On The Wagon

[finch]

I wouldn’t have asked him. Never. I didn’t even think it was possible. I assumed, instead, that he would ask me to join him.

If he’d asked me right away I would have said yes without hesitation. As I studied with him, I started to waver. Buddhism was not easy for me to grasp, but even I could understand that immortality was right out unless you were enlightened and hanging around to help other people, and I was not the bodhisattva type.

There was karma, and the wheel, and all that stuff Jian had explained to me. Immortality just didn’t seem right, put up against all that.

“Are all elemental masters immortal?” I was seventeen when I asked him, just a few weeks from leaving him for the first time, though I didn’t know it. Immortality seemed impossibly abstract.

Jian nodded. It looked like I’d caught him in an explanatory mood. “The first characteristic of an elemental master is his ego, Blaser. Otherwise we could not control the powerful beings that make us what we are. And what person of sufficient ego to master this path wouldn’t think himself important enough to the grand scheme of things to stick around a few hundred years? Feng’s monks believe in the wheel, but we believe we are above the wheel.”

I remembered that for a long time.

Even after I left and he found me in San Francisco, years later. Even after he told me I was welcome…

Even when he finally took me into his bed.

He never asked, and at first I worried that he wasn’t going to keep me around long enough to care if I was aging and he wasn’t. Then I thought maybe he wanted me to figure it out on my own, like it was some kind of test. I thought about nanotechnology, but I worried he might think that was cheating. I studied some alchemy, trying to get a sense for what was out there.

Slowly I started to realize that I didn’t want him to ask me.

In the end, what triggered it was me making some joke at my own expense, about what people would think about our ages – I was almost thirty, and he was still in his late teens. People were looking at me like I was the cradle robber in the relationship.

Jian stared at me for a long time before he spoke, long enough that I wondered if I’d upset him with the joke. “That… that’s true. I lose track of time in this place, Robin. Here, fifteen years might pass without my noticing.”

He hesitated. “Have I truly known you half your life?

I nodded.

“Do you wish to be immortal, Robin?”

I bit my lip. “If you-”

“No. Not what I want. Answer the question.”

“…No.” I’d failed him again, chickening out after all the work he’d put into me. I almost cried. “Part of me wants to so badly, Jian, but there’s things. I mean. After everything about Ragnarok and the worst of the end of the world, I’d feel like I was undoing it all. And there’s the wheel and the cycles and that’s important, right? You were the one who taught me that was important.”

I waited.

He nodded, slowly. “I’ve known people, Robin. Even some I loved. I watched them age and pass, or I watched them learn to resent me for not aging. I don’t know that I can do that again.”

I waited for him to say that he was sending me away.

“When I’m with someone I… care for, I like to leave my nowhere and rejoin the world so that I might appreciate each day for a few years. We will go somewhere you choose, and I’ll catch up on what I’ve missed in the last twenty years or so.”

I nodded stupidly.

“And assuming you’re not tired of me, I’ll release the Dragon and resume aging along with you.”

“… What?”

“Were you not listening?”

I forced myself to breathe.

“You- are you doing this for me?”

“Would it be so strange if I was? We have not been together for all of it, but I’ve known you fifteen years. How long is enough?”

“I just, it’s surprising.”

“You don’t think you’re worth it?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“You are, boy. But if it makes you feel better, I’ve wanted to do this anyway. I’m tired of being an immortal lord of a nowhere land. Time is slippery there; I feel I’ve been waiting far more than a century. But I would rather die here, where people actually live.”

I blinked stupidly.

“Would you like to join me for that, Robin?”

“I. Yes. Oh god, yes.”

“I thought you’d say that,” he smirked, and a whole new future opened up in front of me.

Mirrored from Jack-a-dreams.