The next story was written for an Anne-Christmas-prompt. I wasn't in a particularly happy place when I wrote this and consequently the story isn't happy either, but it is still one of my favourites. Hope you like it as well.

What remains

It was just a grey veil.

A grey veil, so fickle and slight it should have been easy to brush it aside with one movement of a hand. But it was not possible. He had tried countless of times. And failed.

Because this veil, separating him from the happy group of people in whose midst he moved, yet unseen and unnoticed, this veil was not some simple piece of cloth one could touch or move.

It was the veil separating the dead from the living, from the very first day and into eternity, unyielding, undefeatable.

It had been a grenade for him. A grenade that had mangled him, then pain, pain, voices, pain again and finally sacred silence.

He had taken his time in realising he was dead. Realising why people around him suddenly seemed grey and shadowy, why they never looked at him when he talked and why he could not touch anyone, much as he tried.

That had been three years ago and it was his fourth Christmas behind the veil, but the first time he had dared to come back to the home of his childhood. The first Christmas in Ingleside since his death.

They had set his place at the table and he felt a strange sensation whenever he looked at it. Not so much joy as plain relief. Relief that they had not forgotten him. Yet.

Right now he was watching the people around him, so close and yet unreachable. Watched them laugh and talk and eat and sing and wished desperately to be back among them.

He saw his parents and as usual he was shocked for a moment at how old they had gotten. His father's hair was now more grey than brown and his mother who had always seemed to him like a young girl, much more than some of the truly young girls in the Glen, appeared strangely grown-up.

They had told them he had died a quick and painless death, he knew, shot by a single bullet and dead in an instant. Sometimes he wondered whether they had ever guessed the truth – that death had come to him only after days of suffering and that it had been a relief.

Jem certainly knew that the official cause of death was usually a blatant lie, told to appease the families, but even his somewhat brash and sometimes tactless brother had been taught by the war when to keep his silence and keep his silence he did. Kept silent about so many things as all soldiers did and as he too would have done, had he lived.

Currently though Jem was talking, telling some amusing tale, the centre of attention as he often was, sitting next to Faith, a little too close for propriety, and lightly touching her arm with his hand whenever he had the chance.

Something about the picture they presented tore open an old wound of his, the one he had deemed to have healed long ago, and showed once again that feelings survive even death. Certain feelings at least.

He laughed softly and knew that, had they been able to hear him, they would have been surprised at the bitterness in his laugh. War had changed him. Perhaps death had.

Because didn't the hero always get the princess in the end? Had not Jem always been the hero among them? And Faith the only one that could possibly be called a princess?

The times of Knights in Shining Armour were, of course, long gone, but instead she got a doctor and a soldier with half a Modell T and nowadays that was the best there could be.

He averted he gaze, glanced over at his oldest younger sister, pretending to listen to Jem, but to those who knew Nan it was evident in her gaze that she was lost in thoughts, undoubtedly thinking about Jerry, who stood on the other side of the room, talking to Carl.

Neither seemed interested in hearing Jem's tale – perhaps they were already familiar with it, who knew? –, but he could hardly hold it against them.

Jem had by now reached the punch line and as he turned back around he could see his youngest sister Rilla using the general laughter as a cover to steal away. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Ken taking a step towards her, but aborting the attempt once he realised to whom exactly Rilla wanted to talk to.

The young woman sat in a corner, partly hidden, her dark head bowed and was older than she had been before the war, but weren't they all?

He watched Rilla extend a hand and gently touch her shoulder, making a remark too quiet for him to hear and the pain that suddenly flashed through him made a mockery of the slight ache he had felt at the sight of Faith.

She looked lost without being helpless, sad but not desperate. Because the world had hurt Una Meredith far too often and she had learned how to be strong, perhaps stronger than anyone else.

Still it hurt.

"It is time." He did not need to turn around to know it was Aunt Marilla who had spoken.

"She is right," affirmed his grandfather John, "you have been down here for far too long."

He did not move.

"It has been over three years," reminded his grandmother Bertha, who he had only got to know in death, "you have to let got. There is no going back for us, we can only go on. And if you do not do that your feelings will consume you before long."

Slowly he turned around, reluctance clearly evident in the grey eyes his mother had loved so much. Still loved.

"They will be alright," Uncle Matthew, as quiet in death as he had been in life and his preferred companion nonetheless, "all of them."

Then the small red-headed girl, who could not possibly have been more aptly named, stepped forward and took his hand, tugging lightly.

He did not fight it anymore, but let them take him away.

The people around the Christmas tree grew more shadowy still, the veil fluttered and suddenly the thought was no longer a frightening one, but strangely comforting.

It was just a grey veil.