The Gravity of Immortality

Part One, Chapter One: Nobody Important

A/N:

This is something I thought to start a long time ago, but realized I wouldn't be able to do the premise justice at my level. But that was over a year ago. Now, I feel I'd be able to at least write something passable out of it, and I'm glad I waited to start until a few days ago.

So, some things you should be aware of for this fic: because its AU largely takes place in Europe, rather than Asia, a lot of characters will be using variants of their in-game names. Kirito, the main character, won't use any of the names we know him as, because none of them sound European.

Also, a lot of this fic takes place in ancient times, with a progressive movement towards the present as it details different experiences for the protagonist, who is immortal. Because I'm not a history buff, most of what is meant to be historically accurate will be taken from Google searches.

And another thing: the first bit of the fic takes place in the middle of the Bronze Age, right around the time the sword evolved from the dagger. Anything inaccurate is probably meant to be that way, and if it wasn't, then I failed in Google searching. History buffs, don't attack me now.

A fair warning, by the way, is that there are a few things in this fic that go against common beliefs of modern religion. If you don't mind the immortal main character telling you that your faith is BS (and he will if you're Muslim, Jewish or Christian), then go ahead and keep reading, but otherwise, I'd stay away from this one.

Finally, the pairing for this story as a whole is Kirito/anyone I want, because he's immortal and everyone else isn't, so everyone he falls in love with eventually dies. It's a rather unusual way to set up a harem, but I don't mind it because it gives a lot of creative freedom. It's like, I could write romances in any time period up until now and they'd still be fine, because the MC never dies, and he's been alive in all of them.

Anyway, that's all you need to know for this one. Have a good read!

Being immortal makes you aware of a lot of things normal humans never could comprehend in a single lifetime. After all, humans are bound by their own bodies, which grow old, die and then rot. Their souls may stay bright and strong up until they fizzle out with death, but they can't do anything about their physical limitations.

For example, the concept of life after death is BS. There's no way it could happen because the souls leave their bodies the moment their lives end. So the idea that they'll eventually rise from their graves for an eternal life is out, even more so by the fact that dead bodies decay.

Another example that goes to the opposite side of the spectrum is that reincarnation is a legit thing. Sure, it takes a few hundred years sometimes, but eventually, somewhere in the world, that person you had a drink with a century ago will be alive again, with an appearance that is different, but also uncannily similar to how it was at that bar. And he'll walk and talk the same (with talking, usually a different language equivalent of the same), he'll have the same tendencies, he'll have the same kinds of interests, because in reality, it's the same soul in that body.

Do I have proof of that statement about reincarnation? Well, not any that would make sense to a human, because they just try to say it's a coincidence that those people I hung out with a millennium ago look and act almost exactly the same as those guys over on that poster. But it's also the secondary reason why I disproved life after death, so that says something about my logic versus human logic, I guess.

As an immortal, you also lose awareness of some things that humans are acutely aware of. Like the passage of time, for example. Because for you, there's still an eternity left, and there always will be an eternity left, even long after the earth is no longer suitable for life. So things like your hair growing ten inches when it's already half past your waist don't mean much, and you just ignore them until you decide you need to cut your hair because it gets in the way too much.

You lose your awareness of danger pretty quickly. I mean, it's a given, because nothing in existence is dangerous enough to kill you. It actually makes you a better fighter, because if you're actually serious about it, you can focus completely on landing hits without giving a crap that you just got stabbed, since it'll regenerate almost as soon as the weapon leaves your body.

Also, you begin to lose awareness of the people around you after a couple thousand years. Not the ones who you knew all those millennia ago, because you'll always recognize those knuckleheads after they've reincarnated, but the new ones that you've never even met past lives of before. You just kind of learn not to connect with or even notice them, because it'll save you the pain of having to watch them die in what seems like the blink of an eye to you.

All these people living on this earth, and you try to ignore them all because you don't want to watch them die while you still live on, unaffected by time itself. That's what being immortal is like after long enough. And yet even still, there will always be those people that keep coming to you like a moth drawn to the flame. There will always be those who come to you and break through your walls, carefully constructed over millennia spent majorly alone, and reach your heart, make you remember what it's like to care about others and the world around you.

Because even immortals can't escape falling in love.

The first time I fell in love with a mortal human was rather mundane. We met each other during a peaceful time, when all of the continent I lived on was free of war. It wasn't necessarily that the countries were on good terms. It was more like people were afraid of bothering each other, or just didn't have any reason to pick a fight.

See, the people of the world at the time had only just figured out how to make blades longer than daggers that wouldn't bend because of their own weight. Like how people feared the power of nuclear bombs millennia later, people of this time feared what kind of destructive power the longer, heavier, better weapons could produce in the arm of someone competent.

