Cruel Fate

Rosslyn sat delicately on the enormous, lazy boy sofa. It was sea foam green, though there were discolored patches here and there that told its age. It was rather uncomfortable, her butt sinking deep into the cushion and being pulled towards the middle as if to gobble her up. There was a gaping hole in the middle of the armrest opposite her, a coffee stain on the cushion next to her, and two throw pillows with crocheted lace coverings centered in the middle. Sitting on the dilapidated couch, the image of Mr. Zotkiewicz running his hands over pictures of his children and grandchildren in an old photo album came to her.

Radzim Zotkiewicz was born in the small town in Poland called Kazimierz Dolny, very old and beautiful, as he had often mentioned to Rosslyn. He spoke of it so fondly; the artists that would come to paint, the beautiful greenery, the Vistula river he spent many of his boyhood years beside, the natives whose families had lived in the town for centuries, and his first love whom would forever be ingrained in his mind. She had often wondered to herself why he would leave a place that was so dear to him, but never had the nerve to ask. The sadness in his eyes as he spoke longingly of the town told her that mixed in with that love he had for his hometown there was a great pain.

He had come to be one of her citizens at the age of twenty-seven. It wasn't until he was thirty-five, however, that she met him at one of the older Catholic churches in her capital. Tears were dripping from the corners of his eyes, disappearing off the edge of his chin. He was speaking in his native language of Polish, his hands in a prayer position, shaking. For what must have been half an hour she sat watching him, his grief pushing away her reason for coming to the church. He stopped when a brown-haired boy – he couldn't have been more than twelve – ran into the building, shouting while trying to catch his breath, "He's fine! The doctor said he will be fine!"

This caused the man to cry once again, though he smiling now, rather than grieving. Rosslyn later learned that his he had been praying for his youngest son, Samuel, to recover from a deadly bout of pneumonia. And the boy that had run to tell him the good news, that Samuel was indeed going to survive, was his eldest, Michael. She also learned that Mr. Zotkiewicz was a devoted widow; his wife had passed away seven years prior and he had no intentions of remarrying. Later on, Mr. Zotkiewicz told her that his wife was the second greatest love of his life.

She sat up straighter, having caught herself slumping forward just a bit. It was a habit, enforced from her younger years when she had strived so desperately to be the epitome of a 'lady'. A sudden thought then came to her, as those years of big dresses and rigid etiquette came back, "It is a cruel fate to live so long." The words had left her lips so quickly.

"Yes, I imagine it is," a deep, sullen voice answered.

This made her jump, looking wildly around the room to find its owner. She had been the only person in the house and the man now sitting beside her on the couch was dead, or the funeral she'd just left was a sham, which was untrue. The spirit – she liked to use this term better than ghosts for those dead souls that were not malicious – of Mr. Zotkiewicz was staring at her, a look of pity in his eyes.

She was used to dealing with spirits and ghosts (exorcism was nothing abnormal to her), but those that she treasured usually did not come back. It had always occurred to her that this was probably due to the fact that those people had no need to remain among the world of the humans. There was something much better yet awaiting them. But here, Mr. Zotkiewicz was here. She swallowed, "Is there something you need me to do?" The spirits always had things they asked of her, their last wishes.

The spirit of Radzim shook his head slowly. "I was leaving. You came in – you have a strange light around you."

Rosslyn raised an eyebrow at this. She had a light around her? One which only the dead could see? Well, that would explain their amazing ability to find her, but it still left the reasoning for why England's charms she put around her house failed to keep them out. They were faulty, she'd told her uncle once, to which she'd gotten a very miffed response about how she knew nothing about magic. "A light, huh? What color is it?"

"Light. A very bright light."

"Like the light from the car of some idiot that refuses to dim his headlights when he passes you at night? Jesus! You'd think people would have common courtesy."

"It is exactly like that light." Radzim turned his attention to his own transparent body. "No such light radiates from this…what do you call this?" He turned back to her with the question.

Rosslyn smiled, "Spirit. I think this," she gestured with her hand at his transparent body, "is your soul. Most people would say ghost, but I use that for the bad ones, you know. They can be really creepy." She shivered as the memory of a ghost on all fours with fangs chased her through her house resurfaced. "Spirit is what I call the friendly ones, like you."

"Have you always seen," he paused, thinking of which term to use, "souls?"

