823 BC
Ancient Egypt
It is one of the few times she is dressed as a woman should be dressed, according to this place's decorum. The (what will grow to become) Egyptian sun and heat is intense, so she wears the linen dress that is expected for her; the wig settles loose and choppy, brushing at her shoulders. Back, back when she had first been gifted with (cursed with) (taken) immortality, she'd hated trends when she'd first wormed her way into what had been the wealthy class, but now she thinks it a bit jaunty. Her name now is Meketaten, protected by Aten, one of the silly little gods they have now. She doesn't really need to be protected by anyone; her curse (it varies on the name, the lifetime she's in, and now she thinks it a curse) serves well enough. She thinks she stole this name from a princess that died young, but she had heard it and liked the sound, liked the way it touched her ears, so she took it for her own.
The man she sees is wearing a kilt, and she simply sees him across the river. She lounges easily by the riverside (where does she have to go?) and he hesitates, before walking long enough to be lost from sight. A pity; he had suited the kilt well, and it has been a while since she's seen another person—oh.
Oh, perhaps that was why he had looked concerned.
She examines her feet; bare, and blistered, and cut from wandering the desert for so long. Her once nice linen dress was beaten from the sand, and she does not exactly look like she's been keeping up with how a woman should look.
(She wonders how long she was out walking, later discovers a bit of a local legend flared up of a ghostly woman walking the desert eternally.)
(A few centuries later, she'll don a similar getup and wander and give the locals a bit of a fright.)
Now, though, she entertains herself by drawing shapes into the sand with her finger, writing in all the languages she knows, before she squints into the distance and sees a shadow, and smooths out the other writings before going back to the hieroglyphs of now.
It's the same man, who mutely holds out a jug.
Meketaten lifts her eyebrows at him, and he holds it out towards her more aggresively, and she takes it, sipping down the lukewarm beer with a sigh; she hadn't quite realized how dry her throat was until she'd started quenching her thirst.
"What's your name?" She asks, wiping her mouth with the hem of her skirt, unconcernedly baring her legs to this stranger. The modesty she'd been raised with had long since taken flight, replaced by other things.
He stares at her, before he says gruffly, "Fadil."
He who brings life, she thinks, but she isn't entirely sure. Either way, she laughs without thinking. His brow crumples with confusion.
"Meketaten," she responds, and he nods, sitting in front of her stiffly. She smiles at him again, because his face doesn't seem entirely inclined to follow suit.
"Would you like to hear a story, Fadil?" she says, handing him his jug and watching him take a swig, a little excited. She's grown very good at telling stories, now. He shrugs, bare shoulders browned from the sun, and they pass the afternoon passing the jug until it's empty, Meketaten weaving stories that are true and false and a mixture until the sun is close to setting. He stands, then, and says at last, "You're very good at this."
"I've been told," she says, tilting her head. "I must say, Fadil, I lied earlier. My name isn't really Meketaten."
He nods, and looks at her expectantly. She smiles and makes no move to say anything or to stand.
"You shouldn't stay out here," he says. "There are dangerous things in the night."
Meketaten sighs, tilts her head back. "I'm sure. I'm planning on it, actually. Thank you for the beer, Fadil."
Fadil nods, dark hair falling into his eyes, and he wanders off. Meketaten watches him go, feeling the ache in her feet, figures she can spend a night watching the stars.
She watches the stars, knows the names they used to be called but knows that they'll probably change (like hers) and gets up as soon as the sun rises and starts walking again, wandering the desert.
She finds out that a few months after their meeting Fadil dies from a plague. She takes a jug of beer to a place similar to where she had told him stories and he had spoken very little and dumps it all into the river. She palms at the worn, stone knife she always carries, and kneels to carve the familiar pattern into a nearby stone, before she starts walking again.
76 AD
Rome, Italy
She is Marcellina now, but she dresses as a Marcellinus, hammer, and sneaks her way into the arena. She watches the mortals shout and stamp and drink while they watch people slaughter each other.
Gone are the days where she played at the mysterious immortal, occasionally as a god or goddess when the mood struck her (she is proudest of Megaera, vengeance, winged because she'd always liked birds and how easily they could fly away) and knows that mortals are good at dying. She also knows that mortals don't like thinking about their own deaths, and they never seem to see their own coming, even though it's the only thing they're guaranteed to do.
It's ironic, though. She isn't quite sure why she watches it so often, but she knows that the locals like to congregate here, talk here, laugh and commiserate here. She likes these little mayflies, laughs with them and drinks with them, even though they mostly like her because her hair is cut short and she doesn't go by her, or Marcellina, but him and Marcellinus.
They jeer when one dies, and Marcellinus watches with the rest as the next comes out.
Her jaw drops and she flashes back to Meketaten when the next one steps out.
He's wearing armor, so his previously bared chest is covered. He isn't wearing kohl, and he's not holding a jug. He's holding a sword, though, and his hair falls into his eyes the same.
It's Fadil. Or, at least, someone wearing Fadil's face, and she wonders if she'd heard about the wrong Fadil, if she's found someone else like her, and she feels a flutter of hope start to burn in her chest.
(the mayflies are fun, but they are just fun. they do not stay. they do not know what marcellina carries. they don't even know marcellina's actual name. or marcellinus' for that matter.)
He wields his sword rather clumsily, she thinks, oddly fond. He must not have picked it up since now. (she'd started learning combat early, very early, but she quashes the memory swiftly.)
She watches him parry with the previous champion with her heart in her throat, watches his uncertain grip on the sword and the way he stumbles around the arena. The men around her cackle and jeer but Marcellinus doesn't say anything, barely even dares to breathe.
She feels her breath leave her breathe like she's been punched when the sword sticks through his stomach, and feels the bile rise in her throat, even as she's scolding herself.
(she would have found them, wouldn't she? if there was someone like her.)
She even goes down and checks his body after everyone else in the arena has left, to their mayfly lives and their mayfly families and wives and husbands and jobs. She checks his pulse and whispers
"If you're like me, it's okay, do you remember me? I told you my name was Meketaten but that was a lie. Marcellinus is a lie too, really."
(a fluke. fadil and this nameless gladiator were flukes. perhaps her brain is being affected by age, and she was longing to see a friendly face.)
She leaves his body behind, and she leaves Rome behind, too. She only pauses at the gates of the coliseum to dig out her old knife, her most constant companion, and carves out that familiar set of symbols. After all, she'd told him, Marcellinus is a lie.
