FIC: Frozen in Ice Songs (Ray Levoi/Walter Crow Horse, PG-13)
TITLE: Frozen in Ice Songs
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Thunderheart
PAIRING: Ray Levoi/Walter Crow Horse
SUMMARY: Ray was adjusting okay to reservation life, but some things were bred in deep, and those things were hard to change.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Prompts from minim_calibre's Mundane Bingo, which I am not so much playing as gleaning prompts from: being put on the spot about your romantic/sex life, completely socked in by snow. Title from Tori Amos’ Under the Pink Songbook: I dreamed things were frozen in ice songs and other dreams.
The snow had begun during the drive over, but it hadn’t started sticking until later, maybe around the time Mrs. Crow Horse sent the boys down to the basement to relight the pilot light so she could start putting things in the oven. It was hours past supper when Ray and Crow Horse went to leave, but by then the snow was heaped nearly waist-high, and all that was visible of their truck was the top of the cab, the bed completely buried.
Ray wrapped his arms around himself, shivering; it was his first winter in South Dakota, and his cold weather clothes from out east weren’t really up for the job. He kept meaning to drive down to Rapid City to buy some that might actually keep him from freezing to death, but it was easy to put off without reminders like this, the first heavy snow of the season.
Crow Horse put his hands on his hips.
“So,” he said, “you wanna try hitching Jimmy up to a sled, or should we spend the night here?”
When the roads weren’t impassible, it was only about a half hour ride to Crow Horse’s folks’ place, and Ray’s not drinking made him a perpetual designated driver, so they didn’t make a habit of spending the night there. But impassible roads were a fact of reservation life: if it wasn’t snow, it was flooding, or wildfires, or trees down, so sleepovers happened, and it wasn’t their first time.
Crow Horse’s mother brought them an armload of quilts, and they spread them atop the covers until it was like a lead vest weighing on their chests. The ancient pajamas Crow Horse fished out of his old dresser were too tight on him and too short for Ray, so even given the cold they just stripped down to nothing. Flesh to flesh beneath the blankets made better heat, anyway, an old tracker’s trick.
The windows frosted with ice, but it was plenty warm beneath the heavy stack of covers. Ray snuggled down, and was drowsy and distracted when Crow Horse slid his hand over the ridges of Ray’s ribs, pressed his mouth to the nape of Ray’s neck.
Ray tensed. “Don’t. I-they’ll hear us.”
Crow Horse sighed. Wasi’chu people were so damn touchy about sex. Ray was adjusting okay to reservation life, but some things were bred in deep, and those things were hard to change. Sometimes, no amount of explaining the Indian way about things could help him get it; he just had to live it until it made sense to him.
So Crow Horse didn’t try to explain that his parents were worried about his relationship, that they thought his sacrifices-the bloodline, their bloodline-were too big for the payoff. That maybe Ray was taking advantage, somehow they hadn’t thought of yet. Crow Horse had told them everything was fine, and moreover it was worth it, but talk was just talk, and Indian talk especially tended to just show the surface to something. You could only really prove things through action.
The walls were thin, and Ray was right: they’d be heard. But that was the point. No sex was a sign of a sick relationship, and Crow Horse’s parents could not understand the white compulsion to hide sex away. And after all the convincing it had taken to get them to see Ray as Indian, they could not understand how he could be Indian and still have these white ideas confusing him.
The walls were thin, but not so long ago the Lakota had slept in tepees. You did not have walls, even thin ones, and you slept blanket to blanket with your tiospaye, and sex still happened. It was just something people did, like eating or laughter or sleeping. It was the stuff life was made up of, and like everything else you could do it right and make life better, or do it wrong and make life harder for yourself, but that’s all it was: part of life. And Crow Horse still felt pretty much that same way about it.
“Look,” Crow Horse said, “you gotta calm down about this. I mean-look, you’ve heard my folks, right?”
Ray blushed. Normally, Crow Horse wouldn’t let Ray get away with that kind of thing, but since he was trying to sweet talk him, he let it go.
“I-well-that’s not-”
“It’s nothing to get wound up over, is my point. I know you enjoy sex with me, and I promise that my folks aren’t gonna think badly of you if they know that.”
Ray worked his mouth silently for a moment, like he had to physically form the words before he could speak them.
“We have to go slow,” he said finally.
Crow Horse nodded. “Sure, chief. We got lotsa time. We got all night.”
“Really slow,” Ray repeated, and fell into Crow Horse’s embrace.
***
Crow Horse had promised him it would be okay, but that didn’t stop the waves of mortification from rolling through Ray’s stomach as he had to come face to face with Crow Horse’s folks the next morning at breakfast. Ray kept his head down, but no one acted any differently, Mrs. Crow Horse scrambling eggs, Walter and his coffee fogging up the windows as he looked out into the white landscape. The morning sun had melted down the drifts; the bed of the truck was visible again, even.
“Think maybe if it keeps warming up like this, we’ll get down to Rapid and get Ray some grownup winter clothes, so he stops shivering like he’s the last sickly runt left in the box or somethin’.”
Crow Horse laughed, and squeezed Ray’s shoulder, and Ray thawed enough to smile. And then Mr. Crow Horse came in, and Ray’s insides went cold again, the old man’s sharp eyes on him. But then, like it was nothing, like he did it every day, Mr. Crow Horse patted him on the back and called him good kola-two firsts-and Ray found Crow Horse's eyes, and they shared another smile.