Chapter Text
“Marry me,” he says for the fifth time in as many years.
“Not yet,” she says, fond humor in her eyes, flour dusted lightly on her apron.
They live on. Gilan makes a weekly trip from Whitby, and then a monthly trip from Castle Araluen, and Jenny unfailingly takes a day off upon his arrival. They have quiet picnics by the river, long hours in the warm sun with a basket of Jenny’s sweetest pastries and most meticulously prepared sandwiches, her head on his shoulder and his fingers carding through her sun-warmed hair. They sleep in Jenny’s bed, limbs tangled together and soft smiles on their faces. In the mornings they stay in her room longer than they should, desperately prolonging the inevitable.
But it always comes, because if there’s one thing in his life Gilan has never managed to escape, it’s the steady march of time. And so he saddles Blaze and makes the long trek back to his duties. Jenny stands by the road and watches him grow smaller and smaller until the sun crests the treetops to remind her she must open the restaurant.
Month after month he arrives at Castle Araluen, and although there are friendly faces and warm drinks and cozy rooms, it never feels right to him. It never feels like home, not in the way Jenny’s worn blankets and knotty wooden floors do. Most of the time he can ignore the persistent loneliness, but he knows deep down that he’ll never truly belong anywhere where she isn’t.
(It doesn’t help that he still thinks of the office as Crowley’s, though it’s been his for five years.)
He says as much once, while they’re lying under the stars on Jenny’s forty-first birthday.
“I’m never as happy without you as I could be by your side,” he whispers.
“I know,” Jenny says, and he smiles ruefully because he knows too. He knows that the Corps needs him—he couldn’t possibly bring himself to quit even if they didn’t—and he knows that Jenny would never give up her restaurant. He knows, with crushing resignation, that they can never be together in the way they both want.
Gilan knows that he must be content with these stolen nights, these fleeting visits, the letters that come once a fortnight.
Summer bleeds into autumn, the snow falls and then melts, and spring brightens into summer once again. Two years pass, then three, then five. The crinkles at the corners of Jenny’s eyes deepen. Her golden hair grows a touch of white. She winces while bending to take off her shoes. “I suppose I’m not as young as I used to be,” she laughs.
Gilan smiles, but cold fear is pooling in his stomach. Because he’s exactly as young as he used to be.
For years, he’s blamed his youth on genetics, lifestyle, or simply luck. But as the decades pass and his body stubbornly refuses to age a day past thirty, the excuses start to crumble and in their place grows uncertainty.
Gilan’s only been in this world for fifty-seven years, so he has no way of knowing for sure, but something about the smoothness of his skin and the easy mobility of his joints, the color of his hair and clarity of his vision, fills him with the absolute certainty that he’ll never die.
But Jenny will.
And now, looking ahead into the vast and unbearably empty prospect of eternity without her, he feels his eyes fill with tears.
“What’s wrong?” Jenny asks, stunned.
“Nothing,” Gilan says, willing them away, determinedly thinking of anything else. “Nothing.”
Later, when he’s alone, he lets his mind wander again and this time realizes that it’s not only her he’ll have to live without, it’s everyone else he loves. And after fifty-seven years, that list is terrifyingly long.
By some miracle, he manages to push these thoughts to the back of his mind for nearly a decade. It’s hard at first, when every indication of the passage of time reminds him that he’s just that much closer to being alone, but he stops looking in the mirror and before long he starts to forget. Not enough to ever live as carefreely as he once did, but enough to enjoy each day as it comes. He justifies this by telling himself that the worse sin would be wasting that time, tainting it by mourning what he hadn’t yet lost. There’ll be plenty of time to mourn after, he thinks with a grim sort of humor.
Then he’s at Will’s cabin, playing a card game and talking meaninglessly, when Will goes uncharacteristically quiet.
“What are you?” he asks after a long moment, and it’s the first time anyone’s ever confronted him about his strange, nonlinear age, though others have undoubtedly noticed.
Gilan doesn’t reply, and it’s all the answer Will needs. He smiles.
“I might have envied you when I was younger.”
“But now you pity me,” Gilan finishes.
“I don’t pity you,” Will says. “I just—I wish I could help.”
“So do I,” Gilan says quietly. They continue their game, and that’s the last time Will breaches the subject, for which Gilan is deeply grateful.
He retires to avoid suspicion, although his body is as capable as it ever was. But people are starting to talk, and so Gilan leaves the office that has finally started to feel like his and moves to Redmont that same week.
“Marry me,” he says for the fifteenth time in as many years.
Jenny is fifty-nine and the years are carved into her face, her hair is streaked with gray, and her knees creak when she sits, but when she smiles Gilan swears she’s as beautiful as the day he met her.
“I thought you’d never ask.”