410 AD
Wessex, England
She stays away from Rome and she stays away from Egypt both for a long, long time. It's rather difficult to stay out of reach of the Romans, though, so she figures an isolated island would be a good enough place to lie low for a few centuries; she could hop from town to town, make sure no one got suspicious, and maybe go back to the mainland once a couple centuries had passed, or whenever she got tired of it, really. She didn't much like cold weather; she thought of the old women griping about how the cold made their old bones ache and how she had nearly screamed with laughter when she heard it.
She decides on Morfydd, maiden, as soon as she settles into her new modest little cabin and starts to build a fire. Her body may not age but her bones feel the cold like anyone else. She's built up enough wealth over the years that she can live comfortably enough without submitting herself to the whole entire lord-serf system, for which she's grateful, because farmwork takes her back to the oldest days and she despises thinking of them. Instead, she sets herself up as more of a seamstress and a tailor, and manages to make her way from town to town.
It's been a number of years and a number of towns before she ventures out into a tavern, under the guise of just socializing, although she's a woman, when her jaw drops.
It's him. She can't blame her old mind or the distance between them, it's definitely him, she recognizes that flop of dark hair and those near-black eyes, feels her mouth forming a perfect O as they meet eyes—
"Firmin!" A man roars, throwing his arm about his shoulders, and Morfydd-Marcellina-Meketaten abruptly averts her eyes, wondering if she should stay or go or—
That decision is made for her. She feels the presence and turns, smiling in the face of his oddly familiar stoic face. It's been half a millenium but she remembers that face and how it seems to smile with just the eyes.
"Drink?" He asks, and she just nods. He gets them bitter beer, and she feels a lump rise in her throat that she tries to wash down with the beer.
It doesn't take them very long before they're stumbling back to her cabin, him scrabbling aggressively at her dress which she just hoists up over her head and throws off, irritated with it, and feels vastly empowered by the way he stares at her.
Morfydd, despite the name of choice, is no stranger to sex. Greece had thrived with it, and it was an entertaining, pleasuring way to spend an evening. She will blame the beer come morning, and the fact that she was seeing a familiar face.
(and, okay, it had been a while. that was a part of it too.)
They are both drunk, and she is so very lonely, so perhaps she thinks it's better than it is. But he doesn't question it when she gasps the wrong name of his interchanged with the one he's using now (firmin, firm, she's more entertained by this than she should be) and the sensation of a warm body above and beside and below her own fills a hole in her chest that she ignores, and she runs a hand down his chest, perhaps a little more thinned by hunger than the kilted man she remembers, but it is a very nice chest all the same.
When it comes morning, he leaves a small amount of money, and she feels confused until she realizes the dress she was wearing was rather more lowcut than she thought and shorter because she'd torn it and hemmed it and oh.
(does it say something about her that the only way she can seduce someone lately is because he thought she was a prostitute, or does it say something about her body that he assumed that the dress she was wearing and the fact that she was wearing made him think she was a prostitute?)
She thinks it's the fact that she hasn't had much sex lately that she goes to the same bar in the same dress, and stares directly at him when he enters.
Firmin ends up leaving with her at the end of the evening, and he paws off her dress and they fall into her bed together.
She keeps telling herself she should stop, but she doesn't. Months pass and they meet at least once a week and she never corrects him, but they talk on occasion after or before and Morfydd watches him sleep.
He clears his throat, one evening in the dead of winter, when they're huddled together under furs while a fire roars.
"People are saying things about you," he says, voice hushed, "in the village."
"Let them talk," Morfydd murmurs, drowsy, tracing an arm down his bicep and back up to his shoulder, eyes tracing down his body.
He smiles at her, in the way she's learned to see, with his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and he shifts slightly closer, hand drifting to settle over her hip, eyes dark. "They disapprove."
"I can live through that." (i can live through anything.)
He sighs, a little bit, and spreads his fingers wide. "There's talk of me wedding a girl from a nearby village, Morfydd. For alliance purposes."
She closes her eyes, a little. "So I can't count on your business, then."
"Morfydd, you're a seamstress," he says, voice warm with amusement and she blinks at him in surprise.
He laughs. "Did you think me so dim that I wouldn't figure it out?"
"How long did it take you?" She asks curiously, shifting closer.
"The first time I went straight here instead of the tavern and here," he says, and Morfydd suppresses a smile.
(a good month and a half, then.)
"Why'd you keep paying me, then?" She asks curiously.
"You just buy beer for me the next week with it," he points out, and she's the one laughing, this time.
"So," she says, once it dies down. "Wedding."
He sighs, and pulls her closer, by the hip. "A last time doesn't do any harm, does it?"
"No," she breathes out. "'Course not."
It's slow, and sweet, and warm, and he falls asleep abruptly and leaves in the morning, and Morfydd moves villages after he moves to his new wife's village. Much later, she hears he dies after being bucked off a horse. He leaves behind children. She comes to the burial and sees his wife weep and turns away, silent, and goes to get blindingly drunk.
Later, she comes back, and uses the old knife that should probably be dust (she should be dust) and carves the symbols at the base of his grave marker before covering it up with dirt.
1054
Atapureca, Spain
She is Matías, gift of God, now, she's been skipping around Spain for a good few decades, swapping between man and woman. She is fighting one of the countless battles, but she actually knows who she's fighting for, now, met him when dressed in the finery for a woman (for this era, for this location) at a ball when he was a boy. Ferdinand, she thinks, of Castile, and he had been a kind enough boy, but she mostly is in battle because it is what she knows best. Battle had practically birthed her.
It really shouldn't be a shock when she sees him in the dead of battle, but she starts moving towards him, anyways, heedless of the swords swinging around her and the danger that she would surely fear, if she was mortal.
She puts up her shield in enough time to block it from entering his back (she'd seen him die once, and that was enough for a lifetime, or eternity, whichever she'd have these days) and he nods at her, shouts and asks for her name. She responds in the purposefully roughened voice she takes as a man, and he shouts back "Fausto!" before lunging in to take out someone who'd been aiming at her back.
Lucky, she recalls, and they fight back-to-back, and it feels bizarrely right, like he'd done it before, or he could remember spending time with her before, except she thinks this is the first time he's actually ever met her as a man, and isn't that funny, and then she has to focus because someone's trying to gauge her eye out. He's much better at handling a sword this time around, deo gratias, as Marcellinus would have said, and she plunges her sword into the neck of someone trying to fight them.
