THE FIRST TIME they are young, and inexperienced, and the guardian’s name is Rei. She picks up the sword, too big for her, the tip wavering back and forth in her shaking hands, and sets her shoulders and goes to fight. She’s the chosen one, they’ve told her. She’s going to strike down the biggest evil this world has ever seen.
It is a good thing, then, that the scourge of the world is a ten year old boy with dark hair and eyes too big for his face. He is sitting, expression defiant, at the edge of a burning wood, sparks jumping from his fingers. She lifts the sword; she does not hesitate. She does not hesitate.
THE SECOND TIME they are teenagers, in a different world. Rei does not have a name this time, or at least not one she prefers, and the boy, the scourge of the world, is back, and ready, all snarling teeth and burning hatred. Already, he has besieged temples, slaughtered women and children, ravaged sacred forests. Rei-- or the girl who used to be Rei-- sees what he would have become in the first world, and she knows she made the right choice.
They meet in a castle of a lord that once ruled over the land with generosity and a fair hand. He is standing at the parapet, looking out over the horror he has wrought, and when he turns around, there is a dagger in his hand.
“Tell me your name before I kill you,” he says, but he is nothing more than a boy with a face speckled with acne and she is the chosen one.
“Rei,” she says, because it is the only name she has ever loved.
When she plunges her sword into his chest, he makes a strange gasping noise, like he is surprised. His hands go to the blade, wrap around the metal, until blood runs down them, from where his fingers have been cut. His mouth forms the shape of the word how-- but he dies just the same.
THE THIRD TIME she is seventeen and he is twenty-three. She grows up knowing she will be the one to defeat him, the overlord who has ruled over the world since she was eleven, that the prophecies whisper her name. They call her Brianna, now, but it has never felt like her. She feels whispers of another life tugging at her hair, coiling the strands around their fingers, humming that she was something else, once, something more.
She meets him by accident, in the market. There is no mistaking his eyes, his hair, but she does not look the same as she did, once, and he is not expecting her to still be a child.
He is there to deal with taxes, or rather, the lack of them-- someone has not been paying. He makes a surprised noise when she runs into his chest, reaches out and steadies her. She has never touched him, before, never felt the shock of knowledge in the fact that his skin is warm, that he feels human.
“Best watch where you’re going,” he says, and she giggles and looks up at him through her bangs.
“My apologies, m’lord,” she says, and dips into a curtsy. He looks at her, something strange in his eyes, as if he knows who she is. She hardly knows who she is; only the barest of recognition flared through her when she saw him. It is her destiny to kill him; she does not know it has always been her destiny, time and time again.
“What is your name?” He asks.
“Bri,” she says, and she does not know why she abbreviates it. She has never gone by a nickname; this time, it feels right. “What is yours?”
He stares at her for a long while; she wonders when the last time someone asked for his name was. Wonders when the last time he was called by it, and not just ‘liege’ or ‘m’lord.’
“Jaxs.” It is the name of a boy, the name of a commoner. It is not the name of the man destined to ruin the world. He is looking at her strangely, still, as if he is not quite sure what he is seeing.
“Something wrong, m’lord?” She asks, and tells herself get out of here. It is not time, not yet, you do not have a weapon, you do not have a--
“You remind me of someone I used to know,” he says, and her stomach flops a little. “Her name was Reis.”
It does not all come back immediately. She goes home, shaken, but fine, still alive, because he did not guess who she was. That night, when she goes to sleep, she remembers it all-- the ten year old boy, the teenager, the twenty-three year old Jaxs. In the morning, when she wakes, she wonders if that has been his name all along.
The third time, she does not kill him. He is struck down by a falling tree branch, and she pretends that she is not grateful for it.
THE FOURTH TIME she kills him before he is old enough to walk.
THE FIFTH TIME they meet on the plains of a battle field, and she does not realize until later that she is the one who killed him, seven of her arrows in his chest.
THE SIXTH TIME they are the same age. It is the first time in any of the reincarnations that a gap does not exist between them; the first, he was young. The second, she was fourteen and he was nineteen.
The sixth time, she finds him weeping in the ashes of the most sacred church in the land, covered in coal and dirt, tears leaving strange, soot-streaked lines down his face. She thinks I could kill him now and she thinks his name is Jaxs.
She rests a hand on his shoulder, and he jumps at the touch, body thrumming with energy. She can feel his power, she can feel the lithe, cordy movement of his muscles beneath her hand, can feel the instinctive way he holds himself, frozen, not daring to move.
“Jaxs,” she says, and he exhales, a rough, throaty noise.
“So you remember, then,” he says, and she wonders if his voice has always sounded like that. “You didn’t, the last time we spoke.”
They have not spoken in three cycles; she finds herself relieved he still thinks of it. “It has been a long time, since then.”