Of course, being immortal and thus always being several steps ahead of the especially fleeting humans of the time, I had developed several swords of my own many centuries prior, and had already developed a style of using two of them that could beat just about anyone. Legends created about me spurred a lot of people into trying to find me and my forge (actually, the first swords similar to mine were created because somebody took one of my bronze prototype swords and tried to recreate it), so I lived high on a mountain where most people wouldn't think to go.

But, as human diversity states, there would always be people bewitched enough by the tales and brave enough to face the dangers involved with coming to find my forge and take one of my swords. Besides, depending on their circumstances, they would actually become pretty interesting playthings for me for a few years. I usually ended up trapping the warriors for five years (the longest I could stomach watching a person age) and telling them that if they beat me, I'd let them go early. Because nobody could ever beat me, and nobody could escape, it always ended up being the full five years before they were let go.

I just didn't expect the first one to try it in half a century to be a woman. After all, the world was very sexist at the time, and women were considered essential to the home and nowhere else. I myself didn't share these views; humans were humans, regardless of gender, and they'd all die sooner or later anyway. So as far as I was concerned, they could all just do whatever the hell they wanted as long as they didn't bother me.

Back to the woman who actually managed to climb a mountain by herself in order to take my swords, which by that point were already all made of high carbon steel that I made with the plentiful iron ore and coal supplies of the mountain. I had about twenty of them at the time, and really wouldn't have minded just giving the older ones away if it weren't for the attitudes of the humans who came for them, who all wanted to take them by force.

This human woman, probably barely even an adult at the time (so, about the age I appeared to be), just rudely knocked down my forge's door to the outside and burst into the place in spectacularly offensive fashion right as I was hammering on heated steel, trying to make my twenty-first blade in thirty years. I didn't make them as often as I could have, mainly because I also had to train with using them myself.

I looked up from my work for only a moment, sparing no more attention than I needed to in order to address her, then getting back to hammering. What I said translated approximately to, "If you want a sword, can you just wait a bit? I'm in the process of making one as we speak, and it requires more attention than I'd have to spare if I were dealing with you as well."

She actually didn't know what to say at all. So after about five seconds of silence, she ended up walking over to a spare chair I had set up on the side of the room. She just watched me as I worked with the heated metal for the next several minutes, until I moved it with iron tongs to the water for quenching.

It took an hour or so overall before I finished heat treating my new blade, and moved onto fitting the cross guard, made of the same material, between the blade and the handle. After that, I fit some carved, smoothed wood around the handle for grip, then put an iron pommel on it. As a final touch, I wrapped the wooden grip in a soft, tough leather made from the hide of an animal on the mountain.

With the blade successfully completed, I went to one stone wall and picked up a scabbard I had made from hardened leather and silk stitching beforehand, sheathing the blade with a smooth sound. Normally, I'd have sharpened it first, but I decided I'd leave that to the new owner of the blade.

Finally, I turned my attention to my onlooker and got a good look at her. She wore clothing usually worn by male warriors at the time, but there was no denying her gender if you simply looked at her chest or face. Plus, who in their right minds would color their hair bright pink? Only someone with zero concept of the definition of the word camouflage would actually do that.

Her own physical appearance, clothes aside, wasn't half bad, for the first woman I'd met in over a millennium, with a decently curvy figure, fair skin with a few freckles on her cheeks, and expressive brown eyes that had a hint of the pink she colored her hair full of.

Before I got too carried away with myself, I set the sheathed, unsharpened blade in her open palms. I spoke again, and what I said would have translated to, "Take good care of it, it's brand new. You'll need to sharpen it yourself. While I'm at it, could I get the name of the person I'm giving my blade to?"

She responded with just a name, no other formalities attached. It sounded like it came from the faraway nation of Greece, which I hadn't been to since its recent establishment, and the name equated to the modern name, 'Elizabeth'. It didn't really fit her appearance of a northern European, but I didn't say it.

Not wanting to bother with such a long, foreign name, I simply decided to call her, 'Liz' from that point on. I pulled up a stray chair (I had about three in my forge), sitting beside her and looking over. I was about to ask her another question when she spoke up herself.

"Who are you?" she asked me, a wary expression on her face. "I was told that this place was guarded by a demon who never aged, but you look like a regular human."

I chuckled at what I had become in the legends. Last I heard, I was a god of the forge, but now they started calling me a demon? Maybe I had kept a few too many humans here against their will.

"What you heard is a story concocted by people who have been with me for five years or more at a time," I began to explain. My face betrayed no emotion as I spoke, and I didn't move a muscle other than those in my mouth. "I'm nobody important. I'm no demon, but it's true that I don't age. I am an immortal, but I am no god, either. I'm just a human who did the one, ultimate thing that humans were never supposed to do, without realizing the consequences until it was far, far too late."