(they're blazing, they're aflame, no one can touch them, they're as well-fitted here as they were in bed five hundred years ago, and she wonders if because her soul has been drudged up to live forever if her soulmate would have kept reappearing but that thought has to be quashed immediately)
Once the battle ends, he roars and cups her neck and she thinks about if she weren't a man in this moment and she thinks of Firmin and Fadil and that nameless gladiator but Fausto roars and they join the rest of the soldiers in the camaraderie of victory.
She never sees Fausto again, after that night. She sighs, but plants the sword carved with the set of symbols she's been leaving around the world in the battleground, and sets off for the newest Spanish town.
1430
Compiègne, France
Bizarrely, it's one of Marchelle's, warlike, first really personal interactions with someone whose fame lasts well past their time. She'd met her fair share of royals, and she'd talked to philosophers, but nobody strikes her quite as deeply as Joan does.
Joan's rather religious, of course, but Marchelle's always in favor of girls taking on the patriarchy however they like, so she dresses as Marc and joins her cause. She managed to withdraw but Joan is captured, and she attends Joan's trial as discreetly as she can. She doesn't stay to watch her be burned, but she still lingers in France after Joan's death. She'd kept her hair long, so she doesn't have to weather the same heresy charges when she dons a dress, and manages to find her way to the Seine.
She shouldn't even be surprised when she sees him lingering at the riverside, trying to sell her wares, but she feels like she can't breathe (hanging was never fun, even and especially when you survived through it) when she sees him.
She forces herself to go up and asks for his name.
"Florent." Flowers. She allows herself a smile, and responds, "Marchelle. How much?"
He sells it to her, and Marchelle digs around for some money, before she passes on the one she's carved a symbol into out of boredom, the old knife tied close on her thigh. She pressed it into his hands, and takes the food, and doesn't leave, instead sitting near the river as she eats. She ponders that the times between meeting him keep getting shorter, wonders if that means anything, dismisses it. She knows destiny doesn't exist, and she disagrees with Joan's philosophy, and people still think that Megaera has some sort of meaning. She's been involved in enough of human history.
But after Florent's sold all his wares, he hesitates, before he walks over to her, and she stares at him curiously. Fadil, the gladiator, Firmin, Fausto, Florent. If there was fate, it had a sense of humor, and apparently an affinity for alliteration. (ha ha!)
"What is it that you do, Florent?"
He stares at her. "Was it not obvious?"
She laughs. She's missed the sarcasm, she'd missed out on it with Fausto. "Sometimes people have... hobbies."
He shrugs. "I sell my wares," he says. "I go to the tavern, occasionally. I help out around home. I sell more wares. What is it that you do?"
Marchelle smiles, answer ready on her tongue, before she realizes she doesn't have one. She leans back with a thump against her back. "Huh."
"What?"
"I don't... I don't think I do anything," she tells him, a little stunned. "I just sort of... travel around. Should I be doing something, Florent?"
"How should I know?" He says, and the French he's speaking is what jars her out of him being familiar. This isn't Firmin, or Fausto, or even Fadil.
She sighs, runs a hand down her face. "Um. I mean, I guess I'm a... professional lady."
"A professional lady."
"I'm just a lady," she says. "You know."
He stares at her a bit more, then she just says, "So, how about that tavern you mentioned? It's on me, I probably make more as a professional lady than you do as a... wares-man."
They do go to the tavern, but she doesn't have sex with him. She's a bit too proud of that. It's been well over a millenium, after all, she should be over it. She does kiss him on the cheek, though, thanks him for a fun night out, and sets out to figure out if she actually ever does anything.
1649
Seville, Spain
Mina, starling, hates seeing sick people, and above all, she hates being sick. So when she catches another bout of the plague and is herded into somewhere she can be cared for, she is understandably grouchy. This inevitably means she's either going to be buried or burned, and that means she won't be able to go out into public for months, but the worst part of it is when she turns her head to the left one day and sees a familiar face and feels like her heart is about to stop, but if that could happen, she wouldn't be in this situation.
"Hello," he coughs out. "M'Farid. Who're you?"
(farid means unique, she looks up later, and laughs herself until she's almost sick.)
"Mina," she rasps out. "I don't wanna see you die."
"That's a negative attitude to take."
She laughs until she's hacking with coughs. She figures, selfishly, that she can fake dying before seeing him die, but she knows that would be selfish. All these mortals thought they knew the way to ease death, but sometimes, the only thing they needed was a friend.
She feels the sickness and hates it, wants to tell them that she's seen all their attempted, ugly methods of healing before and none of them work, especially not on her, but the caretakers seem incredibly overworked and she figures she can grit her teeth and bare it, but when it comes to Farid, she can't stand to watch.
(she's told, when she's a bit more lucid, that she actually and literally fights a caretaker trying to "balance his temperaments" because she has seen this running around europe for centuries and it never works it just hurts their patients more)
Farid tells stupid jokes to make her laugh through the pain, and she repays him in kind. His jokes are rather crude, crude in a way that nobody spoke to a lady but always joked when she was a soldier, and she laughs her way into coughing anytime they get into it. He's a bit shocked when she comes up with a snappy retort, but they soon end up passing the time as his health worsens and deteriorates by trying to make each other laugh.
They sweat, and bleed, and Mira watches as his hands and feet go black and hers respond in kind. She doesn't start thinking about how she's going to avoid being buried or burned like she usually would, because when she's dead he will be too, and she doesn't want to consider that when he's right there, laughing and bright.
She can tell it's his last day when she wakes up—he looks more like the corpses that have been carried out rather than the way he did when she first was brought in, and she licks her lips, before she asks the ceiling, "Would you like to hear a story, Farid?" and feels the sand and the blisters on her feet and the taste of lukewarm beer as he murmurs back an affirmative. She tells him stories that she shouldn't have been alive to see, and he listens to her rapturously, eyes traveling over her face as they lay on their sides, more distance between them than Firmin and Morfydd, once upon a time.
"I think," Farid begins, "if we'd met any other time—"
"Please don't finish that sentence," she whispers, watches his too-pale face gleaming with sweat, hair all pushed back, dark eyes incongrously bright. "Please don't."
(because they've met plenty of times. it's not her fault that he's born with a new memory and a new name but keeps the same battered body each time. farid nods, and whispers, "all right. okay.")
They stare at each other in silence, and she reaches out, tangles her fingers in his, says, "I'm right here."
He nods, takes in a shaky breath. "I don't think I'm going to make it longer than you."
"That's okay," she whispers back. "I'll see you again."
He probably thinks she means heaven, or the afterlife, but she knows better than that now.
She's telling him the story of how she met Fadil when his breathing slows and stops and his grip loosens. Mira feels her eyes heat up, and she lets out a choking gasp, reaching forwards and grabbing his shoulder. She wants to shake him back awake, take it all back, make him last longer than her so she can at least pretend he made it longer than her until she sees the next one.
