Archive of Our Own ^beta

Some days are better than others. Some days you wake up to the smell of fresh coffee and the steady tap tap tap of someone with clawed toes being very careful not to bother you. You lie in bed a little longer on those mornings, just relishing in the peace and general lack of pressing emergency. The old house creaks in the breeze, but it doesn’t worry you. You know all its complaints by heart.

Then there are the days when you wake to the smell of burning, the house freezing cold, every window wide open, curtains wrenched back. You fly up and out of the skylight, going high enough just to confirm that nothing is actively on fire, before navigating a slow circle down to the back of the house and in through a torn screen.

The kitchen is a wreck, something burnt beyond recognition in a pot that has half-melted across the stove. You land barefoot on the cold tile and turn the flame off. He’s sitting at the table, hunched in on himself, talking to someone who isn’t there. You say his name but he doesn’t look around. You are no more real to him than anything else he’s seeing.

You put a hand on his shoulder and squeeze as gently as you can. You repeat his name. Gradually, he falls silent and looks up at you, eyes glassy and as red as they have ever been.

Let’s go back upstairs, you say.

The really strange part is he doesn’t look different. At least not until you get really close. Trolls don’t age the way humans do. They don’t wrinkle and their hair doesn’t thin. They don’t shrink or bend with arthritis. You don’t think they can even get it. Their skin changes, though. Hardens and starts to chafe, until it’s like trying to push your fingers against an oak tree. The years go by and the barrier between you gets thicker and thicker. By the end, you wonder if he will even be able to move, of if he’ll be trapped like a lacquered piece of furniture inside his own body.

I have no idea how long I’ll live.

The two of you had flown up to the memorial bell tower—you carrying him around the middle despite his protests—and now you sit with your feet kicked out over the side. Your cape is half in his lap, despite his insistence that he isn’t cold.

I have no idea how long I’ll live. Most rusties don’t make it to 20 sweeps. But I don’t know what the fuck my freak blood is going to do.

Right. There hasn’t ever been something like him before, at least not something that was allowed to live out its life. He’s looking at his hands when he tells you, fingers folded, bright yellow nails bitten down far enough to reveal soft strips of grey flesh at the tips . You tell him that doesn’t matter to you.

Your sister talks to you about it in the way she does, warning you without warning you. She gives you books of myths about gods falling in love with mortals, asks you where you think you’ll be a hundred years from now. You wonder if her tune would be any different if her wife wasn’t one of the walking dead, ageless and perfect until the day they put her in the ground.

You read the books, but when he asks you to marry him you still say yes. You never actually do the thing—there’s no ceremony or party, it isn’t recorded on any bullshit registry anywhere, but the two of you know, and that’s all that matters.

He lives past forty. Well past it. Sometimes you wish that he hadn’t. That he was already gone and you’d have had the last twenty years to get over it. You’ve never said that out loud to anyone else and you don’t think you ever will.

You stand in front of the mirror and look at a face that hasn’t changed in decades, freckles and a thin nose and pointed chin, long eyes that still look a little surprised to see themselves. You’d lost the aviators when you were drunk a few years after your brother died, and you just never bothered to replace them. Your friends gave you a hard time, but after a while the eye contact became addictive, a thrilling dare that you didn’t want to stop giving into. The sun still hurts your eyes, but pain doesn’t mean the same thing to you that it used to. There’s nothing heroic or just about eyestrain.

Sometimes you cut your finger just to see it heal back up. It isn’t the same as it was when you were 13 and sitting in your room while the city got dark around you, dragging the sharp point of a paperclip against the tender skin inside your arm and listening for the unfriendly creaks in the hallway, the approach of something deadly.

Your sister has you over for dinner for your birthday, and you leave him at home. He’d refused to come out of the bathroom, and you didn’t have the energy for a fight. He’s fine by himself, as long as you turn off the gas so he can’t set himself on fire by trying to make chocolate pudding at 1am or something stupid like that.

The cake doesn’t have a number on it, just two candles. It used to be a joke between the four of you to try to get as many candles as possible on your cakes, until they were practically collapsing into an inferno. But you haven’t all gotten together as a group in…you don’t even know how long. You’ll run into each other again, without a doubt.

You watch your sister and her wife navigating around each other in the kitchen, moving like different parts of a machine that has worn down into its grooves. You want to ask them how they’ve managed to hang on to it for so long. How they haven’t gone insane from the oncoming pressure of the future. But maybe they have. Maybe they just don’t show it. You certainly don’t.

When you get home, you know something is wrong. Nothing is on fire, the window’s are shut the way you left them, nothing is broken. But the house is still. Silent. You travel from room to room, heart hovering somewhere between your stomach and your throat. Every threshold you cross you expect to find him, finally gone cold. There is a part of you that hopes for it, one you barely even feel guilty for anymore. You’re just so tired.

He isn’t here. You turn all the lights on in the house, but he isn’t here.

Finally you fly up as high as you can and scour the surrounding hillsides. There are houses dotted here and there, but most of them stand empty. Your closest neighbors are over a mile away. Nobody has ever been rude to your face, but it makes sense that no one would want to live too close to the god of time and his unstable troll boyfriend.

You finally find him halfway to the road, stopped at the crest of a hill, a dark blur against the greenery. He is slumped over on his knees, and for a second you think he’s passed out, but when you fly in closer, you see that his lips are moving. Talking to someone again, the way he used to talk to you.

You touch down in front of him so he doesn’t startle. He might not be as quick as he was and you can’t die, but he’s still from a warrior species.

Hey, you say.

He looks up at you, burnt red eyes going wide. He says your name.

Dave.

It’s the first time he’s recognized you all day.

You stand at the top of the hill and look down at him, watching him struggle to make sense of where he is and how he got there, and you wonder if this is how you will feel one day when you look down at his gravestone. Distant and cold and so tired.

Hey, you say again. Let’s go home.

He gets to his feet. Yeah, he says. Okay.

You take his hand. His skin is rough but it’s as warm as it’s always been. When you pick him up he doesn’t kick up a fuss. It’s been years since he’s yelled just to yell. You miss it.

The cold air beats at you as you rise effortlessly into the air, wind yanking at your t-shirt, thrashing your hair into your eyes. He’s not heavy but it still feels like the weight of him pushes you back down. How far will you rise when that weight is no longer there? When there’s nothing to keep you anchored to the world, or anything inside it?

He closes his eyes. Wake me up when we get home, he tells you.