@joe.jones | 10 july

[malta]

What do people do for hobbies around here? Aside from volunteering for medical torture.

Has Victorian flower languages come back in style yet? Bookbinding and leathercraft seems obsolete by now, but what about backgammon or cards. I once lost a game of trappola to the Duchess of Ferrara, she was shark. Scrabble? Does that work with the translator? Pomme de terre is about twice as many points as potato.

[ please enjoy that this translates to "potato is about twice as many points as potato" unless you also speak french.

anyway joe is bored come talk to him ]

Who wants to bring fencing back in fashion?

Comments

[notathreat]

Me too. Spoiled.

[Ellie can't help the smile, thinking back -- bittersweet, but still good.]

When I was a teenager, a friend and I found this kid's camp with a ton of craft supplies, still intact. We came up with all these brushes and paint sets, colored paper and scissors. She made me a paper crown for my birthday. I used the paint set until it was nothing but pans.

[malta]

[ joe is pretty sure she is still a teenager but IN ALL HONESTY he doesn't know what teenagers look like anymore so he doesn't say anything. maybe she is exactly 20, maybe she is 93.

who.

knows.

his smile is full of warmth, even if his eyes hold some number of questions he is debating asking. why wouldn't the art supplies be intact, what does she mean by kid's camp. he doesn't know if he wants to darken the moment asking. maybe once her tea is done. ]

There is this one orange pencil from a set I found in Berlevåg, it was perfect for sunsets. I lost it somewhere in Prague and tore the safe house apart looking for it.

[ a week later nicky returned from a "job" and miraculously "found" the pencil under the floorboards because he'd gone back to berlevåg and bought every orange pencil so joe could have That Perfect Orange forever. ]

Roundabout when is your birthday?

[notathreat]

[SHIT SHE'S NOT EXACTLY SURE aren't twentieth birthdays supposed to come with more fanfare? Who knows. But she can see the questions even past the sweetness in Joe's eyes, knows that she looks young, and tries to pick out an answer.]

I'm twenty. Ish.

[It's a weird way to answer the unspoken question, but she shakes her head, just imagining that orange. For sunsets it'd have to be rich and perfect, with golden undertones, or brick reds.]

Here's hoping we find something like that here.

[Ellie leans back, shrugs both shoulders upward.]

June. But I couldn't actually tell you what the date was where I came from. The last time I was paying attention, it was late spring, and it could have been three months since then. Could have been six. It was starting to get colder.

What about you?

[malta]

I'm 953. [ a beat ] Ish.

[ his smile goes all crooked and makes him look very much like the young man he once was. ]

The calendars have changed since I was born but it was winter. I was told I was born in the rainy season on a rare cloudless, rainless night, the moon at its peak.

[ his fingers drum against his mug. ] It was June when we died, July? I am not so sure. Nicolò is better at dates than I am. Don't tell him I've forgotten our anniversary again.

[notathreat]

[Ellie's expression flickers, and she rivets her eyes to him, a little wide and a little shocked, but something in gravitates quickly toward acceptance, mostly because the rest of this is so goddamn weird.

At this point, what's an apparent immortal? Until he died, apparently.]

Shit, you look... great.

Fuck if I could keep track of years after that long.

[Which is all awkward, but sincere. Ellie purses her lips, tilts her head.]

Are you... vampires?

[malta]

Well, the years go in order.

[ he believes in her ability to count in order ]

No, no bloodsucking. [ he chuckles though because it is funny that it is so many peoples first thought. ]

We don't really know what we are. Functionally immortal. We all died once and then awoke. Now death only comes to visit without coming to stay.

[ a poetic way to say they still die and it doesn't stick. sure makes what he said about nicky – well i tried to get rid of him and he wouldn't die. – hit a little different. ]

[notathreat]

[Ellie can't help but give a quiet laugh, too. She didn't think so, but hey, had to be asked. Just in case.

It makes Ellie think of the OA, and of her deaths. It's there on the tip of her tongue to ask, but she doesn't. It's not hers to tell.]

Sounds real handy.

[And the second she says it, the rest of it trickles in, the horror of it. Maybe nobody ever has to say goodbye to them, but. They have to say goodbye to everyone else, don't they? Over and over again.]

To... some extent, anyway.

[malta]

It ends eventually, [ joe offers as if to soften the realization in some roundabout way but it is preposterous to try. joe does believe in nicky's faith in their destiny, that they are put on this earth to do good, to help where they can.

but he knows why booker thought it a curse, why andy held herself apart from humanity. he knows why and every couple of centuries he feels the losses too heavily to throw himself headfirst into the ephemeral brightness of humanity. times when he tastes every wasted minute like dust and ash on his tongue. ]

No thing can live forever.

