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It happens so slowly that Kravitz doesn’t notice.
Well, that’s not true. He’s noticed a lot of things, like the heartbeat and the body heat and the one time he got a papercut on his hand and it bled and the sudden resurgence of his body being enough of a body to process alcohol. Of course he’s noticed those things. But he was busy, and preoccupied, and didn’t like to look gift horses in the mouth, so he’d brushed it all off.
Taako is staring at him one day while he reads. Kravitz lets him be for the most part, other than raising an eyebrow, but when that doesn’t get a response, he goes back to his book. It’s another minute or so before Taako speaks.
“You don’t have to do that you know,” says Taako.
“Do what?” asks Kravitz, and Taako points at his face, as though that makes it clearer.
“That,” he says, “I’m— I mean, I guess I appreciate the gesture, but you really— like, I know I’m aging. You don’t have to join me.”
Kravitz blinks, and looks up from his book. “Taako,” he says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t have to play dumb, Kravitz, I’ve caught on. Granted it was— I mean, you’re doing a pretty good job of it cropping up slowly, I’ll con— I’ll give you that.”
“Are you planning to lay the charges on me at any point or are we just going to waffle around whatever it is you think I’m doing until I puzzle it out?”
Taako sighs, and points again. “The white hair, Krav. The laughter lines, whatever. The aging. I know you’re doing it and I kn— I know you don’t have to age, ‘cause Lup and Barry sure aren’t, so you don’t have to is what I’m saying.”
Kravitz stares, and then shifts, putting his book down. He’ll break the spine doing that, but he’s a bit preoccupied with trying to parse what Taako’s accusing him of. “Sorry? The… what?”
Taako blinks, and then squints. “Are you— are you fucking with me right now?” When Kravitz shakes his head, Taako gets to his feet, telling Kravitz to stay put as he runs to the bathroom. It’s only a few moments before he returns with a hand mirror, and turns it towards Kravitz.
Kravitz looks at himself for a second, and then back up at Taako. “I really don’t know what I’m looking for. I do look at myself in the mirror, and I’m not seeing any differences from this morning.”
“No,” agrees Taako, “But—” he makes a small noise of frustration and then drops the mirror on Kravitz's lap, dragging himself to the other end of the couch and snatching the photograph resting there, crawling back and handing it to Kravitz. “Look.”
It’s a photo from their wedding day. And of course, Kravitz has seen it a million times, since they keep it on one of the side tables, but he can’t help but look at it foldly. Kravitz had icing on his nose and Taako was laughing into a champagne flute, their arms around each other.
“Can you no— stop being a sap for ten seconds and look,” says Taako, although he has to fight to keep the smile off his face. Kravitz stops thinking about the memory and starts looking at this younger version of him.
And now that he sees it side by side, now that he’s looking for it, he sees what Taako does. His face has more lines— not a lot, not noticeable right away, but it does— and if he squints in the mirror, he can see the few white hairs Taako had spotted.
“See?” says Taako.
“Huh,” says Kravitz. “Yes, I do see. I think I’m doing it accidentally, like the body heat and whatnot. Hold on, I’ll—If it bothers you, I’m sure I can just… sort of reset it if I think about it.” As he talks, his mortal form melts away to show his skeletal form. Briefly, he thinks about how he’s never actually tried this— or tried getting rid of any of the ‘being alive’ features he’s gained recently—, but some part of his shifting forms thing is illusory, so it must be changeable, so he focuses on himself in the picture and shifts back into his body.
“Nothing happened,” says Taako. Kravitz blinks, looking back and forth between the mirror and the photo.
“Huh,” he says, “That’s… unexpected.”
The immortality— not the right word, really, but the concept is close enough— is most apparent with Barry, obviously. Kravitz hadn’t especially paid attention, as it was the same process that had happened to him. Working in the astral plane gets into you, seeps into your bones, your skin. You can still look mortal if you want, but the longer you spend there the more you take on the qualities working with the dead gives you. Not dead, but certainly not alive. Barry’s aging had slowed quite a bit even to start, and the fewer friends that were alive, the more time the new reapers spent in the astral plane, the more static their existence became. Barry has been in his early sixties for a long, long time now.