Seeing him die up close was so much worse than watching a sword go through him in an arena. Mira blindly fumbles, grabs that old knife and a nearby rock and slips it into his clothes, stumbles forwards until she's sitting at his bedside, stroking back his hair with shaking fingers.
She thinks bitterly of all of them—of Fadil-gladiator-Firmin-Fausto-Florent-now-Farid, the memories she's shared with all of them, the way they crumble away to dust only to pop back up and give her hope again even though she should know—
She thinks of Fadil's attentive face, back when she was still reveling in the newness of immortality, freshly absolving herself from her beginnings and ready to face a world without anyway of escaping it, the way he'd brought beer to a girl out of concern.
She thinks of the gladiator, of that bizarre flutter of hope that had popped up in her chest when she'd seen him again, the maybe I'm not alone—that had died so abruptly, at the same time he'd gotten a sword through the stomach.
She thinks of Firmin, of long lovely nights, of bitter beer and wine and warm furs and fire, thinks of opportunity and wonders if she'd managed to present a dowry, if she would have wed him instead, thinks of the gravemarker and the little dark-haired children he'd left behind.
She thinks of Fausto, the way they'd made it to glory together, one of the best, blazing pieces of victory that had settled deep inside her, the way he'd actually made her care about one of the wars she was fighting rather than fighting just for the sake of it.
She thinks of Florent, of the food he'd sold, of the alcohol they'd drank together, the way he'd spoken about life and theology while Marchelle had listened intently, drinking him in because the alternative was to face the yawning void alone and he was the closest, most familiar thing she had other than a knife strapped to her thigh.
"Please," Mira whispers back, and her voice is shaking as she crouches, holding his head to her chest, and tightens her arms around him, rocking him back and forth. "Please."
She isn't entirely sure what she's asking.
(she doesn't even know who she's asking.)
1795
Pennsylvania, America
She is Madeleine, magnificent, and helping found America's actually really quite fun. Her signature's not on the Constitution or anything, but she was there to whisper in the right ears, help stage a comeback in the right battles.
(she tries to help the natives, too, but that goes much more poorly, when she watches in horror as they die from sicknesses blooming off her skin that she's survived millions of times. slavery, she knows, she has to bide her time. it's all awful, she knows, but—well. immortality has a lot of drawbacks.)
This time, he's the one who sees her first, because he taps her on the shoulder and she turns to see the familiar set of dark, near-black eyes staring into hers. They're in the midst of a festival, celebrating some new treaty or other, and it's small and just barely started.
She tries to say something, but he beats her to it, asks her to dance.
She opens her mouth, and "Why not?" tumbles out. He grins, takes her hand, leads her out to the midst of the field, and she catches the glint of his eyes by the firelight. Ah. He's had too much to drink. Firmin got a bit more handsy when he wasn't sober, too, and she has to stop her mind going down this road, because the last time she saw this face it had just died from the plague and she'd been buried alive a day later.
"I haven't seen you around," he says, and spins her before pulling her back, leading them to the lone fiddler playing a ditty nearby. "I'm Francis."
(frenchman, and she thinks of Florent, and again wonders if she actually does anything.)
"Madeleine," she says back, and follows along with his footsteps with some concentration. She isn't very good at formal dancing, no matter how many people try to teach her, and she's much better at informal dancing. "I'm new around here."
The last town, she'd nearly been burned for a witch, and she has to take a moment to curse things here. Puritans seem very superstitious, and, well, they had reason to be. Of her, at least. She'd heard of some nasty business up in Salem that she'd probably look into a bit later in the game.
He grins at her, and it's actually incredibly disarming, it's one of the only smiles-with-teeth he's ever given, and she savors it, staring at him, memorizing the sight.
"We never get newcomers," he says, voice bright, and she realizes with almost a start that he must have been born here, on American soil, and it gives her an oddly pleasant glow in her chest. She's never really been in the right place for a nation/empire's founding before. She hopes this one turns out all right.
"I'm a bit of a wanderer," she tells him, trying hard not to snort from the truth of it. Bit of a wanderer, right. There wasn't a country in the world she hadn't set foot on, hadn't left her mark on. Sure, she had her favorites, and she had a feeling America would be one of them, but she prided herself on venturing everywhere she could.
He looks at her, curiously, and asks, "Where have you been?"
"Oh, Francis, the stories I could tell you," she says, and almost starts laughing or crying right there, but instead he says "Tell me them, then."
He gets her a cup of something that settles warm in her belly when she drinks it, and she tells him a fairly recent story about France, and he sits with his head propped in his hands, staring at her with wide eyes.
"Did you see the Tower?"
Handsome, I helped bring the materials to build the tower, she doesn't say, but instead says, "It's beautiful," which is a true enough statement.
"I hope you see it someday," she adds on, in a near whisper, and he leans forwards and presses his lips against hers and she goes completely and utterly still.
She can tell that this is Francis' first kiss, or, at least, she's reliably sure that it is; his lips are hesitant and careful against hers, and he cups her face sweetly between his hands, and Madeleine remains completely and utterly still for the duration.
He pulls back, looking at her uncertainly, and she musters up a weak smile, before she leans forwards and presses a kiss against his forehead.
"I hope you see the world, Francis," she whispers to him, and then hikes up her skirts in her hands, running away.
Maybe, after so many years, she's become a coward.
She packs up the little cottage she'd bought and steals a horse to ride to a different town.
She can't watch him die again. Not when he's sweet, and innocent, and wants to see the world. Not when all she sees are the little mayflies dying.
1942
New York City, New York, United States
She is Molly, bitter, and she's traversed the country and come back again by the time they're in the height of World War II.
She'd considered going abroad to help on the war effort, but she's still wary of actually seeing the mayflies die, and she isn't sure if dressing up as a man would really help her get over there. Besides, a lot of women were helping the effort from home, so she gets a job in a factory helping manufacture airplane parts. It's been a while since she's associated with women, and it's actually really quite lovely to talk to them, to listen to their opinions on nylons and red lipstick and how to curl their hair to give it the most hold. The company wants to take a picture of all the women, and she ducks out of it just in time.
(she discovered around the time of photography's beginnings that any picture of her goes blurry and a bit distorted, and it reminds her of a vampire in a mirror, for some odd reason. can the picture not capture everything that she's lived? can it not capture all the mayflies she's captured in the flytrap that's made from what used to be her heart?)
