to crack my back. “Fuck, fuck.”

He chuckled, and I relaxed again to find him crawling closer into my arms, resting
his cheek on my chest. “It’s only five now,” he said, yawning. “Have a little bit
of time.”

He moved his thigh suggestively up my own, and I let out a rough laugh. “Don’t
tempt me. I’m already going to die today on my shift.”

And like blinking awake out of a dream, a thick fog, I suddenly fully realized the
words coming out of my mouth - everything that happened. That he was lying in my
arms, back between my sheets, back in my life. I held him closer around his warm,
bare back.

“Actually, this is sort of unbelievable,” I whispered, now serious. He nodded a

stubble-covered cheek against my chest and hummed.

I wanted to drift back to sleep, to say fuck it all, and miss my shift, and wake up
again hours later with him still in my arms, but then he spoke, “You know, I meant
what I said yesterday.”

I lifted my head to look down at him and raised my eyebrows. He met my gaze. “What
I said to Alexander, that we both live here now. I meant that.”

Emotion overwhelmed me – an emotion I couldn’t even name. I thought of my cabin, of

Lugnut in that field, of the first moment Sherlock Holmes ever stepped up
gracefully into my truck. I waited a moment until I was sure I could speak.

“You know,” I said back, not trying to hold back my smile. “I think I could grow to
really like London. For part of the year, at least.”

Sherlock’s head shot up. He looked down at me with wide eyes and a wild head of
curls. I reached up to tuck one of them behind his ear.

And suddenly, I was sure. I was sure of everything. Sure of what I’d just said.

His eyes were glistening. “I still get to see your cabin, though, yes?” he asked.
“I still get to stay there with you?”

I nodded, overwhelmed, and the back of my throat felt hot. “Of course,” I
whispered.

Sherlock frowned. “Well then, I believe I’m supposed to receive some sort of key,
now that this is all decided . . .?”

I laughed, surprised, and it felt like I was gazing straight up at the sun. I
traced his jaw with my thumb. “Do you really need it?” I asked.

And Sherlock leaned down to kiss me deeply, so deeply I felt it straight down to my
very core, to the warm essence of my being. I felt it in the place that knew
exactly who I was, and that knew Denali had been my beloved home, and that now knew
my home would be wherever I woke up with Sherlock in my arms.

Then he smiled at me, and in a wet voice whispered, “No, I don’t.”

\--

Molly’s eyebrows rose all the way up her forehead when she opened her front door,
hand perched on top of her belly, and noticed Sherlock Holmes standing next to me,
with my hand on the small of his back.

Sherlock strode in past her without even a hello. “You’ve an extra guest tonight,”
he said, before he started saying something sarcastic to Greg in the kitchen.

Molly watched his back disappear through the kitchen door, then turned back in the
doorway and looked at me with wide eyes.
“Really?” she asked, whispering.

I could barely speak as I nodded. “Yeah, really.”

Her face crumpled, and her eyes shone. “Oh, John,” she said, reaching out for me,
but I quickly put up a hand and shook my head.

“Don’t start, or I’ll lose it,” I teased her, letting her hear my rough voice, and
we shared a look, one that nearly took my breath away, before she nodded with a wet
smile and stepped back to let me inside to the warmth.

Twelve days.

Twelve days since I had taken a step closer to Sherlock through the lifting fog and
said, “ _I’m going to kiss you now._ ”

Twelve days of coming home after a shift to Sherlock’s shoes outside my cabin door,
of setting off down the Road with his feet up on my dashboard, of waking up with
his curls on my pillowcase. Ten days since we made plans to spend a few weeks in my
cabin after the end of the season, nine days since Sherlock strode into the bedroom
and announced that we were taking a winter vacation down to Kenai Fjords, and eight
days since I stood next to Sherlock while he used the landline in the office,
speaking with the airline to book us two tickets to London, leaving from Anchorage
at the end of November – round-trip tickets with a return flight scheduled for the
first day of April the next year.

I hung my coat on the back of Molly’s door, then turned around to the sight of
Molly staring daggers at Greg, Greg shrugging his shoulders and asking “What?” and
Sherlock looking with extreme interest at the wallpaper.

“You didn’t tell me?!” Molly demanded, hands on her hips.

Greg rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I didn’t. . . It wasn’t my news to say . .
.I wasn’t sure if –”

“Oh, come off it, Griffin, admit that you hadn’t even figured it out,” Sherlock
said from where he was sniffing what Molly had cooking on the stove.

Molly’s eyes bulged from her head. “You didn’t figure it out? Greg, you fucking
_live_ with him! You live in the same cabin! How could you not –”

“He keeps odd hours!” Greg cried. “It’s not like I . . . I’ve been working on my
own stuff for the end of the season, coming out here to be with you, it’s not my
fault I didn’t realize he wasn’t there as much –”

“Wasn’t there at all,” I said, laughing.

“God, you’re impossible,” Molly huffed. She strode past Greg into the kitchen and
swatted Sherlock away from his fifth spoonful of the chili she had simmering. “Out,
everybody sit down at the table with your hands folded and wait.”

I watched Greg’s eyes shine with happiness as he watched Molly’s tense back over
the stove. “Oh come on, don’t ground us . . .” he pleaded.

“Well I need some practice grounding if this baby inherits your self-control,”
Molly said, leaning her stomach around the countertop as she reached for bowls.
“Or, apparently, your observational skills.”

“I can assure you, Molly,” Sherlock said, grabbing a seat next to me at the table,
“I will do everything in my power to insure your child does not inherit Gorlois’
observational skills –”

“Gorlois?” I cut in. “Seriously?”

“ –I once watched him comment on the ‘lack of anything livin’ or breathin’ in an

area at the exact same moment he physically walked into the nose of a deer –”

“You _promised_ me you wouldn’t tell anyone that story,” Greg cried, head in his
hands on the table. “Jesus, Sherlock, you hold out for over ten years, but you just
had to go and tell it now –”

“Hang on,” Molly said, plopping down into her seat with a tired huff. “Why hadn’t
the deer run away at the noise of you walking?”

Greg raised his hands. “Thank you! Exactly, thank you. I knew there was a reason
I’m with you.”

Sherlock opened his mouth with a frown, probably to explain _exactly_ why the deer
somehow hadn’t run away from the noise of the two of them walking, but I shot him a
look over my first spoonful of chili, and he glanced over at the sight of Greg
kissing Molly across the table before looking back at me with a wink and picking up
his spoon.

There was the usual small talk as we ate – end of the season shifts, Greg and
Sherlock’s research findings, Molly’s preparations for training the interim head of
kennels while she would be gone on maternity leave.

And all the time, I tried to keep the disbelieving look off my face. That we were
there, all around the table, and Molly and Greg _knew_ that Sherlock and I were . .
. that we were together. That we had woken up side by side in bed. They knew that
we had kissed, had sex. They knew, without a shadow of a doubt, and they were still
casually eating dinner with us, talking about end-of-season paperwork and some
drama with the winter interns in the kennel office.

And every time I looked over to try and meet Sherlock’s eyes as we ate, his gaze
was already on my face, warm, with an understanding that made me want to leap
across the table, hold his face in my hands and kiss him, chili-spiced lips and
all.

When Greg stood to take our bowls to the sink, Molly leaned back in her seat and
tied her hair up in a loose bun.

“So,” she said, looking at me with an odd look. “The two of you, once the season
ends . . .”

I suddenly understood the meaning of her look, the hint of uncertainty, and I
looked over at Sherlock who nodded at me with warm eyes. His hand grabbed my knee
under the table.

“We’re, uh,” I cleared my throat. “We’re gonna spend some time in Talkeetna once
the season is done, back in my cabin. Then we’ll be in Kenai –”

Molly’s eyes lit up. “Greg!” she called over her shoulder. “Greg, we should join
them! I’ve been meaning to show you the fjords!”

Greg laughed over the sink. “And watch you slip on glacier ice and fall into the
fjords while you’re nine months pregnant? Please, don’t subject me to that. I’ll
end up in hospital for anxiety.”
Molly rolled her eyes and looked back at me with a grin. “Next year, then, maybe,”
she said. My eyes traced the lines of her soft, glowing face. “Of course, kid.”

She glanced at Sherlock. “And then, after Kenai . . .”

Sherlock sat taller in his chair. “Then we’re going to London.”

Molly’s face fell, even as she tried to hide it. “London?” she repeated. She looked
at me with wide eyes. “For . . . for good. . . or?”

“Just for the winter,” I said. Relief washed over her face, and I went on, “I’ll
stay with him a few months, at his place. Experience not living in the boondocks
for a winter before we come back here for next season.”

Sherlock called towards the sink, “That reminds me, Gerald –”

“You’ve gotta stop –” I tried to say, and Sherlock flashed me a smirk before going
on, “Apologies, Giovanni, that reminds me you need to go with me to meet with Dan
tomorrow.”

Greg looked over his shoulder and frowned. “Uh-oh, Dan? Doesn’t sound good . . .”

“I’ve got us a job for next season,” Sherlock said, matter-of-factly. “At least,
once we meet with Dan I’ll have gotten us a job for next season.”

Molly’s mouth dropped open. “What . . .?”

“Details are boring, Garreth can explain it all to you once everything’s finalized,
I’m sure.”

I looked back at Molly, still sitting shocked at the kitchen table. “I promise I
didn’t know about this, or else I would have said earlier,” I told her. I leaned
forward. “What were you . . . what was going to be your plan? You know . . .”

