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In the first lifetime you remember you’re the nicest. It’s a bit out of character but by no means is your nicest your best.
You remember a hill that overlooked the confines of your life and a dingy little cottage that sat atop held together by the small patches of cheap adhesive and poorly plastered on wood. It was old and the person you bought it from was just as old, a tired little woman with faded blue eyes. The nails were rusted and the roof needed a good replacement but your ‘repairman’ wasn’t exactly a repairman. The only thing he was really good at was taking care of the vines and making you smile. Maybe it’s why you married him.
He holds you and kisses you like he means it. His brown eyes are so transparent and readable you’re almost tempted to take advantage of them but you don’t; you don’t want to. You’re content and you’re oblivious. You follow a cycle you are blissfully unaware of:
Wake up, make breakfast, do the laundry, help in the vineyard, make lunch, try to fix that blasted ceiling leak, fail, make supper, sleep with husband. Repeat.
It’s perfection.
So whenever you have that sinking feeling of escape when you look out the window or an emptiness to a kiss you bury it beneath all your other hidden emotions and maybe swallow it down with a bit of wine.
You don’t explain things to your husband.
The first time you see her she’s running up the hill clutching her lower abdomen. You catch sight of her out of the corner of your eye as you hang up the morning’s laundry to dry. You call out to her but she says nothing, doesn’t even acknowledge you. By the time she reaches the top she falls face first into the grass and she’s panting hard. You sprint over and turn her to get a good look at her face but it’s so caked in dirt and soot you can barely recognize any features. There’s a huge circular gash across her stomach and her clothing- well you’d be lying if you said you didn’t recognize the vertical stripes or the six pointed star sown on her left breast. Everything about the situation is screaming ‘proceed with caution’ but you do anything but. She’s slipping in and out of consciousness and you roughly shake her asking if she’s okay.
The nearest doctor is in a town 11 miles over and it’s your husband who recommends letting her stay and recover here. It’s obviously the best course of action considering the patient and the area but it still took you some convincing. You end up taking care of her against your better judgement and the first thing you notice when she wakes up is how green almost jade her eyes are. That and how violent she could be. She wakes up panicked and tries to escape the house in several unsuccessful attempts. Some leave you with a few cuts and scratches the most prominent from the time she broke a vase and slashed broken glass across your cheek. She never makes it far though, always stopped by her own wounds or the fact that you lived in the middle-of-nowhere-France.
You elect to just tying her to the bed post but noooooooo ‘that’s unethical we can’t just do that, she’s our guest.’ Psssh.
In the end she relinquishes after realizing you aren’t going to murder her or turn her in for ransom and finally allows you to properly take care of her injuries. However ‘properly’ you can muster.
You try asking her questions and all you get are sharp replies and small quips about how messy this place is and how terribly you cook. Eventually you give up and just let her be. She doesn’t need to explain things to you. One day you ask her if she wants you to wash her old clothes. She grips the sheets and tells you to burn them. There’s an animosity there you weren’t expecting and it’s the most emotion you’ve gotten out of her since she came. You ask her if she wants to watch and she looks at you for a good while before turning to fall asleep. You want to say you understand you understand the isolation and all the pent up enmity eating at her and driving her to run but you also understand that you don’t and you couldn’t possibly. You’re two completely different worlds reversed and fated.
You’re pretty terrible at this whole caretaker thing.
It takes her three weeks to be fully on her feet again and every now and then you catch her sweeping the floor or picking up some loose trash. Despite your protests she ends up cleaning the entire house and taking over the cooking. By four weeks she’s got the ceiling fixed and by five it’s clear she won’t be leaving for a while. By that time you don’t really care. You don’t need to do much work anymore since she takes care of it all. In the afternoon while your husband works you sit with her and talk. It’s different, every topic is separated by a comfortable silence and every word just sort of flows together things ranging from the weather to general life. You never learn about that wound though and you never learn how she managed to get here and how she stumbled upon your shitty life and fixed it up, made it interesting.