She shook her head, blowing up her cheeks as she tried to remember the exact time when the ability kicked in. "It was probably in 1781 or '82 when it first started. I was about 50 then, in years, but roughly 9 in appearance. It took me longer to mature than the others," confessed the strawberry blonde.

"You are quite old, aren't you?" Rosslyn gave a short nod. "Are you tired of living?"

The question caught her off guard, her smile slipping from her face, replaced by wide eyes and a slightly parted mouth that said more than words ever could. "It's painful," she confided. It was so much easier, she found, speaking to the dead compared to the living.

Radzim nodded, not arguing against her with the phrase she'd heard many times already from others: But you're lucky, there are many people who want to live forever. Perhaps he understood, having lived a relatively long life by human standards himself, how agonizing it became to just wake up each morning after a while.

"At times, a nagging thought comes to me."

The man watched her silently; letting the woman he'd known for most of his life, the woman who never aged a day, let out the words she had so obviously kept hidden all these years.

"That perhaps," she continued, taking a moment to breathe in a calming gulp of air, "it is a curse. Maybe reincarnation is real and this is my punishment for the horrible person I was before." Tears were brimming in her lower eyelid, but she kept them at bay, taking deep breaths to keep herself from breaking down right there. "If so, maybe being this way is also punishing me for my sins now." She shook her head while saying the next words, "It has to be. I could not bear this sort of punishment a second time."

Radzim sighed, "It is not a punishment." As he watched her now, this woman that had held his hand as he slipped away from life, he saw fragility. She had seemed so very strong to him all these years. It was an awakening to see how wrong he was. "You have done much good." He thought of her revelation to him that she had been one of the lead researchers in the development of several vaccinations and the many times he'd gone to her house to find a random group of strangers eating in her dining room. "You help people. It is not a punishment, but a blessing from God to the people. There is someone always watching them, a person that cares for them because they are her people." She had been the one to say that, he reminded himself, all those years ago when he asked why she was in the church that day they met. To pray for my people, she had said.

"I have killed so many." Images of men with slit throats and bullet wounds came back to her. "I've never been able to save anyone." A young boy running towards her with bombs strapped to his chest came to mind, followed by a young blonde-haired, blue-eyed man holding her wrist and telling her with his eyes that it was no use. "I have hurt my people…my own family." Runaway slaves being shot down and a boy hanging by a noose, a knife underneath his left foot the only thing keeping him from being choked to death by the coarse rope swam in her thoughts.

"A dear friend once told me a story," Radzim looked away from her, staring straight ahead at the barren wall in front of them, "about a happy little Princess that grew up to be a very sad woman. Her father, the King, was taken from her because of a war, held captive in a foreign land, and she had never known her mother. The Princess had many people who loved her close by but was lonely still. There was another war and she was hurt by people who loved her, so she hid from them. They had hurt her badly and she did not know if she would ever be able to trust them again. Lonely and afraid, she sat in her room in the empty castle, until a kind man came to save her. He brought her out from the castle, and then he left. The Princess gradually rebuilt the kingdom, found her father unharmed, and forgave those that hurt her. She became happy and lived for a very long time."

"What a silly story," a smile tugged at the corner of Rosslyn's lips. He was repeating the story she made up to correlate with her life to her.

"That Princess hurt people and people hurt her, just like regular humans. You're life is not cursed, you are not alone," he assumed this from her reference to a father and other 'family' members over the years, "you are a normal human being who happens to possess an extraordinary lifespan. Nothing more, nothing less. Humans make mistakes, they hurt and take, but they also give and heal. That is you, as it was me when I was still alive."

"Are all Polish people so long-winded and prone to spiels of wisdom?"

Radzim chuckled, though to Rosslyn it sounded like a distant train whistle being blown. The shaggy white curls atop the spirit man's head shook as his head moved side to side. "No more than any other nation's people. But I listened over the years. I have experienced much. You have to live to understand. I think I have lived enough," he said, standing from the old couch. A smile graced his features as he stared down at the woman, light gathering around him. The airy whisper came just as he vanished, "Until we meet again, my friend."

Head bent to avoid the rays of light that had not yet dissipated completely, a soft voice responded, "Goodbye, dear child."

A/N: This one is a bit sad, I suppose. But I really wanted to show how living a very long life is not necessarily a good thing, especially if you have to live with memories of people that have long passed on. Rosslyn refers to Radzim as a child because he is one in her eyes. She's very old by this point, after all.