She nodded, knowing what I was referring to – our conversation what felt like
months ago about moving to London. “We only had the winter planned, really,” she
said, voice soft. “Staying here so I could oversee the start of winter training,
having the baby back in Fairbanks and staying here in my cabin for a few weeks, but
after that . . .” She trailed off and shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, that’s all solved now,” Sherlock said quietly, with a softness in his voice
I’d never heard him use with another person before.

Molly flashed him a small, still-shocked smile and mouthed “Thank you,” just as
Greg returned from finishing the dishes at the sink.

“Well, I’ll have it out with you later over how the hell you managed to get me a
job behind my back,” he said, looking at Sherlock with a mix of fondness and
exasperation I’d seen on his face hundreds of times before, “But John, tell me, how
do you feel about London?” He sat down and wrapped his arm close around Molly’s
shoulders. “Big difference from a place like here, and all. Are you nervous?”

I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I reached for my half-full beer on the table. I

could hear Sherlock breathe.

I thought of the three times before in my life I’d ever gotten on a plane. Back and
forth to the Canyon with everything I owned in a duffel bag, and dreams of grey
eyes still running through my head from the night before. Standing alone in the
terminal bound for New York, absolutely terrified, watching the planes take off and
land on the runway through the huge windows and wondering how the hell that thing
was about to fly me up into the air without crashing. Clutching my backpack to my
painfully tied-down chest. Stupidly wishing my dad was there to wave me goodbye
onto the flight.

“Honestly,” I said, blinking out of the memory, “I’m not, actually.” I glanced over
at Sherlock, who was looking at me as if nobody else in the room was even there. “I
mean, I’ve never been, obviously,” I went on. “But, I’m excited. Get to let him
lead me around a bit for a change.”

Greg grinned and downed the last of his beer. “Well, I can understand that,” he
said, tightening his arm around Molly. “It’s easy to go somewhere brand new if
you’re with someone you love. I should know, I agreed to stay in this godforsaken
place for the whole bloody winter with her.”

And then, as if on cue, the entire room froze at Greg’s words.

We all simultaneously realized what he’d just said, “ _with someone you love_ ,”
and I watched a blush spread across Greg’s face. “I mean,” he said, sitting upright
and looking just over my shoulder at the wall behind us, “Or, well, with a person
you’re with . . . that you care about . . . you know what I mean –”

Greg and Molly looked at me with pained faces. The room was awkwardly silent.

Then Sherlock huffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I love John,” he said. He

flung his hand at no one in particular while reaching for his beer. “Any idiot
could see that.”

I didn’t want to breathe.

If I did, if I made a sound, then the whole scene before me would suddenly vanish –
I wouldn’t be in Molly’s warm cabin, with her kind smile, and the familiar smell of
her chili. I wouldn’t be sitting across from Greg, who’d become a friend, who knew
before anyone else that I was gay, who knew exactly what me and Sherlock probably
did in bed.

I wouldn’t be sitting next to Sherlock Holmes, calmly drinking his beer and gazing
at the fireplace, seconds after he just uttered the absolutely impossible words, “
_Of course I love John._ ”

I turned to gape at him, every muscle frozen, and then I heard Greg’s sharp inhale
break the thick silence.

“Oh, bloody hell, Sherlock, was that the first time you said it?” he cried out.

Molly’s eyes looked ready to bulge out of her head. Sherlock shrugged and set down
his empty beer. “’S as good a time as any,” he said back, still completely calm.
“It’s not like he didn’t already know.”

And as I still stared at him, frozen, his eyes suddenly flickered over to meet
mine.

I saw everything in his gaze.

I saw thick emotion, churning like the fog from the clearing before it had
evaporated into mist. I saw the moment Sherlock woke up alone on the forest floor
after a night of being strung out, when he thought that a wolf had been sleeping
beside him. I saw his eyes the last moment before I’d turned away from him a year
ago out on the tundra.

I saw a quiet fear, an invisible uncertainty, mixed with the wet look in his eyes
that I’d seen reflected back at me twelve days ago from the window of a bus.

I saw his eyes across my kitchen table, red and wet, as he moaned out, “ _But I
came back!_ ” The way he looked down at his cigarette out in the river rock when he
told me his flight had left twenty minutes ago.

Then he blinked, and it was gone. But I knew that he knew that I had seen.

I swallowed hard and nodded, proud that my eyes stayed dry and clear. It was true,
what he had said. It was incomparably true.

“I know,” I said to him. I cleared my throat. “I knew.” And there was an invisible
relief through the lines of his shoulders. He nodded once, then stole my half-full
beer to take another sip, and that was that.

When I looked back at Greg and Molly, surprised that they were even still in the
room, Greg’s mouth was hanging half-open, staring at Sherlock like he was a
stranger he’d never met before, and Molly’s wet eyes were fixed on me, full of
meaning. I gave her a look that we both knew meant I’d tell her more later.

She gave a secret, soft smile for only me to see, then she sat back and turned to
Sherlock, who was still avoiding Greg’s stunned gaze.

“So, you’ll both still be in Alaska for when the baby comes, yeah?” Molly asked,
breaking the silence. She rolled her eyes, then smiled, as Greg leaned down to kiss
her belly through her sweater, whispering hello to the little baby inside.

Sherlock hummed. “Depends, really, on the effectiveness and accuracy of your due
date, coupled with our travel plans. We already have airline tickets, you know, and
a meeting I have to be back for in London –”

“We’ll still be here,” I cut in. I ignored Sherlock’s huff and reached across the
table to take Molly’s hand in mine. “We may be down in Kenai when we get the call,
but we’ll be there as fast as we can.” I squeezed her fingers. “I promise you,
kid.”

The nerves in her eyes cleared, and she looked over at Sherlock with a serious
glare, one hand on the top of her belly. “I’m holding you to that,” she said.

And I saw the warmth in his eyes, even as he rolled them and said, “Fine. Yes.”

Sherlock kicked off his shoes and put his socked feet up on my dashboard before I
even turned on the engine.

It was quiet, comfortably silent between us as I navigated my truck out of the dirt
by Molly’s cabin and back onto the Road. The late summer sun was just starting to
sink towards the peaks, bathing the horizon line in front of us in purple and gold,
and the tops of the seas of pine trees were blowing like waves in the evening
breeze.

I rolled down my window with the old, squeaking crank, then dropped my hand out the
side to feel the wind against my palm. Sherlock punched the dashboard with his
thumb to turn on the old Jimmy Martin tape.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with cedar, with peppercorn, with the mud
from the damp tundra, with the fur from the dog kennels as we drove by. The
remnants of Molly’s homemade chili which still clung to my lips and hands.

Just as I turned my truck onto the dirt portion of the Road at Savage River, where
the endless mountains opened up to a breathtaking drop on our left, I spoke over
the soft banjo flowing from my crackling speakers.

“So, you love me, then,” I said, tapping the outside of my truck door with my
fingers to the beat.

I glanced over at Sherlock’s eyes, lit up by the reflection of the sunset as we

sped over the rolling hills. “Obviously,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t
hear.

Almost an entire mile passed, dripping pink clouds fading into the evening fog,
before he spoke again. “Was there ever any doubt? In the last few weeks, I
mean. . .”

I looked over at him in the seat. The wind was blowing his curls back from his
face, and the warm light made his eyelashes look like they were made of pure gold.
“No, there wasn’t,” I said.

He put his hand on my thigh and closed his eyes. I shivered from the heat of his
palm. Just when I opened my mouth to say more, he spoke, “You love me, too.”

I laughed. It was more perfect than any speech I could have given him, than any
story about the whale, or about the shotgun, or about sleeping a careful foot away
from James Sholto in a tent. It was perfect, in a way that was so clear, as clear
as the fact that I knew I would eventually tell him all those stories, too. All of
them and then some as each day by his side rolled into one more.

I picked up his hand from my thigh and kissed it just as we took the first turn
into Polychrome Pass. Light lit up the valleys, illuminating the canyons, bursting
across the peaks of snow. I pressed his palm against my lips. “More than the sky is
blue,” I finally said.

“The sky isn’t even blue right now,” he said immediately. “It’s gold.”

I turned his hand over and kissed his palm. “Must be a good omen, then.”

Sherlock shrugged, looking resigned. “Well, you know what they say.”

I frowned. “What do who say?”

“You,” Sherlock said. He flung his hand out towards the sunset. “Everyone. The
supposed ‘number one rule of any National Park’.”

And before I could turn towards him to ask him what the hell he was trying to say,
he looked at me, with the vastness of Alaska reflected in his eyes, and he said in
a warm voice, “You should always listen to your Ranger.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I once sat behind "Aexander" and "Natasha" on a green park bus, and saw
Alexander's little notebook, and eavesdropped about Natasha's salon back in New
York. But no off-duty Rangers were around to answer Alexander's (loud) questions,
and the people across the aisle eventually asked him to shush. Above is the
experience I wish he could have had.
>
> As always, all my thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, sharing, and
leaving love and support. Related to my author's note at the beginning, if you
think Sherlock and John are done with using the strap-on now, after the above scene
without it, think again :) John and Sherlock's intimacy in this chapter is not a
peak, or a culmination, but merely a continuation. And they will continue to love
each other and their bodies in many, many ways.
>
> I know I've been holding off on comment replies during the writing of this fic to
prioritize writing new chapters, but I just wanted to put it out there that I'll be
replying (and offering my effusive thanks to all of you) to comments on the
next/last chapter as a compromise! You all deserve to be individually thanked for
your kind words. I truly, deeply, appreciate hearing from all of you. It heightens
my joy of writing and sharing, and makes me fall more and more in love with these
characters and community. Lugnut sincerely thanks you from his puppy palace in the
sky <3
>
> Next time: The last chapter! A little epilogue, of sorts. You didn't think we
wouldn't get to meet Molly and Greg's baby, did you?

