Avery wasn't what Jack had expected. He'd had an image in his head of some slick business man, suave and empty headed. Maybe it was just the effect of clawing for survival on the mountain for over a week, but Jack didn't think so. There was a confidence there even after all he'd been through—A rock solid assurance that, whatever happened, the winds of fate would not blow cross for long. Jack could see why Calder had followed him so long without questioning it. Standing next to a man like that, you felt like a bit player next to the leading man.

He was tall and barrel chested, Jack's equal in height at least, with dark chestnut hair that fell straight as an arrow back from his stately brow, kept in a neat braid. His eyes were a little deep-set in his proud, aquiline features, but bright. His clothes were ragged from his experience, but he wore them like a king's robes.

“It's down here,” he said, leading them carefully down an icy slope. They'd left the trees behind and were back in the wind now. Jack noticed he was limping heavily. He reached back to help Calder down. “I thought I was done for after the bear chased me out of my camp. But I found this place just in time.”

A tree, once enormous, now dead and all but petrified, stood alone among the snow, a relic of when the forest in the distance had reached this far. There was a shallow cave dug out from underneath the roots.

“Used to be a bear den,” Avery said, a little bitterly. “Ironic, right?”

They might all just fit if they didn't mind being practically on top of one another. Embers were burning in a hastily erected fire pit. He'd built up snow to try and shelter it from the wind without much success. It was a far less comfortable site than the one in the trees.

“I saw you two across the ice,” he said. “And that damn bear. Didn't think I'd be able to catch up with you, but I cut across the ridge from up here. I've figured the area out pretty well in the past few days. Been trying to figure out a way to get around the damn bear to get back to my supplies. Do you have any food?”

“'Fraid not,” Jack replied. “We were hoping to find something in the trees. We do have a first aid kit and blankets and a pretty decent camp back on the other side of the river.”

“Didn't think so,” Avery said with a sigh. “Had to ask. It's been a few days.”

Calder was still staring at Avery with a kind of wordless awe. Jack knew he'd given up hope of ever seeing the man again. He tried not to let it bother him.

“First aid kit though,” Avery continued, sinking down into the pine needles inside the hollow of the tree with a relieved sigh and stretching out his foot. “Could use that. Though I'm not sure how much good it would do me at this point. Stepped through the ice on the first day.”

Jack and Calder settled down next to him and watched with growing horror as he peeled off his boot and revealed his foot. The toes were black, the mass of the foot an ugly blue gray, and lines of red-black radiated up his leg. Jack had seen severe frostbite enough times to recognize it, and that this case was rapidly going gangrenous. Avery was going to lose that foot. He’d lose more if it wasn’t treated soon.

“I might have saved it if not for the fucking bear,” Avery said through clenched teeth. “I'd warmed it back up and I was staying off it, more or less. But I couldn't keep it warm out here. It refroze, and now it's dying still attached to me.”

“It'll be fine,” Calder promised the other man, his eyes wide and distraught. “Rescue is coming any minute. They'll get you to a hospital and fix it up.”

“It won't be tonight,” Jack said, pointing up at the clouds on the horizon. “Storm coming in.”

“God damn it.” Avery struggled to get his boot back on, then leaned back against the tree.

“We have to get back to the other side of the trees,” Calder said with a frown. “That's where we crashed. That's where they'll be looking for us.”

“Tomorrow,” Jack said. “I don't want to linger over here either. But I really don't want to get stuck in those trees when the storm hits and end up cornered by a bear.”

“Where'd he find you?” Avery asked. “You said you were a private pilot?”

“I fly cargo out of Ptarmigan base,” Jack replied, prodding at the fire, trying to get it built back up.

“He used to fly rescue,” Calder explained. “Everyone said he was the best. And they were right. He found you when no one else could.”

“And a lot of good that's doing me now,” Avery scoffed, eyeing Jack with an unfriendly glare. “You should never have brought him out here.”

“Try telling him that,” Jack shot back, tone casual despite the cold look in his eyes. “He was determined to do this with or without me. I had to stop him from walking off on his own to search the mountain for you more than once.”

Avery gave Calder a strange look and Calder looked away, embarrassed.

“Well,” Avery said thoughtfully. “I guess I never could stop him from doing what he wanted to do either. Thank you for getting him this far anyway.”

Things were quiet for a moment longer as Jack continued struggling with the fire against the rising wind.

“What happened out there?” Calder finally asked. “How did you end up like this? I was afraid I would never know.”