It was the most I had talked to anyone, including myself, in over thirty years. I hadn't talked this much since the last time a human came to my home in the mountains. That human actually looked quite a bit like this one, with pale skin, freckles, and similar eyes. His hair was a youthful, glossy brown, though.

That person had busted down my door in a similar manner to the girl next to me, and because I felt a bit irked at him for it, I ended up giving him one of my last remaining bronze swords instead of my new steel ones. I didn't do my usual game of keeping him for five years because I was going through a phase where I didn't want to notice things get older, so he ended up leaving as soon as I gave him the sword of my own will.

"What about yourself, Liz?" I decided to ask her after a few seconds of silence. Anything to draw the attention away from myself. "Why did you come for one of my swords? I honestly haven't been visited by a woman since I started living here, so I'm a bit curious."

"Because of the stories my father told me," she explained, a rueful expression on her freckled face. "Though I see now that they may have been exaggerated. He is an accomplished blacksmith, but he used to be a warrior. He told me that in his days as a warrior, he went climbing this mountain for training, and then he found your home."

Now it made a bit more sense. The man who busted down my door thirty years prior was this girl's father, who, after receiving my prototype sword, gave up being a warrior to try to make more of it, and ended up making the first swords that resembled my own. This girl's apparent age fit that relatively well, though he must have become a father fairly late in life, probably around five to ten years after he met me.

"He said that he was exhausted, and planned to ask you merely for some shelter for the night," she continued when she knew she had my attention again. "But he accidentally broke your old door off its hinges, and thus angered you. He said you were wild, but in the end, you didn't attack him once, and eventually you actually gave him one of your swords and kicked him out, grumbling all along about what a pain it'd be to fix the door."

I recognized some of that as truth, and some of it as fiction meant to impress his daughter. For one, he certainly wasn't exhausted when he broke down my door. He was full of energy, not to mention it was mid-morning when he did it. And for another, I didn't get that mad about my door, because it would only take a little woodworking to fix it. I was irritated, because I hadn't tried to use my carpentering skills for anything but sword handles in over a century, but all I did about it was complain a bit and intentionally give him my least successful bronze prototype sword out of mild spite.

In the end, I decided not to inform Liz of the false parts of her dad's tale. Or, at the very least, not which parts were actually false. "Ah, that man. I remember him now. He came here about thirty years ago, right? I remember that scene playing out a bit differently, though."

I looked her over again before deciding to go through with the other thing I wanted to say. "You certainly bear a resemblance to your father. But there's one main difference: you're a lot easier on the eyes."

She looked away at this, a bright pink decorating her freckled cheeks. I thought it was adorable, but I didn't say it. She seemed plenty embarrassed already, after all.

Then, suddenly, she stood up. "I should probably return home," she told me as she began preparing to leave. "Thank you for the sword, and I'm sorry about your door."

"Don't worry about that, I can fix it easily," I tried to ease her guilt a little. I knew she probably just busted down the door to see if I'd give the same reaction that her father said I did, and it didn't bother me as much with her for some reason.

Just as she reached the door, all her supplies gathered and her new scabbard strapped to her waist, I called out again. I didn't know why I did, or why I said what I said. But for some reason, talking with her had been enjoyable, I couldn't deny that much.

"Liz!" I shouted to catch her attention, pausing briefly when she turned her head to acknowledge me. "I go by the name, Monos, but I wouldn't mind seeing you again. You were interesting to talk to."

Of course, that wasn't my real name. It was merely the Greek word for 'alone' that I chose because of her name, because in the end, I would forever be alone. I had forgotten my real name at least a millennium before then, and had used different words in different languages to refer to myself, every single one of them sharing the same meaning: alone.

"Likewise, Monos." And with that, she left.

That was my first meeting with her. It left me wanting to see her again, though I thought I never would, and that thought saddened me slightly. Little did I know I would see her many more times before her eternal parting came.

A/N:

Not much to say. I wrote this in less than a day, but the idea's been around for over a year. The next part will continue Lisbeth's storyline, and the part after that will conclude it. Then I'll move onto another pairing, and it'll probably be Kirito/Yuuki. I'm trying to stay away from the pairs that are too mainstream, like Kirito/Asuna and Kirito/Sinon, at least for a while (I'll wait until the point in history where decently accurate guns are invented for Sinon's appearance). Expect them to come at the end of the work, more likely than not.

By the way, it'd be nice if I could get some reviews. I've really been needing some decent critique recently, because I'm just not getting any better without it. So yeah, if you have the time and want to use it to help me improve, it'd be much appreciated.

I guess I'll let you get on with life for now. See you next chapter!