Um, anyway. Thanks to Lorie for the encouragement. And for the title suggestions/hints. And thanks to Amand-r for the lyrics. I have no idea how I resisted the slash connotations jumping out at me, but it seems I did. This story is distressingly gen in nature....

Oh, and in other pleas, could someone please send me a tube of Muse-B-Cheerful? Between this, omyara, What Might Have Been, and a couple the muse is still working on, I could really do with some!

They all think that I don't like to fight. That I avoid it like the plague.

Probably because most of the time, I do.

It isn't the grey days that get to me. You know the ones, when it's chill and windy and every colour but grey has been bleached from the world. The kind of day you huddle inside your coat and wish it would rain or storm or - something. Anything, just to break the monotony. The sort of day you think you'd be better off never having left your bed; when it's not just the landscape that's decorated in shades of grey but the people, as well. You know the type of day I mean.

Everybody does.

It's early afternoon when we meet. I'm crossing the street for a cup of coffee when the buzz shivers my spine. I glance oh-so-very-casually up and down the pavement. Left, right, left. A generation of school-children chant through my memory; left, right, left, cross the road. What life was that? I haven't taught kids in—oh, a few decades at least. The fifties? It wasn't the early forties; after the war, definitely. Late forties, perhaps?

I narrowly miss getting hit by a car. That would be the perfect end to a perfect day, no? I suppose the centre line isn't really the safest place to identify my fellow immortal from. Certainly this preoccupation isn't the safest mindset. Then again, safety's not exactly uppermost in my thoughts today. You might even say it's the last thing on my mind.

Plenty of days like that in five thousand years. Plenty of years like that, come to think of it. Even a couple decades, continuous grey. SAD, they call it these days. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Happy in the summer, depressed in the winter. Revel in the spring with the renewal of life, hibernate deep inside yourself with the winter and the cold working its insidious way inside you, body and soul. Bask in the sunlight, curl limp and tepid in the frost. Way back when, they just called it sun-worship. Lots of cultures went in for it.

Of course, that's never been my problem.

He's not young, this one. Skilled with his sword I'd wager; there's confidence in his acceptance of my challenge, but not the arrogance of the very young or the very stupid. And not the false bravado of a coward, either. No; a straightforward challenge, this. Two men, two swords, a deserted alleyway. No axes to grind, no private quests, nothing more than the impetus of the Game.

As if that isn't enough.

There are days when the sun shines deep into your soul. When the world is bright and sharp and the colours cut you open, leave you bleeding on the concrete. When memory becomes dream becomes memory, and every person you meet wears a face you knew, once upon a time.

Days like today.

We walk almost companionably to the challenge site we've both marked for this. An alley just down the street; wide enough for free movement, private enough we shouldn't be observed. He moves like a panther, all lithe grace and leashed power. Big, strong, capable. Watching me as I walk by his side; watching me as carefully as I am him. Intelligent too, most likely.

But not intelligent enough to turn down my challenge. One of these days I'm going to read an opponent wrong. But I don't think today is it.

It was a forest totally unlike this place. But there was an oak right outside his cabin with leaves the same shade of green as that one over there, and his daughter had eyes the colour of the pansy brushing against my ankle. She was newborn when I came; scrawny and pink and wailing, eyes that looked unseeing right through you. He was new-widowed, his wife lost in birthing not two days before, and he with no clue what to do with an infant. I stopped to help him, teach him. Within a year, she was my daughter too. We raised her together, there on the edge of the forest. We taught her how the trees lived, where the deer ran, how the water flowed. They were my family, I was theirs. She ran with us and laughed with us and loved with us.

When he died a year past her wedding-day, he took a part of my soul with him. When decades later she too died, surrounded by her husband and children and grandchildren, I left that forest, heartbroken and lost.

It was five hundred years before I could bear to go back. By then, their descendants were untraceable.

The sun is shining, today. It's a pleasant Saturday in summer; the sky is clear, the trees are green, the plants in flower. Mothers walk their children in the park, fathers jog after the balls their kids throw them. There's a team of schoolchildren mobbing the ice-cream vendor, fresh from the soccer field, tussling and chattering in their red team shirts. Dogs bark, kids laugh, babies gurgle.

I want to cry, and my eyes ache from trying. But there are no tears in me anymore.

The pohutakawa blossoms surround her. She's lying on a bed of their needles, and the blood running from her leg blends into the blooms drifting down about her, ruby red. She holds a blossom in her hand, watching it with all the delight of a five year old. Caught, as am I, by such beauty in the midst of such destruction.

I don't remember her name. I don't even remember if I ever knew it.

February, 1931. For the past two weeks she's served me tea in the mornings, smiling and flirting with all the assurance of a pretty fifteen year old. Secure in her family and her life and her place in the world. She shouldn't be here, lying in the street for us to find. She should have been in school, up on the hill. But she wasn't; and when the earthquake came she was pinned alone under a tree instead of buried in the ruins of the school with her friends. When we lift the tree off her, she smiles and thanks us.

