Author's Website: https://www.squidge.org/~pumpkin/cara/caraindex.html

Disclaimer: Owned by Alliance and borrowed by me. No profit was made and no Mounties were injured in the making of this fic.

Author's Notes:

Story Notes:

"Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it's true."

--Paul Simon, "Train in the Distance"

The night was cold and still, and sound traveled for miles through the heart of the city, pulling Benton Fraser from his warm bed. Trains moaned in the distance, a siren song luring him to the window. Its bubble of cold raised gooseflesh on his arms; in spite of his careful improvements the old tenement was still drafty. Frigid air seeped around the windows, evading his careful caulking, but to a man raised in the heart of Yukon winters, it was hardly noticeable.

There was someone in the street, turning in a flash of long flowing coat; for a moment his mind superimposed a familiar figure on top of the stranger like a slide and his fingertips tightened around the window frame, whitening.

Dief lifted his head, giving an inquiring whine; Fraser ignored him. The dim flame of the kerosene lantern wavered in the warped glass, and his eyes filled, shattering the image into the reflection of a thousand candles.

*She's not coming back. And why in God's name would you want her to?*

The answer to that, at long last, was that he wouldn't. Didn't. Couldn't. But the train whistle still haunted him on cold winter nights, like the sound of her voice. Sometimes he could almost make out the words. Sometimes the train cried aloud in anguish in spite of all that anyone could do to soothe the ache of loss inside him.

Ben. Come with me.

He walked quietly into the kitchen and opened the cabinet, taking out a single candle. Lifting the mantle of the lantern, he lit the candle and watched the wick blacken and curl in the flame, wavering in the drafty apartment as he drew it back and held it upright. The train moaned again as he shielded the fragile flame with his palm and he carried it to the window, knowing and not caring it lit his face and made him visible from without.

A few icy flakes swirled down out of the sky, and he felt tears well perversely as the low wail faded into the distance with a sound like death. Then the flurry thickened, muffling and silencing the echoes across the city of trains in the night, speeding away throughout the land to destinations unknown, never to return.

"Benny?" A sleepy voice from his bed. Ray. He listened as the secondhand bed creaked and the covers rustled, counted the slow footfalls against the floor. Warm hands settled on his shoulders; Ray's mouth touched his neck. Ray's body settled against his, warm and comforting, and the tip of Ray's generous nose traced the curve of his ear. Ray knew his moods and had never seemed to resent them, not even this one.

"Come back to bed, Benny." Ray's hand moved to settle over his heart; Ray waited patiently for his decision. If he returned there, Ray would hold him and kiss the loneliness from him, love him and remind him how it truly felt to love someone. The peace and joy would lull him to sleep and in the morning the city would be white and Ray would make coffee and she would be forgotten again. Until late some other winter's night, when snow was starting to fall and the wind was still, and the low train sounds would reach him and make the scars she had left in his heart ache again.

He bent his head and blew out the candle, then followed Ray back to bed.