She feels her heart jump up into her throat when she bumps into him on her way back from work. He's wearing the wide tie that's fashionable now, and he shifts his hold on his briefcase and huffs, and, well, at least he's less hopeful than Francis.
He keeps going, and she thinks that might be that, until she runs into him at the automat she goes to on Saturdays, and they have to sit next to each other at the bar seats because everywhere else is full of families.
He doesn't recognize her, and he's burying himself behind his newspaper. It unnerves her, a little bit. The past few versions of him had been eager to talk.
"I'm Molly," she offers, tentatively, when he folds up his newspaper, and he glances over at her.
"Frank Walker," he grunts. "Pass the salt, would ya?"
She passes it over, and watches as he sprinkles it on his potato.
And, for that Saturday, that's that. Until she comes back in the next Saturday, and he's sitting with his newspaper again. She sees him set aside the front page, and asks, "Can I borrow that?"
He looks at her carefully, the sides of his eyes, and nods once. Molly picks it up, and carefully peruses the front page, occasionally glancing across at him. He'd turned into a bit of a grouch, but hey, it was New York. Grumpiness was the norm, here.
They swap pages, and sit in silent companionship. It does a lot for Molly, to distance him from the others, because he's never been quite this... standoffish, before.
Kids these days, she thinks, without irony, then immediately had to take a second to chug down coffee and resolutely vow to never say that aloud.
The Saturday swappings of newspapers keeps going throughout the end of the year and into the next. Molly eventually learns to keep the salt next to him all the time, and he usually has her order in before she ever gets there, until one grim morning in February 1943 he's sitting there without a newspaper.
"Frank?" She says tentatively, hopping up onto the seat, and he rubs a hand down his five-o'clock shadow, which is new to him. Frank's usually a clean-shaven guy.
"I've been drafted, Molly."
It hits her like an arrow to the chest. (never fun to extract on her own.) Her mouth works for a few seconds, before she just reaches out and puts her hand over his, squeezing lightly. He grunts.
"I'm... I'm real sorry to hear that, Frank," she says at last. "When are you heading out?"
"Couple of weeks," he mutters, then looks at her, carefully, out of the sides of his eyelashes. "Figured we could ditch the newspapers today. Yeah?"
"Geez, you grump, never thought I'd draw you this far out of your shell," Molly teases, removing her hand from his with a very deliberate amount of force. "You're getting all sentimental on me."
He licks his lips. "I thought... uh, I thought, maybe... you seem like a swell dame, Molly, and..." he clears his throat, and Molly tries very hard not to laugh at him. "Would you want to, uh. Go dancing? Or something?"
Molly smiles at him, takes his hand again. "I think that'd be lovely, Frank."
He smiles at her, carefully, and it's like the first drop of a rain after a draught.
She wears a red dress and recruits the help of some of the girls who work in her factory to curl her hair and do her makeup, thinks in amusement of the old days when she'd cycled between liking and hating the finery of each era before settling on I do not care.
When she steps through the crowd and meets his eyes, she feels the same overwhelming wave of power that she'd felt when Firmin first laid eyes on her, then casts Firmin out of her mind. Frank, now. He was Frank, and she was Molly, and they would have a damn nice evening.
He buys her a drink, and they talk more at the bar than they've talked in months, and she teases him about that a little, throwing her head back in laughter.
It's odd how the whole dancing piece of this situation doesn't hit her until he holds out a hand. She swallows back thoughts of Francis, instead takes his hand, and cautions, "I'm not a great dancer."
"Then I get to laugh at you," he says back, and she laughs at that.
She struggles her way through as many dances as he wants, and he does laugh at her, lots, except in Frank-terms of lots, which means he maybe chuckles a little. By the time her feet are aching and his face is gleaming with sweat, he shyly offers to walk her to her apartment, and she accepts.
They stand practically in each other's arms on the subway, him hanging on to the rail overhead and her with her face tucked into his shoulder, his other arm wrapped around her waist, almost like they're still dancing. She swallows a lump in her throat, and turns her face into his neck.
Once they get back to her building, she hesitates, before she asks, "Do you, um. Do you want coffee?"
He looks at her, and then his eyes widen, comically.
"It could be just coffee," she says hastily, cursing herself.
He hesitates, shrugs a little. "Uh. If you'd, um, if you'd... like. That. I wouldn't... oppose?"
"Okay," she says. "Great. Uh, let's start off with coffee."
She leads him up the stairs, shakes out some coffee grounds, and he paces in the kitchen.
"Like, neither of us are opposing," she points out, "but it might be a bit of a leap, you know, going from sharing a newspaper to sharing a bed."
He nods, rubs at his neck, and says, "Do you want to meet up at the automat tomorrow?"
"Sure," she says, and their conversation is quiet as they talk. She mentions that she traveled, and she has to scramble for a story of when she had the time. She says something about a family trip for her father's work, isn't sure how well it goes over, but how else would she have traveled?
They do meet up at the automat again, and they have breakfast instead of lunch. He tells her about growing up in New York, and Molly props her head on her hand, watching him talk, soaking it in. They go for a walk in the park, then, and she talks more about traveling and presents some of her experiences as just stories.
"You should write a book," he tells her. "Did you like history in school?"
Molly laughs. "Yeah, sure. I've just... I've got a bit of an active imagination, I guess."
"You could say that again," he says in amusement. They end up going out to a bar that night, and he walks her back to her apartment again, and he turns on the radio she barely ever uses when he walks in.
"We didn't dance, today," he says, and she sighs loudly.
"You just love laughing at me, don't you?"
"How could you tell?" He says, and she kicks up a fuss but it's mostly for show. The dancing is more of a hold-and-sway than the dancing they'd done the night previous, and he hesitates.
"Um. Is that offer still... still up for grabs?"
She laughs into his shoulder, but she nods, and he undresses her, this time, reverent and careful, brushing his hands across her shoulders and breathing out "beautiful" and she feels that rush again. Her hands tremble when she undresses him, and his chest is full again, well-fed and toned with exercise, and he looks healthier. She's grateful for that.
They end up going to either his or her apartment at the end of each evening, until she's sitting with the covers wrapped around her while he shuffles around his room, slowly packing.
"I wish you didn't have to go," Molly whispers, and he lets out a sigh.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too." He hesitates, before he turns, and she sees the glint before she sees anything else. Her spine tenses.
"Frank, what are you—"
He shrugs. "I had my granny's old ring. I thought—well—" He holds out the ring, and Molly hesitates, before she carefully takes it and slides it on her left ring finger.
"You do realize, you've been talking to me for about two weeks, now, you big grouch."
