Karma

by Shadowy Star

April 2013

Disclaimer: I don't own the Coldfire trilogy. It belongs to C.S. Friedman. I do own this story and all plotlines in it. Characters not appearing or being mentioned in the original trilogy are likewise mine. Do not archive or translate or otherwise use the story without permission.

Summary: They always meet again.

A/N: Sort of reincarnation fic. Rated M for mentions of self-harm and suicide. Planned as prequel to 'History' but developed its own life, so it isn't. And finally: New Year resolutions done!

Damien and Gerald always meet again. They may wear different names and faces but they always recognize each other, deep down where the soul dwells.

They meet two more times in their first life, and at their last meeting both are old and worn and tired, and Damien has long ago stopped wondering how he'd managed to live to be one hundred and six. They fall asleep holding each other and never wake again, and the laundry girl finds two old men on the couch, fully clothed, arms around each other, fingers entwined, the younger one's head resting gently against the older one's collarbone. They look peaceful, serene as if it's enough to hold and be held like this. They look like they might wake up anytime now but they don't. They don't, and the girl leaves the hotel room as quietly as she came. She senses they need to be together for a little longer before the inevitable things to come part them forever.

In their next life they meet only once, briefly, as kindergarten children playing in a park on a warm summer day. Their parents watch them and talk for a while, and those two hours are spent smiling and laughing and running around and holding each other's hands. Those two hours are all they're going to get in this life and they cry theirs eyes out as their parents leave in opposite directions, taking their respective child with them. The memory of each other's faces never fades with the passing of years. They grow up eventually and go on with their lives but never smile and laugh like that again, having known completeness this once. They fall in and out of love with other people. Sometimes, they even manage relationships that last longer than a few weeks. Damien finishes med school and is soon known for his innovative ideas and thinking outside the box. He dies at the age of thirty-two, trying to figure out a cure for the epidemic pulmonary decease that swept over from the South. He never knows he has, in fact, found a cure and is posthumously celebrated as the founder of modern microbiology. He never knows his serum safes a lot of lives, including the life of a young police officer who gets killed eleven years later in a shooting.

They meet again when Damien sells Gerald one of his prized horses. They go and talk and have a drink. Their conversation touches everything from theology to the New Adepts, people who can Work the tidal fae and what that means for a society that's rooted so firmly in science since the Second Sacrifice. Neither of them has got even a shred of Working talent and somehow, they're both thankful for that. It seems familiar, talking to each other that way and they quickly become best friends. They are both married and love their respective wives, and said wives would sometimes complain about the amount of time they spend together. There's something undefinable between them – it's in the way they smile at each other, in the small, absentmindedly exchanged touches, in the way their eyes light up upon seeing each other. They never become lovers but the emotional connection they share is deeper than most lovers can pride themselves of. They become Godfathers to each other's children, and spoil them rotten, both being among the fifty richest people on the planet. But there are things money can't buy and Gerald is the one to live through it as Damien is killed in a accident. When one year later an explosion takes out the largest part of his research facility and as he lies buried under the wreckage, the last thing Gerald feels before his life blood runs out of him is profound relief.

They meet again in middle school and progress to high school with all the high school drama and high school sweet-hearts, awkward first dates and first kisses and not-at-all-awkward first time sex, and they wonder, only to themselves, how it's possible to have someone this perfect in their lives. They marry right after finishing university – Damien with a degree in psychology, Gerald with one in engineering. They have their fights –big and little ones– but mostly, they live a quiet, happy life. Neither is renowned for anything and they like it that way. What they have is more than enough. Sometimes, they feel they used to be driven with something, and the lack of it is the best thing that could have happened to them. Sometimes, they can almost grasp the snippets of their previous lives. In this life, Gerald dies first, at the age of forty-one, of a hereditary neuromuscular decease even the Adept-medics can't Heal. And though Damien has known what was to come for a long time, he isn't ready –could never be– for the all-encompassing feeling of loss as his world slowly collapses around him when Gerald's chest rises once, twice and then stills, never to draw a breath again. He wraps up their businesses, sells their property and donates the money to a foundation for terminally ill children, and then he goes to the cemetery where the empty shell of his love lies and with a skill he's never known he possesses, he opens the arteries on his wrists.

They meet again at the World's Championship in basketball where Gerald, an aspiring sports journalist, is tasked with interviewing the captain of the most successful Northern team since probably forever. The interview goes quite well and so does their one-night stand. When they meet next ten or something years later, Damien is very successfully training his team and Gerald is a famous sports commentator. They waste no time, busily reacquainting themselves with each other's bodies, and afterwards talk about moving in together after this year's competition and can't know, in this perfect moment, that it won't last. Next morning on his way back from the bakery, Damien gets stabbed by the trainer of the opposing team and dies right there, one of his hands clutching his side, the other still carefully holding the miraculously intact bag of croissants. It is this picture, the brown innocent paper bag with one croissant sticking out that will haunt Gerald for the next week and his voice breaks many times through the finale when Damien's team, as a tribute to their trainer, basically sweeps the floor with their opponents. He retires from public life and tries to go on, tries to cope somehow but fails painfully. He starts to remember other times when he's lost Damien, other lives. First dimly, then more and more clearly, pieces click into place. Only one life stays forgotten – their first one where it all began. Memories overlap, faces overlap until he isn't sure what is real and what is not. Until one spring day he chooses to go for a walk and sees a little boy at a candy store. And maybe he's finally crossed the line to insanity but as he stares at the child something in the large blue eyes shifts to a beginning recognition. Gerald dies the same night peacefully in his sleep.