[notathreat]

No eternal absolutes.

[Ellie shrugs. It's both a comfort and a source of pain, but Joe would know better than she would, wouldn't he? She offers him a small smile.]

Are all your friends like you?

[malta]

Depends, I would consider you a friend.

[ and she is not immortal. it's a little bit of fussy hedging but it is no less true. ]

Nicky and I, the family we found for ourselves, yes, they're like us. [ his life and nicky's life a so entwined there is no telling one immortal secret without the other, but joe still feels like andy, booker, and nile should be able to tell their own stories in their own time. ]

[notathreat]

[Ellie's expression flickers, and she glances down at the table. Okay, that's fair. He made paint for her. That's a damn sight nicer of a start than some of her other close relationships.]

Glad you have that. That you're not alone.

[Seems like that would be a special, horrible kind of hell, to be alone.]

[malta]

[ joe's eyes cut to another closed door, another bedroom, but the softness that lingers when he speaks of nicky vanishes. a muscle in his jaw jumps as he consciously works to relax it away. ]

Yes, Nicky and I are very lucky.

[ whilst he manages not to sound furious, there is no missing the sadness that bleeds through the words. he does know they're lucky, he is grateful every day that they managed to grow past their pasts and forge a better future, grateful nicky only ever asked for patience and not forgiveness. ]

It used to take ages to find each other, but it's grown much easier over the centuries.

[notathreat]

[It's not sadness or curiosity or even something knowing that crosses Ellie's eyes, but the recognition is there. What it means to have mixed feelings for someone. She can't begin to untangle what's in Joe's eyes or the hundreds of years of history there, but Ellie knows what can be packed into just six.

That's something they may get to with time, but no doubt it's something deeply painful.]

... did you set something up?

[malta]

Destiny did. We dream of each other. After our first deaths, we awake with dreams of the others like us. Nicky and I, uh — [ he chuckles to himself, pulling a face before ellie gets one of those ridiculous wide smiles again. ]

The dreams stop when we meet each other and Nicky and I, we killed each other.

[ hashtag... ro...mance? ]

But we dreamed of the others. Transport took a lot longer in the 12th century than it takes in the 21st, industrialization is a hell of a thing.

[notathreat]

[Ellie listens, entranced, and even the idea of them killing each other is only a little horrifying. It's plain to see that a million things have happened in those many, many years- she's familiar with what it means to recount something that sounds fucking ridiculous out of context.]

Did you ever find out why you guys in particular?

[malta]

We have theories. [ joe. joe has theories that he tends to like his baby children. ]

There were three of us, before Nicky and me. It was different then, empires rose and fell within lifetimes, wars were about resources and territories, expansion, and the immortals born from it were warriors. [ he huffs a breath like a laugh, they're all warriors, but andy and quỳnh were a whole different level. ]

The Crusades changed war entirely. Not just war, but life. Art and philosophy, religion, writing. People still use the rationale of the Crusades even now. You should see how annoyed Nicky gets when someone is called a crusader for whatever cause, like it's a good thing.

[ IT'S NOT ]

Nicky and I are particularly well suited to spotting that rhetoric. After us it was a man who came of age during the French revolution, we've been up to our eyeballs in revolutions ever since.

[ now there is nile but she is still so new and so young, joe doesn't want to involve her in this theorizing. he has of course, theorized. nile is a child of the internet, she knows how to find people, that was her job. war has morphed into technological warfare, wars fought by people separated by distance and connected by the web. intelligence far beyond what any of them have done in their tiny resistance groups across so many wars. ]

Nicky says we're here to do good and the why doesn't matter. If we can do good that's reason enough. [ a hum that bleeds into a smile. ] My love is a very smart man.

[notathreat]

[History isn't Ellie's strong point; she has a sixth grade education at best, and other than the eras of the dinosaurs, her use for practical history is limited. Plus, her history teacher was a real dick.

But she's riveted to his explanation, sweeping though it is, watching his face with quiet eyes and a spinning mind.]

He's probably right, but... I mean, humans are always asking that question. It's what everybody's obsessed with here, too.

[malta]

It's true. Existentialism is one of the truly human endeavors.

[ maybe foxes and badgers and hummingbirds are really into philosophy, joe doesn't know, but he's been around for so long that he has read countless books and poems and plays about the nature of existence and life itself. it never changes, one's desperation to find a place for themselves in the world. ]

We all want to find somewhere to belong, why we're here seems to be the first question.