“A couple hundred years.” Still, he makes no motion to get up. She wonders if he is hiding a dagger in his clothes, then chides herself. He doesn’t need a dagger. He is magic. He could kill her on the spot.
It is a miracle she has survived this many cycles. “What are you doing?” She asks because she needs to know. Needs to know what could make the scourge of the land cry like that.
He doesn’t tell her, right away, but he doesn’t move away, either, or kill her. When he does speak, it’s to say: “Waiting to die.”
It is a strange answer. She thinks of the knife in her belt, of the sword, of the crossbow on her back. She could have killed him by now. “Don’t you have a world to conquer?”
“Not this cycle,” he says, and he leans back against her. It is a strange feeling, to have the Scourge leaning against her legs, like they are friends, like they are not in a burning building. “This cycle is to set up for the next.”
It is the first indication she has that perhaps something will change between them. “So you’re not going to be so nasty, this one?”
“No,” he says. “I would like to live past twenty five for once, I think. I will do my preparation, and when I arrive next, everything will be in place.”
She wonders why he is telling her this, for a moment, before her brain hooks on another one of his words. “Past twenty-five?”
“I never have before,” he says. “I feel it would be a type of novelty.”
She has lived past twenty-five in all of the cycles. There were only two where she didn’t die of natural causes, as a hero. She has married men, and had children, and watched her children’s children grow up. Even if she has never devoted herself entirely to them, knowing that her soul is forever tied to another, she has had a family.
She sits down next to him. She feels his surprise when she does, but he lets her, lets her lean their shoulders together.
“We are tied,” she says. “Your soul and mine.”
His head drops to lean against hers. When he lifts his hand and rests it on her knee, his fingertips are sparking with the bright green of magic. “You are destined to kill me,” he says, “every single life.”
Sometimes, she has allowed herself to wonder what his magic would feel like. She has felt other’s; vibrant in the night, buzzing like a caught bird between them.
She reaches out and covers his hand with hers. It hums, not entirely unpleasant, against her skin, small fireworks, trailing sparks in their wake. He looks up at her.
She is not sure who leans in first; she only knows that they kiss, that when she drives the dagger between his ribs, she feels the breath leave his lungs.
THE SEVENTH TIME he does not remember. It is a cruel trick of fate, that he is not able to utilize his careful planning, that she is able to snuff out the life in him without seeing even the barest hint of familiarity in his eyes.
It makes it hurt just a little less.
THE EIGHTH TIME he comes for her. They are the same age, again, in this reincarnation, but she cannot bring herself to raise her blade against him. Not anymore; not again. He has lived past twenty-five in this cycle; she has let him, biding her time on a small island, in an even smaller hut. She knows he will come. Their souls are tied.
He does, in a boat so black against the horizon, it may as well be an inkblot. It doesn’t surprise her that he has come alone, that when he dismounts, she finds the only thing powering the ship was his magic, green and buzzing in the water. She remembers what it feels like.
“You didn’t come looking for me,” he says, and there is something bare in the words, something like sorrow.
“You had already conquered the world by the time you were fourteen,” she says. “I figured that it would take you a little longer to bring on the end of times.”
He is holding a knife in his hand; she recognizes it as the same one she killed him with when they kissed. He went back and retrieved it, then. The thought aches. Just a touch. “I didn’t last long after you, in that cycle,” she says.
He knew that; she can see it in his eyes, in the way he sighs. “What about the next?”
“That one hurt less.”
He is approaching, coming across the sands with a low, even stride. His hair, in all the cycles, has always been the same. His eyes, the color of jade. He is near enough that the blade presses against her sternum. Their breaths come and fall in sync. “Did it,” he asks. Swallows. “Did it always hurt?”
It is a ridiculous question to ask; she was never the one who was killed. Now, she will be. Now, she takes a deep breath and feels the tip of the dagger prick her skin. “Yes.”
He pushes it in, just a little further. She could stop him. She could take it from him, drive it into his chest. The Universe would let her; it is why she is here. “Will it hurt?”
“Yes,” she says, and then she pauses. “We will not meet again, I imagine.” Perhaps the Universe wanted him to win. Perhaps that was why it gave him so many chances and her only one.
If she dies, she is dead. Forever. They both know it, just as much as they know that she will let him kill her.
He leans forward and kisses her, the air alive with electricity, the air alive with the weapon between them. She grabs a fistful of his sleeve and kisses him back, pushing every thought of I am not ready to die I am not ready to die I am not ready to die into the action, until she cannot think anything else.
The knife clatters onto the stone between them; they both ignore it; they both ignore what it means.
THE NINTH TIME she finds him when they are twenty and they conquer the world together. She pretends that this is what the Universe wanted, that she is not betraying every good thing she ever fought for. She will kill him in the next cycle, she tells herself.
THE TENTH TIME she pretends she does not like the feeling of his magic against her skin; the eleventh time, he knows her too well for that.
