Title:
Silence and Slow Time
Prompt: 010.,
"Years"
Word Count: 200
They aren't the same men he met, those long years gone. Time has changed each of them in a thousand subtle ways. If they were to face each other across that gulf of time they would be awful strangers to each other, to themselves, wearing masks made of the changes that slow time brings. Nor would they recognize him – even he, who seems so ageless, has changed in the intervening time, in ways he can't understand or name.
The years have been . . . not good to them, exactly. "Good" to him carries connotations of ease, of benevolence and simplicity, and their years together have been tough and complicated and often painful. But they have been years nonetheless, wild and thrilling and high on the Jazz. Mad years. Full years. Happy years.
Perhaps most important of all, they have been years together – and though they might be strangers to the men they once were, they are brothers, comrades, family to the men that they are. It was the years that did that, those years of terror and gunpowder, crashes and cons and near-misses. Those years gave him his Team.
And what more, after all, could one ask from one's years?