Prompt: Reincarnation Characters: Seamus and Lisa in several iterations. Universe: EL-based. Setting: Spanning time and space over the course of centuries. Summary: A tour through some past lives. Rating: PG
When they first met, the world was young. Her curls were not shiny gold, but instead a deep ebony to match her skin. She looked so different then, but no less beautiful to his eyes. It was her easy laughter that drew him to her, because he knew her life had not been easy and yet she laughed nonetheless. He fell in love with her laughter, and she made him laugh too, for all his life.
When they met again, she knew he had no place in her world. She was a daughter of the Emperor’s court; he was a slave beaten all too often for insolence. She should never have spoken to him. The fact remained that she did, and he spoke back, and she found his wit as charming as her father found it loathsome. He even had a joke before he fell to the executioner’s blade for overstepping his bounds.
His next life was quiet, peaceful, and safe. He married, he had children, he died in his bed as an old man. He was happy, with just the tiniest question that maybe he was not so happy as he could have been. He never knew her then.
They met at court, and he thought himself too old for her. She was young and vibrant, while he had already buried a wife and a child and countless friends on the battlefield. An innocent girl such as she had no place with a man like him, scarred outside and in. But when her father suggested the match, how was he to refuse? He was puzzled that she never objected, and at first he distrusted her willingness. She came to him happily, though, and when the nightmares of battles long lost and won shook his sleep, she would quietly hold him until they passed. Then, he thought perhaps she was not so young as she seemed.
They met once more, and it was the talk of the village how she was head over heels for him. “You silly thing,” they all told her. “He’ll never look twice at you, Bookworm.” She was a tenacious girl, though, and there was no telling her once she’d made up her mind. Eventually she simply made him look, and once he did he never looked back. There was never another for him after she passed, despite the fact that he was still far from an old man.
In a life alone, she stays alone. She does not marry. She devotes herself to her craft, and lives are saved because of it. She is not one to settle, and without her other great love, healing takes up all her soul.
When they last met, it was in a bookshop. She didn’t know he cared much for reading. He didn’t know she had a sense of humour. It didn’t take them long to find out, and once again they came together. …and this time, the odds look good for a happy ending.