16. December 1992

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluegrass: Listen to Ray Wylie Hubbard sing "Stone Blind Horses"
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LHE1DeXvlk/).
>
> Sarah Jarosz: Listen to "Left Home" [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ZBEJgYJ1XxY/).
>
> Also, because it's the song I listened to most when picturing John and Sherlock's
happy ending, give a re-listen to "Green Lights"
[HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1gPUlO70O8/).
>
>  
>
> We made it - the final chapter! Thank you so much for joining me on John's
journey.
>
> Heads up: brief, off-screen reference to John having issues at the airport with
his ID, since it features his dead name and the wrong gender. You'll see it coming
when they get to the Fairbanks airport.
>
> Sit back, dream of Denali, give those songs a listen, and enjoy <3

December 1992

The sudden knock at the door startled me so badly I smacked my head on the bottom
of the upper bunk.

“Fuck!” I hissed, grabbing my throbbing skull.

Sherlock chuckled underneath me. “Well, not anymore, it seems.”

I opened my eyes again to look down at him. He was still wearing all his snow-gear
and coat, full scarf and hat and one hand in a thick glove. His long underwear and
snow pants were shoved down and tangled around one of his ankles, and his other
bare foot was hooked up on one of the wooden rungs of the upper bunk.

And I was still sunk deep inside him, erect cock emerging from the rest of my fully
clothed layers, with sweat dripping down my neck, and all our gear in a
disorganized, heaping pile just inside the door.

We hadn’t really planned it that way.

The day Sherlock had asked me, looking oddly down at his hands holding my own damn
coffee mug as we walked to the truck, whether I had ever thought about seeing Kenai
in the winter, an idea sparked in my mind. That evening I searched for nearly an
hour through my stuffed folder of old papers until I found a number written on the
back of a five-year-old water damaged Denali park map. I’d snuck into the offices
when Sherlock was off with Greg and listened to the line ring, expecting it to ring
forever, or be disconnected, or be someone else, and instead I was pleasantly
surprised to hear Mike’s familiar voice pick up on the other end of the phone.

When I could finally get to my real point, after nearly fifteen minutes of small
talk, hearing all about his last five years living in the cabin he built for
himself down in Seward, how it was driving busses and maintenance trucks for Kenai
Fjords National Park in the summer, I finally asked him if he thought he could do
me a huge favor, and if the old trapper cabin near Exit Glacier was still available
to stay in overnight for winter trekkers.

An hour later I had a full update of five-years’ worth of Mike’s life, a phone
number for the Kenai Ranger station to check the weather before we arrived, and a
full list of directions for how to snowshoe to the trapper cabin, if the avalanche
risk was low enough by the time we got there.

It was low enough, and the skies were clear blue, and so Sherlock and I had spent
nearly nine hours trekking in across the snow and glaciers, surrounded by nothing
but crystal white with the occasional shivering tree. It was endless rolling grey,
pierced by crystal pockets of icy blue. It was Sherlock’s strong limbs outlined by
the vastness of a blinding horizon, shimmering against the open sky and rising
towards the distant peaks.

And I was right there with him, every step, traversing what felt like the end of
the earth side by side, silently reading each other’s bodies, until we finally came
upon the little wooden cabin peeking up out of the snow.

With a couple hundred yards left, and the cabin a warm, welcoming beacon in the
distance, I paused to take some water, and raised my sunglasses so Sherlock could
see my eyes. All I could see of his face around his glasses and scarves was a tiny
little tip of bright pink nose.

“Don’t tell me you’re stopping for a rest,” he moaned. I stood there without
moving, gazing out at the white horizon. His voice was muffled through his scarf.
“It’s literally right there, John. That big brown structure. The only thing that
isn’t white.”

I smirked behind my own scarf and tore my gaze away from the distant falling snow,
then reached out for his hand. Our gloved fingers seemed to grow warm together.
“Not resting, smartass. Just. . .I wanna tell you something.”

He ripped off his sunglasses with his gloved hands so I could catch his incredulous
look. “Seriously? Right now? You couldn’t just wait ten minutes until we’re inside
with a fire where it’s warm?”
I licked my lips. I meant to tell him the little speech I had prepared over the
course of the long day, about how special it was to be out there with him, showing
him what had always before been my own private beauty of Alaska in the wintertime.
How these last weeks by his side again had been bliss. How waking up every morning
next to him back in Talkeetna had made my throat tight, every time.

How he’d made my cabin bedsheets smell like peppercorn and cedar. How I heard his
breathing beside me when I woke up and stared at the ceiling in the darkness,
remembering that night I had begged the long night for someone to come, for anyone
to stay, for warm hands on my skin, and how I’d whispered the story of that lonely
night to him through the silence while he dreamed.

I planned to tell him that I was sorry I hadn’t really been in the mood for sex
over the last two weeks. How it was somehow the impending stress of London on my
mind, weighing heavily in my chest, making me keep my clothes on. How it didn’t
have anything to do with him, even though he always said it was fine, and even
though he tried to hide the confused look of hurt in his eyes whenever I pulled
away and just held him in my arms instead.

I was going to tell him all of that, and see what he said in return. And maybe,
just maybe, if my chest felt lighter, and if the mood felt right. . . if the weight
of it all was gone from my skin, maybe later that night, when we were warm and fed,
I would let him know exactly what I was wearing under my clothes – those straps I’d
slipped on in a moment of madness before we set out for our trek, thinking “ _just
in case, probably not, it’s ridiculous, but just in case._ ”

He looked gorgeous in the waning sun reflecting off the sea of pure snow. He was
cold, and tired, and irritated at me for making us stop when the cabin was finally
in sight. He had just trekked nine hours through the snow and ice so I could
rectify the fact that I had always, for ten years, walked through a wintertime
Alaska alone.

He was everything I had fallen desperately in love with over two endless years. He
was my gorgeous, ridiculous man, with a little pink nose. And God, I wanted him.

And I realized that everything I had wanted say, I could say without opening my
mouth at all.

So I didn’t answer him, but instead I pulled down my own scarf, then lifted his
hand towards my face so I could remove his glove with my teeth. He huffed when I
dropped it down into the thick snow.

And then I slowly, gently, moved his hand up under the bottom of my heavy jacket
and warm layers, towards the waistband of my snow pants, and towards a little strip
of my bare skin.

“What are you --?” he started to ask through his scarf, and then I caught the quick
exhale through his nose, the gasp in his chest, when his fingertips found the
smallest revealed edge of black leather. I shivered at the touch of his cold
fingers against my uncovered body, tracing the strap peeking out above the top of
my long underwear and boxers.

A gust of fresh wind and snow blew with a roar between us. “How . . .?” he said,
voice breathy and low.

I took a step closer, so he could feel the puffs of my breath against his nose.
“Not wearing all of it, obviously,” I said. “But . . . I can be.” I softly cleared
my throat. “Once we get inside that door.”
His grey eyes, once the color of the surrounding glaciers, pooled black. His
fingertips slowly traced the leather as he leaned closer to me, pulled down his
scarf from his face, and licked his chapped lips. He spoke over the howl of the
wind.

“John. . . Christ, John, I. . .” he said, practically growled, and heat sang up my

spine.

And I thought maybe we were about to go at it, right then and there. That I would
take him in my arms, press him down hard into the snow, and cover him with the
warmth of my body, holding him against the fresh white bed of the earth. I thought
of all those short winter days I would just sit in my Talkeetna cabin and stare out
the windows, an unread book in my hands, marveling and paralyzed at the fact that
the fresh snow on my land never had more than one pair of footprints in it all
season.

I wanted to hear the way his sighs would echo across the ice.

But then he blinked, and quickly took a half-step back in the snow.

“Are you . . . you’re sure about this?” he suddenly asked. “This isn’t . . . You
don’t have to do this for me. You know I don’t care . . . well, of course I care.
About you. I care. But, whether we – it doesn’t matter to me. As long as you’re
alright, and we’re alright, we don’t have to . . . there isn’t –”

I cut him off by placing my thumb over his lips. His breath instantly warmed the
tip. His eyes were the first fresh snowfall I ever woke up to see softly falling
over the Canyon.

“I know,” I whispered, stepping closer. “All of that, I know.”

He lowered his forehead to mine, and we stood there huddled in the blinding snow
and wind. His breath fogged across my face, and my palm warmed over the skin of his
cheek.

I wanted to stand there forever. Let us freeze in the snow, our bodies turn to ice,
and everyone who chanced by our frozen forms could see that he had been mine. That
I had been his. And that way we would never have to leave, get on a plane, and go
to London. I would never have leave the endless, empty white horizon.

And he could never leave me.

“It’s just London,” I finally said, keeping my eyes closed. I swallowed over a dry
throat. “In Talkeetna, it didn’t . . . it still felt so far off. We had this trip
in between, and seeing Molly and Greg. The baby, when it comes. Now that we’re
here, I . . . it’s finally real. It’s the next thing.”

I felt his hands on my shoulders, gripping me through my layers. He waited until I

opened my eyes, and I nearly gasped at the piercing blue of his own –now like two
crystal glaciers reflecting the light of the fresh sun onto my face. Snowflakes
settled in his lashes.

“John, listen to me,” he said. “Nothing is set in stone. There isn’t . . . We could
still stay here, if you wanted. We have enough money. Your cabin is still there. I
could take a leave of absence until my work starts again in the Park in April. You
know I would do that . . . that – that nothing is more important.”