They again meet as teenagers one decade and something later and Damien's the same boy from the candy store, only seventeen and gorgeous and a fourteen-years-old Gerald nurses a crush the size of the Dividers on his handsome neighbor. Gerald's family has just moved in wall-to-wall and window-to-window to Damien's. When a few days later Damien leaves for university as he's decided to study architecture, Gerald's heart breaks completely. His parents write it off as the usual teenage melodrama but he withdraws deeper and deeper into himself, and if his forearms are covered by sleeves at all times so what of it? Night after night when the pain of Damien just not being here gets unbearable, his hand wanders under the bed where his box is hidden. When Damien returns four years later Gerald avoids him at all costs until one night when concerned by what he's heard through the wall, Damien climbs out of his window and into Gerald's room and finds him, silently weeping, blood all around. They move in together the next year. Over the following years the scars mostly fade away, only a few remaining bright silver lines against his now tanned skin. As life continues, memories of previous lives kick in for both of them. It begins one autumn evening –autumn is a relative term here on the Southern continent– when they sit in their favorite couch and Damien remembers the candy store he has visited with his aunt on his third birthday. He remembers the shaken old man who was looking at him in shock and relief. This sparks a supernova of an explosion and they remember, remember it all, losing each other, finding each other, having each other. Clutching at each other, they don't even register the high-pitched alarm of the seismometer going off. The quake is the strongest in decades and swallows up their town completely.

They meet again at the altar, Gerald being the priest to marry Damien, young and perfect and beautiful, to another young man – apparently his boyfriend since college. In those endless moments it takes to recite the three lines of blessing he realizes what the other man was, is and will always be to him, and in Damien's eyes he sees the same recognition. But it's too late, has always been too late, and the words are said, and if he knows anything about this so very familiar man, Gerald knows that Damien will never break his promise and he loves him even more for that. So he turns away and busies himself with putting away his supplies until the happy couple and their families has left his church. He carefully closes and bolts the door, writes his resignation with a steady hand, proud a little that his handwriting stays clear even now when his world is breaking apart. He writes two letters. One contains his instructions and is addressed to his two aides. The other one holds two single lines and is addressed to the man whose marriage he's blessed an hour ago, and now, now his hand trembles as he writes – three words are an eternal confession, and two are a plea for forgiveness. It doesn't tremble later when he places the letters on the table where they would be easy to find or when he locks the side door behind him. He never looks back. The Serpent is still untamed, even with eight high bridges –each a testament to human genius– arching over it to the other side. The next bridge is too far away, and he'd rather not linger. But there's a place he knows, a cliff dangerously overlooking the canyon. He walks up to the very end of it and lets himself fall.

They meet again in a private gallery where Gerald's stupid friends has managed to drag him off to. Tonight, there's a gala that ends the two-week exhibition of a famous artist. Gerald circles the gallery once, twice, paying the attention it deserves to each painting. There's a reason the artist is famous. His talent is in each line of pencil or charcoal, in each stroke of brush. Most of the scenes depict everyday people, living everyday lives. And yet, each conveys something, an emotion visible or hidden that caught the artist's trained eye. There's a mother placing a kiss to her child's scrapped knee. There's a veterinary taking care of an injured pet. There's an old woman showing her granddaughter how to knit. There's a small boy tugging at his twin sister's long braid. Some paintings are eerily familiar. Two children playing in a park, laughing in the sun. The same children again, both crying and stretching their arms to each other while being carried away by their mothers. Two friends lost in conversation and each other's presence, their drinks forgotten on the table between them. High school sweet-hearts, kissing. A young reporter interviewing a basketball player. A young man with bleeding lines on his forearms. A priest marrying a couple. When he turns away from that last, he finds himself face to face with the artist and recognition strikes again. Damien's rooms are in the back of the building and when the last guest has left, Gerald ends up staying. For the night, and the morning after and the second night and the second morning after. He just never leaves again. Together, they remember. Together, they heal. Two years later they adopt a child and one year later, the girl's younger brother whom they've finally managed to find, joins them. Life is good. They see their great grandchildren being born and die of old age, and within a week from each other.

They meet again, and again, and again. They meet as two professors at a university, and as patient and physiotherapist. They meet as ship captain and passenger, as two students in a bar, as cafe owner and customer, as soldier and circus artist. They meet at train stations, at delis, at museums, at libraries, at bakeries, at congresses, at parties. They meet in strangest places and in most ordinary ones. They meet as children, as teenagers, as old men and everything in between. They meet once or twice, three, or five, or ten times. Sometimes meeting once lasts a lifetime. Sometimes it doesn't.

They always meet again.

FIN

Extra Notes:

1) Yes, I do realize the concept of karma includes far more than that.

2) Some day I want to further explore all or at least some of those plotlines. I even started to write the artist plot but can't decide whether I want an AU or an actual reincarnation fic.