Sometimes she smiles, you’ll say something and she’ll beam at you and everything about her feels right and wrong at the same time. She’s so out of place with it all and she doesn’t belong here she shouldn’t belong to this life; sometimes you think that you don’t either.
She asks you if you’ve ever thought about leaving. You shrug it off with an ‘everything’s great.’ but she’s incredibly adept at reading you. She looks at you softly and says that she can’t stay forever. You tell her then if that’s true, why hasn’t she left yet? She doesn’t respond.
It’s the middle of the sixth week and you hear engines. Your husband is out in the field. You look out the window and see red flags on the forefront of a Volkswagen. Six soldiers step out and come to a stand as a single man in a black greatcoat is let out of the vehicle and makes his way to the cottage. There are three knocks and you stumble to the door, you don’t remember your palms ever being this sweaty, your breath is completely out of whack and you hope to god she’s hidden.
You allow him to enter, as if you had any choice, and he immediately gets straight to business. His French is completely off and laced in a heavy accent but you get the picture. The other men come pouring into the house without warning and begin their search. They come back no more than a minute later with the woman. You’re both cornered back against the far side of the wall. You play off the situation lightly trying to sound completely innocent until he orders you to shut up. The man in charge commands something to a soldier. He walks over to her and roughly lifts up her shirt to her chest and the large scar over her abdomen is uncovered.
Guns cock and you protest, she just got it while working on the house really it’s no big deal. She’s not who you’re looking for she’s not who you’re looking for she’s not-
You’re ignored. They push her forward but she scrambles out of their grasp, she won’t let them take her back and she’s screaming.
It all happens too quickly. She reaches for a vase on the table and charges him. The man yells something in German and you hear gunshots.
You lose your concept of time for a bit and when you regain it you’re lying on the ground. You hear the patter of footsteps leaving the house and what you think is your husband yelling.
In front of your face you see vacant jade eyes staring back at you.
Then nothing.
...
You don’t realize what’s happening when it happens.
“Excuse me miss? Is there something wrong?”
“What?” You regain yourself and realize you’ve been staring at this stranger for god knows how long.
She smiles, you feel a pang in your heart, like a bit of nostalgia or deja vu. You know that smile and you swear you’ve seen it before.
“I need your signature, for the package.”
“Oh right, yeah just give it here.” You sign it and hand it back avoiding her gaze.
“Have a good day.”
You grumble something akin to a ‘you too’ and she’s gone just like that. Jade eyes stay in your mind for the remainder of the week and everything comes back in small spurts. You don’t know how you feel about the memories, they’re yours yet they’re not and they intrigue you because you know they’re real but then again you don’t because how could they be? One day you wake up speaking French and another knowing how to make wine but you’re doubts never cease. You end up buying three different things online just to see her again but there’s always someone different at the door.
After ten tries you go to the post office yourself and ask for the short-haired jade-eyed girl but she’s not there.
You never see her again.
...
The third like the second life you meet her in a random spur of the moment.
You’re studying on an abroad program in Italy and you bump into a girl on the street. Bags fall and liter the streets with supplies. You help her gather her things, she mumbles something you can’t understand and you look up at her. Jade eyes search frantically for a ball of yarn rolling down the sidewalk and before you can say anything at all she’s gone.
Your entire perception shatters in a matter of seconds. Memories return faster than the last and again you doubt them. Two lives reaching out to you. You wait on that street corner every day at the same time for as long as you can because you need that reassurance that yes that was her but she never comes by.
Eventually the time comes for you to return home and you feel like you didn’t try hard enough.
...
Life is good in the fourth, your struggles and triumphs balance each other nicely.
You meet a boy with blue eyes whose laugh brought you a kind of joy you didn’t know you could possess and out of everyone you’ve been with in this life he feels the most promising. He makes you laugh and when he holds you you feel every breath of air surrounding you carrying you away but the problem is you never needed an escape you needed a way to stay grounded. He never feels like home.