His voice was rough, and the desperate sound of it suddenly warmed me deep in my
bones, banishing away the chill of the icy, wet cold. I felt my mouth turn up into
a grin.

“I know – I know you would,” I whispered. I could feel my beard starting to freeze.
“That’s exactly why I still want to go.”

His eyes glowed warm, shining brighter than the brilliant snow, and I laughed under
my breath as he swooped down to kiss me, dragging the hot air of his breath across
my cold lips until I felt warmth pour down my throat. I pulled him down for one
more kiss when he started to pull back. The air fogged from our panting. I tasted
his warm tongue – the breathless, unbelievably close intimacy of his mouth touching
my own.

“John,” he whispered. “John, you are . . .”

I kissed the rest of the sentence on his lips – his lips which I had watched kiss
my hands, tracing the bones and the veins, while lying in the very cabin I had
built with them from the ground up. The hands that had gripped the wood railing
over the cloudy Seattle sea. The hands that my dad had guided over the smooth lines
of the gun when he taught me to shoot.

And my hands hadn’t looked too small as I watched my fingers disappear one by one
into his wet mouth.

“So,” he said eventually with wet pink lips after we parted. His eyes glanced down
at my waist. He raised his eyebrows.

I laughed. “Eager, are you?”

He turned up his nose and sniffed. “Well you’re the one who started it, wearing
that under all your clothes on this ridiculous hike, stopping us less than half a
kilometer from the cabin just because you couldn’t wait until we got –”

His words died when I pressed my palm against his snowpants over his cock. I
stroked him, rough and firm, knowing that through the layers of clothes he was
growing harder from my touch.

A moan escaped his throat.

I could hardly believe myself. I was standing there, in the middle of the glaciers,
with my hand between another man’s legs. I was kissing him, talking about sex,
wearing leather straps underneath my clothes with an erect cock packed safely away
in my decade-old pack strapped to my back.

I felt bold and wild and ridiculous. I felt twenty-years-old.

My chest was achingly, perfectly, beautifully flat against his own.

I let the heat flood my eyes, let it fizzle up from where it was starting to pulse
deep in my belly.

“What are you waiting for, then?”

Sherlock gave me one last look through the haze of desire in his eyes, one last
silent question. I gazed back at him, and I traced my fingers over his cock, and I
nodded.

I expected him to swoop down and kiss me, or say something snarky, or reach out to
touch me right back, right then and there in the snow. But instead he suddenly
leapt away from my hand, bent to snatch his trekking poles and glove from where
they’d been resting in the snow, and started speed-walking in his snowshoes towards
the cabin on the horizon.

“Sherlock!” I called out to him, but he barely even turned his head over his
shoulder as he yelled back for me to get a move on or else he would leave me to
sleep out in the snow for the night.

I rucked my scarf back up over my face and followed him, breathless, nearly
tripping over myself through the thick snow, gulping down the icy air into my lungs
and laughing like a kid up at the sky. My lungs burned with the cold air, and the
wind bit at my exposed cheeks. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had run
like that just for fun in the snow.

When I finally caught up with him, just as we were walking up to the cabin door, I
grabbed him, walked him back into the wall, and pinned him in a deep kiss, gasping
into his mouth. Our heartbeats exploded against each other, racing in time. He
reached down and grabbed huge handfuls of my ass.

We’d barely parted for long enough to slam the door behind us, kick off our snow
shoes, and drop all our gear into a pile before Sherlock was ripping off his shoes
and pants, and I was digging frantically through my pack, finally unzipping my
pants to shove the cock through the ring.

He flung himself on the lower bunk of the old wooden bed with a grunt, making the
thin mattress cry out and the wood creak, and he’d barely gotten his foot hooked up
on the rungs before my spit-wet fingers were pressing into his hole in one long
slide.

It was rougher than we’d ever done it, rougher even than that one night lifetimes
ago in the tent beneath the raging storm, that first time I’d ever let the wildness
grab hold of me. He cried out at the sting, then reached out for my thighs to pull
me closer, driving me deeper into himself. His long neck flung back, hints of bare,
pale skin visible above his jacket and scarf.

“Fucking look at you,” I whispered. “God, the look of you –”

“Get in me,” he groaned. He hacked spit onto the palm of his hand and reached down
to pump it over the cock. “Deep. Hard. Come on.”

“Fuck, you should hear yourself, begging, begging me for it –”

“You in me, now. . . Christ, John. . .” He moaned, and the sound of it exploded up
my spine, a desperation I couldn’t remember ever hearing in his voice, and it was
for _me_.

“Take me,” he whispered as I lined myself up. The air punched from my lungs. “Come
on, take me . . . in me . . . Yes – open me . . . _oh_. . . yes –"

I’d just pressed inside him, sinking fast and deep into his body, easing into the
pulsing heat of him and sighing at the sound of his thick moan across my lips – I’d
just pumped into him, laughed into his mouth, gazed breathlessly into his shining
eyes, fucked him on his back while he cried out and arched his hips, when that
sudden knock banged against the wooden door with a harsh slam.

I was still cradling the back of my head when Sherlock sighed and moved his hips,
so I could slowly ease out of him. He brought his leg back down to the thin bunkbed
cot with a great flop.

The person knocked again, louder, and I heard a muffled voice on the other side of
the door, trying to call out to us over the sound of the roaring wind beyond.

“Maybe if we ignore him he’ll go away,” Sherlock whispered. Sweat was already
dripping down the sides of his face, even though we hadn’t even stopped to set up a
fire in the cabin.

I stared down at him, taking a few more precious moments to trace the lines of his
swollen lips, then I reluctantly reached down to ease the cock out of the straps,
re-zipping up my pants.

Another loud knock, and even louder yelling. I smiled sadly at him, and I let him
read the full disappointment in my eyes – that I had truly wanted this, been ready
for it. That none of it had ever been a show.

More banging.

“Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

We shared one last look, one that I felt was pained, before Sherlock leaned up to
place a soft kiss on my mouth. “We’ll continue this later, Ranger,” he said,
pressing his lips into my beard.

I cupped his cheek and brought my lips to his forehead. “I’ll hold you to that.”

By the time I finally opened the front door, only about two minutes had passed
since the first knock. We were both fully clothed again, and the cock was safely
shoved back in my bag. I frantically ran my fingers through my hair as I pulled
back the door against the rough wind.

A man was standing on the other side, fully bundled up against the incoming storm.
I eyed the official NPS patch sewn to the outer arm of his winter coat.

“Jesus fuck of all hell, the fuck you two doin’ in there you couldn’t open the door
after one knock? Damn near froze my balls off waitin’ for ya to walk five feet.”

I glanced down quickly at myself one more time, suddenly irrationally terrified
that I still had my pants unzipped, or that the cock was still somehow between my
legs, or that Sherlock would still be sprawled out half-naked on the bunk bed
behind me with his fingers deep in his own ass.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was fully clothed, leaning against the cabin wall
with his hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, uh, sorry bout that,” I said with a hand on the back of my neck. “Just,
exhausted from the trip. Getting settled in – couldn’t really hear what was going
on out here.”

He gave me a hard look, the hardest look I’d gotten in years. I knew he could smell
my bullshit, same as I knew he also wouldn’t be able to guess why I was lying in a
million years. I knew his type. I’d been working with them for half my life.

“Right, well,” he finally said, then reached deep into his inside coat pocket,
“Won’t intrude on ya by coming inside or nothing. Live in the fire-lookout tower
just over the next hill –”

“They keep the fire-lookout staffed in winter?” Sherlock interrupted from leaning
against the wall.

The man leaned in the door to glare at him across the cabin. “. . .on enforcement
watch,” he finished, gravely. “Lookin’ out for trekkers like yourselves, and
keeping this cabin here tidy.”

Sherlock dramatically looked around the dusty, empty room. “And a fine job, sir.”

The man grimaced. He shoved a wadded-up paper towards my chest. “Message came in
for me on the radio this mornin. Must’ve been after you two had already left
Seward, else they wouldn’t’ve bothered me with it. Reckon you don’t need me to read
it out loud for ya.”

I took the paper from his rough, ungloved hands. Fear started curdling in my throat
– an unknown worry I’d only felt a few times before in my life. Images flashed
through my mind. Sherlock being attacked by a bear if I hadn’t run and screamed to
save him that day out on the tundra. Lugnut closing his eyes for the last time on a
dog bed without me by his side in the room.

Molly putting a hand over the curve of her belly.

My heart raced in my chest, and I could barely feel my hands. I tore open the
taped-shut piece of paper, and my eyes frantically scanned the rough handwriting
from the old Ranger, sprawled across the page like the letters were falling off
down to the ground.

Instantly I felt a warmth at my back – Sherlock’s silent presence reading over my

shoulder.

I read it four whole times before I finally tore my eyes away from the page. The
old Ranger was looking like he was about to murder me right there in the doorway,
then started to back away towards his own warm fire through the storming cold.

“Well, got what ya needed, then?” he mumbled.

I nodded, mouth half-open, unable to speak.

Sherlock cleared his throat behind me and extended a hand. “We very much appreciate
you delivering the message,” he said calmly. “Your efforts were not for nothing.”

The man grimaced down at Sherlock’s hand, without reaching out to take it. “Yeah,
well, next time you go out on a trip, plan it so you’re not waiting on important
news, ya hear? Damn near froze my balls off . . . Comin out in a storm like this
one. . .” He got a few steps away before he called back over his shoulder, “And
Jesus’ sakes learn to answer a door!”

I watched, still stunned, as he gradually disappeared into the snow and fog. I
waited until the last glimpse of his old jacket vanished from view, then pulled the
door shut in front of me, turned and rested my back against it.

