Chapter Text
You have been living forever.
It wasn’t very often that you went throwing the ‘f-word’ around, because “forever” insinuated that you knew for a fact that the future was infinite or never ending. People loved to say that their love—for example—would last forever, which from person to person, meant wildly different things in your opinion. Some people were referring to their finite version of forever: however long they lived and maybe into whatever afterlife they believed in. No matter what happened when they were living, that love was going to last until they physically couldn’t love anymore. Some people were really referring to forever—that people would remember just how in love they were and that love would exist until there was no one to remember it. You hated that word and its accompanied ambiguity. You had no idea what the future had to offer.
You also did not care for the word living in your case. You are and have been a firm believer in the idea that in order to live, you had to eventually die. Otherwise…you weren’t really living at all. So when you came to the conclusion that you could not die, you forcibly settled on the idea that you weren’t living either. Sometimes you allow yourself to separate certain periods of time as ‘lifetimes’, defining it on where you resided, what you did, and the different identity you would take on. It was just more organized that way. Your feelings about the word life versus forever were staggeringly different in intensity, though. It wasn’t as annoying to say you were living. You most often settled on saying that you exist, however. That was simple enough and irrefutable in your mind.
You were forced to face the philosophy of your own situation after you did not die for the very first time.
You lived in Mesopotamia as a child and you could vividly remember the gentle hands of your mother showing you how to make and stitch together fabric. You had been living once. You could still feel breath in your chest and the beating of a heart. You could still feel pain. You were living and breathing for all you knew. Flesh and blood. Just like when you were young.
You could not remember your mother’s face and it felt as though you could not see her when you looked in the mirror anymore. Time, plentiful but heavy and overbearing, had changed your face and your body slightly here and there, but it was enough to feel unrecognizable when trying to look all the way back. Your father had been absent for some time, having passed when you were little. Your mother had not remarried and it weighed on you both as you grew up. You had promised that you would find a man to marry. The cloth sales had been enough to feed you and her until you were physically developed enough to be married. You had been unfortunately unsuccessful in finding someone for the longest time. With no patriarch of your family, no one was willing to take you in and make you a wife. You had wept, knowing that what had to be done…could not.
By some sort of miracle, you did find a man who was willing to pair with you. You couldn’t remember his name for the ‘life’ of you, which made you actually chuckle now. You were wildly independent because you had to be. It hadn’t been very much time at all before he cast you out. You had been unable to give him children. You didn’t know why you had been cursed that way. In an attempt to support your mother, you sold the cloths as well as your body. That was all you really could do. It was unsuccessful really, as your mother had died uncomfortably and left you all alone. You tried your best to carry on in grieving, wishing that you might die as well. It would be so much simpler. You had laid in a small river one evening when everything was quiet, water filling your ears. You thought that you might just let yourself run out of air. It stung and felt full, despite your lungs being left empty. You forcibly sat up, clothes sopping with frigid river water. You had no idea what stopped you from just letting yourself drown.
You reached an age that many people did not. Mesopotamian people did not have a calendar or sense of time like there was now, but you had determined that you had lived to approximately 30 years of age. Somehow. You had been desperate to find some sort of income and had learned to dance in busy areas so that you might drum up business for your services or have someone donate you some kind of item. You had managed to dance for a while before your acts of adultery caught the eyes of the temple. Priests had called you to stand before them while they decided what your fate might be. Adultery by women at that time was forbidden, moreso for the married women of that time. However, it was still revered as disgusting, and your lewd dancing posed an issue the temple had never faced before.
They quickly sentenced you to death and you wished that you could say you had been torn up about it, but you really weren’t. They had set you on fire, what a way to go. It was painful, as anyone could imagine. That sinking feeling in one’s stomach in horrid anticipation of what was to come. And then just blinding…searing…burning. It had gone on for much too long before you recalled passing out. You thought, before that moment, that you were finally there. A moment before death.
However, you had woken up in a sea of still bodies. Some burnt, some whole but cut up, some basically skeletons already. You screamed bloody murder once coming to the realization. The bodies wracked up quicker than they were buried, if they were to be buried at all. Some souls, they did not want to pass into the afterlife. There were no burns on your body. You were completely unscathed. Someone had come and found you while you were shaking and sobbing. Unable to fathom how you were alive and well--physically--that person had dropped to their knees before you. Mutters spilled from their mouth, bowing their head to keep from gazing at you.
You had cheated death.
Things were blurry after that. People thought of you as a goddess and worshipped you. They also feared you as such. For that time, you were fed and bathed, paid visits by anyone who got a chance to see you and ask for your blessing, and praised by the priests of the temple. You also thought it was a great gift from an actual god. You knew well enough that you were not a goddess or god of any kind. You were just given a chance to avoid death. Just once.