He takes you to a restaurant with a waiting list of five months and you know exactly what he’s trying to do. When he gets down on one knee and proposes you try to look as surprised as you can for his sake and fold into his embrace. What you feel when you take the ring is what you think is happiness but when a bright eyed waitress claps her hands and opens a bottle of champagne you can feel everything wrong in the moment.
She congratulates you and when she shakes your hand you can feel every previous life reentering your mind. It’s not many but it’s enough to jar you. You try to ignore them and you end up trying for the rest of your life. You marry the blue eyed boy and keep the jade eyed girl as far away from the forefront of your thoughts as you can but you can’t and you’re never able to get another reservation for the restaurant.
...
Your husband in the fifth is a complete asshole. Violet eyes and a spark long dead so you end up going to see a marriage counselor brought on by his constant nagging that ‘Its fine! Come on babe we can fix this just give me another chance.’
As soon as you walk into the office and see the counselor you’re frozen in place because there she is.
“Take a seat.”
The longer you make eye contact the more you’re sure of it and it’s happened again.
Every session is an experience but she never seems as stunned as you. She doesn’t seem to recognize you but maybe it’ll just take some time before she does, she has to, it’s only fair right? That’s how it’s supposed to work, you see her she sees you and lifetimes before.
You only go the the sessions to see her hear her voice and it’s the longest you’ve been with her in any timeline thus far. You like to think you’re friends in this life but every time you enter a session you feel farther and farther away, separated by client and therapist and she never reaches out to you in any other way. The thought of your crumbling marriage is far from your mind replaced with feelings for memories of lives you aren’t even sure are real. You feel a growing need to tell her and you somehow get in your head that if you do say something she’ll remember. It’s probably the only chance you’ll get but every time you’re about to say something the words fall flat.
After four months of counseling you finally start to say something.
“I just feel like there’s something wrong. Like I need to get away from here.” She jots something down.
“When in your marriage did you start feeling like this?”
You ponder on it for a moment.
“It wasn’t in my marriage. I don’t even think it was in this life.” It becomes quiet she stares at you perplexed but you carry on anyway. “Have you ever thought about leaving?”
She doesn’t answer. She never does.
Her job takes her elsewhere and you get a new counselor, a shouty little man with a constant furrow in his brow.
You end up divorcing by the end of the year.
You try to search for her but all ties lead to nothing. Eventually you give up and it’s the first time you find yourself thinking that you’ll see her next time around.
...
In the sixth you’re drafted into a war that takes twenty years off your life.
You’re injured and abandoned- well separated. You lost your platoon a while back and at this point you’re missing-in-action but it’s not like they’re going to come looking for you anyway. Your left arm is completely immobile and you can’t see jack out of your left eye not to mention the bullet in your leg, you’re basically dead at this point. The terrain is extremely hard to manage especially with your injuries and you can’t see yourself making it through the night but you continue on.
You’re dozing off but you know what closing your eyes will mean. After fighting the urge to sleep for an hour you finally blackout.
When you wake up you’re lying on what could barely be described as a bed, more like sacks of flour with a blanket and some pillows thrown on top. You’re inside a one of those little huts the native’s call their homes and you’re immediately on your guard. Your wounds are cleaned and tended to but your arm has been amputated, how you managed to sleep through that ordeal you don’t know. There’s a woman around your age sleeping on a stool in the corner and her breaths come out in short puffs. You’ve been stripped of your uniform and your gun is a few feet away from you perched against the wall, maybe if you just reach-
“What are you doing?”
Shit.
“I just uh-”
“If you move like that you’ll open your wounds.” Her accent is thick.
She gets up from her chair and makes her way towards you gently pushing you back onto the blankets. She’s looking over your amputated arm and you notice her eyes are the most beautiful shade of- fuck.
“How are you feeling?”
You don’t respond. You should be pushing her aside, grabbing your gun and get the hell away from here but then you start to remember jade eyes crinkling as they laugh and a familiar voice that spans miles across your millennia.
You don’t know what to feel.