It’s harder to tell with Lup. She and Taako didn’t look completely identical to start, and even less so after Wonderland, and when Taako get rid of that with a spell slot, he tended to use it to the fullest extent and get rid of any signs of aging too— not that there was much of that, them being elves and all. But sometimes, when you saw them side by side, at family dinners or holiday parties, you could spot it. Not quite far enough different to not be twins yet, but you got the impression that one day, Taako would be her older brother instead of her twin brother.
Kravitz hasn’t aged in a long, long time. There’s a point where whatever life you had before bounty hunting ends, and you throw yourself into your work and it throws itself into you, until your mortal form with your face and your body, and your reaper form melt into each other and you’re not sure which one is real anymore. Perhaps they both are, or perhaps neither. It doesn’t really matter.
It’s static. And although it had never bothered Kravitz, he’d assumed it was irreversible.
Then again, he thinks, inspecting the differences between his wedding day self and his current self in the mirror, he’d never thought to ask.
“Taako,” says Kravitz one morning, looking at himself in the mirror, “I think I’m going to die.”
Taako looks up at him from where he’s crouched to search for the backup shampoo bottle in the cupboard under the sink. “Well, I hope not today, ‘cause I’m too fuckin’ busy to organize a funeral.” It’s a dumb quip, and Kravitz snorts in response, but he can hear the mild concern coating the words.
“No, not today,” he says, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the tension in Taako’s shoulders release. “And of course I could— well, I could always be killed. But I think I could like, die die. Of old age sort of die.”
“This is news?”
“Can you at least pretend to pity me while I grapple with my own mortality for the first time in centuries?” whines Kravitz, and cracks a smile when Taako laughs at him.
“Listen, join the fuckin’ club. We all die someday. Enforcing that law doesn’t, uh, doesn’t exempt you from it forever.” Taako stands up, shampoo bottle in hand. “Also, get out of the bathroom, I need to have a shower.”
Kravitz laughs, and vacates the bathroom, searching through his closet for a sweater to wear.
Right after he receives a mission from the Raven Queen, just as he’s about to leave, she calls him back.
“Kravitz.”
“Yes?” says Kravitz, turning around to face her. She stares at him for a moment, eyes searching, boring into him like she can see his soul. He has no reason to believe she can’t.
“All things end. We can bend that rule, change when and how it takes hold, but we cannot break it. Even when we want to.” She smiles, almost comforting. “Though, I suspect you know that already.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what she’s talking about.
“Yes,” says Kravitz, “Taako said something to that effect. I uh, I guess I just don’t understand why now? If this—” Kravitz gestures to himself, “—can happen whenever, why did it happen now?”
The Raven Queen winks at him, and then says, “What do you want the answer to be?”
Half-elves have shorter lifespans than elves. This is Kravitz’s primary concern; he was a half elf before this started, and he’s looked like a half-elf since then, and so it’s not amiss to assume that if he’s losing the ability to remain static, the fact that he’s a half-elf will come racing up to him.
But it never does. It’s still many, many years before Kravitz can really relax, but eventually, he realizes he’s not reaching old age at the speed a half-elf would. Something about his time serving the Raven Queen is slowing him considerably.
In some 300 odd years, Kravitz has to get reading glasses. Taako makes fun of him until Kravitz points out that Taako’s hair has long since turned from black to silver, which Taako flips him off for.
Kravitz sends a quiet thank you to the Raven Queen, and then to Istus when he realizes how slowly he’s moving, and settles in to enjoy the time he has left.
“I’m scared I’m going to forget again,” says Taako into their dark bedroom.
“How?”
