A/N: This ended up taking a very different tone than I meant it to take and than what the prompt was going for. Oh well. I wrote it first and named it last.
She barely remembers their first meeting now. It had been before she’d lived her first hundredth year, before she’d even known she was immortal. (She has theories about how she gained it, but the relevant memories are from something that happened when she was twenty, which is extremely fuzzy territory now, and it’s all speculation in any case)
“Not really,” she finally answers his question. “If anything I can only know ‘must have beens.’ I know I must have been confused, I know I must have been a bit frightened, I know I must have doubted you, but I don’t remember that as such.”
“So you don’t remember what you were doing or what was going on?”
She shakes her head, but then the motion pauses and her eyes shift a little as she stops seeing what is and starts to see what was. “Was I out picking berries?”
It hurts him, just a bit, that she doesn’t remember such an important moment in her life. However, it is understandable. It has been about 9,000 years for her, after all.
He remembers fine, but then it hasn’t been nearly so long ago from his perspective.
“No,” he says, and her eyes meet his again as her mind is drawn back into the present, “I think that was the second time from your perspective. Or the third. You were doing laundry in the river. I asked you what year it was and you didn’t seem to know what that concept was. I thought maybe my translator had broken and said this out loud and you definitely didn’t know what that was. I asked if you knew who I was and you shook your head.”
That had been both terrifying and exciting. He knew he could go no further back than that, or that if he did he could not meet her there. He’d never dared to try. He didn’t know how much longer or how much further forward he could meet her. He was getting older and his body was starting to show signs of irrevocable damage after all the stress he’d put it under, and his ability was getting weaker, though that was possibly a result of a subconscious desire to not use it to its full extent anymore. It was one of the greater sources of stress.
As if she’d read his mind, she put a hand over his folded ones and said:
“You don’t have to keep doing this. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? A long beautiful ride. I don’t know exactly how it will end for me, but I’m certain your wife and children would appreciate it if you settled down. And you know that your descendants will be my friends for as long as they are able.”
It was true. They had built a space station just so that their ancestor and his immortal friend could have a set spot to meet up. She played cards with them and went on adventures with them and smiled and laughed with them. But they’d often told him that she was always so happy to see him, and he didn’t want to stop. He felt that it would be abandoning her, even if it was to their capable hands. (Not that she needed looking after by anyone really, but no matter what she was, she was still human enough to be a social creature, and to be sad that she would always outlive her friends, even him one day).
He said all this, and she smiled that smile of hers.
“This is all true.” She looked out the viewport, and he thought he could see the stars reflected in her eyes. She had seen some of them born. She would probably see some of those same stars die.
“Oh my friend, you can return to your time and be my friend there until the end of your life, and know that you will, and you already have, brought me much joy and happiness. That will be enough.”
He knew what she wasn’t saying. That it would only be enough because it had to be. “I know.” Was all he said.