Middle-Aged

Summary: A fic documenting the vast differences between the thirtieth birthdays of two of our favorite people...DN until death. As fluffy as the really old bread in the cupboard.

Disclaimer/Dumps coffee in lap/ We all do dumb things. Claiming to own the Immortals doesn't have to be one of them.

Notes: Fluff doesn't come until next chappy. Capesche?

Part I

Daine sat and pointedly shut her eyes tightly, groping around within her for something to be happy about. For not the first nor the last times during these troubled times, she failed past the basics of she wasn't dead yet and still had the strength the fight off the monster--gaining momentum every day as the mass graves grew bigger--as of yet.

Her thoughts, blatantly ignoring her wishes, skipped around to the no less than hectic few days when those with such gifts as she, Numair, Tkaa, and Kitten had were absolutely drained of any movement beyond those of the absolutely necessary kinds and possessed a great weariness of the bones, the flesh, the mind and the heart.

Veralidaine Sarrasri, through no small feat of willpower, smiled.

Not an all-out grin, that would have alerted even the dumbest stranger fifty-feet away of the falsehood of it, but just the slightest upward movement. For an unsure moment in flickered, but the girl grit her teeth and it stayed.

Alas, even Kitten looked dubious, an expression incredibly difficult to manage for the lovely reptilian being. She trilled doubtfully and even her notes were half-hearted, but Daine glared with all the ferocity she could muster.

Kitten looked vaguely put-off.

"Magelet?" Numair had opened one weary eye and looked at her; almost instantly reminding himself not to gaze for too long lest someone suspect.

"Yes, Numair?" The simple phrase was nearly comical, the first syllable being dreary and forced and the last two as light as she could make them.

"You're not fooling anyone."

Daine grew irritated and when she opened her mouth was stunned to find the words nuh-uh on the tip of her tongue.

"Fine." She replied sulkily and slumped back in her chair only to find herself incapable of sleep, despite the fact she had a luxurious fifteen minutes before Jonathon would be able to come and send them off elsewhere.

She wondered absently how long they'd been doing this, she had assured herself time and time again that surely they could keep this up for a few months. Daine began adding up the dates mildly...

And then sat up abruptly, comprehension dawning on her nearly-gray face.

"Oh, Numair."

She had sounded so crestfallen the mage had come out of his half-sleep muddled state worried, wanting to know what was wrong, and how to fix it. "What's wrong?"

"I'm so sorry."

That was alarming in itself, so he dredged up some of the last reserves of his patience. "For what?"

"It's your birthday..." She said unhappily, "And today's been so awful."

She was right. From the start, the unfortunately early start, of the day things had been hellish. The endless hours had gone by in a whirlwind of bloodshed, silver claws, screams, grunts, and at last, of the final stages of exhaustion.

"It's all right." He spoke mildly, for until the guilt of forgetting her good friend's birthday passed, she would not rest. He then smiled, just for a second. "I was hoping that no one would remember."

"Goddess, you're thirty."

Numair didn't even try to smile at that. That had basically been the part he was hoping no one would remember, and he told her as much.

Daine had the decency to giggle at that and for a moment looked like the sixteen-year-old girl she was. He stared at her a little too intently for a little too long, but the moment passed and everyone present was too tired to notice.

For the first time in months her eyes lit up, she practically skipped over to his chair, sat on one of the armrests and grinned at him. Not a fake smile, so that passerby and acquaintances don't have a melancholy girl on top of everything else to deal with, a grin that glowed with happiness.

"We're going to do something fun." She said it in a way that most people said That teacher of yours is a bit odd and Thayet is rather pretty. As an undeniable and consequently unavoidable fact.

For the first time in over two years, Numair was completely floored. "Really?"

She nodded and gave him a sidelong, perhaps flirtatious (though that may have been wishful thinking), and touched his shoulder. "If it kills me."

He knew, beyond a doubt, she meant it.

The afternoon came along slow enough, but sped away just as soon as anyone started to enjoy it. The call had been easy enough to take care of, if you considered things relatively as one should and has to do every now and then. It had only taken an hour or two for Numair to figure out the subtleties of the invisibility spell, and break it. Once they were able to be seen, the flying monkeys (the thought of which had been considered humorous once) were dispatched promptly.

Thoughts swirled wildly around in his head, he was thirty. He was old, in the opinion of some, no longer 'young' in the opinion of others. While it was tough on his vanity, it was far harder for the part his mind he tried to sever to cope with. He was officially middle-aged, and in love with a sixteen-year-old.

That ranked somewhere between mildly alarming and full-out disturbing as far as he was concerned, neither of which boded well for romance.

He sat, unobserved and neutral, on a large patch of sunny grass. Numair listened mildly as Daine tried to chatter (to avoid awkward silences) and wasn't having much luck at it.

At long last she gave him a crooked look as he nodded aimlessly. "It's all right."

"Hm?" He desperately tried to remember what the hell they (the word 'they' being used in the loosest since of the term) had been talking about an failed.

"Really. I don't mind."

"What?"

"You don't have to pretend to be happy." She bit into something that bore a dreadful resemblance to our hardtack and frowned plaintively as she tried to chew it.

"I'm not-"

"-Numair. Just get some rest, okay?"

"Fair enough."

There were certainly worse ways to spend the day than in the miserable company of a miserable friend.