“Just ‘cause sometimes that happens to old people,” says Taako, “And fuck, Kravitz, we’re actually getting old.” He laughs softly, burying himself in Kravitz’s shoulder. His next words are muffled. “I think I could deal with, uh, with literally anything else. But I don’t want to forget again.”
And Kravitz doesn’t have anything that can help, not really, so he pulls Taako tighter and Taako lets him, and they lay in silence for a few minutes.
“If you forget,” says Kravitz, and Taako hangs on a little tighter, “I will spend the rest of my life making sure you know who you are. I’ll tell your life story to you every day if I have to.”
“I love you,” says Taako, and repeats it, over and over like a mantra, like he’s afraid he’ll forget that too.
“I love you,” Kravitz returns, a ressurance, a promise, and Taako quiets. “I always will,” he continues. Taako curls into Kravitz and they fall asleep, words settling on them like a warm blanket on a cold winter night.
“You know, I always thought I’d outlive you,” says Kravitz. He has no idea how much time they have left, but probably not much. A few years, on the outside. The closer they get the easier it is to estimate, and Kravitz is still technically a reaper.
“Yeah?” asks Taako.
“Didn’t like to think about it much, because I— I had no idea what I was going to do. Because I’d known this was— this was probably the happiest I’ve ever been for the longest amount of time and I felt like at some point, it had to end, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to just, get back into the swing of it.”
Taako blinks at him. “How come you ne— why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Thought it was selfish.” It was selfish, of course, wondering what he was going to do after Taako died. “That instead of worrying about you dying directly, I was worried I wouldn’t know what to do after the fact.”
“Sounds sappy and stupid, but uh, not especially selfish. Or at least, if you’re guilty we all are, right?” Taako pauses, and then asks, “Wanna know something, uh, something just as selfish?”
“Shoot.”
“I’m glad we’re growing old together.”
Kravitz senses the secondary sentence underneath this one; that Taako is glad Kravitz isn’t going to live forever. And maybe it is selfish, being glad someone’s lifespan is reduced to match yours, but he thinks about the alternative, thinks about how he’d worried for so long how he was going to deal with Taako aging and him staying the same, and thinks that perhaps Taako is being a little hard on himself.
“Me too.”
Taako and Kravitz react to aging very differently. Taako, well— he doesn’t exactly cling to youth, because Kravitz has seen what that looks like, and that’s not it, but he still seems startled and troubled by the passage of time. Like he doesn’t quite know how to cope with it. He’s said before that New Year's Eve is a weird time of year for him. Not bad, just off, still unexpected after all these years.
Mostly, though, Taako seems troubled by the passage of time as it shows on others. They see it coming from a mile away every time, of course— elves are one of the longest lived species, and Kravitz… Kravitz isn’t sure what speed his life is going at, but it’s certainly slower than anyone else’s. Taako withdraws more every year, recoils from friends like they’re poorly stitched wounds about to open up again. He jokes and whines about looking old, but Kravitz can see on his face there’s more relief than anything else— any sign of aging is a promise that he won’t end up alone forever, even as their friends leave them behind on the material plane.
For Kravitz, aging is a marvel. He think it probably always will be, even the bad parts. He’d never held a vendetta against the Raven Queen for his work, not really, but it had still meant dedicating his life to it until he barely had one to dedicate.
It doesn’t mean that anymore. Oh, he still has a duty to the Raven Queen, to be sure, but he’s been given a second shot at being a person, with a husband and house and a life outside of work, and maybe it is taking away his ability to continue forwards, but in a way, both those things are gifts.
Kravitz has been not alive for a long, long, long time now. Being actually, really, truly alive, with the ability to age at all is spectacular, even if the cost is that it eventually ends.
This is the trade-off, Kravitz supposes, is that if you want to live, you have to be willing to die.
Kravitz looks at the life he has, the one he’s now spent years building in a way he was never really able to before, and knows it’s no contest. Hell, he looks at Taako when he makes him laugh and knows right then it’s no contest, that it never was.
He’d never been that attached to living forever anyway.
Lup turns on the bedroom light in the middle of the night.