However, you did not age from that point on. You continued to live as people began to wither away around you. You still felt that anguish and you still felt hunger pangs and you still felt the pain of a cut or bruise. Inexplicably inhuman in a human body. No matter the things gifted to you by your people, the hole in your chest still remained. No matter the praise or the love. Nothing mattered. You just didn’t understand why your mother had suffered and died before you could’ve gotten to this point and at least shared this with her. You didn’t understand why she died and you didn’t. It felt wrong to be comfortable and enjoy the gifts showered each day beyond your escape from death.
You could remember the day the temple bestowed a veil upon you. That was the main thing that your mother and you used to make for the upper class. At that time, wealthy women were required to wear veils to ensure men knew they were available for marriage. Those women were the best choices at the time. You had asked why they wanted you to wear a veil, you were not a commodity because they believed you were a goddess. You weren’t human, you couldn’t bear children. It was still a mark of status and they had insisted.
The period of time that you had been a goddess was short before the temple insisted that they would bring you their choice of men. You had several suitors over those hundreds of years. You didn’t even want any in the first place, but you were scared and took them anyway. It was uncomfortable to say the least. At least you could share some wealth with them. After more years, they began to sacrifice people for you. You had begged them not to. It seemed backwards, a title of ‘goddess’ but you were still forced to grovel. Then the people of new generations became suspicious of you after a while and you fell from your place of high status. You had no other divine powers besides existing so long.
You just fled.
You hopped from place to place and took on new identities as you could. It was better to stay on the move to keep yourself safe. You had been doing that for nearly all of your 6000 years. No room to get tired of doing it all. It was impossible to do so. Upon fleeing the first time, your curiosity grew as to exactly what your condition was. You had been stung when your people turned on you, which stemmed into the morbid curiosity of whether you could die or not. Perhaps it was just the one time and you had not made the most of it. Perhaps it was your time now.
You tried. You really did. Dozens of times, all different ways.
Your first thought was to find a river, as you had once before. It was unsuccessful. Painful, but unsuccessful. Second was a high jump. The ground had knocked every last bit of wind from your body and you laid in agony for an evening, slipping in and out of consciousness. Upon waking up, you sat up with ease. Your body was fine. You had tried…everything. Even fire again, which you were afraid of at first.
You began to miss your mother even more. It was becoming apparent that this was no gift or blessing. It was your curse.
You eventually settled somewhere new. Alone and with a few things with you, you chopped off all of your hair and bound your chest so that you might pass for a man. You could no longer rely on the way humans ran things. You did this a few times in civilizations or time periods that fell for your disguise. Other times, you had to return to what you already knew best. You would make clothes, try to marry a man, find a way to care for children, or offer sex or dance in exchange for money. You recalled a time in Greece, you had been existing as a woman but had been given the chance to assist Plato himself. When recalling some of the ‘iconic’ time periods you had lived through, you were not blind to the fact that you had somehow been drawn to many places and people that went down in history. You had overheard his many philosophies while providing him with whatever he desired. It was astonishing to see him at work.
Art was particularly up your alley as well. It was one of the many things that you learned about. You had enough time. You learned different styles of painting, sculpting, drawing, etc. Each culture had their own kind of dance for you to pick up. You read and wrote as much as you could, though most of it disappeared anonymously. The only writing you ever carried with you was your journaling, which detailed the different things you had done and lived through. You could mediocrely play any instrument. Perhaps if you had picked just a few and really mastered them it would’ve been better, but you tried to play any instrument you could. Architecture did not go unappreciated by you either. When photography came into existence, you were completely blown away by it. Fashion was an intriguing concept to you as well, which reminded you vaguely of your mother. Film was beyond anything you had anticipated. It was a little difficult to really get into human stories the longer you lived. You tried to pretend like you understood what it meant to be human yourself. You had just been an observer really. At least it felt like it sometimes. On good days, you really felt like you were a part of things. Either way, anything you could get your hands on, you put your all into it the best you could. It wasn’t really official, but you had quite the array of degrees. Learning was important to you. You had to be good at creative problem solving in order to follow along with the times. You experienced a lot of colleges and universities across almost all the continents. You enjoyed space and nature as well. History, English, etc. You didn’t exactly pride yourself on your math skills, that was something that didn’t really click with you. It got confusing with conversions from country to country and different practices. It was too much sometimes. You also avoided figuring out how the human body worked. The brain? Sure. But your body was an enigma, so studying the differences between yours and everyone else’s made you feel awful. It didn’t seem very different anyways, so what was the point?
If you had to be by yourself for all eternity, which it seemed like that would be the case, you were going to make the most of it. Curse or not, there were advantages. You tried to exist as honestly as you possibly could, but that was impossible. You had to lie in creative ways to keep shuffling through your ‘lives’ and starting over. You had figured out several different ways to essentially give yourself money, enlist yourself in classes, etc. You lied whenever you had to. You still found yourself various jobs and sold antique items from your past. Your cyclical system now has most of its kinks ironed out. You bought and sold homes with the amount of money you had and worked to add to your reserves. You never rented. It got tricky when people seemed to switch from sovereign power to biopower. It was Foucault, the philosopher, who had coined those terms. You had been there for that. You were so deeply ingrained into philosophical ideas that you had to understand it. It was impossible not to. Rather than a king or queen or ruling power just picking out people to die (like your first attempt at death), it was an elite group that kept records of everyone and everything. Their division of resources and their influence on cultural ideals decided what kind of person would die, through the cultural elimination of that horde of people. Ignoring or withholding resources. It was…enraging to say the least.