He laughs. "Is that a yes?"
"Was that a proposal?" She says back, and he kisses her, deep and long, until they're reclining back in his bed again.
She goes with him when he gets driven off to his base, and he sends her letters. She wears the engagement ring on her finger, carefully, and sends him a stone carved with the symbols. The old knife has been worn down to practically a sliver over the years. He doesn't ask what they are, and Molly makes no offer to tell him.
She slips into a state of numbness when she opens the door to a uniformed officer on a Saturday morning.
Modern Day
She is crazy, that's what she is. She wears Frank's engagement ring on a gold chain around her neck and she tries to look forwards, but she can't help but stare obsessively at boys with dark hair and dark eyes and olive skin. But she passes the time easily enough—she's found a nice past time.
She's hopping from college town to college town.
It's rather ingenious, she thinks, if she sticks to the big ones; as long as she doesn't go into little classes, she blends in well enough with the average college population and gets to attend lectures for free.
Occasionally, if she likes one a lot, she'll enroll for a semester, and that's where she's going now.
She walks into a wall when she sees who's scowling at a syllabus in the lobby of her new dorm room.
She shakes herself, and manages to recover well enough without anyone seeing her. She took a deep breath in, and out, and then wandered over.
"Hey," she says, aiming for casual, and holds up her own syllabus. "Wanna compare classes?"
He surveys her through those cool eyes and then glances at her course list, before he shakes his head.
"Do you, uh, live in this building?"
"Third floor," he says at last, and she tries hard not to sigh. He's inherited Frank's standoffishness, she sees, and knows it'll probably take a good semester for him to start talking to her.
God, she hopes that he talks to her.
"Me too." She waves her syllabus. "See ya round, I guess."
"Sure," he says.
She finds out his name this time around, and it's basically the funniest thing she's ever heard.
They're at a floor meeting that serves to introduce everyone; her roommate Nudge sits next to her, and he says, "Fang."
She laughs. She actually laughs, out loud, and everyone's eyes swivel towards her.
"Uh," she says, voice edged with laugh, "there's no way your name is actually Fang."
He scowls at her. "Yeah, well, it's my name. What's yours, then?"
She feels her throat dry, and prepares to speak her true name for the first time in over two millenia.
"Maximum," she says. "Max, for short. So, you know, an actual name."
People laugh, and move on.
He scowls a bit.
Max is, essentially, about to get a degree she can do in her sleep (Classic History) but she's taking a vast variety of general education classes, so she gets to learn about astronomy and science and historical events from when she wasn't there, was in some other country doing some other thing. Books, too! She gets to read lots of books she hasn't read for a couple centuries.
She ends up having to transfer out of a class she was wrongly put into, though, straight into a math class with Fang, and she slides into the desk next to him. He scowls at her some more.
She shrugs, and says lightly, "Conflict with my geology course. It's been moved to next semester, I figured I should get this out of the way. What's your major, anyway?"
He scowls, before he mutters "Archaeology" and she blinks at him.
"Oh, hey, cool. Classics."
He blinks at her. "Seriously?"
"Mhm."
"Are you... like, in ROTC or anything?"
"Thought about it, but no," she admits, but the army would probably keep tabs on her if she joined it now. "Why?"
"You don't seem like the Classics sort."
"Lots of gen eds," she admits. "I might change it. We'll see how it goes." She fiddles with the necklace, and is about to ask about archaeology, but the teacher starts the course and they have to start taking notes.
They end up doing their math homework together, housed in one of the study rooms on Tuesday and Thursday evenings before their due dates on Wednesday and Friday mornings.
He stares at her, one early November study break, and asks, "What's the deal with that old ring?"
"Family heirloom," she says, the lie rolling easily off her tongue. "It was my grandma's."
She thinks about it a lot, the amount of descendants she could have had at this point.
"Her fiancé died in World War II." She adds on, stops before the pain can close up her throat.
"Oh," Fang says. "Uh. Sorry, I guess?"
"Yeah," Max says, and shrugs. "I mean, never met him. But she was really cut up about it." She pauses, before she asks, "Archaeology?"
"I dunno, I like the idea of knowing where things came from," Fang says. "Seeing all of it, you know. Figuring out what happened."
"I read this—well, it's really a conspiracy blog, but it has to do with archaeology," she admits.
Max loves the internet. It makes things a lot easier to find out, and learning's way easier, and she figures out a lot of answers to questions she'd had a few centuries ago. Also, well...
"They keep digging up all these things with the same symbols on it," she says. "Some theories say aliens, some say cult. But it's not a language that's known to anyone. Cool, right?"
(it had been a language crafted by two bored siblings to pass off messages between each other.)
He pauses, and leans forwards. "Show me?"
She pulls up the picture of the symbol carved into the arena that his gladiator self had died in. "There's a whole slideshow."
She's very flattered by all the conspiracy theories that pop up. Some of them make her laugh, some of them are bizarrely close to the truth, some of them are just outright insane. She's sure that if cameras were able to capture her, she'd have a number of followings there, too. But there's a couple of paintings from when she'd hung out in France during the whole plein air movement, all in the background, both the male disguise she wore and female dresses she'd worn.
Fang, meanwhile, is clicking through them, face alight with interest. I made that, she wants to say, but she doesn't, instead watches him investigate.
After he goes through it all, he shakes himself a little, and asks, "Are you going home for Thanksgiving?"
"I'm an orphan," she says, easily, and he blinks at her.
"Oh, God—Jesus, I didn't know—"
"Yeah, you didn't," Max says reassuringly. "Don't worry. Happened a long time ago. I don't really have any family, actually."
They're all dead, possibly being used for gasoline, definitely past worm food status. I don't have any descendants, I never had any children, can you imagine how depressing that would be?
He frowns at her. "So, what? Are you just going to stay here?"
She shrugs. "Might do an impromptu roadtrip, might just be lazy on the internet. We'll see how it goes."
He hesitates, says, "You could come to my family's, if you wanted."
She stares at him, mouth slightly ajar, before she snaps back into herself. "Uh, okay," she says, and clears her throat, straightening her math papers. "Sure. Um, when are you leaving on Friday?"
But she has Thanksgiving dinner with him and his mom, and it's... odd. She wants to say, I've seen copies of your son naked and actually was engaged to his mom, for some reason, and realizes it's the first time she's actually met any member of his family, other than seeing his children at his graveside, once. It's... nice, actually. It's good to know that he wasn't alone, even for a little while.