She’s the village doctor. She takes care of you although you don’t know why, you’re the enemy she should have murdered you in your sleep when she had the chance. She doesn’t let you leave the hut and sometimes she has you hide under floor boards as you hear soldiers come and go. You don’t know Vietnamese very well but you’re able to catch the words Americans and ambush.
Your time with her is short but you find yourself being drawn into it again. You should’ve left days ago but the prospect that maybe you’ll finally be able to spend time with her excites you and every new remembrance you get when you see her adds to it.
In a few weeks you’re stumbling around the room and she chuckles when you fall over from trying to stand up straight too fast. But she’s always there to help you back up and you’ve seen so many sides of her but this is the first you’ve ever seen her this fussy. You berate her for it but you always smile when you do.
You feel something in this timeline that burns and sets deep within you. You can’t place a word for that particular burning until a very similar one encompasses every literal fiber of your being. The sound is deafening and death is slow to act.
You don’t know where she is when the bombs drop but you hope to god it wasn’t in the village.
...
You try to suppress the memories of the seventh lifetime as you did with the sixth but for very different reasons.
You’re just entering the third grade when you see her and you’re too young and wild to process all the things you see so you chalk them up as you wanting to be her friend. You ignore it at first because fuck that you don’t need any friends but it’s her that reaches out to you.
She becomes your closest friend and for a while she’s the only one you have. But you’re too impulsive.
Sometimes you tried to explain to her the lives you saw but she always took it as another lie. She never seemed to recollect anything at all she never looked at you the way you saw her and it’s the first timeline you find yourself unbearably alone.
It festers and burns inside you and replaces the set of emotions from the previous life. You become bitter.
Things don’t happen the way they’re supposed to and by your second year of high school you end up breaking her heart. There’s only a handful of timelines where you see her cry, this is one of the few where you’re the reason.
You find that you don’t care and it hurts.
...
Eight is the only lifetime where your name is Vriska Serket.
When you meet her it’s incredibly cliché. She’s a barista at a shitty little coffee shop.
You’re a regular so you don’t typically pay attention when you go in, you say hi to the guy at the counter with the broken shades and the barista’s already got yours ready. It’s nice, you’re in and out and your words are limited to that one ‘hi’ plus it’s right across the street from where you live so there’s no hassle.
Then one day you don’t realize there’s someone different behind the counter until you’re half way down the street and take a sip of your coffee and it’s fucking terrible. Admittedly it was always terrible but you could stomach it. This however, you don’t know what the hell this is. You don’t really feel like turning around just to shove the monstrosity in the baristas face and yell at him for such a shit job so you go the next day.
Then you see he’s not there and it’s a girl. That girl. Oh.
This time it’s different. When you see her there are no sparks, no revelation, you’re not stunned.
Nothing.
She’s just there fumbling with the coffee machine and scared stiff when you slam the door open holding yesterday’s cup. Your eyes meet and every complaint immediately dies in your throat as memories remember and everything about it feels so normal that you burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
You wipe a stray tear from your eye. She’s looking at you like you’re absolutely mad and she’s expecting an answer.
“It’s nothing,” Her jade eyes are piercing and your stomach does a flip. “I just remembered something.”
“Oh.”
You stare at each other a bit awkwardly for a moment.
“Do you um.. have my coffee?”
“Yes its right here,” She pushes it toward you and you give her the money. “Triple shot right?”
“Yeah.” She’s biting on her left cheek and you can see she’s unsure. “My name’s Vriska by the way.” You reach out your hand.
She looks at it for a split second like she’s debating whether or not she should grab it but she does with minimal contact.
“Kanaya.”
“See you around then, Kanaya.” The name feels warm on your tongue and it echo’s in your head. You give her a smile and a wave that looks more like you’re having a convulsion then giving a reassuring gesture but she returns it nonetheless.
“Likewise.”
You never tell her she’s terrible at her job and you never tell her that you already met eight times over. You force caffeine down your throat countless times and smile and she’s absolutely beaming when you do.