She hands me the blossom before she limps away, headed for the nearby Red Cross station. I carry it through all the horror of the days that follow, a tangible reminder of the present in the face of the past that ambushes me at every turn. Too many times I've walked through a city vanquished by nature. Or by men. It makes little difference, in the end. Both leave a city destroyed and crumbling; people stumbling shell-shocked through the streets, crying for loved ones, flinching from the smoke, digging through the rubble. Clutching possessions made all the more important for being all that survived the disaster.

Once upon a time, I would have been up on a pale horse, relishing the chaos and the fear. Gloating on the destruction and the anger and the pain, gorging myself on the misery. Today, it makes me ill.

I hold the pohutakawa blossom in my hand as I stand soul-sick on the deck of the first ship I find heading out of the country. Watch it as carefully as she had, lying serene beneath that tree. But my senses are still fraught with the smells of the fires and the deaths and the grief and the terror, and I cannot find the peace she held.

I let the blossom fall into the ocean, still as bright and cheerful as when she gave it to me with a smile and without a word, days before. Impervious to the horror befallen the city, it drifts away as I watch. As it fades from sight I let the memories fade, too. It's not the first time I've been witness to the destruction of a town, but I carry this vain hope that it will be the last.

At least this time, I wasn't the cause.

The sun is warm on my face. I'm absurdly conscious of this man by my side. This man who may be the death of me, in a moment or two. The weight of my sword hangs solid and comforting against my side, and it crosses my mind that this could be something very like suicide, what I'm about to do. What I've already done.

She wore a dress the exact shade of the sunlight dancing on the water, when we stood on a beach in Santorini and watched the sun come up. On a frozen pond high in the Rockies, she crashed into me and laughed as we both went down. In Paris, she blushed as I asked her to marry me. We spent that night dancing giddy by the Seine, talking softly in the cafes, giggling happy in our bed.

In Geneva, she died.

There are ducks in the pond, mobbing the edges of the water where toddlers throw them bread. Families smile, touch, laugh. The sun sparkles in the water, shines dappled through the trees. There are days when the sun on my skin has been all that's kept me sane and hale and here.

And there are days like today, when the sun shines harsh far inside my soul. When it illuminates all the hidden corners I'd rather not see. When all the scars are clearly visible, highlighting the broken shards that used to be me, once upon a time when that still held meaning.

His were the first arms that ever hugged me as a son hugs his father. His swamp-green eyes, the colour of the pond the ducks and toddlers paddle in today, were the first to regard me with unswerving trust and love. His childhood dreams were the first I ever soothed, his cuts and scrapes and bruises the first I ever kissed better. His adolescent rebellions the first I had to contend with, his growing the first I felt such pride for. My first child. My son.

He's been dead so long, I can no longer tell what is dream and what is memory.

We face off across the alleyway. A cobbled street, uneven ground. Empty of everything but a few piles of garbage, him, and I. The air is heavy, expectant. My sword in my hand is light and eager, and I feel the weight of years lifting from me as I wait and watch. He moves, finally, cat-quick; and I concentrate on where he's moving and on what he's doing and on staying alive; and I try not to see whose face he wears, this man I fight.

I don't care who you are, where you've been, what you do. It's not possible to survive five thousand years and want to live for every moment of them.

Chicken Little with a sword, I've been waiting for the sky to fall.

He draws first blood. It drips steady and draining from a cut on my thigh. The pain is fleeting, irrelevant; the wound soon closed. It's not much of a handicap, not even for the few seconds it's there.

You don't think about much, when you fight. Not if you want to stay alive.

And if I want to stay alive, I need to decide soon, and focus.

Too many faces, today. Too many colours cutting into me, drawing too many memories of too much grief. Too sharp, too bright, too painful. It's the colours that hurt the most, in the end. It's days like today, when the sun shines and the breeze blows warm and everyone is happy. When I really understand what it means to have lived for five thousand years, and I wonder if there isn't such a thing as enough.

It's reflex, in the end. He's on the higher ground, and somewhere in my mind the rest of the swordfight unfolds with the inevitability of fate in the microseconds before he moves. He'll raise his sword, swing in overhead, a descending neck shot. My head will roll on the ground and it'll be done, all the grief and the pain and the memory.

I raise my arm, deflect his blade down along it. Somewhere in the back of my mind the pain flares bright. With the ease of long habit I ignore it as I step in and thrust my sword through his lung.

Because if I do nothing, all the love will be done, too.

And so I pull my sword out of his chest. His blade is still firmly lodged in my forearm, and there's nothing he can do to stop the backhand swing I send towards his neck. I watch solemn and joyful as my blood dribbles down my arm and his sword drops stone-like from faltering fingers.

I want to live.

I want to live.

I WANT TO LIVE