“You did it for me!” Jack paces back and forth on the already-trampled moonlit snow. “You plucked me out of the river of time, and life, and death, and made me who I am! You can do it for Jamie! He’s much more extraordinary than I was! He’s far more worthy! He knows what he cares about, he’d be better at being a Guardian right away than I was! And if there’s no place for him in the Guardians, let him just be an immortal, like I was for so many years! If you feel guilty over leaving me alone, well, that won’t happen with Jamie! I’ll be there for him! Please! Change him!” He stops and stares directly at the moon. “Right now, at best, at best I have seventy more years with him. I want so much more than that. And I want to start forever right now. I don’t want to leave him in uncertainty. I want you to change him while he really likes how he looks. I want you to be fair for once in your existence! Jamie deserves to be immortal, more than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
Fair. The word is slow and vast. Your immortal existence has not always been easy. There were many times when you wished you had not been chosen. When you thought, if you had had a choice, you would choose not to exist this way.
“Yes, but it will be different with Jamie! He won’t be alone!”
But he will still be immortal. I will be fair, Jack, as you have asked. I will not make Jamie immortal against his will.
“How could it be against his will?” Jack asks angrily. “He loves me, he told me he wants to stay with me forever! Do you doubt him?”
I know NOTHING of Jamie. But you must ask him, and he must be willing to make his will clear to me before I even consider taking him from deaths’ rightful kingdom.
“Well, be ready,” Jack says. He grips his staff and the wind rises around him. “It won’t be long before he does.”
Jamie comes home from work and carefully goes through his house, making sure all the doors and windows, and even the chimney flue, are shuttered and closed securely. It doesn’t really matter if he does this or not, he knows, but Jack usually respects these signs. Or, at least he does under normal circumstances.
Jamie sits down in the chair in his living room and faces the curtains, staring at nothing. Circumstances aren’t normal now, not even for him and Jack. He wishes he’d never mentioned his gray hairs or the fine lines that had started to appear around his eyes. He should have guessed that this wouldn’t be something Jack could laugh about, that Jack wouldn’t share Jamie’s pleasure in finally leaving his baby face behind. But he’d said what he’d said, the moment is gone, and now he needs some time alone to think.
Jamie closes his eyes and leans his head back. Jack hadn’t said anything outright, but he hadn’t stayed as long as usual after that conversation, and he had been obviously agitated. And when he left, he had told Jamie he needed to go talk to the moon about something.
Jamie has the uneasy feeling that what Jack wanted to talk about was him. That Jack might have left to ask the Man in the Moon to make Jamie immortal.
With that thought, Jamie stands up and begins to pace. Of course Jack would ask that. Didn’t everyone want to live forever? But he and Jamie had never even talked about it! Jamie hadn’t even formulated his own thoughts about immortality until now. He supposes he had always vaguely thought of it as a good thing. He’s happy that Jack’s immortality allowed Jamie to meet him, because he loves Jack. He wants to spend his whole life with Jack, but…maybe that’s all. He’s never thought of the time he had with Jack stretching longer than that. Maybe when he was younger he had wanted to live forever, but not anymore. Jack is important to him, but so are many things in the ordinary world. He isn’t ready to leave everything, as he knows he would have to do if he accepted Jack’s offer, if he allowed himself to be chosen and frozen as he is now.
But what if Jack didn’t want to be with him now that he’s aging more visibly? The thought twists like a knife in Jamie’s gut, but he doesn’t believe that of Jack, not really. His real fear, the thought that brings a bone-deep chill over him, is of immortality itself. To live on and on without end…how long would it last? Would he and Jack live to see the stars go out? Would they live to the end of everything? And then what? Then what? Where did this kind of power even come from, and why did the Man in the Moon have it?
Even as thoughts of more than a lifetime with Jack grow more tempting, these fears and unanswerable questions clamor higher and higher in his mind, and when he turns in his pacing to see Pitch Black sitting in his chair, he isn’t exactly shocked.
“Well,” Jamie says, “I don’t expect that you’re here at random.”
“Well, when one doesn’t use money, gossip is one of the more common currencies,” Pitch says. “Your relationship with Jack is well-known. That, combined with your blooming fear of immortality, convinced me to stop by.”
Jamie didn’t immediately respond. “Okay,” he says finally. “Why? I don’t get you.”
“I know,” Pitch says. “You haven’t seen me in nearly thirty years, Jack doesn’t have much news about me either, and all in all it probably seems like I was completely defeated thanks to you and your little friends.” He shrugs. “You met me at a very strange time in my life. Or, that is, my existence. For I do not live in any biological sense of the word.”
Jamie’s skin prickles with goosebumps. “Right,” he says. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I came here because rumor has it that you will soon be allowed to choose whether you will become immortal or not,” Pitch says. “And I know more about immortality than either you or Jack. And I can speak in plain language, and I am willing to interfere.” Pitch tilts his head as he looks up at Jamie, incongruous and inhuman in the overstuffed navy-blue chair. “Do you want to make an informed decision?”
“How do I know you’ll tell me the truth?” Jamie asks.