“Hey Ghost Rider,” she says, as Kravitz hauls himself up to a sitting position. Beside him, Taako groans, and turns over.
“Lup, what?” asks Kravitz blearily, rubbing his eyes.
“A text— would have been nice,” grumbles Taako into his pillow.
“Not really a call in advance type of thing,” says Lup, and Kravitz drops his hands and squints at her. She’s illuminated only by the light of the living room, but even with that, and the fact that she still looks all elf, she’s dressed in reaper regalia with her scythe at her side.
“Ah,” says Kravitz. “Me or Taako?”
Taako finally sits up too, takes in the scene. Under the covers, his hand finds Kravitz’s and their fingers lace together.
“Both of you,” she says, “Technically, one of you isn’t due in for another few days, but uh, I figured a few days give or take won’t make much of a difference.”
“That’s not exactly within the rules.”
“Learned from the best,” says Lup, “Now come on, I told Magnus to build you guys a room and it’s waiting for you. I sent a letter to the Mcdonalds’ household already and technically speaking Barry and I are still alive so between the bunch of us, we should be able to manage a couple funerals.”
“Can you make mine open casket except when the casket opens it uh— it shoots confetti everywhere?” Before Lup gets a chance to answer, Taako adds, “This is my dying wish, Lup. You have— you’ve gotta fuckin’ do this for me.”
“Consider it done,” says Lup.
“Please don’t actually do that,” says Kravitz, and the twins laugh.
“Well, come on then,” says Lup, and she extends her hand, using the scythe to open a tear with the other. Taako, hand still holding Kravitz’s tightly, extends out and grabs his sisters, and everything goes grey.
They’re standing on the lawn of a house Kravitz has been to a few times before. It’s bigger than it was the last time he visited by a few rooms. Taako is standing beside him, hands still locked together; on Taako’s other side, Lup still has hold of Taako’s hand too, though she drops it in order to make a grand gesture.
“Here it is. Holler and they’ll hear you, I’m sure.”
Taako drops Kravitz’s hand, throwing his arms around his sister tightly. She returns the hug and they stand there for a moment before Taako steps back, offering his hand to Kravitz again.
“We’ll be seeing you,” says Kravitz. It’s not a question. Lup smiles.
“Oh, I suppose eventually, yeah. Still planning on working this job for a while yet, I think, but we’ll keep you updated.”
“You’d better,” says Taako. Lup hugs him one more time, just quickly, and tears another opening with her scythe, giving them a salute before walking through it and vanishing.
And then they’re alone, momentarily, on the Burnsides’ lawn. Taako is looking at it wonder, and Kravitz remembers with a start that Taako has never been here before.
“I think it’ll be kind of crowded, with the two of us,” says Kravitz, and Taako looks over at him, eyebrows raised. “We’ve been sort of bending rules. As long as Magnus and Julia are willing to build more rooms, we’ve been letting more people stay here. And they always have been.”
“So everyone’s here.”
“Pretty much.”
Taako’s face splits into a wide grin, and he squeezes Kravitz's hand before shouting, “Yo Burnsides! Heard we had a room reservation!”
They can hear the occupants of the house react instantly, and it’s only seconds before Magnus swings open the door— it slams loudly against the outside of the house, but Magnus doesn’t seem to care.
“Taako! Kravitz!” Magnus gives them a wide grin. “Glad you’re here finally.”
“Glad to be here,” says Kravitz, and as Magnus takes them inside and gives them (well, mostly Taako) a tour, Kravitz thinks he’s never said anything as sincere as that.
Well, he thinks, when he gets a quiet moment alone with Taako, almost never.
“I love you,” he says. Taako calls him a sap but then says he loves him too, and Kravitz drinks in the sincerity like fine wine, pulls Taako closer, kisses him for what feels like eons but is still not nearly long enough.
All things end. But perhaps, Kravitz thinks, caught up in his own personal end, an ending can be defined in more ways than one.