They go back to school closer than ever, and she is a little terrified of being his friend due to all the memories of him dying soon after meeting her. But she tries to shove that aside, tries to soak in the whole friendship thing while it lasts, and it's good.
She aims to have a class with him each semester, and they just get closer as the years go on. Nudge jokes that they have the same brain, and Max thinks if only you knew and doesn't try to explain anything to them. How would they even believe her?
However, when Fang excitedly brings around a flyer about his semester abroad their junior year, Max's heart basically stops, which, she needs to stop using this metaphor.
But it's a very familiar place that she's been careful not to set foot in.
"Germany," he says. "I know, you wouldn't think there's a lot of archaeological digs there, but apparently in this town there was this disaster and they think it predates the Egyptian empire—"
Max tries to hide how much her hands are shaking when she takes it, and yes, and he points it out.
"Max, look, your symbols!"
Indeed they are. Max hesitates, swallows, and clears her throat.
"Do you think Classics majors can come along?"
There was no way she was letting him go to her literal, actual hometown tomorrow, where this whole mess started, and since he'd gotten all involved into it—
Well. She wasn't letting him go alone, that's all.
"Are you okay?" Fang asks cautiously, when she didn't look up or speak. Max clears her throat, tries for a smile.
"No, yeah, it's just, uh—my dad's family's from Germany," she says, at last, and Fang looks at her seriously.
"You never bring up your family," he says, and she shrugs, scratches uncomfortably at her ear.
"Yeah, well. Long time ago. Lots of... lots of negative memories."
He looks at her, and Max just shakes her head, smoothing out the flyer and taking out her phone to make a few calls.
They touch down in Germany in August of their senior year and Max feels like she's about to both vomit and pass out when she sets foot on her homeland again.
Fang touches her shoulder in concern. "You okay?"
"Fine, yeah," Max says, adjusting the strap of her backpack. "Fine. When are we going to the dig again?"
"Tomorrow."
Max hesitates, looks at Fang. "If I come by your room around midnight, would you be available?"
He looks at her. "Uh... yeah. Course."
"Good," she says, and goes to start working on her German, considering it's been a couple millennia.
When Max pulls up to the hotel on a motorcycle, calls Fang to come outside, he stares at her.
"Is this a midnight adventure or a midnight crisis?" He says.
"Both," she says, hands tight on the handlebars. "Put on your helmet, we might be breaking some laws."
Fang pauses, but jams the helmet on his head and carefully laces his arms around her waist.
She drives as swiftly as she can without unseating Fang, or crashing into a wall, and barely parks before she steps off, taking off her helmet, and Fang followed cautiously, holding out his hands entreatingly.
"Max, I don't know what's going on—"
"That's the problem," Max begins, grabbing him by the hand, and starts tugging him along. He looks very nervous, and very scared, but Max can't stop, not when this might be her chance—
"Look," Max begins, shoving her free hand through her hair, "I've been trying to think—for years I've been wondering how to explain this—"
She finds the little chain link fence, and essentially rips off the lock with ease, opening it, and Fang hesitates before she pulls him through, shuts it behind him, and starts to pace, trying to figure out how to word it.
She stops, plants her hands on her hips, before she looks at him beesechingly.
"I don't know how to tell you this without sounding insane," Max begins, and heaves out a deep breath. "My name is Max, that much is true, I haven't lied to you about that. But—but I've gone by a lot of other names in the past, see? Meketaten, Marcellinus, Morfydd, Matías, Marchelle, Mina, Molly—all throughout history, I've been living, and not dying, and those stones say Ari and Max, okay?"
He blinks at her, looking incredibly unsettled, pale and bugeyed, and he licks his lips and says at last, "Max, if this is your idea of a prank, it's a really bad one."
"No, listen," she pleads, pressing her hands together, "because you've been there, too. I don't know how, but—but," she says, and scrambles for the old photograph; a red blur and a man in a suit, dancing in the early winter of 1943, and says, "My name was Molly, and I was engaged to a man named Frank Walker. He was drafted and he died, and he proposed to me before I left, look—"
Fang hesitates, before he takes the photograph, and Max yanks out the ring from under her shirt. He looks at it briefly, and shakes his head. "Similar facial features, it's a blurry picture—"
"But Fang, you've seen," she urges. "You've seen, you can never get a good picture of me, not on your phone, not on Nudge's fancy camera, you can't get a good picture of me. I don't know if that's the immortality—"
"Immortality?" He laughs, and there's a hysterical edge to it. "Immortality? Max, do you hear yourself?"
"I don't have to hear it, I lived it," she begs. "Fang, please. Please just follow me and if I can't prove it, then you can take me to whatever sort of asylum you want, and see how I don't age in twenty years—"
He let out a scoff, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "I can't believe you're trying to break into an archaeological dig—"
"It was my house," Max practically shrieks. "I lived there, back when I was mortal—"
"Back when you were—Max, back when you were mortal?! Are you hearing yourself right now?!"
"Yes, because I lived it!" Max snaps back. "I lounged by the Nile in the days of Akenaten, I fought alongisde Joan of Arc, I delivered the materials to build the Eiffel Tower, I used this knife—"
And she brandished it, the smooth worn stone, "to carve every single one of those little rocks we've been obsessing over for the past three years!"
His face goes slack, and he stares at the stone. "That... looks like a museum artifact."
"Because it's mine." Max says. "I bet if you test some of those stones and this knife, you'll get a lot of the similar material markoff. I've been leaving marks everywhere I go, and if you just follow me, I can show you where I became—"
"Immortal," he says, but he looks more resigned, now. "Right. My best friend's immortal."
Max snorts, a little bit. "Hey, my best friend's been dying all over history, how do you think I feel?"
He blinks at her, and says, "So. If I'm supposed to believe this—what, was I just, like—?"
"You were Fadil," she says. "You were a gladiator, you were Firmin, you were Fausto, you were Florent, you were Farid, you were Francis, you were Frank. I met you seven times—eight now—and you would either die, disappear, or I would run away because I was a coward and I didn't want to see you die again. I was Meketaten. I was Marcinella, or Marcinellus, I was Morfydd, I was Matías, I was Marchelle, I was Mina, I was Madeleine, I was Molly, I was so much more. But the times I met you—Fang, the times I met you—"
Max pauses, and closes her eyes. "When I met you, I wasn't lonely anymore," she says quietly. "I never married, I never had children. The last of my relatives died out around the time Caesar Augustus ruled. I've been alone in this world for longer than this nation's stood."
Fang hesitated, before he took her hand.
"Please," Max whispered. "Please, just come with me. I have to tell you the best-kept secret I have."