Now, you had a trail following you.
However, you prided yourself on your wisdom and your creative thinking. So you managed to get by under the radar. It was strange, picking a new place and posing as your own descendant, but that was just how it was. You had to get used to it. You were in the habit of passing your human life or trail onto yourself, with a new name or change in your look. You had to be a chameleon, or face the consequences of the humans around you for as long as you existed.
You tried to promise yourself that you wouldn’t get attached to anything. No place or person or thing. You failed and broke that promise a few times, but that failure was solely your fault. You knew that and couldn’t get too broken up about it. You just had to endure the pain.
Quite a few of those slip ups were places. One thing was you couldn’t return to some places for a long time. In the unfortunate event you grow to like something, you’d have to leave it behind and most likely it would be gone by the time you crawled back there. You found yourself craving far too many restaurants that didn’t exist anymore. Another thing was the nostalgia you felt for a time period. Your favorite time periods included ancient Greece and Rome, the renaissance, revolutionary periods, the romantic period, the victorian period, and pretty much each of the decades of the 1900s. Every time period had their own unique challenges. Living through the black death had been uncomfortable to say the least. You could still get ill and feel awful, but after the initial bout, your ‘immune system’ managed to get rid of it as if it had never been there in the first place. Physically it was gone, but the mental impact remained intact. Existence was exhausting and you had to do it for so…long. Mentally, you were 6000 fucking years old. Getting sick for the thousandth time was not an exaggeration. Wars put a huge damper on things, as one would expect. You didn’t get that impending doom feeling that you would die when war was going on, obviously, but it still sent you spiraling to know that you might end up totally alone. If the entire world disappeared, would you keep on existing? That idea sent a chill down your spine.
You didn’t get why it bothered you so badly, after all these centuries. It wasn’t like you were social. You forcibly removed yourself from the societies you moved through. You were essentially a ghost. That was another reason why you didn’t like to say you were living. You didn’t consider yourself human anymore, despite having to experience every shitty thing humans endured. Humans were social, that’s one of the things that made them different from a lot of other animals. At least, with language and everything. You didn’t know how to be a person. It was ironic, considering you were so old. You had stripped the opportunity to practice that from yourself. It made you feel safer. Like shit, but safer. The romantic period as one of your favorites was horrifically embarrassing when you considered all that irony and lack of humanity.
You hated to admit it, but you just couldn’t help admiring the beautiful things humans had to offer. You wanted so badly to be a pessimist and you were sometimes, but there were just things that made you think that maybe…you were somehow the most human person to ever exist. Sitting on a park bench with the feeling of crisp air at your face and sneaking under your jacket. Seeing a loving couple walk past, hands intertwined. The recent shift in weather, fresh at your nose. The silence when you close your eyes. Distant music and faint, warm lights from a celebration a ways to your left. It was all just so…
You didn’t have a word for it. After all this time, you didn’t. It made your chest hurt. That’s why it bothered you so much. Humans and Earth were what you had gotten used to and if those were gone, you’d wither away into boredom or not existing at all. You weren’t an active social agent, but being here had left a giant impact on you.
You were just afraid. Forever afraid.
There you went, using the ‘f-word’. It was like you couldn’t make up your mind. You had been in Soho for some odd years. You had been in London before, a few times actually. You quite liked it. You had been drawn to England when Shakespeare had been writing and then several times during the 1900s. The 1920s and 60s were particularly interesting times. You weren’t sure what brought you here now. You had bought an apartment and moved your few things in. Moving was actually a special skill you had now. You needed to find a job to keep you from getting bored and give you some padding.
You thought about an art museum or finding a theatre to work for. Exploration of work was typical for you but there were places that you knew you would be alright at for a while. A job was at the forefront of your mind right now, along with the fact you needed to get a new jacket before it got really cold. Sometimes, little things like that slipped your mind while trying to keep your chameleon lifestyle running smoothly. That jacket did slip your mind when you were walking down an unfamiliar street in Soho. It was raining and you had an umbrella, but you were pretty much soaked anyway. The rain wasn’t too cold and that weather certainly didn’t remind you that you would need a warm coat. You also immediately got distracted by a sight along your walk.
Across the road there was a shop: A.Z. Fell and Co. Purveyor of Books to the Gentry. It was a beautiful building, a door directly facing the rounded street corner. The writing was in beautiful gold lettering against a deep brick red color. The building was not bricks on the bottom, though. It had gridded windows, much like a telephone box, and the front door was framed with concrete columns. In one small square of window was a ‘help wanted’ sign.
Completely empty handed and unaware of what the job might entail, you meandered across the street and up to the door.
Why not?