Reposting in preparation for correcting a story that was not flowing well. I apologize for the mess.
Happy Hogswatchnight*, all!
*Hogswatch(day) is the Winter Solstice, as well as the Christmas equivalent, so as it's the day before the Winter Solstice as I post this... :)
Terry Pratchett owns all this Discworld stuff.
Susan had been the one to end it.
Lobsang had given her his best shot at a perfect moment, and while she'd been impressed, Susan had found one or two things to quibble about. It meant he'd have to come back and try again. That was how their courtship went. He would offer; she'd make sure he'd have a plausible excuse to come back. He would smile in an infuriatingly knowing way; sometimes she'd send him away because of it.
After a week or so, she let him kiss her. He was rather better at it than Imp and the three youths who'd had the courage to take her out on more than two dates (a lord's third son named Roderick, a wealthy young nobody Mrs. Gaiter had introduced her to, and one of Lord Vetinari's Dark Clerks by the name of Hansen). That was the point at which she'd begun to have hope; she even had begun to forgive her grandfather for his manipulation. Finding 'someone like her' seemed to be turning out quite well.
Things had proceeded quite normally. There were dinners out. There were trips to the opera, and to mix things up, a showing of The Egging On of the Stoat at the Dysk. The neighbors had gossiped about Susan's infinitesimally sunnier attitude and the official weekly teatime visit from that strange young monk. However, Mrs. Thrasher, Dame Hastings, the Right Honorable Misses Flora and Angelica Blaine, and the entire household of unwed sisters by the name of Garrett had had to assemble most of their gossip from whole cloth, because Lobsang and Susan had rarely consented to use doors, let alone the front one. Susan had spent a little time complaining about how abnormal that was, but after a while, she found she could endure a little abnormality in her life.
After a month or so (by a month or so, one means six weeks and three days, because she cared about the details and he was Time), Susan had let him take her to bed. And gods, it had been sweet enough to rot one's teeth. For a boy who'd only been eighteen a few weeks, Lobsang had been gentle and generous. Of course, that was probably due to the aforementioned being Time thing, as well as the fact that he'd half-grown up as part of the Theives' Guild. One couldn't be part of that fraternity without working closely – one might even be obliged to say intimately – with Ankh-Morpork's seamstresses. He'd had a certain masculine disappointment that Susan hadn't enjoyed it quite as much as he had, but she'd only had to say, "Next time, perhaps" and smile to cheer him up.
They'd practiced. The subsequent next times met expectations.
Too, there were arguments, and Susan was sincerely grateful for them. They were so ordinary! How beautifully commonplace it was to snap at one another that "Maybe you should leave the toilet lid as you found it!" or "Give me a little warning next time!" She was especially grateful for the few quarrels they had managed to have, simply because Lobsang had a miraculous, suspicious talent at avoiding impending arguments. It was infuriating.
"You know when a big row is going to happen," she'd said flatly one day, three months and two days before she'd brought things to an end.
Lobsang had looked up from watching the ants clean up after the picnic they'd just finished in Hide Park, and the look he gave her had made her grit her teeth. It had been the look her mother had always given her just before saying, "Yes, Susan. But we call them horses, not horsies." It was the look she herself gave one or two of her students – the expression undid any verbal praise because she believed the child was being silly on purpose.
Before he could answer, whether to deny or oh-so-patiently praise her observation skills, Susan had cut in, "I mean you know it – you premember it – and make sure we don't have it."
He'd shrugged. "Why not? Isn't it much pleasanter that way?" He'd leaned in to distract her with a kiss.
"Isn't that abusing your powers?" she'd asked, only allowing one peck on the lips. "Isn't that fooling around with history? If we're supposed to have the fight, hadn't we better have it?"
Usually so agile in the dojo, dancing out of the way of razor-edged shuriken as if they were shuttlecocks lobbed by crippled octogenarians, Lobsang's precognition hadn't quite been able to get ahead of his eighteen-year-old mouth.
"What's the point of arguing over something that pointless?"
To say he'd instantly regretted it didn't do justice to the sheer velocity of the metaphorical foot with which he kicked himself. He'd already had a grimace on his face and an apology on his tongue by the time the question mark had carved itself into history, but Susan had already gotten to her feet and started stalking away. The argument itself had lasted an hour; the period of quiet fuming and bouquets of flowers so far out of season that their closest relatives were fossils had lasted about a week.
And then Susan had asked what argument he'd been trying to avoid. And he had refused to tell her. That quarrel had lasted a good week.
Things devolved.
Death had set the whole thing in motion when he had told her that Lobsang was someone like her, someone who was only mostly human. Susan had inferred that they would understand each other because their experiences couldn't help but be similar. Reality enjoyed turning her assumptions into not-very-amusing aphorisms.
Susan's parents had raised her in a strangely regimented way, but she'd been loved and thoughtfully brought up in the expectation of being correctly finished at the Quirm College for Girls, learning a few skills, and running the duchy once she'd come of age. It had only been since she was sixteen that she'd agonized over the bizarre reality of having Death for a grandfather.
Lobsang, on the other hand, had been born twice, had lived as two people, and – as far as Susan was aware – had agonized over approximately nothing in his life. The realization that he wasn't like other people had come late in his life, and with the realization had come the relief of understanding a few personality quirks, as well as powers that were more fun than burdensome.
Perhaps it was his cheerfulness about the entire thing that wore on her. The careful avoidance of uncomfortable discussions on his part certainly didn't help. In time, his smugness had lost what charm it had once had.
But what had convinced Susan that she was better off ending the relationship was the abrupt realization that Lobsang saw her much as she saw everyone else.
The part of her that was Death was eternal; other people were, to that part, just dust motes in the vastness of existence. That was morphic resonance diluted by a generation of separation from her grandfather. Lobsang was the son of Time. He was Time. To him, she was the blip, if a pleasant one.
He was never consciously an ass about it. Those few moments when he went glassy-eyed or exuded an aura of awesome eternity (and that was a surprise the first time it happened!) were as involuntary as a sneeze. Susan could remember every time she'd used her heritage to her advantage – and used it to dismiss anyone she chose. That shamed her. Then it made her angry.
Lobsang saw that coming, too. When he couldn't evade her anymore, after a week of dodging and performing the kinds of mental and verbal gymnastics that would have made even Lord Vetinari raise both eyebrows, Lobsang took her for a long, sad walk along the Ankh.
"I'm sorry for what I can't be," he'd said to her. They had stopped near the Bridge of Size, and Lobsang had looked undecided about trying to take her hand. "And I loved you, you know."
"Past tense already?" Masking the hurt with the anger, this question had barely managed to wriggle its way past gritted teeth.
"Every tense," he'd reminded her rather more gently than she deserved. "But you've already made your decision, haven't you? It can't matter what I feel now."
That stung. And then it enraged.
But all Susan said was, "No."
And, "Goodbye."
