Author's website: http://unhinged.kixxster.org

Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be, but it seems a shame to just let them sit around collecting dust when they could be doing more interesting things.

Author's Notes: This was written for the DS Flashfiction Curtain Challenge. A ringing down of the final curtain, as it were.

Story Notes:

Finale
MR

It's a fuckin' cold day for a funeral, and in a way, I guess that sort've makes it easier to bear.

Not that any day you've gotta go to a funeral is good, but it seems appropriate that we're all standing out here freezing our asses off waiting for the service to start. God knows, he spent enough time outside in weather like this; he probably feels right at home.

Ben told me last night, when we were laying our clothes out, that back before they came up with diggers that could shovel down through the permafrost, anyone who died during the winter had to wait till spring to get buried. Thought at first he was pulling my leg.

"What'd they do? Stick the body in the woodshed?"

"If they were lucky enough to have one, yes." He was holding his dress uniform up to the light, checking to make sure everything was in place and securely sewn on. "The winter I was nine, a friend of my grandfather died rather unexpectedly. He was head of one of those sprawling families the territories seemed to breed back then; there were at least two of his children, their spouses, and assorted grandchildren and great-grandchildren living with him. Something like 13 people in a three room cabin." I winced at the thought. "My grandfather ended up agreeing to keep the body in his workshop till the thaw came. It rather bothered me at the time, even though the body was wrapped in a shroud and placed in the coffin. I was quite relieved when the snow finally melted enough to allow him a proper burial."

"I can see where you would be."

He re-hung the uniform and turned to me, eyes suspiciously shiny. "It's difficult to believe he's actually gone, Ray."

"Hey." I pulled him into a hug and let him lean against me, petting his hair. "He wasn't a young man anymore, Ben. You, of all people, should know that."

"Eighty-three." He answered softly, his voice choked. "A year older than my father would've been if he'd lived." He drew in a shaky breath. "It's just...he'd been there my entire life. I can't recall a time he wasn't there. You know, after my mother died...for the space of two or three years, I saw him more often than I saw my own dad." He drew back and looked at me, wiping his eyes and laughing slightly. "I used to wish he was my father, sometimes."

I don't say anything, just pull him over to the bed so we can sit down. And we stay there a long time, me holding him close while he, once again, cries tears for yet another piece of his past gone missing.

"Ray."

I look up and realize the minister's arrived. "Get up there." I say, shooing him forward. He hangs back a minute, then takes hold of my hand, squeezes it, and quickly makes his way to the front to join the rest of the Honor Guard.

Cold but clear, and don't they look fine in those bright red "shoot me" coats? I shove my hands into the pockets of my parka, not really listening to what the reverend's saying.

When I told mom about Ben and me, how I was coming up here to live with him, she just looked at me and shook her head. "Just remember, Stanley; love isn't all bluebirds and happiness."

She was right. Love is watching the person you love grow older and get grayer. Love is learning when to compromise, and when not to. Love, like life, changes and grows. It pretty much has to, I figure.

"I feel like a curtain's come down," he told me earlier in the day at the funeral dinner, as we sat picking at our food. "My father, Gerard, Muldoon, and now Buck. It's the end of an era, Ray."

"And there are still Mounties," I said, pointing my fork at his chest. "There are freakishly clean-cut young men and women graduating from the Academy, dedicated to upholding truth, justice and the Canadian right to say 'Thank you kindly.'" He smiled. "You know that better than anyone, Benton. You're one of the ones teaching them."

The minister's finished, and now the Honor Guard steps forward. And for just a minute it hits me that Buck Frobisher's really gone. No more Gorgonzola, moose hocks and howling at the moon. As much as they loved him, I bet his family's gonna breath a little easier at night.

And I remember that morning he saw Ben and me off on our adventure long ago; how he stood up so straight and tall and saluted us, and how Ben saluted him back. We never found Franklin or his hand, but we did find something just important. Each other.

And even though I'm not a Mountie and don't have on a bright-red coat, I find myself saluting with the rest of them as they lower the coffin into the ground.

An era has ended. But our life goes on.

FIN

End Finale by MR: psykaos42@yahoo.com

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