For a long, heavy moment, neither of us moved or spoke.

Sherlock was eyeing me from the middle of the room, waiting for me to speak first
even though both of us had just read the folded-up note.

Out of nowhere, I heard the shattered vase as it smashed against the floor – the
one my mom had thrown the day we got home from the clinic with a positive pregnancy
test clutched in my sister’s terrified hand. I remembered exactly where I sat on
the morning bus, exactly how it had smelled, when I’d taken it three towns over to
the little hospital to see her and the new babies, since my mom had claimed there
wasn’t any room for me in the half-empty car, and my dad had been too busy trying
to drive while sipping his beer to argue with her.
I remembered how she had looked so small in that little white hospital bed. So
deflated and fragile, and the twins lying on either side of her in her tired arms
had screamed and wailed.

And I thought of Molly Hooper, that first night we had ever really spent time
together and gotten drinks. Heard her drink-slurred and happy voice over the din of
The Spike’s nightly crowd clear as day, with her knees pressed against mine beneath
the sticky table,“ _You know, John, you’re the most mysterious person I ever met.
Like . . . you’re like the imaginary best friend I always wanted and never had_ ”.

“She had the baby,” I finally whispered.

I stared down at my hands as they unfolded the note again, skimming the words as if
I was afraid they’d gone and changed in the last minute. It was sparse – just the
fact that Molly’d given birth nearly three days ago, but that it had apparently
taken a hell of a lot of effort to reach us down in Seward due to some downed phone
lines from a storm. That she was healthy, and the baby was well and fine, and they
were probably already back in her cabin by the park entrance by the time I had this
message in my hands.

Sherlock grinned at me; the warmth of his smile filled the cold, dark room. “Our
man there was a bit lacking on details,” he said. “But, it appears that everything
went smoothly.”

I shook my head at myself and smiled at the scribbled words. I couldn’t pinpoint
what the hot emotion was that was flooding through my chest, why I was suddenly so
overcome, so overwhelmed, by a simple fact I’d known was going to happen for the
last six months.

I heard my sister’s screams, the way they’d echoed through the hospital hallways
while I sat next to my dad out in the hall.

“I don’t think it was London,” I said. I folded up the paper and put it safe in my
pocket, desperately wanting to keep it for some reason.

Sherlock frowned. “What?”

“My . . . what was weighing on me, lately. The reason I felt so . . . out of sorts.
It wasn’t London. I think it was just . . . this. Her.” I took a deep breath and
rubbed my hands over my face, allowing myself for the first time in years to really
remember it all. “You know, my older sister, my sister Harriet, she got pregnant
when she was nineteen. Tore my mom apart, and everything . . . everything just went
to shit after that. Her own life went to shit – started drinking before the kids
were even on bottles, yeah? It’s just . . .” I finally met his eyes, and I saw in
them the vast understanding, all the words I couldn’t say.

“Molly’s fine, John,” he said, carefully, as if the words themselves would cause me
to break. “She’s with Greg, he’s there, and everything’s fine.”

And suddenly, instead of breaking, I felt relief burst across my face – evaporating
the weight I’d been unknowingly carrying for weeks on my shoulders.

“God, she had her baby,” I said again, knowing my eyes were wet, and before I could
say anything else, before I could even move, Sherlock’s arms were tightly around
me, and I felt his own relief cascading warmth down my neck.

I laughed, a wet sound, and pulled him closer against me.

“We’ll head back out tomorrow,” he whispered against my skin.

“You’re sure? I know we planned on –”

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” he said again. I knew I didn’t have to ask him if he was
sure again.

That time, when our lips met, the kiss was deep and warm. The mad, frantic,
breathless urgency from before had transformed into thick flowing honey down our
limbs, fusing my breaths with his, as he guided me back towards the bed and pressed
me down onto the thin mattress. My entire spine tingled, my muscles surged and
sang, as he traced his wet lips over my skin, slowly unzipped and unbuttoned every
one of our layers, until I was completely bare against him, held close in his arms,
his curls tickling my chest and neck.

Later, when he rode me, I rubbed my palms over his hips and sides and arched my
back up into his willing body. We were both quiet, just breathing, sighs hitching
on our breaths, and as I looked up at him in the gathering dark, and watched a
pearl of sweat drip down his beautiful chest, I whispered, “I love you,” to another
human being for the very first time. Because even after dinner at Greg and Molly’s,
even though Sherlock _knew_ , I had never really gotten my lips to form the words.

And he sank down onto me, shifting his weight in his hips, shivering up his spine
with his palms tracing my shoulders, before he caught the moan in his throat with a
rough whisper that he loved me, too.

\--

It was only the third time I could ever remember seeing the Park in the dead of
winter.

The view from the helicopter looked down onto a vast world of white and grey,
cascading into the distance and clinging to massive, craggy peaks. Wind swirled fog
like ghosts through the river valleys and canyons, and if I squinted my eyes I
could just make out the tops of sagging, snow-heavy winter trees clinging to the
steep slopes.

But, if I was honest, I knew that I was spending far more time watching Sherlock’s
captivated face than staring out my own window at the view.

It was Mike, again, who’d pulled through with the helicopter back up to McKinley
Park. Neighbor of his was planning on making a supply run sometime in the next week
for some Rangers spending the winter in the more remote outposts along Highway 3.
When we made it back into Seward from Exit Glacier, exhausted and spent from the
day-long trek, it only took about 5 seconds of mentioning that we were the guys
who’d gotten the radio call about the baby before the Rangers there were flagging
down Mike to get us on the next helicopter run out early in the morning, saving us
what could have taken a whole week trying to navigate road and plane travel through
the harsh snow.

Sherlock had called Greg using the Ranger station phone before we left to go bunk
in a cheap motel in town, letting them know we were on our way.

I’d listened to his end of the conversation – the announcement of our arrival,
followed by a quick “yes,” then “no,” and then he hung up when I suspected Greg had
been mid-word.

“The fuck was that?” I’d asked him, “You weren’t going to ask any details?”

Sherlock had frowned. “Details? It’s not like we don’t know where Molly’s cabin is,
or who’s going to be there –”

“Like the baby’s fucking _name_ ,” I cried. “Is it a boy or a girl, do they need us
to bring any food, does the kid have enough clothes?”

Sherlock had rolled his eyes as we made our way down the deserted nighttime Seward
street. “Fine, I’ll let you make the ‘new baby phone call’ the next time then, yes?
Honestly, John, it’s like you wanted me to cost them ten dollars in a phone bill
just to ask questions we’re going to learn the answer to in twelve short hours.”

And I’d suppressed a groan, mixed with a helpless grin, as I followed his long
strides on the ice. “You’re impossible,” I’d said, right before I stuck out my toe
so he would slip and fall into the icy slush.

The blades from the helicopter as we descended into McKinley Park sent great clouds
of grey snow flurrying through the air, drowning us in a fog of white. Our pilot, a
woman who’d instantly told us to call her “Mama Dee” when we were introduced at the
Seward airfield, and who’d lived her entire life without once leaving the state of
Alaska, gave us a thumbs up as we grabbed our small bags and climbed out of our
seats.

“Say hello to that lil’ babe now, ya hear?” she called over the still-running
engine.

“We really can’t thank you enough,” I yelled back. “You did us such a favor, it
means –”

“Aw cut that mushy crap and get on outta here,” she said, smiling. Sherlock gave
her one serious nod before we hopped down from the helicopter and jogged away from
the cloud of ice. We turned and watched as she ascended back up into the air,
swaying a bit with the wind, on her way a few miles north towards Healy for a
supply drop before she would touchdown and refuel in Fairbanks.

I laughed when I glanced over at the wild mess the wind had made of Sherlock’s
curls. He frowned dramatically. “Do I amuse you, then?” he asked.

I looked quickly around to make sure we were alone out in the landing field before
I wrapped my palm around the back of his neck, rubbing his skin with my thumb. Far
off over his shoulder, I saw the distant peaks of the park rising up into the snowy
mist, dancing with the grey clouds of the winter sky, all bathed in a glittering,
reflective light.

I saw my home, just behind him. The place I had returned to on the first day of
April, itching to feel the gravel beneath my boots, for ten long years.

It was the place where Lugnut had jumped into my arms, and where I had sent him off
into the sky. Where I had been sitting alone at a staff meeting campfire when a
young kennel intern named Molly Hooper sat next to me on the log. Where I had told
someone I was gay for the very first time, looked down at my body and seen a full,
erect cock. Where I had lived and worked and dreamed.

Where I had looked towards my passenger seat to see Sherlock Holmes leaping up in a
suit.
And I suddenly knew, looking at the memorized rises and falls of Denali over
Sherlock’s shoulder, that London would feel the exact same way, just as long as he
was beside me.

“Shall we?” I said.

He turned to look over his shoulder at the endless snow and ice, the beacons of
soft light breaking down through the grey sky.

He hefted his pack onto his shoulder and smoothed down the front of his winter
coat. “Let’s meet a baby,” he loudly declared, scaring off a nearby ptarmigan as it
flapped up into the sky, and I shook my head as I followed him along the path in
the snow towards the closed park gates.

“Ready?”

Sherlock put a hand on my arm to stop me when we were a few steps away from Molly’s
front door. Inside I could hear a baby crying, followed by Greg’s low hushed voice
mixed with Molly’s soft, tired laugh.

I knew what he meant. Halfway through our helicopter ride up from Seward, Sherlock
had leaned towards me and yelled over the sound of the engine that he felt like he
was on his way to meet his own kid, stupid as that sounded. That he was sitting
there making plans to babyproof his London apartment in his head. And before he
could shake his head at himself again, I put my hand on his thigh, out of view of
the pilot, and yelled back that I had already babyproofed my entire Talkeetna cabin
in my mind last night.