“There’s not much to tell,” Avery said, frowning off into the distance. “I still don’t know what happened up on the mountain. A storm was slowing us down. It was bad, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But our guide, Hays, he climbed up ahead of us and cut his line. He must have justified it to himself somehow. Like he thought he wouldn’t survive the storm if he had to be carrying us. But honestly I think that bigoted son of a bitch was just looking for a reason to abandon me and Dan on the mountain. But something must have gone wrong. He lost his footing or something. If he hadn’t disconnected his line, we would have caught him. Instead he went sliding down the mountain past me and there was nothing I could do. The wind got under Dan, he nearly fell, then disconnected and dropped down, thinking he could re-secure himself on our tracks. But as soon as he was out of sight he was gone. I climbed up a little higher, found a safe ledge to hang from, and I waited.”

He paused for a moment, the lines of his face drawn tight with emotion.

“He didn’t come back.”

Jack and Calder watched him as he rubbed his injured leg absentmindedly, his thoughts far away and ruinous. Neither of them knew what to say, how to comfort the other man, how to tell him what they were fairly certain he already knew about what had happened to Dan.

“When the storm cleared I realized I wouldn’t be making the summit on my own,” Avery went on. “Couldn’t radio for help. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, couldn’t stay where I was. Thought about skiing down the relief but I didn’t think I could do it safely alone and in that low visibility. So when I spotted the ridge I tried to go down that way. Figured there would have to be people on it. There weren’t, but the rescue pilot spotted me. You two saw the wreck so you know what happened there. Single pilot, landed when he shouldn’t have. Crashed when he tried to get back in the air. If he’d flown far enough from the mountain to radio my position and get a few more people in there maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Instead, he picks me up, gets me strapped to a damn gurney, and tries to take off. He didn’t get far which is probably lucky for me. Crashed just a little further down the mountain, before he got enough height to kill us both. It was only bad luck that killed him. I was pretty dazed and shaken up after I cut myself loose of the gurney and crawled out. In shock maybe. I grabbed a bag and wandered off down the mountain. Not really sure what I was thinking. Next thing I know I’m out on the ice field freezing to death, nearly falling through the damn ice. I find that stand of trees and I dig in. Was doing pretty good till the bear.”

“You’re either the toughest or the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Jack said seriously. “If we survive this, you should write a book.”

“You always were pretty amazing at this stuff,” Calder agreed, looking at Avery with a softness in his eyes that made Jack’s heart twist painfully in his chest.

“So that’s my side of things,” Avery cleared his throat and pushed on. “What happened with you two?”

“It’s a bit less exciting,” Calder said. “A lot of flying back and forth over the mountain.”

He gave Avery the short version. Jack didn’t miss the fact that Calder skipped over his and Jack’s relationship. Not that Jack could really blame him for that. His jealous heart was looking for any excuse to pain him tonight.

Things were quiet for a moment once Calder was done. Jack got the fire high enough to warm them a little despite the wind. Avery shifted, rubbed at his leg, frowned at the fire. Jack could tell he was working up to something and waited patiently for him to say it.

“Is Dan...?” He started to speak, trailed off, tried again. “Did he make it off the mountain all right?”

Jack didn't look up from the fire. This wasn't his business, wasn't his place to say. Calder pursed his lips, tried to find the right words.

“Your... The guide, Hays, wandered into base camp a little less than a week ago, with no sign of you or Dan. That's how we knew something had gone wrong. He's stable in a hospital in Anchorage, but he hadn't woken up last I heard. The official rescue team searched the mountain for both of you, but one of the helicopters went down on Abruzzi ridge-”

“I know, I was in it,” Avery interrupted. “Now tell me about Dan.”

“He—” Calder started and stopped, squared his jaw, couldn't find the words. Avery's nostril's flared, his hands clenched tight against his legs. Jack felt an ache of sympathy for the man.

“He's dead,” Jack said at last. “We found him in a crevasse on the mountain. We figure he tried to ski down the relief. I'm sorry.”

Jack had delivered this news to a lot of people over the years, but never in a situation like this. He knew enough to have no idea what to expect. He saw it pass over and through Avery, like a cloud across the sky, like a wave. Jack could almost see the deep tide of grief that caught him like a current and dragged him down, drove him beyond salvageable depths. Jack watched the way it pulled at Avery like gravity, first at the eyes and mouth, then at the shoulders, the way he sank toward the earth, sank into himself. The way people reacted was always different. For some people it was like being suddenly untethered and adrift, a frantic helplessness with nothing to hold on to. Others seemed to have had a rug ripped out from under them, a solid foundation suddenly crumbling away. Many, like Avery, bore it like a crushing weight, and collapsed inwards like a dying star. He’d seen it turn more than one person into a black hole that destroyed everything around it. He watched Avery, waiting to see if he would implode.

Avery brought a trembling hand to his head and took a deep, shaky breath. Then Jack watched the wave pass over him and recede. He sat up again. His eyes were wet, his face lined with a new heaviness. But he’d refused to collapse. He’d put his grief away like a box of old photos in the back of the closet, to be sorted through later. Jack, despite himself, was impressed.

