Superpower Challenge: Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by Salieri
Author: Salieri (troyswann)
Title: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Challenge: Superpowers
Characters: The Frasers
Warnings/Spoilers: Well, we know what happened to Fraser's mom, right?
Length: 730
Notes: I was watching "Hawks and Handsaws" last night, and this suggested itself for this challenge. Oblique, though it may be.




A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Time slowed. Bob could feel it growing sluggish, his blood a slurry that surged only with greater and greater effort through his veins. The spaces between seconds and heartbeats grew silt-clogged. Time trickled through narrowing, muddy channels until it dwindled to an almost imperceptible seeping. An in-drawn breath pooled in his lungs.

The stars stopped moving.

For ten years he had set his watch by constellations, traveling with Orion in the winter, Hercules in the summer. The pendulum suspended from the North Star had swung him with a regular rhythm from one end of his territory to the other, from freeze to thaw to freeze, through dayless night and nightless day. And at the end of each arc, in the pause where energy was gathered to be expended in the long sweeping motion to the other end of the year, there was Caroline.

He would find her in the sunny patch behind the cabin, kneeling between rows of turned earth (at both ends of the year, she knelt there in the tiny garden patch, and it was this that convinced him that time, like the planet, was round). She would raise her head to look toward him, where he hesitated in the lattice of shadows at the edge of their clearing, and for a moment her brow would crease with concentration as though she were trying to pick out some subtle change in the landscape, something she had felt only subliminally and couldn't yet see. In later years, young Benton would rise from his crouch beside her, his own small trowel dangling from his hand, and he would watch Bob with wide, wary eyes. They were enchantments meeting each other at the seam between worlds.

But there was nothing ethereal about Caroline. When they caressed Bob's face as if confirming his identity by touch, Caroline's hands were strong and callused and real. In the pause between seasons, Bob would hold her tightly, relearn the angular shape of her so that he could trace it in his mind as he rode the momentum of duty away and back again. Benton shook his hand with formal gravity before his fingers slipped nimbly from Bob's grip like a fish too slippery to catch. Each return found him taller and less like a baby and more like a boy. In the early days, there was enough time to coax the boy to him, but as Benton grew older, he grew more into himself, became sturdy enough to hold his ground against centripetal forces.

But Caroline was always the same, the way the seasons were always the same in their progression toward familiar newness. Her voice flowed along well-worn channels as she told him to shave the ridiculous beard he grew to keep his face warm, and that he left there only because of the way her fingers moved with the precision of ritual as she took the straight razor to his skin. It was the same unfaltering, gentle dexterity she used to stroke his body awake and then to sleep.

At the beginning and end, there was Caroline.

When he returned that October, struggling mid-season backward against the momentum of his life, Orion was still asleep, and Hercules was looking the other way. When he found that it was true, that she was gone, time slowed to a trickle and stopped.

Stillness. Energy expended. Breath pooled in his lungs.

And so, it was with great effort that he lowered his eyelids and opened them again to blink Benton into focus. Inertia was a resistance he had to lean into with all of his weight. But even this was too slight, and the interlocking wheels remained unmoved. Waiting, Benton stood beside him, eyes as ever wide and wary. He put down the bowl he was holding in both hands—porridge, Bob noticed, lumpy and half-cooked. He put down the bowl next to an identical one that was sitting in front of Bob on the table, and with a tilt of his head, he reached out to touch Bob's face. His fingers fluttered uncertainly across the stubble of beard on Bob's chin and then lifted away.

The stars began to swing across the sky. Orion climbed higher. The breath pooled cold and still in Bob's lungs rushed out in a sob.

The water was still flowing the next morning as he shaved.


^^^

The full text of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.