“That them?” I heard Molly ask from inside, tired excitement in her voice.

Her voice sparked a powerful urge in my chest, a force pulling me forward towards
the door, to see her with my own two eyes, and hold her in my arms.

I answered Sherlock by patting his hand with my own, then I squared my shoulders
and took the last few steps up to the front door. Before I could even raise my hand
to knock, the door swung open, and Greg was suddenly standing before me for the
first time in almost three months, with half his hair sticking up and mis-matched
socks.

“Well thank Christ you two finally decided to show up,” he said, before he pulled
me into a hard bear hug right there in the door.

“Congratulations,” I whispered to him, and he nodded and slapped me once on the

back. I felt the emotion tremble in his chest. I also felt Sherlock trying to slip
beside us through the door, but he was hardly two steps in before Greg pushed me
away from him and grabbed Sherlock’s arm instead.

“Oh no you don’t, come here, you,” he said as he pulled Sherlock into an even
fiercer hug, nearly knocking him back down out into the snow.

I shook my head at Sherlock’s silent plea for me to save him, then slipped past
them into the cozy warmth of the cabin – a cabin I’d walked into countless times
before, hungry for a meal and Molly’s company, only this time the cabin smelled
like baby powder instead of homecooked chili, and there was a tiny pair of
breathing lungs adding to the whispers Sherlock and Greg were exchanging behind me.
I spotted her almost immediately in the old stuffed chair next to the couch. Her
hair was bundled up in a tired bun, and she had dark circles under her eyes across
her pale skin, and a huge, stretched-out pullover from Greg over her small frame.
The baby was curled up fast asleep now on her chest, cradled in her gentle hands.

She was incomparably beautiful.

“God, look at you, kid,” I whispered, suddenly choked up, and I rushed to her, not
even stopping to shed my boots or my jacket, and I leaned down over the chair to
press a kiss to her forehead.

The smile she gave me was brilliant and soft. She put her hand around my wrist
braced on the arm of the chair. “I’m so happy you came,” she said.

I looked deep in her eyes – thought of that moment when her voice had told me the
worst news of my life over the phone earlier that summer. How she had put her hand
on my shoulder, not needing to say anything at all, as I processed the fact that my
best friend had just slipped away.

“I promised you, didn’t I?” I said, and her eyes glistened as she squeezed my
wrist.

Greg came up from behind and thumped me again on the back. His chest was puffed up,
radiating pride. “Come on, then, you want to hold the little bugger?”

I stared at him. “I . . . Well, I don’t need to – You know, I wasn’t

expecting . . . shouldn’t you wait a few weeks --?”

Molly kicked my shin with her socked foot. “Stop yammering and take your coat off
and wash your hands. Come on.”

I glanced quickly at Sherlock, who just shrugged, then went to do as Molly said. My
fingers shook as I dried them off on the kitchen towel and rolled up my flannel
sleeves. Even though I’d held my sister’s kids a few times before I left, and held
a baby or two over the years whenever coworkers came back from maternity leave, it
somehow felt like I had never held a baby at all, not once in my life.

I shook my shoulders once to knock some sense into myself before coming back to
Molly, who stood up gracefully, like she’d done that holding a sleeping baby a
thousand times before, and then held the baby out so she could place them in my
arms.

The warm weight of the child, of _Molly’s_ child, curled up against my chest.
Emotion pulsed through me. Her baby’s cheek rested against my chest in a way that
was nothing like my sister’s twins had fit there before, back when I hadn’t been
flat, and their little bodies had only amplified, like a screaming siren, those
parts of my skin I was always desperately trying to hide. It had made me never want
to hold them, even when they screamed to be picked up, and my sister begged me with
exhausted eyes, irritated that I wouldn’t just come over and help.

Now, though, the little baby fit perfectly against my body, curled up into my
warmth, and I could feel the tiny puffs of breath in the hollow of my throat. I
stroked the baby’s spine with my finger, feeling the soft, warm curve, breathing in
their scent from the wisps of brown hair.

Molly’s hand joined mine stroking the back of the baby’s head. “This is Theo,” she
whispered.
Shock rolled through me.

Shock and a hot, thick emotion that made me clench my jaw to try and catch my
breath. I blinked away the sudden water in my eyes so it wouldn’t drip down onto
the baby’s head – onto _Theo’s_ head. I knew the breaths coming out through my nose
were shaking, and that Molly could hear. For once, I didn’t try to stop them. I
wanted her to know, to understand, to somehow see the depth of what she had done.

I kept looking down at Theo’s soft little hairs as I whispered, in a low rough
voice, “Oh, Molly. . .” I swallowed hard. “You didn’t . . . God, you didn’t have to
do that. . .”

I heard Molly sniff, and her hand rested over mine against her baby’s soft spine,
then I looked down across Theo’s sleepy closed eyes, his curled up nose. “Hello,
little boy,” I whispered to him, but then Molly made an odd sound in her throat.

I looked up at her, still trying to blink away my wet eyes, and I saw that she had
a dry smile on her lips. “We knew that would happen,” she said, with a warm light
in her eyes. She looked over at Greg, who’d come to stand by her side. Silently, I
could feel Sherlock’s warm presence at my back, looking down at the sleeping baby
over my shoulder.

Greg cleared his throat and stroked his fingers across the nape of Molly’s neck.
“It’s Theodora, actually,” he said, smiling down at Theo in my arms. The baby
started to shift and fuss, and Molly reached out to stroke the back of her head to
try and calm.

I looked up at them both, stunned with an emotion I couldn’t name, could never ever
name even if I tried for a thousand years. “A girl?” I asked, barely a sound.

Molly nodded, and shrugged with a little grin, before Greg’s voice filled the
fragile, silent communication between us. “Molly here caved and asked to know at
the last ultrasound. Doctors said with ‘total certainty’ that it was gonna be a
boy. We had the name all picked out . . .” He gave me a soft look, “Actually, we
couldn’t settle on a single one until . . . ‘til Molly told me ‘bout your family.
Your granddad and your dad. We agreed on that, sure enough.”

Molly reached over gently to take the now crying baby from my arms, rocking her
against her chest. “And when our screaming little princess came out a girl . . .
Well, Greg here thinks it sounds,” and Molly lifted one hand to make air quotes,
“’punk and edgy’ to call her Theo for short, and . . . I don’t know.” She looked up
at me with suddenly deep, serious eyes. “It just fits, I thought. I hope . . . You
don’t mind? I know it’s a boy’s name for your family, but I thought . . . well it
doesn’t really matter, it could go both ways?”

I felt Sherlock’s hand at the bottom of my back. I sucked in a desperate, rough

breath to force my lungs to work. I knew that he knew I was only just barely
keeping it all together, that I was teetering on the edge of that emotion I could
never name.

Theodora’s cries quieted as she curled up in Molly’s arms. Her eyelashes rested
against her round, pink cheeks, dotted with a single freckle beneath her left eye.
“Of course I don’t mind,” I finally got out. I reached out one more time to stroke
my pinky finger along her tiny hand. She grabbed onto me with a surprising grip and
didn’t let go.

“God, kid,” I whispered, “how could I ever mind?”

Molly let one tear fall from her tired eyes as she looked up at me from her
daughter, as if I was the only person in the room, on the whole earth. I held my
breath.

It was the most I’d ever felt seen since Sherlock had taken my face in his hands,
and looked down at me in the open tundra, and desperately whispered, “ _John, you
are. I know._.”

And Molly didn’t even know, would probably never know, but she knew enough about
me, the most mysterious man she had ever met, to name her beautiful daughter Theo.
She knew enough to do that.

And she whispered back at me, with glistening eyes, “Good. That’s good.”

Sherlock and I spent the next hour cooking them a huge casserole from the random
bag of groceries Sherlock had mysteriously pulled from his bag. When I’d asked him
how the fuck he managed to buy those between Kenai and Molly’s cabin, Sherlock had
just irritatingly shrugged and said I needed to allow him to have at least some
secrets.

By the time we had the kitchen cleaned and the food cooling on the stove, Sherlock
and I turned around to see Molly and Greg both dead asleep on the couch, with
little Theo asleep to the world in her crib by Molly’s side.

“Shall we?” Sherlock whispered, motioning to the door.

I nodded, following his logic that we should give them an hour of silent sleep,
then tiptoed to grab my coat off the back of the chair before slipping into my
boots.

The winter sun had just slipped behind the distant peaks, even though it was still
the early afternoon, and I shivered at the burst of grey cold that followed on the
heels of the cloudy sunset. We stood side by side on Molly’s small wooden porch,
watching for a few minutes as the world around us slowly faded into the mist and
grey.

Bits of my life seemed to flash before my eyes, appearing through the dark fog like
ghosts before evaporating up into the sky.

I saw Molly’s glowing face as she held her new daughter to her breast. The first
time my dad ever called me Ranger, covered in mud and laughing that I’d found the
lost cat. The last time I had gripped a wooden railing – the way the salty horizon
line had been invisible, just a giant wall of thick grey.

Finally, after almost ten minutes, Sherlock took a deep breath beside me, fogging
in the air. He spoke in a low voice out at the dark sea of trees.

“That’s what your name would have been?” he asked. “Theo?”

I nodded, and my throat choked up again with wet heat. I spoke before I knew my
voice would be steady, forcing myself to let Sherlock hear, to let him understand.