“I knew there was a good chance he was gone,” Avery said, his voice quiet but even. “But I still can’t quite believe it.”

“That’s pretty normal,” Jack told him. “Most people can’t until they see the body.”

Silence settled on them like snow. Calder watched Avery with a frown, clearly wanting to comfort him but unsure how. Avery stared at nothing, just processing his grief.

“You know,” Jack said to fill the silence, “the history of ghost stories in America starts around the Civil War.”

“Trivia, Jack?” Calder said with a small, uneasy smile. “Really?”

Jack shrugged a little.

“Just something I read,” he said. “Thought it applied. Before the war, people died at home. Death was something intimate, visible. Familiar. And then suddenly fathers and sons are leaving in droves, dying on distant fields, their bodies never identified or returned. And their families at home can't believe it. With no body to make the death real, nothing physical to cling to, they couldn't accept it. So they invented ghost stories, where their loved ones could still come home. The Civil War changed how America related to death.”

“I'm not sure I can believe that,” Avery said, watching the fire. “There's nothing comforting about the idea of people you love being trapped forever, unable to move on. And why would so many ghost stories be scary?”

Jack considered that for a moment, looking up at the wind that moved the sea green needles of the pine above them in hypnotic waves, as though they sat at the bottom of a green ocean.

“I'm not sure,” Jack admitted. “Maybe it's about guilt. Wanting the person you lost back in any form, no matter the consequences, and then hating yourself for the pain you'd inflict on them and others just to keep them around, even in a small way. Just to know they weren't completely gone.”

“I don't believe in ghosts,” Calder said, sitting between them and yet somehow feeling miles distant from either Avery, who he wanted to reach but couldn't, or Jack, who he seemed to have forgotten as soon as he saw Avery again. At least so it seemed to Jack. “I don't think there's an afterlife or any part of us that can live on. But I do think we can leave impressions on a place, like the impression of writing on the pages of a notepad after the page you wrote on has been removed. Invisible, but you can still feel it under your fingers, even see it under the right conditions. I think moments of strong emotion can stay in a place. You can feel it when something terrible happened where you're standing. And a house that's been a happy family home for generations feels different from a new apartment that's never been lived in, or a hotel full of fleeting impressions.”

Jack considered that, imagining moments of his life changing the shape of the world around him, like fingers pressed into warm wax. Was his home a different place, now that he'd shared it with Calder? He knew it would feel different to him. What would it be like, going home alone, once Calder had gone with Avery and left him behind? He remembered the soft, dreamlike moments in the early morning light of the cave and thought that if any place had been changed by him being in it, it was there. Could he go back, lie in that place, and feel that warmth and simple, serene contentment again?

“I don't know what I believe,” Jack said. “I'd like for there to be somewhere after this. It would be nice. A happy ending to a not very happy story. But I'm not sure that seems likely.”

“I believe,” Avery said, his voice very soft in the growing darkness. The sun was setting beyond the distant trees. The pale white sky darkened to charcoal. The clouds they'd seen earlier boiled slowly closer on the back of a chilly wind. Avery pulled his coat closer as they all shivered, huddling deeper into the tree. “I want to believe.”

Jack got up and began building up the snow around the base of the tree, just trying to shield them from the wind a little better. Calder got up and joined him after a moment. They traded off when their hands got too cold, until they'd established a decent berm around the tree. By the end, they were working in the dark. But at least they weren't directly in the wind anymore. Jack watched the wind tossing the branches above them, more violently now, and thought it probably wouldn't do much good once the storm came in.

They settled into the tree, sitting up with Calder in the middle, and Jack pulled the blanket out of their bag and spread it over them. It wasn't much good shared between three men, but it was better than nothing. They could only hope their shared body heat would be enough to keep them all from freezing in the night. Jack thought Avery might be able to keep them all warm on his own. He radiated heat from a growing fever as his dying foot festered away silently, poisoning his blood.

It took Jack a long time to fall asleep, though he was exhausted and the yawning void of his shriveled, empty stomach was a constant fatigue. He watched Calder sleep instead, wishing it were easier to just turn off the things he felt when he looked at the other man. There was a long time when he would have given anything not to be the way he was. Now he would be happy just to not be in love with Calder. He didn't think he'd survive the hurt that was coming. He'd tried so hard to keep himself distant, but Calder had just kept pushing. He'd forced his way into Jack's life and into his heart like a hurricane, and he would leave Jack's life in similar shambles when he walked out of it.

