My attempt at the popular reincarnation style fics, very much inspired by The X-Files "The Field Where I Died".
Present Tense
"We carry the dead in our hands as we might carry water - with a careful, reverential tread... How easily, how easily their faces spill."-John Glenday
You feel him before you see him, the arms that reach around you and lift you onto the bed, as you know, as you always have.
Your eyes flutter open and his hand reaches out, holding water. It isn't food but it's all he has because he's nearly as bad off as you, and he soothes you in Gaelic, quiet words like your mother whispered before the famine took her off, or your older brother said when he boarded the ship for America.
The water tastes cold in your mouth, like the Blood Spring all those ages ago, still vivid in your senses, and for a moment you're not a child of eight but a grown man, strong of mind and limb, standing in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor. His hand gently holds your faded fingers and it's the same touch you remember, centuries ago.
You blink and your eyes close.
(Again.)
2.
This is how the world ends: not a great burst of energy, of radiance as it gives it last, an explosion of fire and ice, but a quiet, slow burning, fading and dimming almost imperceptively with each day.
The ground is dry, scorched and long paved over, the buildings vacant and filled with broken glass that cracks beneath your feet. Above you a ceiling fan turns, spun by an invisible hand or the last drop of electricity left in the wires, sputtering as it dies.
He's lying on the bed beneath it and you sit on the floor next to him, the knapsack clutched to your chest, it's meager rations - all you could steal today - guarded. Your face is bruised, lip split open, and your shoes scuff against the ground. You pull out a cracker and offer it to him, but he only looks at you.
"What's your name?" His voice is quiet, hoarse from disuse. No one talks, not anymore, and you haven't asked his name.
"Tony."
"Tony." He repeats it and the accent is off, the inflection all wrong in this voice. You say nothing because it isn't even your name, not now, but it's the only name that was ever truly your's. "You should run, while you can." He whispers. "They say there's still water up east."
You've been running a long time it seems, one life after another, each run a practice for the next. But it doesn't matter.
He coughs, a bloody trail leaving his chin and you wipe it away, watching as the heat dries it instantly against your skin, and even if you were strangers this morning you've known him forever. His mouth trembles with a smile and he's so old this time, like the great-grandfather you've nearly forgotten, and you're young, so young, and you'll never get any older.
Your hands clench, nails chewing into your palms, the dried blood against your skin, as you feel the tightness in the air, the thud of your heartbeat against the encroaching darkness, and you know, finally, that it's the end. Your fingers catch his shirt, clinging to it, your eyes closing, and in the last moment you whisper, because you know it's still out there, still listening.
"Take me back."
So it does.
3.
You taste the salt in the wind from the day you're born, and you think this life, this body was made for the sea and the ship you sail across it. You're forty-eight before you find him, and you wondered if you'd missed him this time entirely, if he'd been born somewhere else and you hadn't known.
He's sixteen years old, all gangly limbs and awkward angles, faint British accent, and yellow hair pulled back in a queue. He's born to sail and he pours his soul into it, his hours spent working on the decks and staring out across the waters with eyes full of dreams.
There's a storm six weeks after he signs on and somewhere in the middle of it another sailor notices the lad long swept overboard and tangled in the rigging. You haul him up and over the side, laying him down on the deck, breathing and pushing against a quiet heart.
It's no use, in the end, because you can't bring him back, not with the sea he loved inside him so long, and the blood frozen in his veins, but you don't stop until they pull you away from the body.
Three months later another boy signs on, and he looks nothing like him, not even the sort of boy who would trip and fall overboard, but you lash him to the mast during the first storm and curse yourself for not doing it before, even as you see his face everywhere, the large eyes watching you as the years go by. You relive that day over and over, a jagged tear beneath your heart that bleeds a little more as each day passes.
Salt water in wounds is painful, you know.
4.
His eyes are blue this time, as clear as a summer lake, and you have to search to see the dark eyes lingering beneath the surface, like the root of a plant that's been torn out of the earth but leaves a little bit behind to grow again.
He doesn't know you, of course, he never does, and he's a knight and you're only his servant, and there's no friendship in this life because even in the same time you're worlds apart. He hasn't long to live, you know this, because you can always sense it, like a storm felt in an old injury, and no matter how you try to warn him he doesn't listen.
It happens on a summer morning and there's a bit of light filtering through the trees, enough to catch his armour and transform it into liquid silver as he falls backwards off his horse, the crossbow arrow lodged in his throat. You run to him, your cape catching around your knees, nearly tripping you, as you fall beside him and pull him into your arms, the sound of the fighting all around you little more than a dull clang inside your head.
He tries to speak, but he can't because of all the blood, and you're crying, because you've watched him die so many times already, and it shouldn't hurt, not anymore, but it always does.
"It was in Scotland the first time." You say, and your voice is ragged, nothing like the way you used to sound. "I fell and I didn't even know I had the bullet in my back. You held me as I died, and I felt your blood on me. Don't you remember?"
He's heavy in your arms but he doesn't remember, and he's gone, eyes glazed, the wound stopped bleeding long ago, and you don't lay him down until they come and take him from you.
You don't know when you broke or how to put yourself back together.
5.
For Y2K, while everyone else watches Dick Clark count the ball down and worries about the lights going out, you drive out across the desert and down to Project Tic-Toc, or rather, where it used to be, because there's only an abandoned shell, half buried in the sand like an ancient Egyptian tomb.
There's sand inside, now, all but obscuring the yellow hourglass beneath your feet, but the Tunnel still stands, slowly crumbling, frayed wires clinging to the last whispers of energy. Your hands have forgotten nothing, and it's the work of minutes to locate the files, the final records. You sit in front of the screen, the dark space where your signal and his used to run across, parallel lines woven across the darkness, a monitor of your vital signs.