After months of buying and throwing away coffee you spend decades with a girl whose jade eyes made you stir and it’s the only timeline where you can say you were happy to just be alive. You wouldn’t go as far as to say you knew what love was, but well, you did. You loved her.
And it scared you.
There’s such a finality you have with her and for a while it makes sense.
She tastes like the sun.
You live the longest in this life, 80 years and when you die she’s there by your deathbed holding your hand and making sure you’re comfortable and hydrated.
You grin and your chuckles sound more like you’re gagging.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re so goddamn fussy.” She tightens her grip and gives you an incredulous stare.
“Vriska you are literally dying right now how can you just-”
You let go of her hand wave her off. “Calm down Kanaya I’m going to see you again.”
There’s a strange kind of recognition in her eyes when you close yours.
...
You’re too old for it to matter.
Washed up and diseased and she’s just barely holding on to whatever pieces of sanity are left in those faded eyes. You’re both withered away left to the care of aids and medication and she can’t even hold a conversation about soup.
She dies without a single memory and you die with them all.
...
You’re too young for it to matter.
She’s in her forties and you’re a rowdy little four year old who can’t stop pushing the brown eyed boy down the stairs. She teaches the art class and you draw her with big eyes dancing but it looks like a long green swiggle and a crude gesture surrounded by eights.
She doesn’t like you.
When you’re five you remember nine sets of names and Vriska is the only one you’ll answer to. You can’t stop calling Miss Astris Kanaya.
...
You don’t like to think about this one because it’s too weird.
She’s your mother and you’re basically born with memories of affection bordering on the incestuous. You can barely remember your birth name because as far as you knew your name was Vriska and that’s that. You’re a French vintner, a scoundrel, you’re married, you’ve fought a war, you’ve been to Italy, you speak four languages, you’re hundreds of years old, your mother’s name is Kanaya and by the age of 12 you’re admitted into a psychiatric ward.
The only thing it does is break you.
...
She’s dying.
Seven arrows lodged in her chest. It’s definitely the work of one of your men.
Dead jade eyes give you memories for a future you’re too foregone to heed.
You always despise yourself for that one particular raid and it ruins you.
...
Your ages are fine as are the circumstances and everything matches perfectly for six lives in a row and yet, they don’t.
Friends, roommates, coworkers, clients, classmates it doesn’t matter. There’s a lavender eyed girl in every single one of them.
On the third you decide that you hate her.
Because she makes her happy. Because when they’re around each other you see a glint in her eyes that she never got around you and it’s probably just chance right? Because it’s you who remembers, not her, and it’s you who was there for her first and it’s you it has to be you but those six lifetimes speak otherwise because they always find each other. You’re always too late.
And you can’t stay mad because you see how much she loves her and how far it expands across their lives and it stings so much you can't bring yourself to give in and interfere.
There are countless lives you watch them fall together. You refuse to believe that there’s only one where you have the option to love her.
And every time you think of the next time.
Maybe next time or the next time or the next time or the next time or the next time or the next time or the next time or the next time or the next ti-
Maybe.
...
It’s hard to let go of her.
...
You’re a teenager, she’s married.
Next.
...
You’re an assassin, you kill her.
Next.
...
She’s a customer; you chase her, she’s gone.
Next.
...
There’s an accident, you’re a paramedic, she dies.
Next.
...
She’s a queen, you’re a thief, you die.
Next.
...
Die. Repeat. Jade eyes. Remember. Die.
...
You can’t make her remember no matter how hard you try.
Nothing clicks. She never sees you as more than what you are right now. Every time you reach out to her and blurt out a ‘Kanaya’ her confused stares send you spiraling down.
You just want her to see you.
...
You still go by Vriska.
Whenever you see her and regain the memories it’s like an automatic switch. You change your name and there’s a personality that comes with it. A mind built up from centuries of repetition.
You try to love others but it’s not the same.