Pitch catches Jamie’s brown eyes with his luminous gold ones and holds them as his expression loses any lightness or amusement it had held. “Because the Man in the Moon grants true immortality, and none of us—yes, Jamie, even me, I was his first and favorite once—were given a choice, and all of us wish we had been.”
Jamie’s palms begin to sweat and Pitch stares at him in silence for several long moments before finally blinking and sitting back in the chair. “Well?” he asks.
“I—say what you have to say,” Jamie says.
“As you wish,” Pitch says, with a slight incline of his head toward Jamie. “I said already that the Man in the Moon grants true immortality. This is what that means: you will never die. From your thoughts, I know you have begun to have a very slight idea of what this entails.” Pitch takes a deep breath. “I have seen the life of a star from its birth to its death. I have seen the rise and fall of more empires than the stars that you can number from your window. I have been instrumental in the rise and fall of more empires, peoples, and nations than you have hairs on your head. I have destroyed planets, and I have lived long enough for the only person who remembers I did such things to forgive me for it. Ah, Jamie. Remember when you were fourteen and your only wish was to stop the terrible things happening in the world? As a true immortal, you will learn how to stop many terrible things. And then, as time slowly cycles on, you will take your turn to be the cause of many terrible things. And the cycle will turn, again, and again, and again. Some ages will know you as a god; some ages will know you as a devil. You will change, Jamie. Immortals do not stagnate, this is a lie that storytellers have created by watching aging members of their own species. We immortals only wish we could stagnate, withdraw from the world, and rest, but we cannot. We are always changing, always learning, always acting. The Man in the Moon grants great power with immortality, and it is power that demands to be used, even if it changes, too. There is no rest for the immortal, and rarely peace.”
“Then…” Jamie’s heart is pounding, and he can barely speak. “Is there any…”
“Is there balm in Gilead?” Pitch asks. He stands, towering over Jamie. “Well, you are to be offered this chance at immortality for the sake of love, are you not? Love.” A lopsided smile tugs at his lips. “If I was who you thought I am, now I would give you a lecture on the falseness of love. But I am not, and I say love makes much, much time worthwhile. Love, and hate, and desire, and contention—oh, you will never forget how to feel, as an immortal.” He laughs. “Tell me, Jamie, how do you love Jack? How does Jack love you? Even if you hated him, would you love him? Even if he hated you, would he love you? Five hundred thousand years from now, when you are on a planet suffering the same burning blindness as this one, and Jack freezes it in revenge that he was too young to take here, how long will it take you to forgive him? After the first time you do your level best to kill him, how long will it take for him to forgive you? Do you love each other with a cosmic love? Will you love him when you take on new, alien forms? Will you love him or hate him in the depths of the spaces between stars?” Pitch pauses, and seems to shrink. “It is all right to say no,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you don’t love Jack. It just means that you’re only cut out to be human.”
Jamie realizes that he’s backed away from Pitch far enough that he’s about to fall over his couch. “I…I could love Jack for more than one human lifetime,” Jamie says. “But I…I don’t know how many. You…a star! That’s b—billions of years.”
“Well, I didn’t sit there and watch it the whole time,” Pitch says. He grins briefly before sobering once more. “I understand what you mean about your feelings for Jack. And I have an offer to make you, before you make your choice.”
Jamie takes a small step forward, trying to look confident. “What is it?”
“True immortality means that you will never die, and cannot be killed by most means. However, the Man in the Moon could kill you. He retains that power. I have only seen him use this power once—and why he did not use it on me, I’m not sure; perhaps the privilege of even a hated firstborn is so great—but I believe I understand it. So you could accept immortality, Jamie, and then, when it became too much for your human mind and heart, I could come kill you. Jack and the other Guardians would hate me, of course, but, well, I am a villain for the nonce.”
Jamie brings the heels of his hands to his temples. “That’s awful.”
“Yes, but it would be unique,” Pitch says. He turns away slightly. “And if I was to test this power, I would prefer to do so on someone who was not afraid. And you haven’t been afraid of me since you were eight years old.”
“You don’t really like murder,” Jamie murmurs. “But you want to know if you can kill the Man in the Moon’s immortals.”
“Even with love, it is an uneasy thing for mortals to become deathless,” Pitch says. “It is not just.”
“I could change all that—though of course I wouldn’t be around to see the results,” Jamie says.
Pitch shakes his head. “But who better than you? Once, you allowed the immortals you know to have their full lives. You could allow them to have their full deaths, if they wanted them.”
Jamie finds himself smiling, against all reason. “What if it takes me longer than you think to get tired of immortality?”
Pitch smiles back. “My conception of a long time is still quite different from yours. I will be patient. And I will always be there.”
Jamie nods slowly. “If I say yes to the Man in the Moon’s offer of immortality, I’m also saying yes to your offer.”
“Perfect,” Pitch says. “I’ll be there when you do. I don’t want to wait for the gossip.” He gives Jamie a little bow. “Have fun agonizing over you decision for a little while longer. Oh—and I suggest not mentioning this conversation to Jack.”
“Not on your existence,” Jamie says. And though he truly has accepted Pitch’s offer—he doesn’t want to live a life with no death at the end—there’s at least one small, strange part of him that really would like to see what it looks like when Jack destroys a planet.