Echoes of Eternity

There was nothing left to say.

Years hung around her neck, heavy as an old mill stone. The kind of stone she had never seen. Yet she wore those years as a Queen might her crown. To say that one aged with dignity would be to compare them to her, and the comparison would be weak.

Her hand, liver spotted and frail, clutched his with surprising strength. Surprising only to those who had never known her. Courage and an iron will still glittered in her eyes as she looked up at him from her bed. She gifted him a smile, and in that smile, he saw the woman she had been. Saw the beauty in the woman she was.

Raising her hand to his lips, tears falling on the thin, papery skin, he kissed her fingers. It had always been so between them. Neither harboured regret save for the years spent apart. His lips on her fingers reminded her of bright days made warmer by the light of fond remembrance.

She had known he would come to her as she lay dying. Known too that she had nothing to say to him, no forgiveness to grant or ask. That he had come said enough for them both, and the tears that streaked his face as he looked down at her said still more.

Love is beautiful, made more so by its rarity in a world that had lost its meaning. Yet she remembered. Remembered because he had shown it to her, taught her to love a pure and unselfish love that lasted long after he departed. That love had carried her through the years that followed and that she in turn gave to her husband and their children.

Always inside, deep in her heart beside the decades spent with Thomas before he passed and their children, shone the memory of times gone by. Days and blissful nights with the man now sitting beside her.

So short their time together had been. The years short in the scale of her life, and more so in the scale of his. He had thought to spare her from the knowledge. Though only to protect her from the agony of loving him too much. And so, he had. How she had cursed him for going, yet how much worse it would have been to pass her life with one who could not do the same with her.

His deep brown eyes and curling black hair were just as they had been that summer’s night decades before. She smiled then, remembering that night, watching his heart break just a little bit more.

It had been a joyous time, close to completing her undergrad at Queen’s, she had gone to a festival. All around her light and music, laughter and dancing. People celebrated the end of term, the coming of summer, and for some of them, the culmination of their time in school.

On that first meeting, they had said barely a thing to each other. Lost in the moment, the joy of living. But time passed, as it always does, and slowly they grew closer together.

For a time, they had been happy. Day by day, week by week, month by month. She had learned what it meant to really love. Throughout the rest of her life, even after that crushing day when he went away, after the rage and confusion of his leaving, she remembered him fondly. Those halcyon days together.

And today he looked just the same standing beside her. Curly black hair and gleaming dark eyes. Skin glowing with youth and health, the smile that shone through the tears as he looked down at her where she lay. Just the same as she remembered, as though he had stepped out of a photo from summers past.

As though the years had forgotten to include him in their passing.

Gil tried to apologize, the words catching in his throat before his voice could give them shape. But she knew what he meant to say, she could see the years weighing him down just as they did for her. Though his own millstone stood infinitely larger.

There was pain in his eyes. Those same wonderful eyes she had come to love a lifetime before. An old pain and not for the first time since his parting, she wondered how many times he had been forced to say goodbye. Wondered how many faces he must see when he looked at her. Wondered how he could stand it.

Taking her frail, bony hand in his own strong, trembling one, he pressed it to his lips. The first drops of tears for another one lost to him splashed against her papery skin. It broke her heart to see him this way, the man whom she'd loved and once thought to grow old with.

His eyes begged her for forgiveness. Asked her not to blame him for his weakness in loving her so very long ago. But there was nothing to forgive and nothing left to say except goodbye.

Reaching up he stroked his head, a head that had once worn a crown in the brave days of old. How regal he had always seemed to her when first she knew him, before she learned to see the weight of time that hung around his neck. The gentle pain in his eyes as he looked at her, as though counting down the days until he would be forced to leave.

He was King of a land all but forgotten, he hunched over her hand, back shaking with tears that refused to fall. He had said farewell to so many in his life, she knew only the smallest part of his grief, studied long after their parting. She had known he would come to her, hoped it would be soon enough to see his ageless face, just as he had been there for his friend the wild man in ages past.

Gil looked up, looked deep into her eyes and the final piece slid into place. For years she had thought him cold, for longer she had thought the fire of his love long extinguished. But there, buried under the centuries of pain, it shone out at her as bright and clear as it had ever been.

He tried to tell her… but words failed him.

He had told her, through out their years together, that she was a treasure of the ages, a woman without equal. He used to tell her that loved her to the bottom of the ocean and through the long, waking nights. At the time she had assumed it was the kind of lovely nothings couples said all the time, an exaggerated expression of his love for her. But she had learned the truth, worked it out eventually.

Those were the things that had unmade him, reforged him into the man he was. The greatest words of love that he could say. The greatest trials ever undergone, and he would carry his love for her through them all again.

In vain he tried to find the words to tell her that he wished he had never gone away. Tried to explain that if he could do it again, he would never have made that mistake. Tried…

Stroking his cheek, tugging gently on the point of his black beard just as she had done in younger, brighter days, she forgave him. There was no need, not for her. But he did not know how she had lived in the decades since their parting, though they might seem only an instant to him. He did not know that he was forgiven a thousand times over since the wounds his leaving caused had healed. He did not know that she had long since learned who and what he was, and loved and accepted him even if it was only as a memory. A ghost of a man who had come into her life and left it again.

She knew he could not have stayed with her, eventually she would have noticed that he didn’t age. Eventually she would have seen him, young and healthy as the day they had met and been unable to stop herself growing to resent it. It was only human, and he had been alive long enough to have learned that at terrible cost.

Her eyes closed as his strong, brown hand cupped her cheek and his lips touched her forehead for the barest moment.

When she opened her eyes again, he stood in the door to her room, coat over his arm and hand raised in a silent farewell. Then he was gone, leaving only a final memory to add to her collection if only for a brief while.

Minutes passed as she remembered the last time, he had left her. Hand lingering on the door, eyes full of torment she had not then believed, he had tried to say something more then too. But she had been too angry to hear, and he had been unable to say.

Looking down at her own hands, thin, frail, and spotted with age that would never touch Gil, she could still feel his touch against her skin. Still see the small, damp patches where his tears had fallen. Where her own tears fell as she watched.

“Mom,” said a voice from the door, bringing her head up. “My children are here with their families; do you think you're strong enough to see them?”

“Of course, David,” she had toyed with naming the boy Gil, but thought the name and the memories better left in the past. Later, she realized that he was eternal, after all, and needed no help to immortalize his name. Not since the 1870's when his story was translated.

It was good that Gil had come to see her. She could never have dreamed that he would come to say farewell, and yet, just as he had so many decades before, he had been beside her again.

For so long she had thought about what she would ask him if he ever showed his face again. But in the end, there was only love, and nothing more to say.