Avery didn't sleep for a long time either. Jack saw him, staring out into the darkness, still and quiet. Thinking about Dan, Jack imagined. Maybe he was being selfish, melodramatic. He'd been involved with Calder only a week at most. Avery had just lost the man he'd been in love with for years, someone he'd intended to spend the rest of his life with. If Jack's life would be in shambles when Calder left, Avery's was a desolate ruin, crumbling slowly into the sea.

Jack fell asleep before Avery did, but he slept restlessly. He woke often, when the wind howled over their rough, improvised wall and the fire guttered. He checked his extremities one at a time to make sure he could still move them. Then he checked Calder and Avery to make sure they were still alive, their hands and feet still covered by the blanket, their cheeks still flushed and not gray. He was used to it, in a way. He'd spent more than one night sleeping in his plane, waking every hour or so to clear ice from the wings. That never made it any more pleasant.

Morning came, the sun struggling to break through the heavy clouds of the storm that had arrived in the night and settled over them like a patient scavenger, waiting to scour their bones. The wind screamed through the branches of the trees and howled low through the open spaces, clawing at any exposed skin with claws of ice. Jack stared into the white out, cold and stiff and starving. There was a bone deep exhaustion in him, like a fog on his brain, which whispered that it would not be so bad to just lay back down in the snow and sleep until it all went away. But Calder was still alive, and he'd made a promise. He could live that long.

Avery was not doing well. The fever that had taken hold last night was only getting worse. He seemed slightly dazed, his gray eyes hazy with distant confusion. Calder wrapped the blanket around Avery’s shoulders as he and Jack struggled to their feet and began contemplating making their way back to the other camp. They stepped away a little to talk.

“I don't know if we should try it in this storm,” Calder said, worried, the wind tossing his hair into his wide, worried eyes. “I'm not sure Avery can make it.”

“He needs the antibiotics from the first aid kit,” Jack replied, grim as he looked back at Avery, staring into the fire, barely conscious. “I don't think he'll last the night otherwise.”

Calder looked back at the other man as well and Jack’s heart ached to see the distress in Calder’s face. He couldn’t lose Avery now, not after all this.

“How are you doing?” Jack asked lowering his voice, leaning a little closer.

“I’m fine,” Calder said dismissively. “Hungry, tired, the usual.”

“I didn’t mean physically,” Jack pointed out.

Calder looked away, considering the question silently for a moment.

“I don’t know how to feel,” he admitted. “I should be happy, finding him alive. But instead I’m just terrified. I don’t know how to save him. Thinking he was dead was bad enough, but watching it happen…”

“Things are going to be fine,” Jack said, though in truth he wasn’t so confident of that. “We’re going to get back to camp and rescue is going to come. You’ll be back teaching yoga in no time.”

Calder snorted, more incredulous than amused.

“I’ll be raking in the insurance payments for my plane and all this nonsense,” Jack went on. “I’ll have enough to replace the Ann in a few months. I’ll go back to flying, and you and Avery will go back to Oklahoma and live happily ever after.”

Jack was impressed with himself for keeping the bitterness from his voice as well as he did, but Calder frowned at him.

“Jack, I’m not—”

“It’s fine,” Jack held up a hand to stop him, forced a smile. “I never bought that ‘closure’ business anyway. You’re still in love with him.”

“It’s not like that,” Calder insisted, but Jack thought he could see doubt in Calder’s eyes.

“It’s not like I blame you,” Jack said, looking away, trying to keep this casual despite how he felt, which resembled a sandcastle as the rising tide eroded the sand from its base, crumbling slowly but surely toward the sea. “I can see the way you look at him. You were always still in love with him. You practically said it yourself.”

Calder shook his head, frustrated.

“You still don’t believe in me after all of this?” Calder huffed, turning away. “There’s no way to convince you, is there?”

“It’s better this way,” Jack repeated the words he’d said to himself so many times since this started, hunching his shoulders. It was his turn to be the stubborn one now. “You and me, we were just passing the time anyway. I told you I don’t really do relationships.”

Calder looked at him, seeming lost and helpless among the snow as he had that first day they’d flown out together.

“You’re important to me, Jack,” he said, trying, even though he knew there was no way to make Jack believe him.

Just not important enough, Jack thought and looked away.

“I just want you to know that, however this turns out, I won’t hold it against you,” he said. “You do whatever you need to do for you. You know I’ll do the same.”

“And what if you’re still what I want?” Calder asked, his brown eyes almost liquid gold in the morning light. It broke Jack’s heart to even look at him. He looked away, shuffled his feet, the crunch of snow almost lost in the wind. 

“I just want you to be happy,” Jack answered at last.

Calder shook his head and turned away.

“We’ll talk about this when we’re back at camp,” he said. “Avery can’t wait.”

Jack couldn't argue with that. Avery looked dead on his feet already. There was nothing to gather, no breakfast to eat, no way to stall. In a close, anxious group, they began to walk.