The First Time
A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction
~2070~
Most days, Nicholas can't quite believe his wife is eighty-nine years old – to him, she certainly doesn't look it.
Perhaps his eyesight has taken another turn for the worse (he already wears Coke-bottle glasses, a requirement he's grudgingly accepted is necessary for any close work – reading or sewing or examining something placed before him he was not anticipating – though he flatly refuses to put them on out of doors or if he suspects he's being photographed, call it a lingering twinge of vanity), but he doesn't see the wrinkles or drooping skin he's always mentally associated with women over seventy. Her hair still has colour, unlike his, and no matter how many times she's sworn the kids dye it for her, he's never been convinced the pigmentation isn't natural – it looks too close to the colour he remembers it being in their youth. Her eyes still sparkle when she laughs, and she's so limber and quick that if her steps weren't so loud – he at least has the skill of moving without sound, a talent she's never possessed – it would be impossible to keep track of where she's at in their small apartment at any given time.
No, indeed.
Jo is much too beautiful to be eighty-nine.
There must be some mistake.
Nicholas isn't delusional enough to think one of their grandchildren's peers would be interested in her, knows eighty-nine (regardless of appearances) is ancient to them, but he can imagine her with someone the age of their children, someone only twenty or thirty years her junior. She's so vigorous and youthful for her age.
So he marvels, just a little, that she's still interested in him.
He looks in the mirror at the old man he's become and, every now and again, wonders what he's doing with her.
In another life, he was one of Queen Victoria's most striking blue-blooded great grandchildren; even ill with swollen joints and dark rings from sleep deprivation underneath his eyes, even in captivity without his uniforms and epaulettes, even when he had his hair shaved off after he caught the measles from some cadets Mama permitted him to play with during one of her rare moments of leniency, he'd always been a good-looking young man.
But it isn't the boy he remembers being who's reflected back at him these days. It's a fussy old man with a perpetual squint and thin snowy hair who – for all Nicholas can recognise himself in the image – might as well be as much a stranger in the glass as Louisa was to Jo, the first time she saw her.
Why is he so changed and Jo not one iota?
This is one of the greatest mysteries of his life.
Undressing for bed one evening, Nicholas has that rising hairs on the back of the neck sensation which mean somebody is watching, and so he knows – without turning round to check – Jo, already cosy on her side of the bed, has set down whatever she was looking at – some book or magazine, perhaps a letter from the grandchild of theirs who is pregnant, the one who's going to make them great-grandparents any day now – and fixed her eyes on him.
Why is a woman like her so interested in observing the nighttime routine of a man in his nineties? She still looks at him – here, now – exactly the same way she did the first time he undressed in front of her. Back in 2005, when they moved in together, well after their school years were ended. Andrew Tiegan – and very likely Catherine, too – would have killed him if he'd been intimate with her when they were teenagers, and – besides – Nicholas had been raised to be modest. Sometimes he regrets – just a little – not waiting until they were actually married... But Jo at twenty-four was modern-minded, and he wasn't made of stone. And by that point, since they were living alone together, even if he hadn't laid a finger on her, everyone still would have assumed they were... Well. They'd been engaged, at least. He'd proposed on her sixteenth birthday, riding on a trolleybus – she'd said yes, of course, but they conveniently forgot to mention the incident to her parents for two years. His being eighteen and her...well, not...had had a lot to do with their temporary lapse of memory. He still misses them both dreadfully – Jo's parents, his surrogate 'end of the century' parents. They'd been very good to him.
"I'm afraid there's not much to look at," he chuckles, slowly turning to face her as he does up his pyjama-shirt buttons. "What are you thinking about?"
Jo cocks her head. Even as an old lady, she looks girly and impish when she does that. "That I can honestly say you look exactly the same as you did the first time I saw you."
It takes a moment for Nicholas to get it. When he finally does, when the penny drops, he bursts out laughing, hard and guttural, belly and shoulders quaking.
"I'd forgotten," he says, when he can breathe for wheezing again. "How foolish of me."
He wonders he's never considered it before.
Jo possessed the memory of another timeline, before they changed things, before he chose to end the circle and stay – a memory of him as an old man – ninety-one, just as he is now – giving her the mirror.
Nick's transformation into a milder, less erratic version of the old man she remembered from her fourteenth year had sneaked up upon her gradually bit by bit. Then, one day, she'd looked over at him with fresh and unexpected clarity, recognised who it was sitting across from her at the breakfast table, and was quietly delighted to see an old friend had appeared in her husband's place without usurping him.
It was just as well he'd changed by and by; she would have felt stupid being a few months shy of ninety, a wrinkly old lady, and having a husband who looked as if he'd just materialized from a history book page.
She was glad he'd shown up again, when he was really meant to.
Of course, technically, the first time she saw Nicholas was in a hazy dream – he'd been a boy, then, maybe her own age (at the time), running away from pursuers in Russia – a dream she hadn't even remembered when she finally met him (in his younger guise) taking tea at Sir Ivor's house.
A dream she didn't think twice about until many years later.
But he doesn't need to know that.
She's never told anyone about that.