Part of you is still there, in the machines, because part of the Tunnel is in your veins ever since you died at Gettysburg, so long ago. It was never supposed to happen, of course, but you can't force eons of time through an all too mortal heart and not alter it. The human body is fragile and even time itself can't make it immortal. But it can change it, give it it's knowledge, all the ages from the beginning to the end of time, memories crammed into a human mind, clinging through a thousand lifetimes, making you remember even if he doesn't.
In the end, you finally understand. You should, after all, because you helped create it, poured your sweat and blood, and ultimately your life into the Tunnel, and programmed it to respond to you. There were no hands controlling the Tunnel, so it controlled itself. It was created to send and bring, to save you both, and it failed. So it did the only thing it could do - start over again, give you a second, a third life and more, over and over again, back and forth in time, a story out of order, until it succeeds in what it was programmed to do. You can't just die in the past when you never were born there at all, only loop, a new life and another one, until things come out right.
There's still a spark of life left in the wires. Just a spark.
But it's enough.
6.
The earth shifts and turns as if you're standing on fragile ground, running backwards, parallel lines bleeding into each other, magnets seeking and finding again.
He's dying when they bring him to you, and there's no hope this time, not even a whisper, because he's torn and impossibly broken and for all your physician's skill you can't save him. You've seen him before, you realize, and not known him - how could you have not, unless you're starting to forget, also - strong and tall, with his sword and shield in his hand as the sand turns crimson beneath him, and he pawns his soul for a moment in the sun.
They say we who are about to die salute you, and they do die, hundreds of them, even if you manage to save one or two, because even with your knowledge of the future there's precious little to create it out of in the heart of Rome.
This life he never sees you at all. You turn to pick up medicines that will do nothing and look back to see his chest still, heart having stopped without even opening his eyes.
Alchemy turns dust into gold and it crumbles in your hands.
7.
You're eighteen and there's a war again, like wine on the lips of every red-blooded male near his age, intoxicating the young and old alike as they sign their names and don their uniforms.
You join with them, because you're born for this, you can feel it in your blood and bones, the battlefields calling out to you with every breath you take. It's Christmas before you see him and realize why you were drawn into this war, when he looks across the trenches at you, and you see that his eyes are back to dark, nearly the same as you remember.
"Parlez-vous français?" The words are tentative, and the aged sound of his voice is strange to your ears, not matching the still child-like planes of his face or the pronounced ears the winter has turned red.
"Nein." You say quietly, and the other man whispers a muttered word of French, a curse you think, into his palms, breathing on his fingers to warm them against the biting cold, not calling again.
You crawl up over the edge of the trench and into his, and you talk. It doesn't matter what you tell him because he can't understand you, not a word, and certainly not "tunnel" or "signals" or any of the other things you say. But he smiles when you share your cigarettes, and your heart warms when he pulls a worn photograph from his pocket and runs a thumb across the girl's face with a touch that tells you that if he survives this war he's going home, back to her, and he'll marry her. You even reach into your uniform with numb fingers and show him your girl, the one who's not as pretty as the others but smiles when you take her hand in your's and wants a dozen children for you both to love and spoil.
The truce is over in the morning, and you don't see him when you're back in your own trench and the war starts again as if yesterday was only a dream and killing is all you know.
It comes to this: a flash of light against the darkness, the ringing in your ears, and the screams of the dying. He looks up, over the edge of the trenches he's nineteen and he's never going home, and your gun falls from your hands chances are you're never going home, either as you start to yell, to force him to stay down. Your gun never fires but the soldier's next to you does, and you watch as the scarlet ribbons rise up in the air and fall to the dust with the final twitches of a dying enemy.
We all fall down.
(At least this time.)
8.
You're expecting death, finally it seems, but even so it doesn't dull the pain when the knife slips up under your ribs and you start to bleed your life away into the cold, damp pavement. You land on your hands and knees, the rest of your body disconnected and nerveless as the hands rifle through your pockets and grab your wallet.
He's gone in a moment and you're lying on your back, and you can feel nothing other than the pain from the wound, one hand curled over it, the other limp beside you, the crimson rain soaking your T-shirt to your skin, and your eyes closed.
When they open again an ambulance's lights are flashing and a face swims into focus above you, blue eyes for the third time, pulling your hand away from the wound. You try to say his name - not the one he has now or even the time before, but the one he had all those lifetimes ago as you gasp for breath and choke. An oxygen mask comes down over your face, and you fight it, because this time you have to say his name, to make him remember because you can't go on anymore, not like this.
Then your heart lurches and you feel it stop, cold inside your chest. Hands close around your heart, pushing a rhythm, and it's no use, doesn't he know that, but you're first this time, and it hurts less that way.
But he doesn't let you die, doesn't leave you he never did and you smile, a ragged twitch of your lips that he doesn't see, and you let yourself fall into the warming darkness, only sleeping.
When you swim back to the surface it's two weeks later and you're alive, hooked to monitors all singing with life, and he's standing there, red hair and freckles, a chart in hand, a stethoscope around his neck.
Your mind drifts as he tells you that you're lucky, that you're going to make it, while your mind is a century away, as you search for something and never find it. There's a hollow space in your heart, you realize, and you sense know that it's over, the Tunnel has finally quietly gone to sleep, and this is your last life.
Then he stops, head tilting, something in his eyes, as he looks at you, and when he speaks his voice is somehow familiar, even so changed.
"Have we met before?"