“Theodore, yeah.” I paused and gulped down another breath, fighting against the
aching clench in my chest. On the railing, Sherlock’s hand quietly settled over my
own. “Watson family name for . . .” I swallowed hard, “for five generations. Dad,
granddad, granddad’s dad, and all that.”

“You told Molly that part,” he said softly. It dawned on me that I had never fully
confirmed for him whether Molly knew.

I moved my thumb so it settled on top of his hand. “Just that part, yeah. I never .
. .” My eyes fogged, and my breath came out in quick shakes, “God, I never thought
that she . . . That she would name her –”

I stopped myself, and I looked over at Sherlock with tears in my eyes. I didn’t
have the words for how to tell him what all of this meant – that there was a little
girl, a little girl named Theo, whose mom wouldn’t hit her, and whose dad wouldn’t
pick up a gun. A little girl named Theo, whom I would get to watch grow up, would
get to hold her hands as she learned to walk, and one day teach her how to build
her own bed out of sanded wood, just like my dad had taught me.

Would teach her the names of the Denali peaks, and the rivers, and all the stars.

That one day I would tell her about a special sled dog named Lugnut, and show her
the picture of us I used to keep by the side of my bed. I would tell her the story
of how her parents met, sitting around a Toklat campfire with hearts in their eyes.
Would tell her the story of how I met Sherlock, an anonymous man in a suit leaping
up uninvited into my truck.

And I didn’t have the words to tell Sherlock that . . . that if that little girl
named Theo ended up like me . . . somehow, by pure chance. . . If the little girl
named Theo ended up the way that I was, that I could be there. I could show that
little kid how to shave, and tell them it would be ok, the same way I always
wished, deep down, that someone had done for me.

That, even though this would never actually happen, even though it was just the
tiniest, invisible chance, that if they went to have that surgery, and no one else
would go, that they wouldn’t wake up alone in a hospital room, because I would be
there. I would hold their hand. I would tell the nurse if it hurt, if I could see
that they were in too much pain.

I could do all of this, and they wouldn’t even have to change their name.

And I didn’t have the words to tell Sherlock how remarkable it was that I knew that
Molly would let me be that person in Theo’s life, and that I knew that I would be
wanted. That the both of us, that Sherlock and I, would be wanted.

“A little girl,” I whispered, in a choked voice, not even caring that my voice came
out sounding too high.

Sherlock’s own eyes glistened, shining a breathtaking clear blue. They looked like
the morning sky right before the sunrise as I rode the Greyhound bus across the
Utah state line, when I’d finally glimpsed the sign that said just one-hundred
miles left before Canyonlands, and I’d sucked in an excited breath even though it
pulled at the fresh scars on my chest.

“She’s beautiful, John,” he said, and then I felt the deep sob finally wrench
itself free from my chest, cascading down my cheeks, and moaning across my tongue.

I fell into his arms, and he held me.

Impossibly, he held me.

And I knew, as I cried freely for the first time against his chest, not holding
anything back, not trying to stifle the sound, that one day, one day soon, I would
tell Sherlock about the time when I was six-years old, and my sister ran and
tattled to my parents that I wouldn’t listen to her unless she called me Theo. And
my dad had sat me down on the rickety metal steps outside our trailer, and thumped
me on the back, and said, “ _Alright, now, what’s this about calling yourself Theo?
A boy’s name, that is. Ain’t got no reason to be callin’ yourself that when you’ve
got your own beautiful name. One your momma picked out just for you._ ”

I knew that I probably didn’t even have to tell him, that maybe he somehow already
knew. But that I would tell him, just the same, because it was a story I never
thought in a million years that I’d have someone to listen to.

For the first time in my entire life, I cried for the Watson’s younger daughter.
For the fact that my dad said for ten years he always wanted a son, and when he
finally realized he had one, he didn’t want it anymore.

I cried, quiet, wet sounds aching in my throat, and water in my eyes, because I
knew that Sherlock Holmes would hold me up. He would keep me standing on my own two
feet.

A long time later, when my breathing had finally calmed, and I stood looking out at
the fresh darkness with my cheek pressed against Sherlock’s chest, wrapped tightly
in his arms, Sherlock squeezed me hard for a moment before he muttered into my
hair, “You know, I believe I prefer the name John.”

And, surprisingly, I laughed, free and open, the sound echoing out into the fog. My
puffy eyes were finally dry. I looked up to press a kiss to his cold cheek as I
whispered back, “Of course you do.”

\--

I nudged Sherlock in the ribs to wake him up as the flight attendant made the
announcement that the plane was starting to descend.

He hummed in his sleep and scrunched his eyes further closed, then shook his head
and burrowed deeper beneath the thin plane blanket. I shook my head at him and
turned back towards the window, gazing down at the vast sprawl of London slowly
coming into view through the puffs of cloud.

It took my breath away. This city somehow looked ten times larger than even the New
York I’d seen from the plane in my memories – massive and pulsing and impressively
shimmering beneath the clear midday sun. I tracked the gradual appearance of the
tops of soaring metal buildings, piercing up into the sky, as I thought back to the
night before, huddled close in the cheap motel by the Fairbanks airport.

We’d ended up staying with Greg and Molly for nearly a week in the end, and after
two days of Sherlock and I trying to leave to get out of their hair, not wanting to
overstay our welcome or stress them out even more, Molly had finally huffed and
said that if we left, her and Greg would die of exhaustion, or from killing each
other, and that the two of us needed to stick around and make ourselves useful
cooking and cleaning and babysitting before she’d ever let us get on a plane to
London.

So one week later, after long goodbyes were made in the doorway, and after I’d
choked up all over again watching Sherlock kiss Theo’s head as she slept against
his chest, we hopped on the weekly winter run of the Alaska railroad, taking that
into Fairbanks where we found the only available room left before our early morning
flight to Seattle, where we could connect with a plane straight to London.
That night, we’d both lain on our backs in the two tiny twin beds staring up at the
ceiling, listening to each other breath. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep a wink that
night, pulsing with energy thinking of Molly, of Theo, of London.

I startled at Sherlock’s voice in the darkness, whispered from a few feet away.
“We’ll see them again soon. We’ll fly back once or twice – won’t have to wait until
April.”

I smiled to myself in the dark, because of course Sherlock had seen the way I’d
barely been able to tear my eyes away from the baby. Of course he had noticed the
clench of my jaw on the train when it pulled away from the Denali station – the way
Molly’s hand had clung to my sleeve until the last possible second when I stepped
down off her porch.

I remembered he couldn’t see me and cleared my throat. “Yeah. Okay.”

Our voices sounded intimate in the darkness, even more so, somehow, for the fact
that we were in separate beds, with empty old carpet in between us.

I heard Sherlock’s sheets rustling, and the creak of his mattress, and before I
could ask him what he was doing, I suddenly had the whole weight of his body
crawling on top of me in the dark.

I huffed a laugh, clinging to his shoulders so he wouldn’t fall off the tiny bed.
“Hell, Sherlock, there’s hardly enough room over here for me –”

“Quit whining and budge over,” he muttered, flailing himself to get comfortable
under the scratchy hotel sheet.

I moved to the very edge of the mattress, part of my ass hanging off the side, and
he curled himself up against my chest in my arms and sighed.

“Oh, are you comfortable?” I asked him.

He pulled my arms tighter around him and mumbled, “Quite.”

I kissed the back of his neck, brushing my nose through his curls. I could feel him
drifting off to sleep, and the thought of being alone in the room, the knowledge
that he had wanted to sleep by my side, even here, even now, made me squeeze him to
keep him awake.

“Tell me about London,” I whispered.

He yawned. “Already told you all about London. All winter. Practically the only
thing to do for fun in your godforsaken cabin.”

I grinned and rolled my eyes in the dark, then rubbed my palm up over his chest. I
pressed my fingertips to his heartbeat, counting the rhythm. “Tell me again,” I
said, warm and deep in the dark.

He was silent for a few moments, so silent that I thought he’d gone and succumbed
to sleep, but finally I heard the deep thrum of his voice, wrapping around my limbs
in the darkness as if he held every bone in his strong hands. Vibrating deep in my
own chest.

“Well, to start with,” he said, kissing the back of my hand in the dark, “I’ll need
to warn you that I keep a wolf skull on the mantlepiece in my flat . . .”
The hard jolt of the plane startled me from my thoughts. I gripped the armrests in
fear before I realized that we had just landed and were gliding smoothly to a stop.
Sherlock grumbled next to me and stretched his legs from his near-eight-hour nap.

“I’m still tired,” he grumbled. The rest of the plane was becoming restless to get
up out of their seats as we made our way to the gate.

“Well, by all means, feel free to just ride this back to Seattle,” I said. “Get
another nap in so you won’t have to miss out on any sleep.”

He kicked my foot under the seats. I smirked.

The plane stopped, and the entire cabin stood up all at once in a frantic rush. We
were there. We were there in London. My heart started to race in my chest. My palms
sweat.

I didn’t even know what the city looked like, had never seen his place, didn’t know
where to go. I didn’t know how to use the train system, what street he lived on,
where to buy the nearest food.

I took a deep breath, frustrated at myself, for the low hum of nerves and panic
flowing through my system. My hands clenched the armrests. I didn’t even realize
Sherlock was waiting for me to stand up until his hand touched my shoulder.

“John?” he said, as if he’d already called my name once before.

I looked at him. He’d changed at the beginning of the flight back into one of his
suits – something I hadn’t seen on his body since that first day he appeared in my
life in a parking lot. It hugged the lines of his body, made him look wondrous and
otherworldly and alive. Competent and in control.

“John,” he said again, whispering, waiting for me. He looked worried.