Fang licks his lips, hesitates. Then:
"Okay," he whispers, and squeezes her hand. "Okay."
She squeezes back, and leads him to where she spent her childhood. She tells him about her neighbors, pointing to the thick trees where their houses had once stood, talking to fill her nerves, before stopping where the tape was, goosebumps shocking up her spine.
"This is it," she spoke, through numb lips, and paused, digging out her knife. "It's time you heard of how I stole my immortality."
"Stole?" Fang asks.
Max was playing with her baby brother Ari when the strange man came. He wore a long cloak that was the same flickering color of the stream on summer days, switching from between green and deep blue within the blink of an eye.
Max wishes that she'd set him ablaze with the logs that were resting in the fire.
The strange man entranced her father. Her father was an alchemist, aiming to provide food fit for the gods, to produce gold from straw, to heal maladies and illnesses with a wave of a hand, but the strange man took those already impossible dreams and placed them ever higher.
Though the strange man sat at their table and dined with them for nearly a year, Max never heard his voice, or saw his face. From what her father had said, the strange main had a voice like the fire's crackle, a face like a god.
That was before he'd been turned strange.
The longer the man with the sea cloak stayed, the more bitter and enraged her father would become. She and her brother would be cast out of the house for weeks at a time while her father worked feverishly on the latest project, demands from the strange man, insisting it was for their greater good.
Freezing in the cold at night and seeing her limbs turn colors did not feel much like the greater good, nor did the loud rumblings of Ari's belly come suppertime. Her father screamed more whenever Max stood up, and Max would scream back, and Ari would cry.
It would take until Max had reached womanhood, and Ari at the age of seven, before the smooth, sharp stones were placed in their hands, their father and the strange man watching.
"You must fight," her father says, eyes ablaze. "That is the only way this will work. And I'm sorry, but one of you will die."
Ari had cried when he had heard his father say that, and Max pleaded with him, but he would not cave. They were kept in the pit even as they refused to fight, as they froze and starved, refusing to raise a hand against the other.
Then Max saw the green-blue-flicker cloak flutter down, and something primal, something dark, changed within her. And by the look of her brother, something had changed within him too.
The rage boiled underneath Max's skin, made her feel to hot to even function, made it feel like she was about to evaporate out of her own skin. She lunged forwards without thought, and they fought dirty and angry and nothing like the siblings who had refused to raise hand against the other.
It all came to a culmination when Max kicked, hand out, practically atop her brother— when he had gone tilting rapidly back when Max didn't mean to send them to overbalance—when Max felt her brother land on her, felt her blade slice through his neck from the sheer force of the fall, the sickening crack—and Max screamed, and the spell was broken—
"IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HIM!" Her father screamed, cradling his dead son in his arms as Max felt herself grow rapidly cold, absent from the rage, only becoming horrified and terrified—"HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GREATEST WARRIOR! HE WAS YOUR BROTHER!"
Max scrambled out of the pit as fast as she could, and ran as far as her legs would take her.
It would take an axe burying itself into her neck and the subsequent months of agonized healing to realize what the strange man had done.
Max was silent, and so was Fang.
"That's awful," he whispers, and Max shudders at the memory, staring at the stone knife in revulsion.
"I keep it as a reminder," Max says. "I try to fight for what's right, but I forget, a lot of the time. Long term, you know. All the wars repeat. The songs are all the same, it's just different people singing them. What's even the right side of a war people a hundred years later can't name, anyway?"
She hesitates, swallows, points to the pit that's taped off, feels the energy reverberate up through her toes all the way to her scalp.
"That's where I did it."
Fang hesitates, looks down. "Do you... do you want to go?"
"I think the man's cloak is still down there," she says, at last. "I don't think I ever say him when I was running away."
"What, he disappeared?"
"In one way or another. Never seen another hint of him."
They hesitate, but they go down together, and Fang pauses when Max hits the ground.
Then Max feels the energy ramp up, and collapses to the ground.
"Max—Max—"
"It was here," Max wheezes out. "I can—I can feel it, it was here—"
The memory's echoing too strong around her brain, rattling and clanking against all the other memories she keeps carefully sorted, and she lets out a scream, grabbing at her head, and she wants to die—
Something grabs her arm, and it... stops. Max blinks, looks up, but Fang's sunk to his knees, pale and weak, hand like a vice around her wrist.
"Fang?" She says, weakly, reaching for him.
He lets out a shaky laugh, tilts his head so his hair covers his eyes. "Fadil," he whispers. "We drank beer at the riverside."
Max jolts closer to him, staring at him with wide, hopeful brown eyes. But how can he—
He clears his throat. "Fulvius," he says, and let out a shaky laugh. "You looked like you were about to vault off the stands."
Max swallows, reaches out.
"Firmin," he continues, strongly, and laughs for a solid thirty seconds. "I thought you were a prostitute. I can't believe I kept paying you—I was so cheap—I didn't want to ever give you up, but you left—"
"I had to," she said numbly. "You got married—"
"Fausto," he says, and grins. "Glory to the Castiles, glory to the fighting duo—I never found someone who complimented my sword so well—"
"You were better than Fulvius," she says, and he throws his head back and laughs, and they huddle ever closer, some sort of impossible bloom of hope growing bigger and bigger in her chest, something she hasn't felt since Fulvius—
"Florent," he says, and grins. "You did absolutely nothing, did you?"
Max snorts, head hung. "I paid for your drink!"
"Farid," he says, and looks at her somberly. "I died next to you."
"I cried for decades," Max whispers back, meeting his gaze, and something heavy is crossing in his eyes, something she's never seen any of his faces wear, and she feels the hope grow and grow, thinks wildly that she needs to check for swords and spears—
"Francis," he says, and beams. "I saw the world, after you," he breathes. "I went to Europe—I saw England, and Spain, and France—and I kept looking for you, I thought you were a fairy, a sprite—"
Max feels a slight hint of shame. "Just a coward."
He pulls her hand up to kiss, grins at her roguishly. "The best coward." He sombers. "Frank. He died thinking of you."
He reaches out, and touches the ring, and then looks at her.
"I remember them," he says hoarsely. "I remember them all."
Max surges forwards, and they kiss, lips meeting, both of them armed with the full knowledge of what they had had over the course of the millennia—what they had shared, what they had done, how he had died and she had mourned but it was okay, it was okay, wasn't it, they were together—
They were together.
This was published on my AO3 account under the same name, batterytriplicate. I also have a tumblr if you have any questions you want to ask or a prompt (maybe) or if you just want to know when I release new stories.