Fuchsia, Teal, Brown, Blue, Red, Purple. But she’s there she’s always there reminding you of who you are and every other love falls flat because jade eyes haunt your dreams. They scream at you. And even then, even when you try to return to your life, this life the one you’re living, you can’t the old memories destroyed it. Some timelines you see her late into your life when you’ve already lived it out, those are your favorites, in those you actually had a chance to just be. Others not so much, you have so many ambitions and things you know you’re going to accomplish. Ideas you’ll spread places you’ll go and sometimes you make it so far in such a short amount of time just for it to crumble when Cerulean eyes catch Jade.
You are constantly living in realities past and future that the present becomes a fleeting experience and it’s the worst kind of immortality.
You know you’re going to see her, every life she’ll be there.
Every life you’ll meet her.
...
You come to hate jade eyes.
You don’t want this. You run. You need to move and you keep moving from place to place. Country to country and its one dream that you manage to live out, traveling and seeing the world but when you imagined your travels you never saw it as an escape from the one person you found homage in.
You wish that she never existed. You wish you could forget. You wish you weren’t so stuck on someone who doesn’t even know who you are.
You just want to live life for life again.
...
You like to retreat back into the first or the eighth. You love the eighth the most but sometimes you find yourself forgetting.
They’re so far back at this point that they tend to mix, lost at the bottom of your mind. Perfection with a horror or your tranquility with anxiety. You forget which ones are which, which shade of jade to focus on, which ones bring you your ease and which remind you of your fears.
Eventually you stop thinking of the joy all together. You find a way to think of nothing.
...
You don’t care any more. It’s the sixtieth maybe the seventieth. It doesn’t matter.
You’re on your bike and you’re not really paying attention. Wheels screech to a halt and you topple over. You think you broke your leg or something and the person that hit you is scrambling out of their car.
“Oh my god I’m so sorry! Are you alright?!”
There’s a crowd surrounding and she goes to help you. A hand reaches out. The moment you meet her eyes you break down right there in the middle of the street and you’re crying you’re actually crying what the hell is wrong with you. She’s confused again, she’s always confused and there’s a cut on her forehead from the accident that’s dripping down onto her cheeks.
It’s a lie.
You do care. You care too much.
...
You’re tired.
How long have you been alive? How many times have you done this?
There’s not a light in your eyes.
...
...
...
It’s 1888.
Your life plays out in the form of gambles and card games. It’s a diseased little tenement in the slums of France housing people with nothing to their names and the scum of the earth. A fight broke out at least once a day and you’re pretty sure that stain in the corner is some kind of bodily fluid. You fit in though.
One day you get a letter from no one. It’s simple enough but the words burn into your sockets and you stubbornly ignore them, you don’t know what they mean you don't know who it's from so why should it matter? It’s not like you can keep away very long though. You try to read it over and over again debating if you should do what you think the letter says, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t and no reason for you to be ignoring it to begin with but whoever wrote this clearly didn't know that you were a borderline illiterate.
You get another one and another one and you don't know how the hell this person got your address. Eventually the letters add up to eight in total so you listen. They all say the same thing.
They're directions. To where it doesn't specify but a lackluster life searches for obscure meanings. It's not like you have anything to loose.
You go east to Strasbourg. There’s a little dirt road going west that you follow to a valley with hills stretching as far as you can see and you’re pretty sure you’re lost. There’s nothing here but a narrow dirt road and bright green grass and the directions say something about a line of vines reaching up to a... what the hell does that say?
You keep walking in a perpetual grumble until you completely wander off the road. It’s dark and in the distance you see a little cottage with smoke rising from the chimney. The side of the hill that lifts it up is covered in sprouts and the left of the house is hidden behind vines and flowers reaching up to the roof. It's familiar like an old song distorted and rewritten. You run up to it.
You get closer and see a woman rocking in a chair.
You get closer. Almost to the top. You think she called something out to you, you’re too worn to hear it.
You get closer. She’s getting up to meet you.
She’s smiling why the fuck is smiling why is she so happy who even is she-
“Of course you’d come at eight.”
Your world stops, rewinds, plays.
“Hello Vriska.”
You’re home.
“Hey Kanaya.”