I remembered the look on his face from back in Fairbanks, when we were walking into
the airport to check in for our flight, and I’d suddenly held him back and pulled
him off to the side.

“Look,” I’d said with a dry mouth, “My . . . there might be an issue before we get
on. Sometimes there is . . . My – my ID. My passport. It’s not. . .well, you know,
it isn’t –”

He’d looked at me as if I was the only other pair of eyes in the world. “Do you
want me to stay by you?” he’d asked.

The thought filled me with warmth, until I realized . . . “No,” I’d said, as gently
as I could. “No, I . . . I don’t want you to, to hear that. What they’ll say.” I
swallowed hard, over the pain in my throat, remembering what had happened the last
time I boarded a plane after the winter in the Canyon. “They’ll call me a different
name. It’s . . . I just . . I don’t want you to hear that,” I said.

He’d nodded, so seriously it took my breath away. He didn’t look hurt at all. Not
even offended that I hadn’t wanted him to be with me, to stay.

“I could call my brother,” he said, leaning down to keep his voice low. “He could
speak to someone before we go through, get that changed, and then you wouldn’t be
asked, they wouldn’t say –”

“Thanks, but . . .” I glanced quickly around before reaching out to hold his hand
in mine, just for a moment between our bodies. “Later, maybe,” I said, searching
deep into his eyes. “I don’t even want to know how many laws he would be breaking
to do that, but, right now, I just . . . I need to do this myself. Just, get it
over with the way I’m used to.”

I waited, silent, willing him to understand. An eternal second passed before he

squeezed my hand with his fingers. There was an unreadable expression on his face,
something glowing in his eyes.

“I love you,” he’d whispered, so softly I could barely hear him over the noise of
the airport.

And it was the sound of those words that had held my head high as I handed my ID
over for our check-in, knowing Sherlock Holmes was waiting ten feet behind me,
waiting to get on a plane by my side so he could share the other half of his life
with me.

I looked up at Sherlock now, still hunched over in the aisle of the plane waiting
for me to respond. It had only been a few seconds since he reached down to touch my
shoulder. I smiled up at him and rose to my feet. “Sorry, just . . . zoned out
there,” I said. I knew he could sense the white lie, but I gave him an assured nod.
“Let’s go.”

I started to head for the line of taxis on the curb after we’d collected our few
bags – the same duffel I’d brought to the Canyon, and Sherlock’s small suitcase
stuffed with his outdoor gear and Denali clothes. It was unbelievable, like a
dream, watching him deftly navigate us through the crowded airport now, with his
designer suit, and his agile fingers, and his coiffed curls falling perfectly
around his face.

He was so far, a million miles away, from the mud-covered man I’d held to me and
kissed out on the tundra in the rain. As if that man had been the caterpillar, and
now he was the butterfly that had burst from the cocoon.

But as he turned back to me and beckoned me away from the taxis with a nod of his
head, towards a sleek black car I could see parked a little way down the sidewalk,
I realized all at once that he was exactly the same. The very same man who had
laughed as we fell half-way down a slope of moss and mud, and who had put his feet
up on my truck dashboard as he listened to my bluegrass tapes, and who told me one
night outside our small tent that wolves mate for life.

I knew all of that, so clearly, the same way I knew he would scoff at me for days
if he ever knew the caterpillar metaphor I’d just used in my mind.

“What’s so humorous?” he asked as a man in a black suit took our luggage from our
hands.

I shook my head and grinned at him as I stepped down into the expensive car,
deciding not to question the ‘how’ or the ‘why’. “Nothing,” I answered under my
breath. He frowned at me as I rubbed a hand over my brimming smile. “Nothing at
all.”

I stared out the window as we drove, gazing at the pulsing city, and Sherlock
quietly pointed out buildings we were passing along the way – places he’d been and
worked, restaurants where he’d eaten, streets he usually walked.

The buildings rose higher and higher, giant skyscrapers of glass and steel,
reflecting the lights of the cars and the fading afternoon sun. It felt like we
were driving into the center of the earth, the heartbeat of all bustling human life
on the planet, as we eventually wound our way through the narrow London streets.

“I didn’t realize you lived so close to downtown?” I finally said.

He shot me a quick wink before reaching forward to tap on the glass for the driver.
“Right here is perfect,” he said. The car immediately swerved over to the curb.

Sherlock didn’t respond at the odd look I shot him as he motioned for us to get out
of the car. He pulled me back when I went to reach for our bags in the trunk.
“He’ll take those on to our home,” he said, casually, as if he hadn’t just called a
London apartment I’d never even seen yet “ _our home._ ”

It suddenly made sense in my mind – the expensive car and the man in the suit.
“Your brother’s doing?” I guessed.

Sherlock shrugged as the car pulled away into the traffic. “Sometimes he makes
himself useful.”

I continued watching the car disappear down the road as the city swarmed around me.
The buildings towered and dwarfed me, and the endless tides of people rushed past
us, jostling me where I stood, drowning everything in noise. I felt like I was
disappearing into the chaos, evaporating into the giant hum, and I would never know
my own name or hear silence ever again.

And yet somehow Sherlock stood as if set apart from it all. He stood gracefully in
the chaos, arms behind his back, rising up out of the crowd with his long neck
framed by the collar of his crisp white shirt.

I looked down quickly at my own clothes – my usual winter jacket and flannel shirt
with old jeans – and grimaced.

“Don’t worry, no dress code where we’re headed,” he said, reading my thoughts.

I looked up once more at the city as it enveloped me, snaking around my skin. It
smelled of wet asphalt, and a million people, and the smog of the cars as they
zoomed by. Nothing like the clear air of the tundra, the perfume of wildflowers,
the warmth of the moss.

“Coming, Ranger?” I heard called from a few feet away. Sherlock was starting to
walk into the massive crowd, away from the street.

I gave him a look. “Don’t tell me you’re going to call me that all the way out
here,” I said, as I caught up to his side. We started to walk, and he kept his pace
in tune with mine. “John will work just fine,” I said, under my breath. I swerved
just in time to avoid a group of people barreling down the sidewalk. Sherlock stuck
out an arm in front of me so I wouldn’t step off the curb down into the street
after looking the wrong way.

He held his arm there against my chest for an extra moment. “Fine, then,” he said,
as we waited for the light to change. His face was bright, full of the energy of
the city pressing in against my limbs. “Will you come accompany me for a delicious
Italian dinner, _John_?”

The light changed, and the mass of people around us started to move as I gazed back
into his eyes.

For one endless moment, everything else fell away.

All that existed was Sherlock Holmes, standing in the streets of London, waiting
patiently in his beautiful suit to take me with him to dinner. The bundle of nerves
in my chest evaporated as I gazed back into his eyes, grounding me like Denali’s
eternal peak in the middle of the moving chaos.

“Lead the way, Ranger,” I finally said to him, suddenly overwhelmed at his
presence, at the fact that he had taken me there, was sharing it all with me – his
own Denali.

He smiled at me, then beckoned with his head for me to come. His private grin
brimmed over like the waters of the rushing Toklat after the first snowmelt of the
spring, when everything was fresh, and new, and clean.

“John,” he whispered, audible over every sound in London. It was the sound of my
entire life, my soul, my name.

And I followed him, in perfect sync by his side, into the blue skyscraper sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be honest, this is the thing I have created in my life that I am most proud
of, that has been the largest labor of love, and such a huge piece of my soul.
Sharing my love for Alaska, for Denali, for the sled dogs, for these characters,
with you all has been such a treasure.
>
> Thank you for allowing me to share John's story. For the love, help, advice,
feedback, support, recs, art, comments, and joy you all have given in response to
his journey. Special thanks again to oxfordlunch, finnagain, smirkdoctor, and the
handful of you who told me at con how this story has moved you. Thanks to
happierstill and alexaprilgarden for letting me bounce ideas off you both, squee
about rangers, and the endless emotional support. Thanks to my main squeezes
annabagnell and songlin for making me laugh when I was writing the most heart-
wrenching chapters of this fic, and for screaming at me in joy (and angst) after
they read each one.
>
> A few quick things before I bid y'all adieu:
>
> Feel free to draw/paint any fanart of this universe that you wish, just share it
with us all so we can go bananas over it!
>
> One day, when I see her play live again, I will work up the courage to tell Sarah
Jarosz that her music inspired an entire book. I'll let y'all know when I do :)
>
> A reminder that John Watson's journey is not the same as every trans man's
journey, and that every trans person has their own unique experiences and voice.
>
> If you want to read some more fics featuring trans characters in Sherlock fandom,
check out the July episode of Three Patch Podcast, where I'll be chatting with
songlin and finnagain about the glorious wonders of Sherlock fics featuring more
trans characters! Along with some excellent recs you can (and should definitely)
check out.
>
> As for what's next for me, I WILL be finishing Gallant Darling, Pray for Me! As
well as starting on a new fic that the illustrious drinkingcoco won from me in the
2018 Fandom Trumps Hate auction. If Winter Olympics OT3 Johnlockstrade sounds cool
to you (lol, see what I did there?) then keep an eye out for when that starts
posting!
>
> Until then, come say hi on the social medias, and say hello in the comments! Fics
like these are true labors of love to write, and my highest joy is getting to
interact with you all and talk about it via comments once it's finished. Now that
the fic is done, I can start replying to comments left here again. Hurrah!
>
> See ya down below :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

* [Cover for The Bluest of Blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109717) by

[11jane11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/11jane11/pseuds/11jane11)
* [[Cover] The Bluest of Blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14687700) by
[allsovacant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allsovacant/pseuds/allsovacant)

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